Research on everything ever said about Java Applets - the issues will be exactly the same, differences may be only in specific numbers - plus, of cause, you will have platform and (some) browser dependency :)

Why? When I look at OpenXML documentation, as an example, it is full of "stubs" like that, which do not give me a bit of information (but take an whole useless page) What's the purpose? To prove that that they hire document writers from the the same cohort of kiddie programmers who document "getX" method as "gets x"?

Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

The same crowd that invented "Extreme Programming", "Design Patterns", etc.

I thought these were two opposite crowds. XP was from PHP etc developers, Patters were from C++ & Java world

Reminds me of Dilbert at the firing range :laugh:

Few million cores - more like a cloud of small computers. No bits - it's chemical and it is not binary. It has slow information transfer: it's only partly electrical, and in part it is chemical. It has true randomness though - without "pseudo" :) - including self-organising logic (damage a part - other will learn to do its job) In brief, nothing close to any computer.

_Damian S_ wrote:

As professional developers, I would assume most of us have done this many times over.

I think it deserves a pole - I would assume most developers, even "professional", are working on projects defined by architects or teams, etc. (I discard small utilities you had to write in a week's time) So I would not take anything like this for granted.

digital man wrote:

This is what the agency should be doing

No, not here in Sydney. Employment agents are not programmers, and they are not capable of conducting technical interviews. If the whole point is to make elimination and save your time, you can use, as example http://www.brainbench.com/[^]/ You'll have to pay for their service. Will it have false positives or negatives? Of cause, as others here are saying. But the site puts 3 min time-out on every question, which does not leave much room for getting the answers online. Anyway, either you risk false positives, or you spend your own time on optimising the quality of the selection. I'd ignore such worries: you'll be conducting another round anyway.

And what would you do if you were their CEO? Or would you do as an ISV, once your product does almost everything that almost everyone asks for? Should they "scale-down" their staff and just release compatibility upgrades and new versions for new OS? It's like an old theory I read once about what limits the life of trees. You know, trees do not have genetic cycle of aging, like animals, but still they reach some age and die. So the theory went that they die... of starvation, due to their own growth. The body mass grows like their size to the power of 3, and feeding capacity (cross-section of the trunk, leaves area. those things) - like the size to the power of 2. So the bigger they grow, the more they starve. Not that it should apply to software companies :)

There is "SVN Workbench" (based on Python) in Ubuntu - look for pysvn-workbench. Not as good as TortoiseSVN, since no integration is provided, and some bits are missing like recursive add... But in my view, better than command line

Nothing can beat TortoiseSVN. All Linux guys - who've been on Windows before - are crying when they find our that Tortoise is Windows only

Kidding ? :omg: Coding without it is like using FORTRAN: do not catch anything, or enclose all code in try/catch, just in case ;P

Happy simple country with simple rules :) And simple opinions... Some people in this world do not even go to colleges, and not always because they are lazy. It takes either money or time (which are the same, in the end) and not every one can afford it. Though all this is a side line from this topic...

Todd Smith wrote:

patches for security related issues

If one has a firewall on their router, and uses Mozilla instead of Outlook and IE, I doubt an average person should be concerned about security patches.

jschell wrote:

the other formal methodologies are almost universally not followed as well

I do not see this as a problem. Among successful companies, as you correctly mentioned, there are some who do it by the book, and more are made successful by competent managers and professional developers who do not follow any formal methodology, as they are past a need for a textbook. And similarly different are the loosers in IT world - both who try to follow some methodology on paper, and those who do not have a clue. The later bunch, when they found out that there is such thing as "agile" methodology, gladly jumped on it, just as the Dilbert cartoon (quoted somewhere in previous replies) depicted so well ;)

This "we don't need no education" manifesto was born by dot-com boom, when fresh graduates flooded start-ups, with the only "business plan" just to do something, which could be sold later. Later it clicked with management for all the wrong reasons, which you well described in your rhetoric question. ;P

Even so, I hope no OS would be able to guess the contents of encrypted tax returns I keep on my disks :laugh:

In practice: take Word 2007 doc template, populate it with data from DB, and show to the user. Mind you, without Office components - WPF and Open XML SDK. :) Not quite MFC - XPS document view is provided by WPF only.

'Couse it should be HDD

Orchestrator or Conductor ? (There would by some already, called Symphony ;) )

Would not help - my XP shuts down automatically after waking up:mad: And the laptop does not allow me to prevent hibernation completely.