Close in CAS means close in proximity to friendly troops. Before smart munitions this required the aircraft to also be in close proximity to hit the enemy force without hitting friendlies. Now an orbiting bomber or drone can deliver a targeted strike while flying high in the sky miles away.
I love the old warthog, but in the days of drones, I can't see much of a use anymore.
I think we'll have the Warthog until after the ground troops are confident with the drones / remotely piloted craft. That opinion is less to do with my own ideas about the potential of drones to do CAS well, and more to do with my assessment of what military decision makers will tolerate in terms of change.
It seems like you are invoking the No true Scotsman fallacy. There's a lot of companies that do "Agile" and "Scrum" that are exactly like he describes. When Feature X has to be done this sprint because it's already been sold to (Board|Client|Investors|Other Dept), there's not much time to think about "How?", it's more like "If I'm going to be working Sat and Sun again?".
I'm sure there are organizations out there where Agile/Scrum is working fantastic for them in practice, and developers are happy with their work and career prospects. I just have yet to encounter one in the wild personally.
In what possible way is that a No True Scotsman fallacy? Do you think you can slap a "Scotsman" label on a fish, and it magically turns into a Scotsman? What Agile is, is described in the Agile Manifesto. What Scrum is, is described in even more detail. When what you're doing is not that, you're not doing that, no matter what you call it.
I totally agree that there are a lot of companies that claim to be doing Agile or Scrum, and often it just means they picked one element, pulled it out of its context, and applied it in a situation that has nothing to do with Agile or Scrum.
Years ago I worked for a company that claimed to be doing Scrum because they started each day with a stand-up meeting. The meeting was fine, but what they did really wasn't Scrum by any stretch of the imagination. No sprints, no backlog, no retrospective, no well-defined stories, and no clue what our pace of development was. And even if you do have all the trappings of Scrum, it's still not Scrum if you ignore the underlying principles.
Words have meanings, or they are useless. So, let's define "agile". It doesn't mean "apply a label to any process that you already have". So, where do we find a definition for agile? Probably the best candidate is the Agile Manifesto. But there's not much concrete process there, so now what?
I worked in an agile (and, in fact, XP) environment for a while. The rule there was that the product manager owned the decision of what stories went into the project, but the technical team owned the estimates. That's kind of agile-y (we're doing stories and estimates, yay for us!), but it's also just good engineering management.
If you're in a situation where "Feature X has to be done this sprint because it's already been sold to (Board|Client|Investors|Other Dept)", you're in trouble whether or not you call your process "agile". The trouble you're in doesn't have much to do with whether you're agile or not, either - it has to do with management that doesn't listen to engineering reality. (However, it is a violation of at least one of the principles from the agile manifesto - sustainable pace.)
> So, where do we find a definition for agile? Probably the best candidate is the Agile Manifesto. But there's not much concrete process there, so now what?
So, now we recognize that "agile" doesn't describe the elements of a software-development process, it describes a set of priorities which are used for determining what process is adopted, and how the processes adopted are applied, in a particular organization (a set of priorities which specifically calls for consideration of the particular people involved and how they particularly interact.)
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is "People over process". While that doesn't mean process is not important, it does mean people are more important. Whatever your process is, it should be focused on people, working code, customer collaboration and the ability to respond to changing requirements. Even if you try that, it's still possible to have a process that does these things badly. But I still have to see someone argue that these principles themselves are a bad idea. (Well, responding to change can be harmful when driven to extremes.)
Scrum is the most process-oriented process that's still pretty agile. But one of the most essential aspects of it is that you refine your process based on how it works. In an organization with multiple Scrum teams, eventually every team will have a slightly different way of doing things, because that's what works for them.
Fair enough. But that means that the complaints about agile don't really have much to do with agile, they have to do with bad processes that are trying to implement agile. (Scrum is more concrete, though, and can be more validly criticized or defended without as much confusion over the definition.)
> But that means that the complaints about agile don't really have much to do with agile
Well, yeah, that's usually the problems with complaints about agile -- they aren't about agile, they are about a specific set of processes (usually ones developed, adopted, and applied by an organization not applying the principles in the Agile Manifesto) which that particular organization, or the consultant selling them, called "agile" as a way to hook on to the popularity of the buzzword.
> Scrum is more concrete, though, and can be more validly criticized or defended without as much confusion over the definition.
In principal, sure, Scrum is subject to process-based criticism, although lots of criticism of Scrum are about "what I've seen organization X, that claims to be using Scrum, do" rather than "the framework defined in the Scrum Guide".
As at least one study and plenty of anecdata has shown, music helps a lot of people with their work performance. The ROI on that $10/mo should be pretty good for your average developer. Spotify radio and playlists make easy to discover new music or listen to music you like without spending any time curating playlists etc.
If you think of the time spent to find and buy 720 songs, at just one minute each, that's 12 hours spent just buying songs. The value of spotify is wasting no time or money on acquiring or managing a music library.
ThinkPads are incredibly easy and quick to repair, most repairs could be done quicker than you could drive/transit to the nearest hardware repair shop. There are access panels for hard drive, memory, etc labeled with icons next to the screw holes. Not to mention if you have kids, perfect time to teach them a little about hardware.
Except the macbook pro ergonomics are horrible. After an hour or two of use my wrists looked like I had been trying to cut my wrists with a plastic knife all day. Apple rounds every single corner/edge on the laptop except the one you're most likely to come in contact with. Thinkpads round that corner aggressively so you're not likely to even come in contact with it.
It's my pet theory that it's only a small percent of the population that faces issues with the macbook pro hurting their wrists due to a ratio of (long)arm length to (short)torso length. Never the less the common response is to blame the users (and google macbook pro wrists to see they are many), instead of realizing people don't always get to work in a perfect ergonomic setup.
As I've gotten older and have less free time and there's so much more content out there, one practice I've come to accept is reading the wikipedia page and plot synopsis for a book/movie before starting watching something. In the same way I read HN comments before deciding whether to read the original article often times. Before wikipedia I would read the last chapters of books first.
I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a slow moving movie.
But how does just reading the synopsis indicate if something is any good? Wouldn't you be better just looking at the IMDB score? Or are you looking out to avoid things with 'dumb' endings?
There's something awesome about the way you really get "into the universe" when you spend hours reading a book or binge watching a tv show. All of the events and characters are fresh in your brain and you see the connections you may have missed if there was a night's sleep and a day's work in between.
After being called a "Harry Potter looking mother fucker", "white ass sumbitch", "saltine fuck" etc. on MARTA, I can tell you that no, it's unpleasant. Most of the people I know who told me not to take MARTA were middle-upper class African American people.
You live near Five Points and don't feel unsafe? Are you inside the Georgia State bubble, or on the courthouse side? I've been followed a number of times after coming out of Five Points MARTA. I've had four people follow me and call me a "Harry Potter looking motherfucker" who only left when I passed a cop. I mean I got used to the city and knew what to do/where not to go, but the paths I had to take and where not to go were usually only a block of difference.
And Five Points used to actually just have gangs hanging out on the sidewalk before they cracked down two years ago. I've been threatened, but never attacked, on MARTA, but I'm a big guy (6' 5" and 210 pounds while I was taking MARTA), and nearly all of my female friends had a "a couple of people tried to block my exit and stop me from getting to my car" stories. My fiancee had two guys wait outside of the station exit gates saying "Here, kitty kitty" at night -- and that was at Sandy Springs MARTA. The east/west line is way worse.
I've never felt unsafe on MARTA rail. But Five Points? When I worked at 101 Marietta, every one of my MARTA-ing co-workers had a story of working late and getting mugged on the way to the train.
I can't imagine an all remote team that relies on email. I've worked remote my entire career and chat is the lifeblood of a remote company. In essence, the chat server becomes the virtual office. When people sign on in the morning, you know they are there. People say bye before signing off (leaving the office). There's a #watercooler channel for people to have idle chitchat. A project manager can ask a question in the project chat room just as they would the teams open office room, etc.
I love the old warthog, but in the days of drones, I can't see much of a use anymore.