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Requirements Rant

What is the point of having requirements if the designs are not made according to them? Where is the traceability between requirements and design? (I've never seen requirements called out in a design. Most times I don't think the developer even refers to them, only to the mental model in their head. It's a chore, not a useful process.) When stakeholders read requirements and nod their approval, usually what they're saying is, "I tried to read this, but it confused me, and I don't know what this means. Now of course I'm not going to say that, because I'm not going to look stupid, but I hope you understood what I want." Or, "I didn't read this, because I don't want to, or I don't have time, but you seem intelligent to me, and I trust you know what you're doing." How could requirements be written so that users would actually read them? (The same could be said for a lot of documentation.) Is there any point to prod
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Geek Love - New York Times

Geek Love - New York Times : "The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By March 9, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor Geek Love By ADAM ROGERS San Francisco GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it. I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world. Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely
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Save Windows XP

While I may not care so much whether or not Windows XP survives (I would be happy migrating to Ubuntu ), I would be discouraged if both my workplace and my family were forced to switch to Vista. At my workplace it would mean endless headaches, and since I am the IT support person in my family, I would be forced to attempt to fix the Vista bugs that my wife found at home. Sign the petition! Regardless of your feelings about open source vs. proprietary, no one should be forced to switch by a manufacturer.
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God and Computers Webcast

"In the fall of 1999, computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science. The lectures were broadcast live on the Internet and watched regularly by tens of thousands of people around the world, and they have remained popular many months after the event." Information about the lectures in book form can be found here .
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