Probably an easy one: Are there any rules of thumb or pointers that could help recognise political requirements? Let’s say one of stakeholders (your boss, a head of another department or an actual user) asks for a feature or particular characteristic of software being developed by yourself or your team. Is there a litmus test to determ...
Taking shs's question a step further... Why isn't all government sponsored software open source? I can see excluding some for security purposes, but the rest? Didn't we as tax payers already pay for it? The government has no rights, only the people, so how can the government license something? Who is the licensee? It would be the pu...
Programmers as a group have a not exactly ill-deserved reputation for thinking little of others work/opinions and thinking a great deal of our own. I know that, I see it in myself all the time, and I consciously let such things slide on that basis when I see them. But... I'm in the unfortunate position where I'm working in an environme...
When trying to link some well established tools to my company's active directory, I hit a roadblock. I was told that: "Sorry, I cannot trust our domain admin password to [F/OSS] software...". This question deals specifically with how to convince IT that F/OSS software isn't (automatically) less trustworthy than any other software j...
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. But, how do you convince your boss to allow to host a BarCamp in its company ? My first boss reply was that it is too risky for the company, because ...
I have a software idea that can make my company a large amount of money (but is otherwise worthless to me -- it relies on specific assets the company already owns). I'm sure I could do all of the work myself, in my down time over the next year. How can I maximize my reward for the idea? By reward, I want increased cash flow, extra ben...
I have some really good ideas for this project but I'm not working on it personally. I don't have much pull in this company, so how do I get my features (good ideas) implemented in this project? Please help re-tag this. ...
Does anyone know of any active open source projects working on political campaign management software? I looked on sourceforge but didn't see anything relevant from the queries "political", "politics", "donations", "campaign", or in the categories "accounting", "politics" or "voting". I'm involved with a political campaign that is curr...
So I am trying to introduce code review to my teams. But a considerable number of peers fear that the political aspect might ruin the otherwise good teamwork. Have you encountered politics problems when you do code review? If so, how do you avoid it? Or more precisely, how to do a proper code review so there's least politics involved? ...
These days the Internet has turned the whole World in a single community. Still, many countries do have certain restrictions on software products and their source code. I couldn't help but wonder if there's a website somewhere which lists all the restrictions that exist world-wide for certain software technologies. (Not just the restrict...
From http://banbuilder.com/: Why BanBuilder? BanBuilder is designed to allow you to customize your banned-words list, and is constantly evolving. As people find new ways around the banned words (using symbols instead of letters, for example), they get added to the database. And its all free! The idea sounds great, ...
Quick Story: I started a new job where everyone funneled their questions to 'the geek'. Being an experienced developer, I can do most of my assignments without consultation with the geek - thinks such as how to select the top 10 rows in a table. Question: Is there a preferred way of handling these cases without offending the existing ...
I am the sole software developer in a company and I answer directly to the owner of the company. We also use the services of an outside developer. The owner isn't a developer but 'wrote software in qbasic' many years ago. He has reasonable abilities to spec projects. The outside developer doesn't answer directly to me, and my boss is re...
There's a big hullabaloo about hacked source code from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit that Global Warming skeptics are saying proves that the scientists who wrote these IDL and Fortran programs were intentionally fudging data. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/05/the-smoking-code-part-2/ To rebut the claim, one ...
I have a web form with about 15 checkboxes that users may check 0 or all 15 checkboxes and any quantity in between. The database that will store the form data is MySQL, but reports will be generated from the data in MS Access using a MySQL ODBC connection. I see three options for handling this. The Spreadsheet way: Have one table wit...
Currently in a situation where a co-worker refuses to do any work, and seems to want to make me do all the work, and then take the credit for it. Unfortunately for me, he tells the boss that we are sharing the work, but he is doing more work than I am. Said co-worker has been with the company longer than I have so the boss believes him m...
I'd like to upgrade from Java 5 to Java 6. We all know about the technical advantages and benefits, but: I have the problem that a major client refuses to upgrade from java 5 to java 6 because of "the risks" and "no/too few benefits for us" (banking sector). What can be answered to a non-technical decider at the client what benefits he...
Here's something I've been pondering after countless hours fixing JS to be cross-browser compatible (mostly IE): Why isn't Javascript consistent accross browsers? I mean, why can't JS be nice like Java and Flash? Instead, we have to resort to frameworks like jQuery. Don't get me wrong, they make my life easier - but why do they even exi...
Has anyone ever executed a deployment of opensource software product masqueraded with a paid product? Let's say a company had paid thousands of $$ annual licensing for a particular product. Every kludge that you designed could not get that product work according to the requirements of the project at hand. However, you were able to depl...