the term virus hints at the reproduction system and means of spreading, not the effects of the infection...
Posts made by jwenting
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RE: John McAfee
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RE: I SERIOUSLY hope nobody is still using this OS...
@wonkoTheSane said:
Pretty sure you could also just click cancel as this wasnt a logon for the pc, it was network credentials - not mandatory.
yes, this dialog would pop up when connecting to a network after you'd already logged on to the PC and got to the desktop.
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RE: Increase your lifetime warranty
it's indeed a scam. These plans aren't warranty at all, they're an insurance policy and have all the limits and restrictions of those as compared to a warranty plan. Also, depending on your jurisdiction, you might actually by law have warranty far exceeding what the warranty card that came with your product tells you you have. And for those things where it does appear worthwhile, the seller knows quite well that
a) the vast majority of users will never have a valid claim (because the product is highly unlikely to develop a covered flaw before the "extended warranty" runs ou),
b) the vast majority of people buying it will forget about having the coverage and/or lose the paperwork needed to actually make a claim and
c) they unscrupulous ones count on the company issueing the coverage going out of business before any claims are likely to be issued (self liquidation, and just starting a new company every other year or so, or just economic reality, the one time I had such a plan the store I'd bought it was out of business when the product failed years later, there was no way to get it replaced)
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RE: Clueless
@bstorer said:
@belgariontheking said:
Why do people talk like that on IRC? Just give me one message with everything, don't give it to me in 4 word increments.
I don't know.
leftover
from the time
when computers
had small screens
Of course with current PDAs and EEEEEEEEEEEE PCs that time has returned. -
RE: Oracle... The rise and fall of the RDBMS with the biggest teeth. (&& Chin > K2)
by marketing to government departments :)
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RE: Welcome to DBA chaos.
there are female DBA?
If there are, I've never met any that admitted to being one.
No, let's just say I have a lot of experience dealing with DBAs and all but 2 of them were indeed session killing backup monkeys.
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RE: The I Hate Metalink thread
@Wooly said:
Nope... I think you'll find its bloated shit... just like everything else to come out of Oracle since version 7.0
you obviously didn't get my several months' old joke :(
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RE: Why are there no automation tools?
@BiffMaGriff said:
@Wooly said:
Well I'm not interested in making Oracle my lover. I'm interested in making Oracle my slave. :)The problem with Oracle people is we hate you more than we hate Oracle... Quite simple... :) Enjoy
Better creatures have tried and failed. All ended up being enslaved by the Oracle instead. Submit now and spare yourself the pain of forced induction by accepting your fate and the voluntary indoctrination program instead.
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RE: "Real World" Java Development?
@Alex Papadimoulis said:
@stratos said:
think you will see that everywhere, no matter what language.
I'm not really surprised about this fact... but the problem is, I'm having a hard time figuring out what "stacks" people acutally use. No one writes a blog post that says, "we just use Tomcat, Servlets, and JSP".
not surprising as it's not easy to answer.
We run many projects, and the actual stack depends on the project requirements. WebLogic, OC4J, JBoss, WebSphere, we use it all. Struts, Spring, JSP, ADF, bring it on. JDeveloper, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Netbeans, you name it. ANT, Maven? Subversion, Visual Sourcesafe, CVS.
But rarely will all that take place inside the scope of a single project.We tried last year to come up with a 'standard stack' that would be the recommended basis for new projects but gave up on the idea as the diversity of projects we run is just too great.
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RE: Welcome to DBA chaos.
sadly (or is it?) the SQL skills of most DBAs are negligable. They know how to run tools to kick off backups and kill jobs, but that's about it unless they're given step by step instructions (and there'd better be no typos anywhere).
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RE: Why are there no automation tools?
@BiffMaGriff said:
I seriously don't know what the problem is with you Oracle people. Every forum I post on every DBA I ask all I get is hostility.
If your attitude was less hostile towards Oracle and indicative of actually having a question after doing some research rather than just ranting about things you don't understand, you'd get a lot less hostility in return.
Not that there was much so far of course, the very first response told you where to look for answers rather than telling you where to stuff it which would possibly have been a more appropriate response to your rant (and the hostility you claim to experience). -
RE: Daftest "Plz send teh codes" yet...
don't you love those Indian 'programmers'?
One claims to need 'zu koduz' for his 'final year project', another (claiming to be a professional) asks that 'student' for 'yur koduz' so he can 'help'...
Is it some new courtship ritual over there to try to cheat on an assignment?
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RE: Are you superstitious?
@danixdefcon5 said:
Heh. My previous job involved major infrastructure changes from time to time, in a large financial institution. Many of the IT staff carried saints in their wallets for "good luck". I think they took "pray everything goes well" too literally ;)
Another superstition for the dev team was not to order pizza. For some reason, every time they ordered pizza, the app deployment would fail, and a simple 15-minute deployment would turn into a 5-hour nightmare... unless they didn't order pizza. Therefore, pizza was banned for major deployments.
Neither is superstition. The first is religion, established over centuries by study of empirical evidence. The second is common sense. If pizza causes the deployment to fail, it's only logical to not order pizza.
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RE: But the computer says...
@morbiuswilters said:
@belgariontheking said:
@bstorer said:
@halcyon1234 said:
You could use cash. They may not accept other forms of payment because they're not sure they'll get their money for it, but cash is as good as ... well, cash.How do you make a store sell you something?
Ultimately, you can't make them sell you something, but you can notify the credit card company, because the store is probably violating their merchant agreement.
Cash can be counterfeit and stores are free to refuse it if they want. With a credit card, the merchant is pretty much guaranteed payment which is why the card companies don't insist on positive ID.
Not here. Cash is legal tender, and stores are required by law to accept anything that's legal tender in this country. It's the same in the US.
So stores here (even if they have signs stating otherwise, such signs are possibly illegal) are required by law to accept any Euro coins or bills, and in the US the same would apply for any US dollar coins or bills.
They only get away with refusing some small coins and large bills because to most people it's not worth the trouble to take a store to court over such policies.
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RE: Definite proof that using a laptop can bring down a plane
light is indeed EM waves, but of course not all EM uses the same frequency.
It just happens to be that the transmissions of early US cellphones were in roughly the same frequency range as that used by navigational beacons for aircraft (but at lower signal intensity) and could thus cause interference in receivers for those beacons if used near those receivers.
With GSM that problem doesn't exist.
As already said, the claim by QANTAS that the problems were caused by someone's laptop are almost certainly an attempt to defuse any liability claims brought on by their current sloppy maintenance procedures, or by Airbus to prevent similar claims about their shoddy automated control systems.
If it were really possible for someone's laptop to cause the control system to go haywire it would have happened hundreds of times already, even if it were only possible because of a shoddily designed Airbus system (which is installed in hundreds of these aircraft and possibly thousands more of other types). -
RE: University tales
@Quietust said:
@Maciej said:
The nerve of her, not being totally confident in her understanding of what was going on!
The nerve of you, resurrecting a four month-old thread just to post an inane comment like that.4 months (minus a few days) is nothing. I've seen 5+ year old threads turned zombie by kiddos who don't even bother to read the solutions offered to the original question but just add "haf zame prob, plz hlp mi" or some such on quite a few forums.
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RE: Scripted tech support WTF
@danixdefcon5 said:
@cklam said:
Do mind me asking me asking why somebody with a B.Sc in CompSci is working L1 support - I mean that is like perdition, right ? Is her degree from Nigeria or a similar place or did she piss off somebody in Ma Bell's management hierarchy ?
Tech Support's gotta be one of IT's Nine Hells, but at least they're always hiring!
Or because (like some companies I worked in) there's a policy that everyone has to do TS for a number of hours per month. The idea is that putting people in the line of fire gives them more appreciation for the implications of their work or something like that.
Never got around to doing L1 (jumped ship before it got to that) but I've regularly done L2 and L3 is just part of everyone's job description almost everywhere (and L1 sometimes get automatically shunted to L2 or L3 if lines are busy at L1 level).
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RE: Successful Offshoring?
@DoctorFriday said:
@jwenting said:
it worked only because we had several native Romanians working in our office who served as not only project leads and managers but also as liaison with the remote team.
We have a similar arrangement except replace Romania with India, but I think that part of the success lies with what technology is being used. Most things go pretty well, but something "uncommon" like C is quite difficult to get nailed down.
IMO, rather than say "no, we don't develop in technology X" and lose business, the companies will accept any job and learn on-the-fly and the results speak for themselves.
Quite likely, which in no small part explains the terribly high number of (mainly) Indian kids scouring the web for quick hacks and ways to cheat at certification exams.
That's less of a problem in eastern Europe where shops mostly specialise in specific technologies and will not take on projects that fall outside of their area of expertise. -
RE: Are you superstitious?
superstition? No. Rational measures based on empirical evidence to ward of bad luck? Certainly.
Now where's that four leaf clover.
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RE: I need to teach someone to program.
not design patterns, not at this stage.
The world does NOT need another person calling himself an OO developer who's idea of a good program design is blindly putting some patters together out of a book.
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RE: But the computer says...
which is not technically correct.
You can travel without a passport in and between countries that are signatories to the Schengen treaty.
Not all EU member states are signatories, and not all signatories are EU members.The UK for example is an EU member but not a signatory, so one needs to show his passport at the border when entering the UK or when entering any Schengen signatory country from the UK.
And of course when travelling by air a passport or European identity card is still required at the airport (several times even, when checking in and when passing security, and when boarding. When deplaning after arrival in a Schengen signatory country from another no passport checks are performed (which caused a major financial hit on airports when the treaty went into effect, as all had to build special deplaning tracks for passengers arriving from these countries).
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RE: Scripted tech support WTF
@belgariontheking said:
Seems like a pretty standard L1 script to me. They get a lot of idiots who DON'T know what they're doing but claim to.
I'm not convinced that the restoration of service had anything to do with your call. Then again it might have.
Correct. And if it had they kept him occupied while scrambling to solve it, which makes most people feel appreciated.
At least he wasn't put on hold with some nasty "music" for an hour at $1.50 per minute... -
RE: But the computer says...
@operagost said:
@halcyon1234 said:
Complain as much as you want about Canada being a tyranny-- but really, when it comes down to it, the only reason I need the passport is because someone else's president is an insane, paranoid nutjob won't let me into their country without one by air-- or by land in 2009. Not naming any names, or anything, of course.
What other countries can you get into without a passport?
Excellent question. And who can get into Canadadada without a passport? I'm sure I can't, and just a passport isn't enough. I need to fill in a form stating where I'll be staying, when I'll be leaving, and just about all my posessions I am bringing in.
And I'm lucky, I don't need to apply for a visum (at considerable cost) from a Canadian embassy or consulate several weeks before departing for the country. -
RE: But the computer says...
maybe, but it does make it harder for "undocumented workers" to get a passport with which to apply for things like voter registration, access to air travel, etc. etc.
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RE: Successful Offshoring?
at least you got something...
I've been involved in 2 projects where we never got anything at all, except a lawsuit for not paying for delivery of non-delivered goods.
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RE: "We know you've got a licence, now prove it"
nothing wrong with that. So the email address was used prior to register for support to a purchased license.
Doesn't mean it's you holding that license, it could be someone else who used the address before you.Or the program is specific to a person, and the email address isn't enough to uniquely identify that person.
Or they just wanted to tick you off for being a jerk to them in the past.
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RE: But the computer says...
the real WTF is that they accept written applications at all.
There's no way to guarantee that the passport isn't being made out to some non-existent person with a real photograph.Of course requiring a known passport as a doublecheck provides some security, but not a lot. That passport could have been the result of an earlier fraudulent application.
Proper process would require application in person, handing over either an existent passport or proof of identity (birth and residence certificates usually). -
RE: Try-catch style
@Bombe said:
@too_many_usernames said:
I don't think I really appreciated until this point just how passionate people are on this particular topic.
Until now I wasn’t even aware that there is an issue with the number of function exit points.Most people need to be bitten by it to become aware :)
While I'm not religious about it, I do approve of the desire to try and limit the number of exit points as much as possible.
Certainly no more than a single exit point should exist for normal process flow, if there is that's a sure sign the method has multiple responsibilities and needs to be split up.Makes debugging and maintenance a lot easier to perform.
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RE: Successful Offshoring?
yes. Company I used to work for had a successful group in Romania. BUT it worked only because we had several native Romanians working in our office who served as not only project leads and managers but also as liaison with the remote team.
Effectively we offshored the bulk of the work but did all the integration and business logic work (the hard stuff) at our own offices.That combination worked, getting the application out the door on time and on budget, albeit with only (literally) minutes to spare when the web service stack it needed to communicate with crashed on the morning of the day it was supposed to be demoed in the afternoon to customers (which was no fault of either the local or remote team, they did however discover that their system didn't handle that particular error scenario gracefully).
But that doesn't offset the general bad taste in my mouth I've gotten with almost every other offshoring project I've ever been (directly or indirectly) involved with.
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RE: How much of a WTF is this interview?
@metrogirl said:
I hate when people don't keep their word.
So do I, but over the years I've come to expect it. It seems to be standard human behaviour.
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RE: Commercials -- had enough?
@CDarklock said:
@morbiuswilters said:
it ignores the fact that people haven't lived in small towns and cities with a Main Street since the suburb was invented
Um... my karate school is on Main street. Right next door to the police station and across the street from a most excellent used bookstore, which in turn is next door to a very good music shop. I don't live in that town now, but I did live there for four years.
Sounds like the town I come from, except there's no karate school, police station, used bookstore, or music store there.
There is however a grocery, a butcher, a baker, a church, a firestation (in one of the few sidestreets), and a cafe all on the main street. -
RE: Commercials -- had enough?
@belgariontheking said:
Now, I know what the point of commercials is, but I've had just about enough of these commercials advertising their products trying to sound like campaign ads. Do they think they're being cute? or funny?
Without quoting them, is anyone else sick of this?
Are you sure it's not the other way around, campaign ads trying to sound like normal advertising in the hope of tricking you into not seeing through the obvious campaign promises everyone knows are made to be broken?
I'm sick of advertising, period. It all seems designed to make customers look stupid and company staff like idiots.
So it's insulting me twice, once by calling me stupid and once more by assuming I'm going to buy stuff made and sold by idiots.
As a result I've not bought anything because of the advertising in decades, but I have a long list of things I will definitely NOT buy because of the advertising. -
RE: Weird annoying Python/vista stuff
the real WTF is advocating Emacs. VI baby!
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RE: How much of a WTF is this interview?
So they have a project they think needs "a week or so" of work by someone with your skills and experience.
They let you come in for a week, probably unpaid, with no contract. After that week the project is done and you're told that "we don't think you're going to fit in our team" and not hired after all.
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RE: Jack Thompson Disbarred
@NorseLaQuet said:
@morbiuswilters said:
I don't like the guy, but what illegal activities did he engage in? He made several filings against the Florida Bar and various Florida judges that alleged some dubious things, but it seems like this is just retribution by the Bar for his campaign against it. Is there actually any legal reason why he should have been disbarred?
This guy is just crazy. From what I heard - he frequently submitted porn as evidence and was repeatedly told to stop.
You just have to ask yourself: should a crazy and arrogant man be allowed to have a voice in our legal system after blatantly and repeatedly disrespecting the rules?
If not, it's going to get awfully quiet in courtrooms across the nation, as well as in the White House and on the Hill (and all their equivalents at all levels).
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RE: Evil Crocs
@amischiefr said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@jwenting said:
Well said. High heels are idiotic. Unhealthy, unnatural, uncomfortable (given how women always kick them off as soon as possible and can't walk well wearing them).
Who cares if they are painful? They're hot. Seriously, you're a real whiner.
Well said Morb, they ARE hot! I don't mind if they kick them off as soon as they get into my bedroom. I mean seriously jwenting, you don't like them because they take them off? Maybe you're like the other poster and prefer the grunge girls with fishnet arm thingies, dirty converse shoes, 25 rings in their face and black makeup. To each his own I guess.
I wouldn't want a woman to be uncomfortable just to look good, because she won't. Nothing wrong with black makeup btw, but the nosering has to go :)
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RE: Code Monkey like Fritos
I don't like fritos and coffee...
But yes, I do have a manager called Rob ;)
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RE: Ban Google, Save India
@Spectre said:
@lizardfoot said:
How are they going to get "teh codez" without being able to search on Google?
Do they actually use it? I thought they go straight to Java forums.That's what I thought too. Their "profs" (they don't seem to have teachers) gives them a doubt (they do seem to question everything over there) and tells them to go to the Sun forums (or some other sites) to sol prob.
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RE: Student licenses, Windows XP, and YOU!
@curtmack said:
All valid solutions, to be sure. I was mostly curious as to why you can only enter a new key if you're activating over the telephone, when the product key is equally important for Internet activation. The average liberal arts major from southeast Nebraska does not know how to alter the registry.
who do you think wrote the activation wizard specs document? Hint: it wasn't Bill Gates but you seem to relate to him :)
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RE: The I Hate Metalink thread
The all "new and improved" Metalink is now available. Oracle decided to use Flash so it must be good (after all, Adobe makes it...).
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RE: Evil Crocs
@element[0] said:
@amischiefr said:
What on earth could you possibly have against a hot woman with some nice long legs wearing high heels?
What on earth could you possibly have against a hot woman with some nice long legs wearing crocs?
my point is it's just opinion, i think high heels look stupid, i mean when you think about it they are a pretty dumb design for a shoe.
i prefer my women is a cool skate shoe or the like but that's just my preference, to be honest when assessing the hotness of a girl her footware does not feature heavily in my decision making process
Well said. High heels are idiotic. Unhealthy, unnatural, uncomfortable (given how women always kick them off as soon as possible and can't walk well wearing them).
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RE: Evil Crocs
@jetcitywoman said:
Yeah, I don't get them either. Feet have an especially hard time coping with things like fungus so you need matierals that can keep them clean and dry. Plastic is NOT one of them.
Strangely (and I can attest to that, I love to wear them for the very reason) your feet will sweat LESS wearing them than pretty much anything else.
And the sizing/shape and low weight make them extremely comfortable for people with wide or problematic feet.Not all plastics are the same... The material used was selected specifically to reduce sweating and be anti-septic and easy to clean.
My only gripe with them so far (and I've been wearing them for some years) is that the soles wear down rather quickly because the material is rather soft. -
RE: Password storage system
a small paper notebook and a pencil does the trick for me.
For added security also carry a lighter or a box of matches (unless you like the taste of paper).
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RE: Rational agrument against Hungarian notation?
most people stop reading as soon as they have the information they want, so people wanting only the datatype would stop reading as soon as they read the prefix.
HN supposes that people are more interested in the type of a variable than in what that data actually means I guess.
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RE: Game engine WTF.
@mrprogguy said:
@trollable said:
1) TheUseOfCamelCasing
2) sHungarian sNotation
3) Defining all the variables up at the top
4) Poor checking to see which triangle the point is in
5) Having "pretty much exactly the same code" twice in the same function
6) use of float
Let's see.
1) used in many langages and many APIs. Maybe it is adequate in that case. not a WTF
2) widely used. recommanded by many (but not me). not a WTF
3) sometimes it makes the code much more readable. not a WTF
4) bug? not a WTF
5) can it be factorized? not sure. not a WTF
6) this is the best choice. fast. thread-safe. precise. not a WTF.Ditto from me on all counts...except maybe the float/double thing. Pretty sure doubles are handled without multiple instructions in the FPU, which would make them thread-safe. On the other hand, I really should go look that up. [^o)]
depends on the CPU...
Hungarian Notation is a WTF, though it's a WTF not so much of the persons using it but of the person inventing it [;)]
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RE: Foreign Keys just get in the way
@El Foo said:
@felix said:
@hank miller said:
Between sqlite (www.sqlite.org) on the low end, and postgresql on the high end, I see no need for mysql anywhere.
Indeed? What if you need concurrent access to the database? SQLite can't handle it. Not by itself. Are you willing to code the concurrency layer youself when there's a ready-made alternative?
If you need concurrent access in situations where SQLite will break, use Postgre. For small applications, a few locks never hurt anyone, and for larger applications SQLite is unsuitable anyway.Ah, the idea that small applications will forever stay small...
Forget it, applications ALWAYS grow out of whatever their scale was intended to be. If it was intended to be a pilot for another application that would be using a "proper" database, be especially scared.
You need only 1 database engine that's both fast and smalle: Firebird.
Though I prefer to code in Java using database independent code so switching to something big like DB/2 or Oracle isn't usually a problem... -
RE: Does Agile work for standard software development
Incorporating SOME agile elements can work fine, but don't take on the entire bandwagon or you're bound for failure in all but the smallest projects.
Waterfall I'd not recommend except for extremely static environments (maintenance projects on mainframe applications with release cycles of half a year or more), something like UP works a lot better. It has the agile system of shorter feedback loops without the problem of there being no design and division of responsibility.
How do we manage the development process to
1) meet the delivery date if somehow possibleBy setting a realistic release schedule, not by releasing whatever you have at the time the deadline approaches.
2) provide our management with reliable data on our progress
By keeping track of progress, something agile methods prohibit (they basically scrap all tracking and tracing as part of their drive to be "flexible").
What we do is create a list of modules. Each module gets a booking code and time estimate.
Hours get booked to track whether our planning was accurate and to check on budget status.
A large sheet is printed with every module and boxes for each phase of development (FA, TA, implementation, testing, signoff) as well as a priotity number. When a phase is complete, it's marked off on that list which hangs in a central location. When all phases are complete the module is highlighted using a fluorescent marker.
That way it's easy to see how far along you are in the project (of course it's not perfect, some days you may program 5 small modules while a massive one may take 2 months, but it's a nice thing for managers to see the list growing smaller and smaller. That's why we divide up the small modules and do a few of those whenever there's been no visible progress for a while, keeps the managers happy :)). -
RE: Agile != cowboy
Agile methods can work, to a degree. But in the real world most often the project requirements don't lend themselves to the rather shoddy design systems (no design basically, just wing it) approach that many agile methods employ.
If you're working on a small application that won't need to be maintained and expanded over several versions and years that's fine, for large enterprise level systems it's asking for disaster.
Problem is that the consultants who prefer agile methods build such large systems and then leave, leaving people like the common denizen of this site to pick up the pieces a year or so later when something needs to be changed.What you're describing as strong points of agile development are the few points where it is indeed strong (though I hate peer programming, I can't work with someone looking over my shoulder constantly).
And those are precisely the parts of "agile" development that are often left out by those same consultants to save money (after all, why send 2 people to peer program when one person can create the same amount of code in almost the same time, you'd just be undercut by the competition for the contract).