Brooks's law

[Henry]

Since you are guarding even the comment pages of your wiki like a national treasure
I put my comment here. Can you please remove the wrong statement on this page
http://wiki.osdev.org/Beginner_Mistakes

<quote>Brooks' Law states that the more people on a project, the longer it takes. </quote>

If you realy want to put Brookes's law in such simple terms I think you could state two things:
- The more people are working on a project the more the overhead increases.
- Adding developers to a late project will make it later.

The text of the wiki reads like "one programmer can do the same work faster then 10 programmers".

[Combuster]

Since you are guarding even the comment pages of your wiki like a national treasure

Says someone that hasn't even ever logged in to the wiki, let alone effect a change. Are you a troll?

[bluemoon]

1. the more people on a project, the longer it takes.
2. one programmer can do the same work faster then 10 programmers".

(1) does not imply (2), since:
- The work for (1) may, and in reality usually be, much more than (2) due to more contribution and opinions.
- You assume the work can be completed by one programmer.

Anyway, different people may get slightly different meaning over the same word, and it does not matter much as long as the core idea is the retained.

[Antti]

As an almost-ontopic note, I think that one good thing about having more than one developer in a project is that it makes it necessary to have proper interfaces/documentation/comments. In a small project one developer can remember all the "this procedure cannot run until this and this" etc.

In an ideal project, this is not a problem but...

[Combuster]

Still, for the people that page was written for, two of them can't write a OS faster than one. Let alone write an OS, which makes the entire brooks' law thing moot anyway ; )

[Love4Boobies]

Still, we shouldn't misquote. Brooks' law probably doesn't apply at all since hobby projects generally have quite a loose schedule.

I suspect the OP is a previously banned member who is annoyed at having some of his/her own wiki gibberish reverted. As for discussion pages, I've yet to see anything of the sort in the 5 years I've been a member.

[Combuster]

Well, to be honest I don't see an actual quote. I only see a paraphrasing of the core principle that more project members means the amount of work will increase due to overhead. The way it is phrased adds the ambiguity whether this concerns wall time or effort time - and from personal experience (not OS related though) both may turn out to be very true.

Plus, the idiots that want to do commercial or especially educational OSdev tend to actually do have a schedule.

Anyway, I don't see an obvious improvement to make as being politically correct does not help the target audience. If you have ideas, feel free to edit it as that's what the wiki is for

[linguofreak]

Since you are guarding even the comment pages of your wiki like a national treasure

Says someone that hasn't even ever logged in to the wiki, let alone effect a change. Are you a troll?

I think by "guarding like a national treasure" he means "requiring a login to edit, rather than letting people edit anonymously like Wikipedia".

[Griwes]

A login AND reading instructions!

Logging would probably be bearable for some people; but reading instructions?!

[bluemoon]

Login account is free, I think it's main purpose is to present a CC0-alike statement to contributors, but not about preventing anyone from editing, furthermore you can still do it anonymously by creating dummy login account.

[Combuster]

Login account is free, I think it's main purpose is to present a CC0-alike statement to contributors

Simpler: No spambot has a combined mediawiki and phpbb engine.

[Mikemk]

Login account is free, I think it's main purpose is to present a CC0-alike statement to contributors

Simpler: No spambot has a combined mediawiki and phpbb engine.

It actually says this somewhere in the wiki.