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Ten Geek Business Myths
hpcanswers writes "Venture capitalist Ron Garret has posted a list of eleven (despite the title) common mistakes entrepreneurs with a technology background make. A common theme is that good ideas sell; in reality, what a customer wants sells. By extension, having a Ph.D. and holding a patent are not particularly helpful if the intended end-user does not have the same level of understanding of the widget as the creator does."
11) Hot Grits down pants: Not as great as it sounds.
-- Off-topic. but important to /. readers --
As Jobs Leave America's Shoress...
The New Face of Class War
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The attacks on middle-class jobs are lending new meaning to the phrase "class war". The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled. America, the land of opportunity, is giving way to ever deepening polarization between rich and poor.
The assault on jobs predates the Bush regime. However, the loss of middle-class jobs has become particularly intense in the 21st century, and, like other pressing problems, has been ignored by President Bush, who is focused on waging war in the Middle East and building a police state at home. The lives and careers that are being lost to the carnage of a gratuitous war in Iraq are paralleled by the economic destruction of careers, families, and communities in the U.S.A. Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the U.S. government has sought to protect employment of its citizens. Bush has turned his back on this responsibility. He has given his support to the offshoring of American jobs that is eroding the living standards of Americans. It is another example of his betrayal of the public trust.
"Free trade" and "globalization" are the guises behind which class war is being conducted against the middle class by both political parties. Patrick J. Buchanan, a three-time contender for the presidential nomination, put it well when he wrote1 that NAFTA and the various so-called trade agreements were never trade deals. The agreements were enabling acts that enabled U.S. corporations to dump their American workers, avoid Social Security taxes, health care and pensions, and move their factories offshore to locations where labor is cheap.
The offshore outsourcing of American jobs has nothing to do with free trade based on comparative advantage. Offshoring is labor arbitrage. First world capital and technology are not seeking comparative advantage at home in order to compete abroad. They are seeking absolute advantage abroad in cheap labor.
Two recent developments made possible the supremacy of absolute over comparative advantage: the high speed Internet and the collapse of world socialism, which opened China's and India's vast under-utilized labor resources to first world capital.
In times past, first world workers had nothing to fear from cheap labor abroad. Americans worked with superior capital, technology and business organization. This made Americans far more productive than Indians and Chinese, and, as it was not possible for U.S. firms to substitute cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor, American jobs and living standards were not threatened by low wages abroad or by the products that these low wages produced.
The advent of offshoring has made it possible for U.S. firms using first world capital and technology to produce goods and services for the U.S. market with foreign labor. The result is to separate Americans' incomes from the production of the goods and services that they consume. This new development, often called "globalization," allows cheap foreign labor to work with the same capital, technology and business know-how as U.S. workers. The foreign workers are now as productive as Americans, with the difference being that the large excess supply of labor that overhangs labor markets in China and India keeps wages in these countries low. Labor that is equally productive but paid a fraction of the wage is a magnet for Western capital and technology.
Although a new development, offshoring is destroying entire industries, occupations and communities in the United States. The devastation of U.S. manufacturing employment was waved away with promises that a "new economy" based on high-tech knowledge jobs would take its place. Education and retraining were touted as the answer.
In testimony before the U.S.-China Commission,2 I explained that offshoring is the replacement of U.S. labor with foreign labor in U.S. production functions over a
I like LISP (Scheme actually, don't know full LISP yet), but is it really so good? I even borrowed Paul Grahams book from the library recently, but only flipped through it. I simply have my doubts about the syntax: is it really OK for productivity? It looks kind of ugly and verbose.
I like some of the language features, but I am not convinced enough to switch.
Any experiences out there?
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I did a lot of Lisp back in school. I've never used it in real life, though. Here's the thing: most programming algorithms boil down to performing some operation over a list of objects. Languages that facilitate this process while alleviating you of housekeeping tend to be very productive. But if the syntax is too unconventional, no one will use it. So you need a language with built-in lists, easy iteration and mappable functions, and a conventional syntax that is easy to learn. Also, it should have lots of good libraries and be "correct" in a certain academic way, so there are no surprises and everything is explicit.
In other words, learn Python.
I like LISP (Scheme actually, don't know full LISP yet), but is it really so good? I even borrowed Paul Grahams book from the library recently, but only flipped through it. I simply have my doubts about the syntax: is it really OK for productivity? It looks kind of ugly and verbose.
Syntax is not the reason to avoid Lisp.
The biggest reason to think twice about using Lisp is library support. Do stuff in Python or Ruby (or even Perl) that uses regular expressions, ftp and email, date conversions, reading from zipped files, Unicode, MD5 checksums, MIME handling, and so on. Then do the same in Lisp using an out-of-the-box implementation that runs on all platforms. Just try it yourself.
I don't have a lot of LISP experience, but it looks like once you grok the LISP nature, it's an incredible environment. You can write new language primitives (no more complaining "Well, when I used to program in $LANG, we had the $FOO feature" -- you write an implementation of $FOO and use it just like it was part of the language). It's also easy to write complete mini-languages (or maybe I should say "extension languages"), so you can create a domain-specific language, then write all your code in that language. Kind of like writing numerical analysis programs using Mathematica instead of FORTRAN. It also seems to lend itself to "bottom up" development, making it easy to write (and test) small routines, then use those routines to build more powerful ones.
I've been meaning to get a handle on LISP for a long time now, just wish I had the free time to do so (I've got Paul Graham's book, as well as SICP).
Just junk food for thought...
"Cultural peculularities?"
Is that when you have the cultural peculiarity of ululating at people?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Sounds like religion to me. I have worked with Lisp, and I have not found this to be true. In my experience, different languages are often better suited for different tasks, and those who believe that one language is optimized for everything just have a biased view based on their own preferences.
The details may be off, but the concept isn't. Both of my kids play youth soccer. One problem some naturally talented players have is that they're so much better than their fellow players, they don't pass because they find from experience that it is less effective than just keeping it themselves. So when they get promoted to leagues with better players, they don't have the mindset to pass when they should. Meanwhile players that take longer to develop learn to pass when they should, and do better once they play more skilled opposition.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.