No, I'm not an arbiter, but I'm old enough to not care about new services (especially social ones), and yes, I work on tools aggregating social media.
But instead of arguing, why not wait and check in the next following months who will be right ? I'm much more interested in reality-check than belief-check.
I showed you how fast an innovative culture can be shattered. I like Google Services, but frankly, as Hairyfeet said about Apple, they took all the low-hanging fruits, and if they intend to reduce expenses to increase their margins, they are so wrong, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Deming_philosophy_synopsis
(b) However, when people and organizations focus primarily on costs, costs tend to rise and quality declines over time.
Where do you see something exciting in these projects ? They are just eye-catching, and I predict they will be killed in the near future (Wave is already dead). See hairyfeet's reply, his fad's concept is so true.
To make room for 2010's freshmen, a half-dozen American giants on 2009's list got dumped: AT&T, ExxonMobil, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, and Target
You are so right about fads ! Everybody thinks that innovation must be eye-catching. I recommend that you read Edwards Deming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming ). For example "The New Economics", it really hurts. He's right since 50 years, and was never listened in his own country.
Will Cook be able to predict new markets like Jobs did and stay one step ahead of the game, or will it be like the Pepsi guy where they try to coast on past success and slowly go downhill? In any case i'd say the next 5 years are gonna be pretty rough and tumble, especially if the economy keeps going south
After reading Steve Jobs' biography, my CEO told me that it was pure luck that Jobs was successful with Apple. He was a psychopath, and he was obsessed with design. It's just that his obsession matched the market.
I believe that Apple will do as Google and Microsoft: they'll improve their existing products, and perhaps buy companies which offer new products. But I doubt they'll be able to propose new ideas. Perhaps they have enough money to start copying competition, but at a higher cost (as did Microsoft with its XBox). I'm now waiting to see what FoxConn and Lenovo will propose in the near future.
About ASP.NET, you made a mistake. I'm an ASP.Net developer too. What disappears is Silverlight, not ASP.Net.
Sadly though, that's the problem with every other company on the planet.
Sadly, I agree with you. When times are tough, all companies tend to reduce their expenses, and the first cuts are with employees and research. In my opinion, this is very wrong, the economy slows down because every company has the same behaviour. Having such a pessimistic point of view means that Google is not confident anymore in their products.
What irritates me is that the companies doing the most effort on reducing expenses are the richest ones, and the resulting profits will not be redistributed, except for the shareholders. Typically, management asks their employees to do more with less (improve productivity), and at the end, they fire people to improve their margins further.
And no, Google invest where they know that they'll have money in return (search, gmail, etc..), and mostly because of competition. THIS IS NOT INNOVATION !!! Innovation is about taking risks, investing everywhere. See Microsoft and IBM, they do a lot of Research, because they know that you cannot predict what will be a success in the future. Remember the 20% at Google (20% of your time is spent on new projects), it's not officially dead, but I'll tell you: IT'S DEAD !
If you just concentrate on improving a product, this is not innovation, this is just improving your quality, process and productivity. When you have an innovative company (using a disruptive innovation), like Google was, and you start to copy your followers, this means that you are not able to innovate anymore, you have no new ideas and no vision for the future. The only thing you can do is to buy smaller companies to add value to yours.
Google is the new Microsoft, let's see what company will take Google's place.
No, you are wrong, here is an example: http://google.com/codesearch No more service, and no replacement (don't believe what they say, this service was indexing all source code on the Internet, not Google's only).
Google is killing every service that doesn't return quick money. This means that Google just stopped all innovation (except a few star projects, like Google car, but what does an advertisement's company do in the automobile's domain anyway ? It's so... out of place).
Why would you want to take risks when you can make money with existing products ? Why would you put money in Research when you can concentrate on Development ? Oh, that's right: let's buy any startup that has an interesting idea, and kill the idea if it doesn't make money.
Does the CEO realizes that he's trading CPU's limitation against bandwidth's limitation ?
Generating a picture in full HD requires 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels. But for a movie, the resolution is 4096 x 3112 = 12,746,752 pixels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
This gives 36 megabytes per picture. Now, you have to create 25 pictures for one second. You get 5400 megabytes for every minute of movie.
It may be faster to compute digital animation, but you still have a large IO problem, both in storage and in preserving the data (you may lose pixels when downloading the files) !
It's similar to outsourcing tasks: it's a short-term solution for larger problems.
Totally agree ! I'm european, and I suffer from an incurable illness: celiac disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't eat organic food.
When I eat gluten, and most particularly wheat, I become very tired, I get a giant dermatosis and my articulations hurt in less than one hour. In fact, my intestinal villi are destroyed when exposed to gliadin, and this leads to cancer after several years.
It took me more than 10 years to discover why I was constantly ill, since my doctor thought it was the "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" (he never heard about celiac disease before). All the symptoms disappeared after a week-long gluten-free diet. Now, I need to eat and sleep less, because my body absorbs all the nutrients in the food, and I have less problems with my emotions (I'm probably less autistic).
BTW, since I have only been recently diagnosed, I still don't know what other kinds of food I'm allergic to. Beer and milk cause me pain. Buying food takes a lot of time, since wheat is everywhere: soy sauce, ham, bread, most frozen food, some chocolates, etc...
Wheat has been "improved" by selection, so GM food is probably even more dangerous. Who knows what kind of allergy might appear, and in how much time will it be detected ? Can you imagine that people may die from cancer at 40 after ingesting GM during all their life ? How can you prevent that ?
In fact, all the foods that have been improved (wheat, milk, corn,...) are dangerous for me, so GM is a big no no.
Celiac disease seems to affect 1% of the population, but how much people will be diagnosed ?
Various groups of people had to pull ropes, and Ringelmann discovered that people unconsciously reduced their effort when they were in a group, even when everybody except one in the group faked the rope-pulling !
The two biggest problems of collaborative work are: 1) communicating takes time, and you cannot work during this time 2) people provide less effort when they work collaboratively Of course, there are a lot of advantages !
About creativity, I think that innovation is not a solitary activity. You need to interact to get ideas, and the more you learn about diverse subjects, the more you can be creative. This is why people like Leonardo da Vinci were able to invent so much: they had a large knowledge across a lot of domains. Nowadays, it's difficult to have such a broad knowledge, because we need to concentrate on a few domains. This is why group brainstorming is efficient: people with different views and approaches work on a common problem by sharing their knowledge.
What hurts creativity the most is not group brainstorming, it's the fact that people don't want to challenge themselves. This is called mental fixedness. Now, everybody concentrates on improving current ideas, not challenging them or creating new ones. New ideas emerge only when you are unsatisfied with the current ideas.
On a personal note, I was an introvert 3 years ago, and I was a very good coder. Since 3 years, I'm now an extrovert, and even though my social skills increased tremendously, I don't enjoy coding anymore. I still enjoy solitary activities, like writing for my blog, but I'm not interested into pure logic anymore. I believe that logic and introversion are related. I consider myself as a creative guy, and my creativity which was used for writing code is now used on social interactions.
1) root-cause analysis: take your original question, and ask why you want that. Find 3 to 5 answers. Reapply the process to your answers: why do you want that ? Answers that have no parent are root causes. When there are no more answers, take a look at all the root causes, and what you are searching should be obvious !
2) domain analysis: enumerate all your activities in development. For example: coding, debugging, managing, planning, etc... Now, put a score on every activity, 0=it sucks, 10=it's great. When you finished the scoring, take the 3 biggest scores, and imagine what job could fit these 3 activities without the other activities. That is your dream job !
1) How does that next programmer know what is expected?
He has examples on how to call the routine and what it returns. I agree that you need to add a little bit information about inputs and outputs, but you can name the variables in a correct way.
2) "show how to call your code," That's the API documentation, not the code documentation.
Do you mean that you write 2 documentations ? Good luck ! When you code, your API is your code.
3) Again, how does the next programmer know what the behavior is supposed to be?
He has examples of the inputs and their outputs. Unless your code is terribly complicated (which means that you probably didn't subdivide it enough), there is no real need to document code. I rarely saw code that was impossible to understand, when the number of lines was small (and yes, I wrote large programs in assembly language).
4) "improve the stability of your program, and reduce the QA time." That has nothing to do with documentation.
It's a side-benefit.
but there is STILL going to be maintenance later on by someone.
You are totally right. Now, let's see where you want to spend your time: 1) maintaining a documentation that will be probably useful in a few years (and in general, the code is so old, it sucks and nobody wants to maintain it) 2) maintaining tests, that will "document" the routines behaviour, and checks that there is no regression.
Except that writing tests add value to your project, since you always validate that your code works.
Documenting code doesn't add any value, except if you write an OS or middleware, and in these cases, you only need to document what every call returns.
In fact, tests easily replace any kind of documentation.
As an agile developer, I recommend against documenting your code.
You need to document the algorithms, but never the code.
Documenting your code will require you a lot of maintenance. Every time you change your code, you need to change your documentation. It's a never-ending process.
Instead, decide on a meaningful notation for your routines names (so any coder knows what the routine is supposed to do), and write tests, or more exactly functional tests. Tests have a few goals: 1) check that your code behaves as expected. Suppose that you have to fix a bug in your code, without tests, you cannot be sure that the fix will not be harmful. It also allows greater flexibility in your code, and it will not smell like a rotting corpse. 2) show how to call your code, in order to get results. Examples are very useful for other developers. 3) confirm a behaviour. Your code does something, but sometimes, it's not clear. Your test should demonstrate the value of your code. 4) improve the stability of your program, and reduce the QA time.
Once the habit of writing tests is acquired, you'll start writing the tests before the code. This is called TDD (Test Driven Development), and helps reduce a lot the amount of code you need to write, because you only write useful code. Who wants to write unused tested code ?
Adjusting your seat is a good advice, but you should also change your position. When your body starts to hurt, just listen to it, and change your position by straightening your back, it's very simple and effective.
Also, I recommend using a Trackball, because it's the horizontal movements when using a mouse that hurt your wrist. I personally use a Microsoft trackball, mine is at least 6 years old, and still working nicely.
a few sad stories of injured policemen at the protests
In Lybia, the goverment says that a lot of soldiers were killed during the protests, but in fact, they were killed by other soldiers because they refused to shoot people.
Being a soldier does not automatically make you a brainless killer.
I'm from France. Back in 1982, when I wanted to buy a computer, I checked all the prices, and the Commodore 64 was very expensive (5000 francs, which is $1000). The TRS80 was even more expensive: 6000 francs, or $1200. Atari and TI99/4A were expensive too. At that time, I bought a TI58C, and it cost me 600 francs, or $120.
Two computers were available at a much lower price: ZX Spectrum and Oric, at 2000 francs, or $300. I bought an Oric, since the Spectrum was late, and american computers were outrageously expensive. My next computer was an Atari 520 ST in 1986, and it cost me 7000 francs, or $1300.
Every geek on Slashdot was speaking about it, because it was so much better than the other search engines. In a few years, Google became the company we know.
Now, Google is not the most preferred search engine anymore, there is no real competition, but DuckDuckGo seems to be a nice contender.
Innovation is not about taking a single idea and pushing it until it works. Innovation is about taking a lot of ideas, and see what is viable. I see that you don't know the story behind post-it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postit Fry explained that you have one very successful idea out of 5000 concepts.
Google's goal is to aggregate all the knowledge in the world, so why do they close useful search services, like codesearch ? http://google.com/codesearch If a project needs a large team to maintain it, like Wave or Buzz, I agree that Google needs to stop putting money into these projects, but when the project requires only a few people, why stop it completely ? Also, I think it's a very bad idea to stop these projects (Wave, Buzz) entirely: 1) they should reduce the teams to only a few guys, in order to keep the services. Maybe it will become successful one day. 2) killing projects like this shows to the whole Google employees that it's useless to suggest new ideas, because Google will never take the risk to start them. The message is: "Google is only interested into successful projects, and will not take any risk". If I was a Google employee, I would start my own company, instead of giving my own idea to them.
Even Google Health might become important in a near future, I'm not sure, I cannot test it, being outside of US.
And I'd like to see what Google will do with their automated cars. It's a technological showcase, but the risk is too high to have an automated car: if you have an accident, who is responsible ?
Focus has nothing to do with success. MySpace was focused, and it fails. Facebook is focused, and it succeeds.
Apple is not focusing on technology, since it's trying to be a software AND an hardware company (iMac, iPod, iPad). A lot of companies tried to sell tablets, and only Apple succeeded in branding it. And don't talk to me about iOS or anything, nobody cares about that.
Apple's success is only because they are focusing on the users, and Google doesn't care at all about them, it cares only about its clients (advertisers), or in other words money.
Let's see if Apple without Jobs will continue its focus on users. Let's see how long Google will continue to dominate the search market, once people realize that Google doesn't care about them.
No, it's not because of capitalism, since IBM and Microsoft are probably even more capitalist than Google or Apple. It's a human decision. Do you focus on your next quarter, or do you see farther ?
Google encouraged its employees to work 20% of their time on innovation. Now, I'm sure that this is no more the case.
Google is taking the easiest route, and when you stop taking risks, you don't create anymore. The option "let's cut all useless expenses" is necessary only when you are in big financial trouble, otherwise, it's just plainly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm not an arbiter, but I'm old enough to not care about new services (especially social ones), and yes, I work on tools aggregating social media.
But instead of arguing, why not wait and check in the next following months who will be right ?
I'm much more interested in reality-check than belief-check.
I showed you how fast an innovative culture can be shattered.
I like Google Services, but frankly, as Hairyfeet said about Apple, they took all the low-hanging fruits, and if they intend to reduce expenses to increase their margins, they are so wrong, read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Deming_philosophy_synopsis
(b) However, when people and organizations focus primarily on costs, costs tend to rise and quality declines over time.
and that was explained in 1950 !
No, the management is ashamed: they could have saved 8,000 biscuits and cups of tea !
Riots happen in China but are repressed, and of course hidden from public view.
Here is an article from last week in FoxConn:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/10/did-300-workers-at-an-xbox-360-factory-threaten-mass-suicide/
Thanks ! I didn't notice it.
Where do you see something exciting in these projects ?
They are just eye-catching, and I predict they will be killed in the near future (Wave is already dead).
See hairyfeet's reply, his fad's concept is so true.
About innovation, read this interesting article about 3M:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm
To sum it up: 3M had a culture of innovation during 100 years. A single CEO killed this culture in 4 years.
And 3M just got out of the top 50 most innovative companies:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html
To make room for 2010's freshmen, a half-dozen American giants on 2009's list got dumped: AT&T, ExxonMobil, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, and Target
You are so right about fads !
Everybody thinks that innovation must be eye-catching.
I recommend that you read Edwards Deming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming ). For example "The New Economics", it really hurts. He's right since 50 years, and was never listened in his own country.
Will Cook be able to predict new markets like Jobs did and stay one step ahead of the game, or will it be like the Pepsi guy where they try to coast on past success and slowly go downhill? In any case i'd say the next 5 years are gonna be pretty rough and tumble, especially if the economy keeps going south
After reading Steve Jobs' biography, my CEO told me that it was pure luck that Jobs was successful with Apple.
He was a psychopath, and he was obsessed with design.
It's just that his obsession matched the market.
I believe that Apple will do as Google and Microsoft: they'll improve their existing products, and perhaps buy companies which offer new products.
But I doubt they'll be able to propose new ideas.
Perhaps they have enough money to start copying competition, but at a higher cost (as did Microsoft with its XBox).
I'm now waiting to see what FoxConn and Lenovo will propose in the near future.
About ASP.NET, you made a mistake. I'm an ASP.Net developer too. What disappears is Silverlight, not ASP.Net.
Sadly though, that's the problem with every other company on the planet.
Sadly, I agree with you.
When times are tough, all companies tend to reduce their expenses, and the first cuts are with employees and research.
In my opinion, this is very wrong, the economy slows down because every company has the same behaviour.
Having such a pessimistic point of view means that Google is not confident anymore in their products.
What irritates me is that the companies doing the most effort on reducing expenses are the richest ones, and the resulting profits will not be redistributed, except for the shareholders.
Typically, management asks their employees to do more with less (improve productivity), and at the end, they fire people to improve their margins further.
And no, Google invest where they know that they'll have money in return (search, gmail, etc..), and mostly because of competition.
THIS IS NOT INNOVATION !!!
Innovation is about taking risks, investing everywhere. See Microsoft and IBM, they do a lot of Research, because they know that you cannot predict what will be a success in the future.
Remember the 20% at Google (20% of your time is spent on new projects), it's not officially dead, but I'll tell you: IT'S DEAD !
If you just concentrate on improving a product, this is not innovation, this is just improving your quality, process and productivity.
When you have an innovative company (using a disruptive innovation), like Google was, and you start to copy your followers, this means that you are not able to innovate anymore, you have no new ideas and no vision for the future.
The only thing you can do is to buy smaller companies to add value to yours.
Google is the new Microsoft, let's see what company will take Google's place.
No, you are wrong, here is an example: http://google.com/codesearch
No more service, and no replacement (don't believe what they say, this service was indexing all source code on the Internet, not Google's only).
Google is killing every service that doesn't return quick money. This means that Google just stopped all innovation (except a few star projects, like Google car, but what does an advertisement's company do in the automobile's domain anyway ? It's so ... out of place).
Why would you want to take risks when you can make money with existing products ?
Why would you put money in Research when you can concentrate on Development ?
Oh, that's right: let's buy any startup that has an interesting idea, and kill the idea if it doesn't make money.
Google is ranked as the 2nd most innovative company in 2010:
http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/innovative_companies_2010.html
Let's see how it will do in the next rankings.
The problem with Google is now greed.
Does the CEO realizes that he's trading CPU's limitation against bandwidth's limitation ?
Generating a picture in full HD requires 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels.
But for a movie, the resolution is 4096 x 3112 = 12,746,752 pixels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution
This gives 36 megabytes per picture.
Now, you have to create 25 pictures for one second.
You get 5400 megabytes for every minute of movie.
It may be faster to compute digital animation, but you still have a large IO problem, both in storage and in preserving the data (you may lose pixels when downloading the files) !
It's similar to outsourcing tasks: it's a short-term solution for larger problems.
In French, a pipa is a toad.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipa_(amphibien)
But I would rather err on the safe side.
Totally agree !
I'm european, and I suffer from an incurable illness: celiac disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeliac_disease
I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't eat organic food.
When I eat gluten, and most particularly wheat, I become very tired, I get a giant dermatosis and my articulations hurt in less than one hour.
In fact, my intestinal villi are destroyed when exposed to gliadin, and this leads to cancer after several years.
It took me more than 10 years to discover why I was constantly ill, since my doctor thought it was the "Irritable Bowel Syndrome" (he never heard about celiac disease before).
All the symptoms disappeared after a week-long gluten-free diet.
Now, I need to eat and sleep less, because my body absorbs all the nutrients in the food, and I have less problems with my emotions (I'm probably less autistic).
BTW, since I have only been recently diagnosed, I still don't know what other kinds of food I'm allergic to.
Beer and milk cause me pain.
Buying food takes a lot of time, since wheat is everywhere: soy sauce, ham, bread, most frozen food, some chocolates, etc...
Wheat has been "improved" by selection, so GM food is probably even more dangerous. Who knows what kind of allergy might appear, and in how much time will it be detected ? Can you imagine that people may die from cancer at 40 after ingesting GM during all their life ? How can you prevent that ?
In fact, all the foods that have been improved (wheat, milk, corn, ...) are dangerous for me, so GM is a big no no.
Celiac disease seems to affect 1% of the population, but how much people will be diagnosed ?
They don't add, they multiply !
This is not new, it has been discovered in 1913, by a french agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect
Various groups of people had to pull ropes, and Ringelmann discovered that people unconsciously reduced their effort when they were in a group, even when everybody except one in the group faked the rope-pulling !
The two biggest problems of collaborative work are:
1) communicating takes time, and you cannot work during this time
2) people provide less effort when they work collaboratively
Of course, there are a lot of advantages !
This is also related to social loafing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_loafing
and it has interesting challenges, like raising funds for Wikipedia.
About creativity, I think that innovation is not a solitary activity.
You need to interact to get ideas, and the more you learn about diverse subjects, the more you can be creative. This is why people like Leonardo da Vinci were able to invent so much: they had a large knowledge across a lot of domains. Nowadays, it's difficult to have such a broad knowledge, because we need to concentrate on a few domains. This is why group brainstorming is efficient: people with different views and approaches work on a common problem by sharing their knowledge.
What hurts creativity the most is not group brainstorming, it's the fact that people don't want to challenge themselves. This is called mental fixedness. Now, everybody concentrates on improving current ideas, not challenging them or creating new ones. New ideas emerge only when you are unsatisfied with the current ideas.
On a personal note, I was an introvert 3 years ago, and I was a very good coder. Since 3 years, I'm now an extrovert, and even though my social skills increased tremendously, I don't enjoy coding anymore. I still enjoy solitary activities, like writing for my blog, but I'm not interested into pure logic anymore.
I believe that logic and introversion are related. I consider myself as a creative guy, and my creativity which was used for writing code is now used on social interactions.
I propose 2 methods to reformulate your question:
1) root-cause analysis: take your original question, and ask why you want that. Find 3 to 5 answers.
Reapply the process to your answers: why do you want that ?
Answers that have no parent are root causes.
When there are no more answers, take a look at all the root causes, and what you are searching should be obvious !
2) domain analysis: enumerate all your activities in development.
For example: coding, debugging, managing, planning, etc...
Now, put a score on every activity, 0=it sucks, 10=it's great.
When you finished the scoring, take the 3 biggest scores, and imagine what job could fit these 3 activities without the other activities.
That is your dream job !
If you still don't know, read this:
http://www.inspirationandchai.com/Regrets-of-the-Dying.html
1) How does that next programmer know what is expected?
He has examples on how to call the routine and what it returns.
I agree that you need to add a little bit information about inputs and outputs, but you can name the variables in a correct way.
2) "show how to call your code," That's the API documentation, not the code documentation.
Do you mean that you write 2 documentations ?
Good luck !
When you code, your API is your code.
3) Again, how does the next programmer know what the behavior is supposed to be?
He has examples of the inputs and their outputs.
Unless your code is terribly complicated (which means that you probably didn't subdivide it enough), there is no real need to document code.
I rarely saw code that was impossible to understand, when the number of lines was small (and yes, I wrote large programs in assembly language).
4) "improve the stability of your program, and reduce the QA time." That has nothing to do with documentation.
It's a side-benefit.
but there is STILL going to be maintenance later on by someone.
You are totally right.
Now, let's see where you want to spend your time:
1) maintaining a documentation that will be probably useful in a few years (and in general, the code is so old, it sucks and nobody wants to maintain it)
2) maintaining tests, that will "document" the routines behaviour, and checks that there is no regression.
Except that writing tests add value to your project, since you always validate that your code works.
Documenting code doesn't add any value, except if you write an OS or middleware, and in these cases, you only need to document what every call returns.
In fact, tests easily replace any kind of documentation.
As an agile developer, I recommend against documenting your code.
You need to document the algorithms, but never the code.
Documenting your code will require you a lot of maintenance. Every time you change your code, you need to change your documentation. It's a never-ending process.
Instead, decide on a meaningful notation for your routines names (so any coder knows what the routine is supposed to do), and write tests, or more exactly functional tests.
Tests have a few goals:
1) check that your code behaves as expected.
Suppose that you have to fix a bug in your code, without tests, you cannot be sure that the fix will not be harmful.
It also allows greater flexibility in your code, and it will not smell like a rotting corpse.
2) show how to call your code, in order to get results. Examples are very useful for other developers.
3) confirm a behaviour. Your code does something, but sometimes, it's not clear. Your test should demonstrate the value of your code.
4) improve the stability of your program, and reduce the QA time.
Once the habit of writing tests is acquired, you'll start writing the tests before the code.
This is called TDD (Test Driven Development), and helps reduce a lot the amount of code you need to write, because you only write useful code.
Who wants to write unused tested code ?
Adjusting your seat is a good advice, but you should also change your position.
When your body starts to hurt, just listen to it, and change your position by straightening your back, it's very simple and effective.
Also, I recommend using a Trackball, because it's the horizontal movements when using a mouse that hurt your wrist.
I personally use a Microsoft trackball, mine is at least 6 years old, and still working nicely.
Most expensive rag ever !
a few sad stories of injured policemen at the protests
In Lybia, the goverment says that a lot of soldiers were killed during the protests, but in fact, they were killed by other soldiers because they refused to shoot people.
Being a soldier does not automatically make you a brainless killer.
I doubt that you bought a C64 in the eighties.
I'm from France.
Back in 1982, when I wanted to buy a computer, I checked all the prices, and the Commodore 64 was very expensive (5000 francs, which is $1000).
The TRS80 was even more expensive: 6000 francs, or $1200.
Atari and TI99/4A were expensive too.
At that time, I bought a TI58C, and it cost me 600 francs, or $120.
Two computers were available at a much lower price: ZX Spectrum and Oric, at 2000 francs, or $300. I bought an Oric, since the Spectrum was late, and american computers were outrageously expensive.
My next computer was an Atari 520 ST in 1986, and it cost me 7000 francs, or $1300.
Not really (taken from another post):
http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-sources
Do you remember Google when it started ?
Every geek on Slashdot was speaking about it, because it was so much better than the other search engines.
In a few years, Google became the company we know.
Now, Google is not the most preferred search engine anymore, there is no real competition, but DuckDuckGo seems to be a nice contender.
Sorry, but you are wrong.
Innovation is not about taking a single idea and pushing it until it works.
Innovation is about taking a lot of ideas, and see what is viable.
I see that you don't know the story behind post-it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postit
Fry explained that you have one very successful idea out of 5000 concepts.
Google's goal is to aggregate all the knowledge in the world, so why do they close useful search services, like codesearch ?
http://google.com/codesearch
If a project needs a large team to maintain it, like Wave or Buzz, I agree that Google needs to stop putting money into these projects, but when the project requires only a few people, why stop it completely ?
Also, I think it's a very bad idea to stop these projects (Wave, Buzz) entirely:
1) they should reduce the teams to only a few guys, in order to keep the services. Maybe it will become successful one day.
2) killing projects like this shows to the whole Google employees that it's useless to suggest new ideas, because Google will never take the risk to start them. The message is: "Google is only interested into successful projects, and will not take any risk". If I was a Google employee, I would start my own company, instead of giving my own idea to them.
Even Google Health might become important in a near future, I'm not sure, I cannot test it, being outside of US.
And I'd like to see what Google will do with their automated cars.
It's a technological showcase, but the risk is too high to have an automated car: if you have an accident, who is responsible ?
Focus has nothing to do with success. MySpace was focused, and it fails. Facebook is focused, and it succeeds.
Apple is not focusing on technology, since it's trying to be a software AND an hardware company (iMac, iPod, iPad).
A lot of companies tried to sell tablets, and only Apple succeeded in branding it.
And don't talk to me about iOS or anything, nobody cares about that.
Apple's success is only because they are focusing on the users, and Google doesn't care at all about them, it cares only about its clients (advertisers), or in other words money.
Let's see if Apple without Jobs will continue its focus on users.
Let's see how long Google will continue to dominate the search market, once people realize that Google doesn't care about them.
No, it's not because of capitalism, since IBM and Microsoft are probably even more capitalist than Google or Apple.
It's a human decision.
Do you focus on your next quarter, or do you see farther ?
Google encouraged its employees to work 20% of their time on innovation. Now, I'm sure that this is no more the case.
Google is taking the easiest route, and when you stop taking risks, you don't create anymore.
The option "let's cut all useless expenses" is necessary only when you are in big financial trouble, otherwise, it's just plainly stupid.
Let's see how the stock market will respond now.