Every time I read a history of a programme and find a line "completely re-wrote the code", I begin having second thougths about how really good the programme is.
Many great designers operate under the pardigm of "throw-one-away". Solve the problem once, throw out your work, and solve it again.
The idea is that your second attempt at solving the same problem will be much more elegant, as a result of lessons learned the first time you solved it.
The RIAA are alleged to have manipulated mp3.com's stock price by selling it short, in order to destroy it. If there is any truth in this, you can bet that they will push very hard for a death sentence.
You can not "manipulate" a stock price by short selling.
Short selling is simply a way to invest in a stock if you believe it will go down.
To everyone blurting out "Web companies don't have a cost advantage! They charge shipping! They lose any advantage there! If you tax them, they'll lose the ability to compete!", and to everyone saying "Traditional companies have a cost advantage! They get better bulk purchase rates!":
We could go back and forth for hours comparing bits and pieces of brick-and-mortar vs. e-commerce retailing. You'd have to get a copy of recent quarterly filings to do a fair comparison. Let's look at a range of factors involved.
Lower real estate (You can hold your inventory in a warehouse in Iowa, and don't need to pay for space in downtown Manhattan)
Less inventory risk It's easier to perform just-in-time ordering to meet demand, and you don't have to take the risk involved in keeping tons of inventory on demand.
You can focus on any one of these, and argue that either side has a cost advantage. If anyone can provide solid revenue/costs numbers comparing an e-tailer to a brick-and-morter in a similar business, then we can talk about who has the cost advantage.
Let me get this straight. So you're saying that anything that requires an "enormous amount of time and effort" and is "quite a challenge" can't be done by traditional open-source methods? You mean, for instance, an operating system? [snipped open source zealotry]
Enterprise database applications are subject to FUD that runs far deeper than what we see in the desktop OS competition. I implement enterprise datawarehousing solutions for a living, and I see that most clients will ONLY accept an implementation that's built on the RDBMS they already use in house.
You can open source the operating system, or the desktop environment, because your test bed starts out as hobbyists (the early adopters). Good luck finding the first company that will take the plunge and bet their entire transactional system on an untested platform, when they can pay for the insurance of an Oracle or a SQLServer.
It's 2000 for gawd's sakes: not providing 24/7, high-speed internet access would be like asking students bring their own toilet paper to school. It is something that one assumes a school provides in all the residence halls. On the
Actually, this case clearly points out, one should not assume that a university provides high-speed network access to every dorm room. It's very common in private institutions, where the number of students (and, therefore, dorm rooms) is comparitively low. Large state universities still face a huge capital expenditure to provide that service. And fast network access in the dorm room is not a top priority among the target audience of state universities.
These students did in fact have a right to use the university network. They used it every day, in their various labs and study facilities. Says right there in the news articles that were linked in the/. post. So they can use the network, just not where it would actually useful for them. Somewhere it mentioned that students pay for some sort of technology fee that goes directly to the campus network. So they DO pay for it. Hard to steal something you pay for and are already allowed to use, eh?
No, you're wrong.
The University provided these students access to the ethernet jacks on limited terms. Specifically, those terms were, "You can use our ethernet jacks while you're in our labs. You can get a room with ethernet for $24 per semester."
These kids wanted ethernet in their room, but they didn't want to pay the fee. That violates the contract.
Let's get away from the religious zealotry of "Free the network for everyone!" for a moment. What if it were another shared, public resource? For example, library reference books. My college library had certain books which you could not take out of the library. There was no option to take the book straight home, do all your research, and bring it straight back. The library's terms of service required that you use the book on their premises. So that's what we did. Nobody goes around shouting "communication must be free!" when it's library books... But these kids needed to read email in their room, so that makes it okay? No.
A service contract is committed to by all parties under certain terms and conditions. In this case, most of us agree that the conditions were unreasonable and antiquated, but that doesn't grant the right to violate said conditions.
For some time now, Barron's has been trying to protect their interest in the Old Economy by bashing New Economy stocks, particularly Amazon. In this article, they have finally foregone all journalistic integrity and employed bad accounting to create a market scare.
To reach the conclusions presented in their article, they ignored all 1st-quarter income. This includes important investment events like secondary offerings, in which a recently-public company issues more stock and raises buckets of new capital. Often, a secondary can raise more money than an IPO, because the company can issue new shares at a substantial markup over the IPO price.
Many of the companies listed by Barron's have conducted secondaries since the 1st of this year, but including that capital in their calculations wouldn't have scared investors nearly as much, so Barron's ignored that information, regardless of the fact that it is publicly available from the SEC.
For companies that operate on internet time, financial data that's three months old is near-meaningless to today's operations. Barron's knows that, but if they used current data, they wouldn't have the numbers to support their case.
To anyone who takes a moment to examine the accounting practices behind this article, it is clearly yellow journalism.
It still gives us some interesting questions to think about.
Can something this big & cruft-ridden succesfully go from closed-source to open source?
One of the biggest things an open source project needs to grow is dedicated coders. jwz, in the infamous mozilla resignation letter, complains "The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only those who write the code truly control the project."
Now seriously -- If you look long enough in the win2k code base, you'll probably find code from DOS 1.0, more than 2 decades old. Who can get excited about that?
Wow, it's remarkably disgusting that this post is marked "insightful."
As a Carnegie Mellon alum, here are a couple points I think are important to keep in mind:
Girls always get the same BS that MaxVlast is spewing right now. It tends to drive them away from the technical degree programs. It's disgusting.
Mark Stehlik, the lead of the undergrad CS program, is very personally committed to encouraging women & girls to pursue CS careers. Not by lowering admissions standards on a gender basis, but by going to high schools, and even elementary schools, and encouraging young girls to be interested in technology
People making comments like this only come across as bigoted, and they make the rest of us look bad.
I'm in my first job out of school, working as a consultant, and we're expected to work 50 hour weeks, minimum.
In addition, we have this sick version of the Prisoner's Dilemma that Katz mentions -- even if I did only work 50 hours a week, everyone around me is putting in 60-70, so I could end up looking unmotivated.
But, on the upside, I can seriously make plans to retire before I'm 30. So, we might expect that my total hours worked in my lifetime is something like (assuming 3 weeks vacation each yr):
Imagine that I'll live until I'm 80, and the average per week becomes (assuming we keep those 3 vacation weeks per year at 0 hrs/wk):
(23,520 hrs / 52 yrs) / 49 wks/yr = 8.70
So, in the long run, it's not such a bad break, is it? Pay your dues now, and enjoy the outcome in the long run.
If I had to guess, I'd venture that the government is finding a way to include all the 0s from retired people to bring the average down. Everyone should read How to lie with statistics to understand how people can spin the numbers however they want.
One other thing -- Suck did a similar feature over the summer...unfortunately I can't find the piece, but the killer quote from it was "Now, of course, status stems from how hard you work; if you have time for recreation, you're not truly in demand, and if you're not truly in demand, you can't be very important."
When you write code, do you really care if Granny Smith in Minneapolis can read your name in an About box?
Or, do you care if other developers, other programmers, and other clueful people know that you wrote the code, and that you wrote it well?
Litter your code with tons of useful comments, and sign them, and anyone who touches the code forever after will know exactly which portions of the code you wrote, and they can decide for themselves how well you wrote it.
If your name just appears in the About box, maybe you just brought coffee to the real developers. Who can tell the difference?
If I understand correctly, what happened went like this:
The defendent provides a service to help people find rare books, via email. For example, Customer X tells the defendant, "I want an original manuscript of Plato's Republic. Please contact online booksellers and have them contact me if they have this book."
The defendent contacts many online booksellers telling anyone with an original manuscript of Plato's Republic to email Customer X.
Customer X doesn't get any responses from Amazon, and contacts the defendant saying, "Hey, I'm not getting any messages from Amazon."
After several Customer Xs complain, the defendant attempts to figure out why messages from Amazon aren't going through, so they capture messages sent from Amazon to their users. Not for the purpose of reading them (because we already know what Customer X wants to buy), but for the purpose of seeing where the messages die.
Someone throws a hissy-fit, a federal judge steps in, and $250,000 later, we can all go back to being productive.
This kind of technology is not new, and the NSA is not the only group developing it.
For example, The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon (can't find a working link, but try http://informedia.cs.cmu.edu/) tries to find information about "interesting topics" from a feed of worldwide TV news broadcasts. They have even put a nice voice-command interface on their system, so you can query it by saying things like, "Tell me about last night's Bull's game."
Another example, the WebKB project, also out of Carnegie Mellon, has shown some success in deriving meaningful information by web-crawling -- where the signal:noise ratio is probably even lower than in phone calls.
The NSA could build a pretty good system for this kind of stuff without doing much original research. Developing the technology isn't that questionable. The application is a little spooky, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Many great designers operate under the pardigm of "throw-one-away". Solve the problem once, throw out your work, and solve it again.
The idea is that your second attempt at solving the same problem will be much more elegant, as a result of lessons learned the first time you solved it.
Ender's Shadow is very good, but the three sequels in the Ender plotline get worse and worse as you go along.
You can not "manipulate" a stock price by short selling.
Short selling is simply a way to invest in a stock if you believe it will go down.
We could go back and forth for hours comparing bits and pieces of brick-and-mortar vs. e-commerce retailing. You'd have to get a copy of recent quarterly filings to do a fair comparison. Let's look at a range of factors involved.
Cost advantages to the brick-and-mortars:
- Bulk purchase ability
- Established, efficient inventory infrastructure (ex. warehousing, tracking, shipping)
- No cost to ship to the end consumer
Cost advantages to the e-tailers:- No sales tax
- Lower real estate
- Less inventory risk
You can focus on any one of these, and argue that either side has a cost advantage. If anyone can provide solid revenue/costs numbers comparing an e-tailer to a brick-and-morter in a similar business, then we can talk about who has the cost advantage.(You can hold your inventory in a warehouse in Iowa, and don't need to pay for space in downtown Manhattan)
It's easier to perform just-in-time ordering to meet demand, and you don't have to take the risk involved in keeping tons of inventory on demand.
-JTB
Enterprise database applications are subject to FUD that runs far deeper than what we see in the desktop OS competition. I implement enterprise datawarehousing solutions for a living, and I see that most clients will ONLY accept an implementation that's built on the RDBMS they already use in house.
You can open source the operating system, or the desktop environment, because your test bed starts out as hobbyists (the early adopters). Good luck finding the first company that will take the plunge and bet their entire transactional system on an untested platform, when they can pay for the insurance of an Oracle or a SQLServer.
-JTB
Actually, this case clearly points out, one should not assume that a university provides high-speed network access to every dorm room. It's very common in private institutions, where the number of students (and, therefore, dorm rooms) is comparitively low. Large state universities still face a huge capital expenditure to provide that service. And fast network access in the dorm room is not a top priority among the target audience of state universities.
No, you're wrong.
The University provided these students access to the ethernet jacks on limited terms. Specifically, those terms were, "You can use our ethernet jacks while you're in our labs. You can get a room with ethernet for $24 per semester."
These kids wanted ethernet in their room, but they didn't want to pay the fee. That violates the contract.
Let's get away from the religious zealotry of "Free the network for everyone!" for a moment. What if it were another shared, public resource? For example, library reference books. My college library had certain books which you could not take out of the library. There was no option to take the book straight home, do all your research, and bring it straight back. The library's terms of service required that you use the book on their premises. So that's what we did. Nobody goes around shouting "communication must be free!" when it's library books... But these kids needed to read email in their room, so that makes it okay? No.
A service contract is committed to by all parties under certain terms and conditions. In this case, most of us agree that the conditions were unreasonable and antiquated, but that doesn't grant the right to violate said conditions.
-JTB
To reach the conclusions presented in their article, they ignored all 1st-quarter income. This includes important investment events like secondary offerings, in which a recently-public company issues more stock and raises buckets of new capital. Often, a secondary can raise more money than an IPO, because the company can issue new shares at a substantial markup over the IPO price.
Many of the companies listed by Barron's have conducted secondaries since the 1st of this year, but including that capital in their calculations wouldn't have scared investors nearly as much, so Barron's ignored that information, regardless of the fact that it is publicly available from the SEC.
For companies that operate on internet time, financial data that's three months old is near-meaningless to today's operations. Barron's knows that, but if they used current data, they wouldn't have the numbers to support their case.
To anyone who takes a moment to examine the accounting practices behind this article, it is clearly yellow journalism.
Can something this big & cruft-ridden succesfully go from closed-source to open source?
One of the biggest things an open source project needs to grow is dedicated coders. jwz, in the infamous mozilla resignation letter, complains "The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only those who write the code truly control the project."
Now seriously -- If you look long enough in the win2k code base, you'll probably find code from DOS 1.0, more than 2 decades old. Who can get excited about that?
As a Carnegie Mellon alum, here are a couple points I think are important to keep in mind:
Girls always get the same BS that MaxVlast is spewing right now. It tends to drive them away from the technical degree programs. It's disgusting.
Mark Stehlik, the lead of the undergrad CS program, is very personally committed to encouraging women & girls to pursue CS careers. Not by lowering admissions standards on a gender basis, but by going to high schools, and even elementary schools, and encouraging young girls to be interested in technology
People making comments like this only come across as bigoted, and they make the rest of us look bad.
In addition, we have this sick version of the Prisoner's Dilemma that Katz mentions -- even if I did only work 50 hours a week, everyone around me is putting in 60-70, so I could end up looking unmotivated.
But, on the upside, I can seriously make plans to retire before I'm 30. So, we might expect that my total hours worked in my lifetime is something like (assuming 3 weeks vacation each yr):
60 hrs/wk * 49 wk/yr * 8 yrs (i.e., 30-22) = 23,520
Imagine that I'll live until I'm 80, and the average per week becomes (assuming we keep those 3 vacation weeks per year at 0 hrs/wk):
(23,520 hrs / 52 yrs) / 49 wks/yr = 8.70
So, in the long run, it's not such a bad break, is it? Pay your dues now, and enjoy the outcome in the long run.
If I had to guess, I'd venture that the government is finding a way to include all the 0s from retired people to bring the average down. Everyone should read How to lie with statistics to understand how people can spin the numbers however they want.
One other thing -- Suck did a similar feature over the summer...unfortunately I can't find the piece, but the killer quote from it was "Now, of course, status stems from how hard you work; if you have time for recreation, you're not truly in demand, and if you're not truly in demand, you can't be very important."
Your article is interesting, but your premise is flawed.
At market close today, the market cap of AMZN was $35,314,053,00.
At the same time, the market cap of LNUX was $9,925,500,000
So they're not valued the same. AMZN is valued almost four times higher.
-JTB
Or, do you care if other developers, other programmers, and other clueful people know that you wrote the code, and that you wrote it well?
Litter your code with tons of useful comments, and sign them, and anyone who touches the code forever after will know exactly which portions of the code you wrote, and they can decide for themselves how well you wrote it.
If your name just appears in the About box, maybe you just brought coffee to the real developers. Who can tell the difference?
-JTB
Sounds like a waste of everyone's time.
For example, The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon (can't find a working link, but try http://informedia.cs.cmu.edu/) tries to find information about "interesting topics" from a feed of worldwide TV news broadcasts. They have even put a nice voice-command interface on their system, so you can query it by saying things like, "Tell me about last night's Bull's game."
Another example, the WebKB project, also out of Carnegie Mellon, has shown some success in deriving meaningful information by web-crawling -- where the signal:noise ratio is probably even lower than in phone calls.
The NSA could build a pretty good system for this kind of stuff without doing much original research. Developing the technology isn't that questionable. The application is a little spooky, though.