People like to refer to the el-cheapo PC's as reason why Apple's computers are so overpriced. My rule of thumb is usually that a Mac is around 15-20% slower (in CPU, not I/O) than the top PC available at the time for around $500 more. This used to hold true in the U.S., I think it's more like $200-300 now, but it still holds true in Canada to some degree.
CanadaComputers.com, probably one of the cheapest sites to get PC componentry, has an AMD FX-51 system for $2345 , FX-53 for $2689, and a P4 3.4E for $2055.
Certainly these are probably faster CPUs, but a) dual G5s would make up a fair amount of the ground if you're a multitasker vs. just a gamer, b) it would only really matter if CPU was the prime determinant to your purchase. Which is pretty rare except for benchmark freaks -- Graphics, I/O , BUS, and memory speeds matter a lot more for regular workstation use. The G5 fares well there.
Again, Acura , Honda and Toyota have the best "on paper" combination of price/performance/reliability out of almost all of the car makers -- but people sometimes still want a different make for non-quantitative reasons.
The exchange rate is what messes up Mac prices in Canada. I suppose they could sell them at a lower margin here, but that could start causing cross-border problems where people start ordering Macs from Canada because they're cheaper.
And, as others mentioned, $2,799 is for a G5. There's an eMac for $1049, iMac for $1749, and notebooks from $1449. I don't care that you have a 17-inch CRT already -- you didn't give the complete picture.
Interestingly, the product that WOULD have worked well for you was probably a G4 cube or a G4 desktop. They're still available.
I originally bought a mac while I lived in the U.S. It's an expensive habit to retain in Canada -- I originally purchased my 17" powerbook for $5200 in May 2003. The upgraded model in November was $4200 -- and 80% of that price drop was due to exchange rate. Now they're $3700, though this time mostly due to Apple's drop vs. exchange. Whatcha gonna do. I enjoy it much more than the Thinkpad I have at work, so much so that I bring it to work and work off the PB. One can get from point A to point B in style with an Acura, but some people want a BMW.
Outsourcing isn't just evil, it's illegal. Corporations in the United States are required to operate in a manner consistent with the common good: in other words, they are required to be responsible for the personal welfare of their workers and their communities.
Actually, no, it's not illegal. There is ample legal precedent that it's illegal to put the personal welfare of workers and communities above that of shareholders. Henry Ford, was sued successfully by shareholders for reducing the price of the Model T by 58% between 1908 and 1916, as he believed the purpose of business was to be an organ of society. The courts disagreed.
The Pinto case is another interesting one. While in the end a jury agreed to punish Ford, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (!) and business council supported the idea that human lives can be subjected to a cost/benefit analysis based on lawsuit estimates -- because the business is only responsible to shareholders in law.
That was why corporations were suffered to exist in the first place!
Yes, you're absolutely right. But the laws do not reflect that reality.
Eventually reality catches up with the symbols and illusions we create. Unfortunately, it may be a very painful reckoning.
I've bought 1st gen powerbooks since the G3 days... I had a G3/400 (Lombard), Titanium 500mhz, and a 17" Aluminum 1ghz, now 1.33ghz... They've all treated me well, no major problems.
Minor problems have existed, like keyboard marks on the screen, and one of the keys on my keyboard came off, but, these are quick/easy fixes. I've also noticed the AlBooks sometimes don't always awake from sleep (once every month or two). Oh, and, the first-gen AlBooks' CPU fan was much more mosquito-like than the current fan. But... nothing big.
I even dropped my Titanium, which was prone to warping, and it was fine, though the bottom case was warped on the sides afterwards -- I replaced it for a couple hundred $ before I sold it, good as new.
The only first generation Apple product I regretted purchasing was the Airport Extreme Base Station. It took almost 1 year of patches before it could hold a connection in my apartment beyond a couple hours.
Funny every job you said is a service job, not a manufactoring job like software programming. you Build and test software like a factory, not as a service and support.
Building software is more akin to the design and prototyping process that occurs before a product makes it to manufacturing.
Programming is way too varied and dynamic to be compared to typical mass manufacturing. A better analogy would be "craftsman" or "engineering", two professions that are arguably more service-oriented than typical manufacturing jobs.
Performance really doesn't play an issue in outshoring to India - if your job's so simple a monkey could do it, your job's going to get outsourced, regardless of your performance. You can't really match cost efficiency of someone who lives in a country with 1/10 the per capita income.
Perhaps I'm missing your point, but the issue is not that jobs are "so simple a monkey can do it". The problem is that complex jobs requiring lots of education are just as doable by people in India at 1/10th the wage. And I would be very surprised if the code were significantly less maintainable than typical business code.
It's very fashionable to believe that North Americans somehow have a monopoly on modern education, training, and knowledge workers; Bangalore is rapidly showing how dangerously untrue this lazy thinking is.
Not sure if this will help, but, here goes. My experience about human organizations (not-for-profit, for-profit, small, medium, large, whatever) goes something like this:
Small organizations: take on the strengths and weaknesses of their leader to an almost pathological degree. If weaknesses outweigh strengths (which is most often the case, especially someone with the force of will and ego to start their own organization), it becomes like living in a dysfunctional family with very difficult parents.
Assuming you can deal with the inherent risks of small company life (they can go under, they're not usually prestigious, and they don't offer traditional "job security" of a nice bonus & severance package), this probably is the easiest way to avoid bureaucratic politics, though you'll have to deal with the more intimate personality conflicts that tend to arise.
Large organizations: All large organizations, whether corporate or public service, seem to be obsessed with "mechanizing" their structure and processes. It's an irrational form of rationality. They don't look at their task, what the purpose behind the organization is (it has to be more than "profit"). Through this, they sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Such organizations inevitably become politicized and split by bureaucratic and technocratic interest groups, unless top management keeps re-enforcing & renewing the organization's purpose -- having a reason for existing: a goal, a mission, something that transcends the power-politics and aimlessness of "profit maximization". Of course, this never lasts. But it is the moments of renewal that matter -- that make organizations worth working for.
What's a techie to do? Nevertheless, in a politicized organization, which seems to be what you have the most experience with, Machiavellian tactics are what tend to be the only effective course, in the large, anyway. Being staff, techies can't really play at this, they can only line up behind a player and hope to contribute their talents & knowledge to the organization without getting too caught up in the struggle. Your best bet is to try to pick a faction that somewhat shares your values, and have a team & manager with enough upper management factional support to ensure you're somewhat protected from the politics.
Of course, none of this is easy to find -- the best way is through having a network of techie friends, hoping that someone lucks out. This is why you usually see "changing of the guards" in any management firing & re-org... people bring on their friends, both managerial and technical, to bring like-minded people to fight their interests in the larger battle for the corporation's direction and resources.
Anyway, the above is a bit of anecdotal, but some of it is based on real organizational theory, which might help you understand the utter pettiness that tends to devour many of our institutions. (I'd suggest some Henry Mintzberg to start).
Re:My father's response to Carr's article
on
Why I.T. Matters
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· Score: 1
Your father is a smart man.
1. innovation drives the economy 2. analysis (risk management & number twiddling) is not synthesis (strategy & innovation) 3. read more Peter Drucker.
This is going to sound like a plug, but I have nothing to do with this company or product - I just thought it was really cool.
When I was wandering through JavaOne last year, I ran across this booth by VisiComp, Inc. who sells this debugger called RetroVue. I think it's an interesting attempt at bridging the gap between live-breakpoint debugging and logging.
The main issue with debugging vs. logging is that logging provides you with a history of operations that allows you to determine the execution order and state of variables at various times of the execution, something that debuggers don't actually help you with.
RetroVue seems to instrument your Java bytecode to generate a journal file. This journal file is quite similar to a core file extended over time, by recording all operations that occurred in the program over time: every method call, every variable assignment, exception thrown, and context switch. RetroVue then allows you to play back the execution of the application.
It includes a timeline view to jump around the various execution points of the program, as well as an ongoing call-list to show the call sequence that has occurred. It also notes every context switch that the VM makes, and detects deadlocks, thus making it a great tool for multi-threaded application debugging. You can adjust the speed of the playback if you would like to watch things unfold in front of you, or you can pause it at any time and step through the various operations. Want to find out when that variable was last assigned to? Just click a button. Want to find out when that method is called? Same.
They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.
I have a hard time understanding how one's skill set is determined by their nationality. Ability to communicate in English, perhaps. But then again, I would say the same about any Bay Area born engineer that moves to Bangalore and has to communicate part time in Hindi.
In any case, I think there's a major difference between one's ability to write prose or design a chip. Communication among team members is crucial, of course. But if they're all of a similar nationality & language, as you say, that wouldn't be a problem now, would it?
There certainly have been notable advances in productivity over the past decade or so.
I can, for example, correctly format a document in a graphical word processor much quicker than I could with Wordperfect 5.1 (DOS), which was released... circa 1990? Of course, there are some WP51 lovers out there that can do it better than me, but I don't think my experience is isolated - it lead to the Windows versions and the eventual ascention of MS Word.
Word processers haven't improved all that much over the past several years, admittedly.
Another productivity trend is the ascention of the Web. I can now get information and answers much quicker than I could by making a trip to a library to do a card catalogue or Lexis/Nexis search.
For programmers, many of the refactoring tools in environments like Eclipse have spead up software maintenance tremendously. I can rename classes or methods across a codebase and have it update all dependencies.
If I wanted to learn UNIX, I could install it at home with the release of Linux.
Setting up a LAN these days is a much less challenging problem with the near standardization on twisted-pair Ethernet - compared to the wide varieties of thin-net vs. thick-net coaxial and token ring in the early 1990's.
These are just a few examples. Computing and automation has significantly improved the productivity of operations in our economy. While we don't really know all of the reasons behind the surge of U.S. economic productivity figures in the late 1990's, the central bank tends to attribute them to information technology.
I do agree, however, that this productivity is oversold, and much of the productivity from computing actually comes from the informational / social side-effects that it has on organizations.
The Win32 widget toolkit, which is *the* industry standard, is written in C....And hasn't been used for most Windows GUI's for the past 7 years in favour of VC++ (ATL or MFC) or Visual Basic.
Also remember that WinFX, the API set for Windows Longhorn, is all.NET managed code. New features will *not* be exposed through Win32. In effect, Win32 is a legacy API.
"According to one recent analysis, the government now spends $20,000 a year for every household in America, the most since World War II"
Not that I respect the Bush spending program, but figures like this are misleading. Is it nominal or real terms ? Plus, the U.S. is economically much bigger than 60 years ago. Government spending in terms of % of GDP is the figure that really gives an idea of spending that was relative to WW2.
Price isn't necessarily determined by costs, it's determined by what the market will bear. If the market will only bear 0 price music, then the system has broken down, and the opportunity cost of spending most of your time as an artist will become much steeper. We would dry up the primary pool of capital available that enables artistry as a profession instead of a hobby.
This is not, in my opinion, in the interests of society, it's a tragedy of the (creative) commons.
On the face of it, there needs to be recognition that all intellectual works are services, not products. This recognition could imply free copies as the norm, not the exception. But then we have a problem: the master copy costs $X to make and such costs (plus profit, which is really just a future cost) must be covered to create an economic system.
The current system does this inequitably, but in an arguably much simpler manner than any potential alternatives: universal licensing, subscriptions, or perhaps, a capital-market model where you give the artist money after the fact to keep them making their art (whether software, music, etc.).
I haven't heard of other viable alternatives from this crowd.
Provide a set of declarative attributes for setting a service's reliability , transactions, and security, much more flexible and simple than EJB 2.x and COM+ do today.
The real thing to pay attention to with Longhorn, is Indigo - the new transactions and communications framework. They're investing a lot of effort into keeping it simple and to keep all aspects orthogonal to one another.
Indigo is really the replacement for COM+, built on top of the web services stack (the WS-* specs). The WS-* specs aim to supplant CORBA as the dominant distributed computing paradigm by enabling any platform to integrate through the various XML protocols. This seems to be the only viable way forward to get true interop between the Windows and ABM (anyone but Microsoft) world.
Some rather interesting things Indigo is trying to do: - make transactions pervasive in coding, even with volatile objects. Using a "lightweight transaction manager", an in-memory transaction on an ArrayList would take only a microsecond to begin and commit.
- embed the transaction manager in the kernel for durable transactions.
- Provide a set of declarative attributes for setting a service's reliability , transactions, and security, much more flexible and simple than
Windows XP was named "Whistler" after the Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort. "Longhorn" is named after the saloon at that resort... http://www.longhornsaloon.ca/
They're not silly. Is "Jaguar" or "Panther" silly? How about some of the codenames for Redhat releases?
It really is about making programming information-based applications for Windows similar to programming for ASP.NET. This keeps Windows relevant in the enterprise against the onslaught of web applications, or so the theory goes. InfoPath is another stab at this.
So, from one perspective, it's just another stab at making ActiveX-like features available in a browser window, for intranet applications. It won't really fly over the internet proper (unless people in droves flock to it, which probably is unlikely given they didn't with ActiveX).
I'm positive there would be an uproar in the open source/NIX community when you start saying things like there should be no/usr and no/bin, it should just work.
Nothing "just" works without configuration! What would you propose: an elaborate registry, as Windows has?
I am pretty sure that a MacOS X power user that has a thorny weird issue would have a much easier time going to the "file metaphor" than the Windows user would have in digging through a hierarchical registry that is NO metaphor other than a simple tree structure.
Crazy, radical, non-traditional thoughts like that are needed for the future of computing, but will never be accepted by old timers who insist that a well-organized hierarchy-based file system is the way to go (which I read in replies many times when people mention this type of abstraction).
I agree in part. This doesn't mean we should knee-jerk and give up an enduring metaphor for a poorly thought-out solution. The history of computing has very few enduring metaphors.
Microsoft is pushing the envelope in a fairly predictable fashion, but it's good that they're throwing their weight behind new approaches. On the other hand, I would hope we don't really just take a page from Microsoft and try to make MySQL the filesystem for Linux.
The Unites States is a highly regulated country in almost all industries: rules, regulations, subsidies, trade barriers, etc.
Pure lassez-faire markets are not usually acceptable in a modern society: society can not handle the pace of change and wildly-swinging boom bust cycles of the 19th century that led to widespread and deep unemployment every decade or so.
Since the 1980s, the "conservatives" decided to be the exact opposite of what a conservative would do: instead of taking gradual steps to proven solutions, they have been reactionary -- trying to move us back to the 19th century classical liberalism that apparently will work much much better than the 20th century's approach.
Unfortuantely, the U.S. in particular has also had to deal with some world-class coporate scandals lately, leading to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, the biggest set of business regulations since... wait for it... FDR! So much for that deregulatory agenda.
No, I don't think regulation will come back to haunt us, if it is well-designed regulation. I think, for example, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which came as part of FDR's New Deal, was a good regulation. It insisted on auditing for publicly traded companies and public filings on the state of the company. It's widly known that at the time most businesspeople derided such changes as communist and blatently anti-free market. How times change.
"Without copyright and patents, the price of software would be reduced down to near $0, the cost of reproduction."
Software development is a service that is funded through productization. People's time and knowledge are not "zero cost", even if their volunteer it without pay. There always is an opportunity cost involved.
You seem miss that in the old days, composers were commissioned by kings and queens to write music; that was how they stayed alive, not through performance art.
Perhaps we can create a market-oriented commission system. But that still would require a form of copyright.
I think the musicians have to perform live as they had to do a hundred years ago and as many musicians have to do now
So, in your opinion, there is no artistic merit to recording art; only performance art? What about written art, is it not the same as recording art? Should only lecturers get paid, now?
The era to become rich by selling millions of CDs without any real work is over.
The number of musicians that get rich by selling millions of CDs is rather small. And I think you might want to revise your view about how much work goes into promoting their art. It is "real work".
Ditto for authors.
Copyright is about a system that allows remuneration for artists so that society gets the benefits of their work. It's something that many people in this society accept, and will fight for. Many companies have distorted copyright as an attempt to make unlimited profits off of something that was once considered creative. Similar for software companies. This needs to be changed.
Music recordings could be viewed as a service, just like software development could be viewed as a service. The question becomes, what's the easiest and most equitable way to fund such efforts? Today, it's through productization. Perhaps there can be a better, different model, such as flexible DRM as in the iTunes Music Store.
RMS has often suggested that there should be no freedom restrictions for such efforts. RMS' only indication of funding was the charging of a "small fee" for the redistribution of works. He does not seem to want to attribute any economic value to artistic works, such as software development.
I think that's against the interests of society at large. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with viewing artistic works as an economic good ("Wow, that was a great song, I'll pay you to write another one!"), but of course one can take it to extremes, as the prevailing system has.
"It is impossible for everybody to be wrong about some matter of value."
There were times when slavery was generally held to be right and justifiable.
As I said in a prior post, might does not make right. Yet, there's no way any human can know if what they believe is "right" or "true", hence why we need carefully regulated democractic or market structures to bring an approximation of freedom (not correctness!) to our decisions.
Or, if they're impatient, a group can revolt. That seems to be what the filesharing trend is, in political terms: a revolt against the prevailing system. This doesn't mean they subscribe to the RMS party line that all copyright is bad; I'd be quite surprised if that were the case. But certainly many people recognize that today's system is driven by an oligopoly. Indie labels have made inroads, but they can't change the rules of the game. Music is not driven by a flexible market system where things can actually change if enough dollars want it to change. And hence they're going around the system.
"if the majority is doing something because they think its right and justified, it becomes so."
Majorities do not need to better decisions. This is a "might makes right" argument, and the United States founding fathers were actually quite obsessed with limiting the power of the majority, because freedom and liberty require protections for the minority as well.
This is a common misnomer of democracies, one that political scientists have tried to point out for years. Democratic processes do not lead to good governments or better decisions, nor are they more efficient than dictatorships. They're actually rather inefficient.
Democracies are freer than other forms of government because, they give legitmacy to rulers through a process that allows us to throw the bums out. That doesn't mean we'll choose good leaders, GW Bush being a case in point.
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People like to refer to the el-cheapo PC's as reason why Apple's computers are so overpriced. My rule of thumb is usually that a Mac is around 15-20% slower (in CPU, not I/O) than the top PC available at the time for around $500 more. This used to hold true in the U.S., I think it's more like $200-300 now, but it still holds true in Canada to some degree.
CanadaComputers.com, probably one of the cheapest sites to get PC componentry, has an AMD FX-51 system for $2345 , FX-53 for $2689, and a P4 3.4E for $2055.
Certainly these are probably faster CPUs, but a) dual G5s would make up a fair amount of the ground if you're a multitasker vs. just a gamer, b) it would only really matter if CPU was the prime determinant to your purchase. Which is pretty rare except for benchmark freaks -- Graphics, I/O , BUS, and memory speeds matter a lot more for regular workstation use. The G5 fares well there.
Again, Acura , Honda and Toyota have the best "on paper" combination of price/performance/reliability out of almost all of the car makers -- but people sometimes still want a different make for non-quantitative reasons.
The exchange rate is what messes up Mac prices in Canada. I suppose they could sell them at a lower margin here, but that could start causing cross-border problems where people start ordering Macs from Canada because they're cheaper.
And, as others mentioned, $2,799 is for a G5. There's an eMac for $1049, iMac for $1749, and notebooks from $1449. I don't care that you have a 17-inch CRT already -- you didn't give the complete picture.
Interestingly, the product that WOULD have worked well for you was probably a G4 cube or a G4 desktop. They're still available.
I originally bought a mac while I lived in the U.S. It's an expensive habit to retain in Canada -- I originally purchased my 17" powerbook for $5200 in May 2003. The upgraded model in November was $4200 -- and 80% of that price drop was due to exchange rate. Now they're $3700, though this time mostly due to Apple's drop vs. exchange. Whatcha gonna do. I enjoy it much more than the Thinkpad I have at work, so much so that I bring it to work and work off the PB. One can get from point A to point B in style with an Acura, but some people want a BMW.
Outsourcing isn't just evil, it's illegal. Corporations in the United States are required to operate in a manner consistent with the common good: in other words, they are required to be responsible for the personal welfare of their workers and their communities.
Actually, no, it's not illegal. There is ample legal precedent that it's illegal to put the personal welfare of workers and communities above that of shareholders. Henry Ford, was sued successfully by shareholders for reducing the price of the Model T by 58% between 1908 and 1916, as he believed the purpose of business was to be an organ of society. The courts disagreed.
The Pinto case is another interesting one. While in the end a jury agreed to punish Ford, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (!) and business council supported the idea that human lives can be subjected to a cost/benefit analysis based on lawsuit estimates -- because the business is only responsible to shareholders in law.
That was why corporations were suffered to exist in the first place!
Yes, you're absolutely right. But the laws do not reflect that reality.
Eventually reality catches up with the symbols and illusions we create. Unfortunately, it may be a very painful reckoning.
I've bought 1st gen powerbooks since the G3 days... I had a G3/400 (Lombard), Titanium 500mhz, and a 17" Aluminum 1ghz, now 1.33ghz... They've all treated me well, no major problems.
Minor problems have existed, like keyboard marks on the screen, and one of the keys on my keyboard came off, but, these are quick/easy fixes. I've also noticed the AlBooks sometimes don't always awake from sleep (once every month or two). Oh, and, the first-gen AlBooks' CPU fan was much more mosquito-like than the current fan. But... nothing big.
I even dropped my Titanium, which was prone to warping, and it was fine, though the bottom case was warped on the sides afterwards -- I replaced it for a couple hundred $ before I sold it, good as new.
The only first generation Apple product I regretted purchasing was the Airport Extreme Base Station. It took almost 1 year of patches before it could hold a connection in my apartment beyond a couple hours.
Funny every job you said is a service job, not a manufactoring job like software programming. you Build and test software like a factory, not as a service and support.
Building software is more akin to the design and prototyping process that occurs before a product makes it to manufacturing.
Programming is way too varied and dynamic to be compared to typical mass manufacturing. A better analogy would be "craftsman" or "engineering", two professions that are arguably more service-oriented than typical manufacturing jobs.
Performance really doesn't play an issue in outshoring to India - if your job's so simple a monkey could do it, your job's going to get outsourced, regardless of your performance. You can't really match cost efficiency of someone who lives in a country with 1/10 the per capita income.
Perhaps I'm missing your point, but the issue is not that jobs are "so simple a monkey can do it". The problem is that complex jobs requiring lots of education are just as doable by people in India at 1/10th the wage. And I would be very surprised if the code were significantly less maintainable than typical business code.
It's very fashionable to believe that North Americans somehow have a monopoly on modern education, training, and knowledge workers; Bangalore is rapidly showing how dangerously untrue this lazy thinking is.
Not sure if this will help, but, here goes. My experience about human organizations (not-for-profit, for-profit, small, medium, large, whatever) goes something like this:
... people bring on their friends, both managerial and technical, to bring like-minded people to fight their interests in the larger battle for the corporation's direction and resources.
Small organizations: take on the strengths and weaknesses of their leader to an almost pathological degree. If weaknesses outweigh strengths (which is most often the case, especially someone with the force of will and ego to start their own organization), it becomes like living in a dysfunctional family with very difficult parents.
Assuming you can deal with the inherent risks of small company life (they can go under, they're not usually prestigious, and they don't offer traditional "job security" of a nice bonus & severance package), this probably is the easiest way to avoid bureaucratic politics, though you'll have to deal with the more intimate personality conflicts that tend to arise.
Large organizations: All large organizations, whether corporate or public service, seem to be obsessed with "mechanizing" their structure and processes. It's an irrational form of rationality. They don't look at their task, what the purpose behind the organization is (it has to be more than "profit"). Through this, they sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Such organizations inevitably become politicized and split by bureaucratic and technocratic interest groups, unless top management keeps re-enforcing & renewing the organization's purpose -- having a reason for existing: a goal, a mission, something that transcends the power-politics and aimlessness of "profit maximization". Of course, this never lasts. But it is the moments of renewal that matter -- that make organizations worth working for.
What's a techie to do? Nevertheless, in a politicized organization, which seems to be what you have the most experience with, Machiavellian tactics are what tend to be the only effective course, in the large, anyway. Being staff, techies can't really play at this, they can only line up behind a player and hope to contribute their talents & knowledge to the organization without getting too caught up in the struggle. Your best bet is to try to pick a faction that somewhat shares your values, and have a team & manager with enough upper management factional support to ensure you're somewhat protected from the politics.
Of course, none of this is easy to find -- the best way is through having a network of techie friends, hoping that someone lucks out. This is why you usually see "changing of the guards" in any management firing & re-org
Anyway, the above is a bit of anecdotal, but some of it is based on real organizational theory, which might help you understand the utter pettiness that tends to devour many of our institutions. (I'd suggest some Henry Mintzberg to start).
Your father is a smart man.
1. innovation drives the economy
2. analysis (risk management & number twiddling) is not synthesis (strategy & innovation)
3. read more Peter Drucker.
That's pretty good advice.
This is going to sound like a plug, but I have nothing to do with this company or product - I just thought it was really cool.
When I was wandering through JavaOne last year, I ran across this booth by VisiComp, Inc. who sells this debugger called RetroVue. I think it's an interesting attempt at bridging the gap between live-breakpoint debugging and logging.
The main issue with debugging vs. logging is that logging provides you with a history of operations that allows you to determine the execution order and state of variables at various times of the execution, something that debuggers don't actually help you with.
RetroVue seems to instrument your Java bytecode to generate a journal file. This journal file is quite similar to a core file extended over time, by recording all operations that occurred in the program over time: every method call, every variable assignment, exception thrown, and context switch. RetroVue then allows you to play back the execution of the application.
It includes a timeline view to jump around the various execution points of the program, as well as an ongoing call-list to show the call sequence that has occurred. It also notes every context switch that the VM makes, and detects deadlocks, thus making it a great tool for multi-threaded application debugging. You can adjust the speed of the playback if you would like to watch things unfold in front of you, or you can pause it at any time and step through the various operations. Want to find out when that variable was last assigned to? Just click a button. Want to find out when that method is called? Same.
It's not free/cheap, but it seems quite useful.
They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.
I have a hard time understanding how one's skill set is determined by their nationality. Ability to communicate in English, perhaps. But then again, I would say the same about any Bay Area born engineer that moves to Bangalore and has to communicate part time in Hindi.
In any case, I think there's a major difference between one's ability to write prose or design a chip. Communication among team members is crucial, of course. But if they're all of a similar nationality & language, as you say, that wouldn't be a problem now, would it?
There certainly have been notable advances in productivity over the past decade or so.
I can, for example, correctly format a document in a graphical word processor much quicker than I could with Wordperfect 5.1 (DOS), which was released... circa 1990? Of course, there are some WP51 lovers out there that can do it better than me, but I don't think my experience is isolated - it lead to the Windows versions and the eventual ascention of MS Word.
Word processers haven't improved all that much over the past several years, admittedly.
Another productivity trend is the ascention of the Web. I can now get information and answers much quicker than I could by making a trip to a library to do a card catalogue or Lexis/Nexis search.
For programmers, many of the refactoring tools in environments like Eclipse have spead up software maintenance tremendously. I can rename classes or methods across a codebase and have it update all dependencies.
If I wanted to learn UNIX, I could install it at home with the release of Linux.
Setting up a LAN these days is a much less challenging problem with the near standardization on twisted-pair Ethernet - compared to the wide varieties of thin-net vs. thick-net coaxial and token ring in the early 1990's.
These are just a few examples. Computing and automation has significantly improved the productivity of operations in our economy. While we don't really know all of the reasons behind the surge of U.S. economic productivity figures in the late 1990's, the central bank tends to attribute them to information technology.
I do agree, however, that this productivity is oversold, and much of the productivity from computing actually comes from the informational / social side-effects that it has on organizations.
The Win32 widget toolkit, which is *the* industry standard, is written in C. ...And hasn't been used for most Windows GUI's for the past 7 years in favour of VC++ (ATL or MFC) or Visual Basic.
.NET managed code. New features will *not* be exposed through Win32. In effect, Win32 is a legacy API.
Also remember that WinFX, the API set for Windows Longhorn, is all
"According to one recent analysis, the government now spends $20,000 a year for every household in America, the most since World War II"
Not that I respect the Bush spending program, but figures like this are misleading. Is it nominal or real terms
? Plus, the U.S. is economically much bigger than 60 years ago. Government spending in terms of % of GDP is the figure that really gives an idea of spending that was relative to WW2.
Price isn't necessarily determined by costs, it's determined by what the market will bear. If the market will only bear 0 price music, then the system has broken down, and the opportunity cost of spending most of your time as an artist will become much steeper. We would dry up the primary pool of capital available that enables artistry as a profession instead of a hobby.
This is not, in my opinion, in the interests of society, it's a tragedy of the (creative) commons.
On the face of it, there needs to be recognition that all intellectual works are services, not products. This recognition could imply free copies as the norm, not the exception. But then we have a problem: the master copy costs $X to make and such costs (plus profit, which is really just a future cost) must be covered to create an economic system.
The current system does this inequitably, but in an arguably much simpler manner than any potential alternatives: universal licensing, subscriptions, or perhaps, a capital-market model where you give the artist money after the fact to keep them making their art (whether software, music, etc.).
I haven't heard of other viable alternatives from this crowd.
sorry..
Provide a set of declarative attributes for setting a service's reliability , transactions, and security, much more flexible and simple than EJB 2.x and COM+ do today.
The real thing to pay attention to with Longhorn, is Indigo - the new transactions and communications framework. They're investing a lot of effort into keeping it simple and to keep all aspects orthogonal to one another.
Indigo is really the replacement for COM+, built on top of the web services stack (the WS-* specs). The WS-* specs aim to supplant CORBA as the dominant distributed computing paradigm by enabling any platform to integrate through the various XML protocols. This seems to be the only viable way forward to get true interop between the Windows and ABM (anyone but Microsoft) world.
Some rather interesting things Indigo is trying to do:
- make transactions pervasive in coding, even with volatile objects. Using a "lightweight transaction manager", an in-memory transaction on an ArrayList would take only a microsecond to begin and commit.
- embed the transaction manager in the kernel for durable transactions.
- Provide a set of declarative attributes for setting a service's reliability , transactions, and security, much more flexible and simple than
Windows XP was named "Whistler" after the Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort. "Longhorn" is named after the saloon at that resort... http://www.longhornsaloon.ca/
They're not silly. Is "Jaguar" or "Panther" silly? How about some of the codenames for Redhat releases?
It really is about making programming information-based applications for Windows similar to programming for ASP.NET. This keeps Windows relevant in the enterprise against the onslaught of web applications, or so the theory goes. InfoPath is another stab at this.
So, from one perspective, it's just another stab at making ActiveX-like features available in a browser window, for intranet applications. It won't really fly over the internet proper (unless people in droves flock to it, which probably is unlikely given they didn't with ActiveX).
I'm positive there would be an uproar in the open source/NIX community when you start saying things like there should be no /usr and no /bin, it should just work.
Nothing "just" works without configuration! What would you propose: an elaborate registry, as Windows has?
I am pretty sure that a MacOS X power user that has a thorny weird issue would have a much easier time going to the "file metaphor" than the Windows user would have in digging through a hierarchical registry that is NO metaphor other than a simple tree structure.
Crazy, radical, non-traditional thoughts like that are needed for the future of computing, but will never be accepted by old timers who insist that a well-organized hierarchy-based file system is the way to go (which I read in replies many times when people mention this type of abstraction).
I agree in part. This doesn't mean we should knee-jerk and give up an enduring metaphor for a poorly thought-out solution. The history of computing has very few enduring metaphors.
Microsoft is pushing the envelope in a fairly predictable fashion, but it's good that they're throwing their weight behind new approaches. On the other hand, I would hope we don't really just take a page from Microsoft and try to make MySQL the filesystem for Linux.
The Unites States is a highly regulated country in almost all industries: rules, regulations, subsidies, trade barriers, etc.
Pure lassez-faire markets are not usually acceptable in a modern society: society can not handle the pace of change and wildly-swinging boom bust cycles of the 19th century that led to widespread and deep unemployment every decade or so.
Since the 1980s, the "conservatives" decided to be the exact opposite of what a conservative would do: instead of taking gradual steps to proven solutions, they have been reactionary -- trying to move us back to the 19th century classical liberalism that apparently will work much much better than the 20th century's approach.
Unfortuantely, the U.S. in particular has also had to deal with some world-class coporate scandals lately, leading to the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, the biggest set of business regulations since... wait for it... FDR! So much for that deregulatory agenda.
No, I don't think regulation will come back to haunt us, if it is well-designed regulation. I think, for example, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which came as part of FDR's New Deal, was a good regulation. It insisted on auditing for publicly traded companies and public filings on the state of the company. It's widly known that at the time most businesspeople derided such changes as communist and blatently anti-free market. How times change.
"Without copyright and patents, the price of software would be reduced down to near $0, the cost of reproduction."
Software development is a service that is funded through productization. People's time and knowledge are not "zero cost", even if their volunteer it without pay. There always is an opportunity cost involved.
You seem miss that in the old days, composers were commissioned by kings and queens to write music; that was how they stayed alive, not through performance art.
Perhaps we can create a market-oriented commission system. But that still would require a form of copyright.
I think the musicians have to perform live as they had to do a hundred years ago and as many musicians have to do now
So, in your opinion, there is no artistic merit to recording art; only performance art? What about written art, is it not the same as recording art? Should only lecturers get paid, now?
The era to become rich by selling millions of CDs without any real work is over.
The number of musicians that get rich by selling millions of CDs is rather small. And I think you might want to revise your view about how much work goes into promoting their art. It is "real work".
Ditto for authors.
Copyright is about a system that allows remuneration for artists so that society gets the benefits of their work. It's something that many people in this society accept, and will fight for. Many companies have distorted copyright as an attempt to make unlimited profits off of something that was once considered creative. Similar for software companies. This needs to be changed.
Music recordings could be viewed as a service, just like software development could be viewed as a service. The question becomes, what's the easiest and most equitable way to fund such efforts? Today, it's through productization. Perhaps there can be a better, different model, such as flexible DRM as in the iTunes Music Store.
RMS has often suggested that there should be no freedom restrictions for such efforts. RMS' only indication of funding was the charging of a "small fee" for the redistribution of works. He does not seem to want to attribute any economic value to artistic works, such as software development.
I think that's against the interests of society at large. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with viewing artistic works as an economic good ("Wow, that was a great song, I'll pay you to write another one!"), but of course one can take it to extremes, as the prevailing system has.
"It is impossible for everybody to be wrong about some matter of value."
There were times when slavery was generally held to be right and justifiable.
As I said in a prior post, might does not make right. Yet, there's no way any human can know if what they believe is "right" or "true", hence why we need carefully regulated democractic or market structures to bring an approximation of freedom (not correctness!) to our decisions.
Or, if they're impatient, a group can revolt. That seems to be what the filesharing trend is, in political terms: a revolt against the prevailing system. This doesn't mean they subscribe to the RMS party line that all copyright is bad; I'd be quite surprised if that were the case. But certainly many people recognize that today's system is driven by an oligopoly. Indie labels have made inroads, but they can't change the rules of the game. Music is not driven by a flexible market system where things can actually change if enough dollars want it to change. And hence they're going around the system.
"if the majority is doing something because they think its right and justified, it becomes so."
Majorities do not need to better decisions. This is a "might makes right" argument, and the United States founding fathers were actually quite obsessed with limiting the power of the majority, because freedom and liberty require protections for the minority as well.
This is a common misnomer of democracies, one that political scientists have tried to point out for years. Democratic processes do not lead to good governments or better decisions, nor are they more efficient than dictatorships. They're actually rather inefficient.
Democracies are freer than other forms of government because, they give legitmacy to rulers through a process that allows us to throw the bums out. That doesn't mean we'll choose good leaders, GW Bush being a case in point.