and show me how they don't have design patterns. every programming form has design patterns, patterns that have evolved to solve repeatable problems. It' s like you're completely ignoring the context in which this stuff was created. Do you solve everything from first principles? They're not tied to object orientation.
The distinctions you draw raise the granularity of the metaphor. Pilot/co-pilot is a metaphor to a pair currently programming at a point in time. Not to the whole project.
"Flying is a real-time task"
Programming is too. Sure, you can change mistakes later, but it helps if someone catches it right then & there. It also helps if you keep your code clean right then & there, and don't allow bad habits to seep in.
"You cannot bring in new staff if you are short on human resources for some reason. "
This is a false. You're not going to hire someone in-flight, just like you're not going to hire someone mid-method/function. You hire in-between pairing sessions.
"Flying is a highly interactive task."
So is team programming - it's one of the most interactive tasks you could possibly come up with! There often is constant collaboration, lots of questions. A team that has heads-down, earphones-on programming style does happen, but arguably isn't tremendously effective.
"Flying is pretty complex in some phases of the flight "
I've seen pretty tricky designs during some of my pairing sessions.
Now obviously it's not a perfect metaphor, in that pilots/co-pilots are a life-critical exercies. But it's useful in a number of ways. I think your post does more to justify the metaphor than to convince otherwise.
I would highly suggest reading Ward Cunningham's "XP is guru friendly!" position paper, which I believe is part of the OOPSLA 2000 proceedings.
Your evaluation is the exact opposite of the intent of XP. Martin Fowler has often railed against the notion of "plug compatible programming units" so prevalent in the minds of many IT managers.
XP is a very humanistic approach, it relies heavily on oral history and varying the master/apprentice roleplaying model. It is guru-friendly, assuming the guru wants to share the love. If he/she doesn't have the desire to communicate his ideas to others, then he probably doesn't belong on any team - let alone an XP team.
"The only people that write about ideal methodologies and their theoretical applications are academics. I am reluctant to use the term "scholar" on these people"
That XP was created and tested several times in practical (i.e. business) environments, and has succeeded, makes me question your assumption here.
"Anybody can attempt to write for the project but if it doesn't fit with the design or is too far off base to incorporate into the design, that code doesn't get into the next release. "
So, you know all of the requirements up front? Who is the one being academic here?
society won't come to a halt, but within a generation of abolishing IP law (i.e. people can't get effectively remunerated for creative knowledge work) you'll see people choosing that profession less & less.
some do it for love, sure, but it would be a hobby then. and hobbies tend to generate less results than do for-profit ventures, which (by their nature) require a return on investment to cover the costs of capital.
as much as you'd like to think that hobbiests created all this wonderful open source stuff, please remember that the past 4 years of improvements to Linux, Apache, etc. has been significantly a result of corporate developers working for RedHat, IBM, et al, not only hobbiests.
captialism and profit are necessities because profits are primarily an objective measurement of the economic resources that a company uses. certainly it can be used as reward to executives and shareholders -- and it is -- but the majority of profit is plowed back into retained earnings. a high profit level is needed to cover the costs of tomorrow -- without one, the company is actually taking away more resources from society than it is contributing.
While I appreciate some intelligent thinking on this matter, might I suggest another, part complementary, part conflicitng perspective. You said:
If the resources aren't intrinsically scarce, introducing artificial scarcity [through IP laws] might not be the best option. However, in post scarcity society, one would function in a gift economy anyway.
Modern economies are most broadly divided into three sectors: manufactured goods, services, and agriculture. You (much like most of the business community) are attempting to fit the round peg of intellectual property creation, which is a service, into the square hole of the digital manifestation (bits) of intellectual property, which is a good .
Currently we treat such services as goods because we haven't determine a better way of distributing economic resources than the license-for-access model.
Certainly there is no scarcity of bits out there, the scarcity in that regard traditionally has been the costs of the transportation medium, whether it be disks, tape, etc., which the Internet now theoretically makes negligible (though practically isn't the case due to limited bandwidth, and consequential opportunity costs incurred by waiting for a download over a 56/kb modem link, or for larger items over a hi-speed internet link).
But anyway, let's assume that theoretically transportation costs are negligable. Your added stuff about nanotech really is irrelevant to the discussion because it just places physical goods on par with the theoretical reality of bits today.
Let's divide the two kinds of work into manual work and knowledge work -- some jobs are a significant combination of both (surgeons, for example).
My argument is that it is not information that is the world's economic driver, but it is the value of knowledge work. Bits aren't scarce, the people that know what bits to use are scarce. This isn't a new idea, Peter Drucker has been knowledge work for over 40 years, and a post-capitalist society significantly driven by knowledge for over 10 years. Alivn Toffler has also referred to knowledge being the new form of power in the future, the prior forms being violence and money.
When you use a service: a hairdresser, a plumber, an accountant, etc., you are gaining value from act of work they provide. You pay them money for their services. Similarily, when you licence a piece of intellectual property, you are gaining access to the manifestation of a service that is valuable to you.
Services are intrinsically scarce. They involve a universal scarcity: time, and more intangible scarcities that certainly warrent further study: talent, creativity, and knowledge. Hence there is a need for law to regulate access to such services to ensure the distribution of economic resources.
Having said that, current U.S. IP laws are flawed, and overstep their bounds. The DMCA does this by preventing people from "figuring out how things work", which probably should always be an intrinsic fair use. Patent time limits are probably too long, and need to be narrower in scope.
However, there is a continued need for some form of IP law -- which may look very different from today's copyright and pattents -- to correctly distribute economic resources to service providers. This probably will require a lot more thought and experimentation. The world of the future may transcend capitalism, but it won't likely be non-capitalist, as supply for certain services will remain scarce.
It's a bit of a game, yes, but generally it goes like this: look at the value of your services, and look at the class of your customer. You can't ignore that different customers require different levels of service.
There are three balancing points you need to look at when setting a price for goods or services: a) what's it worth to them (1 customer) b) how much are you worth relative to your peers in ways that MATTER to your customer c) what's the benchmarked rate for this class of service
Sales skills involve convicing your customer of your estimates for (A) and (B), and also keeping (C) in mind as you haggle. You'll need a "benchmarked" rate such as those at RealRates to keep your feet on the ground.
Notice how the stock market uses a stock ticker listing the last bid/offer prices for issues? That's because people need a benchmark to know what others are charging, what tactics to use, what the trend is, etc.
It's not so simple that "companies buy outrageously priced services and products". What's outrageous to one person is acceptable to another, because DIFFERENT customers have DIFFERENT needs, many of which are intangible. You can't purely quantify price on technical quality alone, though that's a major factor.
A perfect example: J2EE servers tend to be fairly costly, compared to jBoss (free). This is the subject of many a flamewar: why do people keep spending the $$ on IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic? There are a lot of people that are certain of the imminent world triumph of jBoss, but I'm not so sure (even though it's a solid product). There are a LOT of intangibles that go on when purchasing a mission-critical product. To keep this brief, I'll focus on one: TRUST.
Do you (as a Manager Director or VP of a company, responsible for the company's performance) trust the jBoss team? Do deliver quality, to continue making improvements, etc? It's an open source team without identifiable faces... so you try to find a face... and the leader, Marc Fleury is often associated with it. So when you say "do you trust jBoss", it's really a question of, "do you trust Marc Fleury?".
Alternatively, do you trust BEA? The owners of Tuxedo which has a reputation for reliability & scalability, and with a suppport staff that is always in the message boards helping people out, with major accounts among your peers, with guaranteed 24x7 support if need be, etc.
Similarily for Linux, it originally was do you trust Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox -- but is increasingly "do you trust IBM and RedHat and Oracle?"
Many people think "I don't trust those suits" when judging mySQL vs. Oracle vs. PostgreSQL, or [insert pissing contest here], but that's because you're not a suit. Suits trust other suits, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They'll pay around the rate their peers are.
The replies to this message apparently are very skewed towards those that receive little or no training, or of training with little quality. I'd like to add a counter balance to that.
My background: I've been a trainer for two years for a small training & consulting company out of New York (though I've since moved on). I've trained (and consulted) globally, with my courses ranging from beginner to advanced Java, C++, Web Services, XML/XSLT, J2EE, EJB, and most recently the Microsoft 2-day VS.NET seminars. I've taught principal engineers and developers of products you may have heardof, as well as variousothercompanies.
Is training worth it? It depends. The main benefits of training vs. books are: a) you can't ask a book a question b) books can't help you when their examples don't compile c) you'd like to get an answer to that gnatty problem you've been experiencing in that DLL you've been screwing with for 3 days (i.e. free consulting advice) d) some authors really can't write e) some technologies are so new or specialized there isn't much in the way of quality books out there (i.e. advanced oracle performance tuning, advanced J2EE architecture, writing for an EAI framework like TIBCO, etc.)
Training is a way of imparting knowledge that the books have IN CONTEXT of the real world AND providing the extra knowledge that the books don't have.
Most training sucks, of course, because a) it's not relevant to your day-to-day job or b) the buyer doesn't know what constitutes good training.
This really harkens back to the scourge of the land of IT: a lack of good managers. It's up to managers to know what training is needed & whether the vendor is of sufficient quality. It's also up to the managers to involve the team with this decision -- I fully agree with the premise of this article that those being trained should influence the training -- if you're not seen as being competent enough to know what you need, there's a real reality-deficiency occurring.
Given the above, what makes a good instructor for technical courses? IMHO, in order: a1) advanced technical knowledge & expertise a2) good teaching skills b) patience c) energy (you have to carry the crowd through the tough parts) d) humility (you can sometimes be wrong)
They're all needed, though at bare minimum A1 & A2... if you have teaching skills but don't know much, you're not accomplishing anything except entertaining/babysitting a crowd for a few days. In an advanced crowd this will generate a lot of anger. Conversely, if you know a lot but have the communication skills of a potato chip, you'll still get a lot of angry people wanting to give you the boot.
Having said that, a good course with a good instructor can be a very rewarding experience, probably a major highlight of your career growth -- assuming you get the right course for the right reasons with a good instructor.
In perspective, a 5 day course can run between $1-3k a person, depending on the depth, level, and reputation of the instructor. That's not cheap. It's probably only worth it to go with the "world class" instructors, whether well known (like the folks at DevelopMentor, or Hotsos), or relatively unknown but promising (like my old company).
As for what industries regularily offer training -- generally in my experience, financial and insurance companies. There's always ongoing training there for new technologies, and most new IT hires get 4-12 weeks of training in business and technology.
hey, there's such a thing as GOOD euro death metal too. Emusic sells Entombed, Opeth, Carcass, and Morbid Angel, all of which are very good, assuming you like the style. Some decent Alternative and Goth too.
MHO, what school you go to doesn't have that much of an impact. Your natural ability, personality and willingness to learn aren't going to be changed by a post-secondary institution, and those are the things that really count.
Hey, I'm a Waterloo dropout, so I do agree. I'm just relating my experience that I've found more people with the above qualities at Waterloo than other universities during the time period 1996-2001. Maybe it's changed. Certainly some of he UW mythos has been shattered by the ego displayed by co-ops during the dot-com mania (give me perks, ft salary, etc.)
(Disclaimer: I'm a former Waterloo CS student. Left for my career without graduating around the beginning the dot-com bubble, still employed, no regrets.)
I agree with your assessment that there's a mythos behind UW students that seems to be carried among other companies as well, particularily in professional service firms, whether smaller ones or larger (like Accenture). But this mythos isn't entirely without basis.
I would generalize your observation to include my own experiences interviewing and working with UW co-ops and graduates: many UW students often *do* interview better than most other graduates and/or interns. And they often do generate better-than-average results. Over the past 2 companies I've worked for on the U.S. west coast and the east coast -- management fell in love with UW students.
I would attribute this to what some might find surprising: many CS and Eng students at UW have very good communication skills relative to their peers in other schools. The co-op program requires them to be good, since they have to work in between heads-down course work. Naturally every class has legendary high-mark/anti-social students, but they wind up being professors anyway *grin*.
A secondary reason for UW student's success at Microsoft and PSFs is that UW tends to hammer programming skills into CS students, even if it kills them (as anyone who's taken Operating Systems will attest to).
Being relatively professional speakers, the best UW co-ops are usually both confident & technically savvy enough to be placed on the front-lines to do real work -- whether in front of a client for a contract, or @ Microsoft with the culture of debating ideas.
Usually the UW co-ops and/or graduates I have known have been better than many full-time employees at client sites. But not perfect. I find UW grads, like all grads, have a lot of learning to do in placing systems work in business context. There's also a general lack of both high and low-level design skills, and an overemphasis on tricky algorithms and/or cleverness. The cynic in me believes this makes them fit right into Microsoft, which until.NET rarely considered elegance an important facet of keeping software costs low. The only grads that have design skills and/or good business skills usually are self-taught.
So, in summary: there is a myth around waterloo students, but not entirely unwarrented. They're more experienced programmers than most regular interns from other schools, and often they can be better communicators.
How can you be so sure that's what he meant in the quote? An economist, for example, has a very different understanding of the term "free", which was the point Gaijin42 was making.
I'll try to give a bit of an economic analysis of why "freeloading" isn't sustainable:
The "zero-price" of many Linux distributions available on FTP sites makes for an economic illusion. Not charging money for something implies that *someone* is paying for production costs. This is generally the time & effort of volunteers + the salaries & equipment for employed OSS vendor developers.
In economic terms, time & effort is a cost. At its rawest level, it's the continually incurred opportunity cost of OSS developers spending their time & effort on free software development vs. doing something else. Hence, it's not "free". Someone is making a sacrifice for you.
Now, the real issue with this is how to sustain the model. Capitalism has consumption & investment. OSS has the "gift" culture but also can use capitalism in some ways.
An OSS product is sustainable (i.e. alive & evolving) if the producers:
a) make money on it (somehow) and funnel it back into production [on hardware, desks, chairs, or even salaries] b) get users to contribute to production with their time & effort (i.e. so more "itches" can be scratched, and development continues)
Obviously Linux has a bit of both. OSS started with B, but is now a lot more dependent on A -- in particular, many high-profile OSS programmers are employed by vendors using this model.
If you lose either of these, development ceases.
So, basically, as soon as YOU, the user, download Linux, you're leveraging all of the sunk costs of those that came before you. If you don't contribute back to it, you're doing nothing to sustain its development or it's evolution. OSS is dependent on a a certain percentage of users contributing back to the product, which keeps it alive. Lacking this, the product will sit in stasis. (Take a look at Freshmeat.net for countless examples of this: the original author got tired & moved on, and no one picked up the flame).
Linux, Apache, etc, will not fall into stasis: there's enough of a percentage that contributes to the product, mainly because of its increased VALUE to society over other free software products. You're going to get a lot of people ponying up the cost of that.
But for "general" GPL'ed software, i.e. new stuff coming out, if you want to keep it evolving, you probably should contribute. Or watch it fade, like countless projects have.
I recognize that you care only about meeting your own goals. I was just suggesting it's quite possible that others (opportunists) will economically profit off your invention if you don't. If you don't care, that's fine.
As for your second paragraph about "images pumped by the market" telling me what to think, I believe you really haven't read much history....
By the way, most of your examples happened 30 years ago. These days, getting a company to stop hoarding money long enough to actually make progress at anything is the exception at best.
You've clearly got selective vision here. IBM has made tremendous strides in semiconductors and magnetic storage over the past several years. Bell Labs continues to come up with chips that improve the quality of digital phone conversations (eliminating the "lag" and "echo" on overseas connections). Pharmaceutical companies continue to generate some impressive innovations in drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, aids, etc.
That's even funnier than the article. What "steady wage?" You're kidding, right? Hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off every year, most for nothing more than doing a good job.
And unemployment continues to be at the lowest historical level coming out of a recession.
Given your obvious bias, you're really lacking in credibility here.
There's nothing wrong with your perspective to invention, but one thing to note is it appears you're going for the "bleeding heart inventor" approach, which is to say that you don't care if you profit off your invention, which is fine, but when it's introduced to the wider world it's almost certain if that others WILL profit from your idea instead of you. If you don't care fine, but I would think that most
As for your model of how the world gets changed, I would say you're sorrily simplifying it, and ignoring the impact of organizations on innovation & invention over the past 100 years.
Effectively, yes, you did violate the copyright. Mainly because it's probabilistically impossible to configure millions of random bits into a James Brown song, given the currently forseeable future of technology.
Tech people love to throw the "but it's all just bits" argument into a copyright debate. But the problem is that, NO, it's not all bits. It can be represented as bits, but it requires an analog (creative!) input to begin with. Since creativity is valued in our society, we give artists protection for a time.
The current law is ridiculously biased in favor of media giants, but we shouldn't throw copyright completely out because of that.
Salvatore wrote the Dark Elf series of books in D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. I believe there are over three trilogies by now. When I was 13 years old, I found them actually quite good... that's probably because it was his target audience.
But then I recently picked up one of the latest Dark Elf books... ech. I couldn't get into it. The writing was just too bad. I guess this is what age does to you. The Star Wars books really aren't targetted at intelligent late-20 or 30-somethings. They're for teens who like D&D and Dragonlance (and adults who never grew out of it).
One thing I will give kudos to Salvatore for: he has a talent for describing fight scenes. I think the reviewer found this annoying, but that aspect of his books has traditionally been their saving grace: if you want to read a book of detailed fight scenes with a bit of plot in-between, pick up a Salvatore book. Remember my "13 year old" audience theory -- flowery writing and complex plots aren't necessarily cool to most. Lots of fights are. Not too many of my friends liked Tolkien in high school, but there sure were a lot of Dragonlance fans.
No doubt for a series like Star Wars, this probably looked like a good choice on paper.
"And I REFUSE to believe that DOS/Win3.1/Win32 was absolutely the best, most marketable product during that period...okay, it may have been the best, but was it "97% of the market" best?"
A lot of this had to do with IBM & not Microsoft. IBM PC's were 'the' standard in the 1980's for businesses. Apples were quite expensive, and did a number of moves that didn't impress IT divisions (the lemmings commercial was one).
If you want an IBM PC, you used a Microsoft operating system. DR-DOS, OS/2, and DesqView were competitors that had a lot of mindshare, at least in my community. When Windows 95 came out, most found it "good enough" (I stayed with OS/2, personally).
It's a big leap to suggest that an entire market is "dumb", there's usually a rational reason behind what may appear to be irrational behavior. In this case, it was using an IBM PC. The other major reason was the influence of the monopolistic practices Microsoft used to be the "default".
Monopolies aren't necesarily anti-capitalist; many economists don't worry about monopolists because they don't last beyond a decade or two.
" I just don't believe so--I mean look how quickly Linux has stormed the scene. Are we to assume that NO ONE else but Microsoft was so astute at making operating systems until some kid sat down at his PC? Something just DOESN'T make sense here."
I think again what many people do here is assume because they don't like the market's behavior, it must be dumb. Now I will say that the growth of Windows over the past 7 years is mainly due to the monopolization of operating systems on IBM PC's through anticompetitve means. On the other hand, Microsoft Office was arguably largely a market choice. *shrug*
So, I wouldn't be worried so much about "true capitalism". Think more about "real capitalism". There are people that abuse the system, and we arguably need referees to police that. It's just unfortunate that our referees changed political affiliations just as they were about to red card Microsoft.
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and show me how they don't have design patterns. every programming form has design patterns, patterns that have evolved to solve repeatable problems. It' s like you're completely ignoring the context in which this stuff was created. Do you solve everything from first principles? They're not tied to object orientation.
The distinctions you draw raise the granularity of the metaphor. Pilot/co-pilot is a metaphor to a pair currently programming at a point in time. Not to the whole project.
"Flying is a real-time task"
Programming is too. Sure, you can change mistakes later, but it helps if someone catches it right then & there. It also helps if you keep your code clean right then & there, and don't allow bad habits to seep in.
"You cannot bring in new staff if you are short on human resources for some reason. "
This is a false. You're not going to hire someone in-flight, just like you're not going to hire someone mid-method/function. You hire in-between pairing sessions.
"Flying is a highly interactive task."
So is team programming - it's one of the most interactive tasks you could possibly come up with! There often is constant collaboration, lots of questions. A team that has heads-down, earphones-on programming style does happen, but arguably isn't tremendously effective.
"Flying is pretty complex in some phases of the flight "
I've seen pretty tricky designs during some of my pairing sessions.
Now obviously it's not a perfect metaphor, in that pilots/co-pilots are a life-critical exercies. But it's useful in a number of ways. I think your post does more to justify the metaphor than to convince otherwise.
I would highly suggest reading Ward Cunningham's "XP is guru friendly!" position paper, which I believe is part of the OOPSLA 2000 proceedings.
Your evaluation is the exact opposite of the intent of XP. Martin Fowler has often railed against the notion of "plug compatible programming units" so prevalent in the minds of many IT managers.
XP is a very humanistic approach, it relies heavily on oral history and varying the master/apprentice roleplaying model. It is guru-friendly, assuming the guru wants to share the love. If he/she doesn't have the desire to communicate his ideas to others, then he probably doesn't belong on any team - let alone an XP team.
"The only people that write about ideal methodologies and their theoretical applications are academics. I am reluctant to use the term "scholar" on these people"
That XP was created and tested several times in practical (i.e. business) environments, and has succeeded, makes me question your assumption here.
"Anybody can attempt to write for the project but if it doesn't fit with the design or is too far off base to incorporate into the design, that code doesn't get into the next release. "
So, you know all of the requirements up front? Who is the one being academic here?
society won't come to a halt, but within a generation of abolishing IP law (i.e. people can't get effectively remunerated for creative knowledge work) you'll see people choosing that profession less & less.
some do it for love, sure, but it would be a hobby then. and hobbies tend to generate less results than do for-profit ventures, which (by their nature) require a return on investment to cover the costs of capital.
as much as you'd like to think that hobbiests created all this wonderful open source stuff, please remember that the past 4 years of improvements to Linux, Apache, etc. has been significantly a result of corporate developers working for RedHat, IBM, et al, not only hobbiests.
captialism and profit are necessities because profits are primarily an objective measurement of the economic resources that a company uses. certainly it can be used as reward to executives and shareholders -- and it is -- but the majority of profit is plowed back into retained earnings. a high profit level is needed to cover the costs of tomorrow -- without one, the company is actually taking away more resources from society than it is contributing.
While I appreciate some intelligent thinking on this matter, might I suggest another, part complementary, part conflicitng perspective. You said:
If the resources aren't intrinsically scarce, introducing artificial scarcity [through IP laws] might not be the best option. However, in post scarcity society, one would function in a gift economy anyway.
Modern economies are most broadly divided into three sectors: manufactured goods, services, and agriculture. You (much like most of the business community) are attempting to fit the round peg of intellectual property creation, which is a service , into the square hole of the digital manifestation (bits) of intellectual property, which is a good .
Currently we treat such services as goods because we haven't determine a better way of distributing economic resources than the license-for-access model.
Certainly there is no scarcity of bits out there, the scarcity in that regard traditionally has been the costs of the transportation medium, whether it be disks, tape, etc., which the Internet now theoretically makes negligible (though practically isn't the case due to limited bandwidth, and consequential opportunity costs incurred by waiting for a download over a 56/kb modem link, or for larger items over a hi-speed internet link).
But anyway, let's assume that theoretically transportation costs are negligable. Your added stuff about nanotech really is irrelevant to the discussion because it just places physical goods on par with the theoretical reality of bits today.
Let's divide the two kinds of work into manual work and knowledge work -- some jobs are a significant combination of both (surgeons, for example).
My argument is that it is not information that is the world's economic driver, but it is the value of knowledge work. Bits aren't scarce, the people that know what bits to use are scarce. This isn't a new idea, Peter Drucker has been knowledge work for over 40 years, and a post-capitalist society significantly driven by knowledge for over 10 years. Alivn Toffler has also referred to knowledge being the new form of power in the future, the prior forms being violence and money.
When you use a service: a hairdresser, a plumber, an accountant, etc., you are gaining value from act of work they provide. You pay them money for their services. Similarily, when you licence a piece of intellectual property, you are gaining access to the manifestation of a service that is valuable to you.
Services are intrinsically scarce. They involve a universal scarcity: time, and more intangible scarcities that certainly warrent further study: talent, creativity, and knowledge. Hence there is a need for law to regulate access to such services to ensure the distribution of economic resources.
Having said that, current U.S. IP laws are flawed, and overstep their bounds. The DMCA does this by preventing people from "figuring out how things work", which probably should always be an intrinsic fair use. Patent time limits are probably too long, and need to be narrower in scope.
However, there is a continued need for some form of IP law -- which may look very different from today's copyright and pattents -- to correctly distribute economic resources to service providers. This probably will require a lot more thought and experimentation. The world of the future may transcend capitalism, but it won't likely be non-capitalist, as supply for certain services will remain scarce.
yes "note" has an "e" on the end of it. sigh.
Please not Apple provides professional DVD burning software: DVD Studio Pro, allowing you to burn on any drive for $1000.
Are they within their rights? Sure. Is this wrong? Perhaps.
It's a bit of a game, yes, but generally it goes like this: look at the value of your services, and look at the class of your customer. You can't ignore that different customers require different levels of service.
There are three balancing points you need to look at when setting a price for goods or services:
a) what's it worth to them (1 customer)
b) how much are you worth relative to your peers in ways that MATTER to your customer
c) what's the benchmarked rate for this class of service
Sales skills involve convicing your customer of your estimates for (A) and (B), and also keeping (C) in mind as you haggle. You'll need a "benchmarked" rate such as those at RealRates to keep your feet on the ground.
Notice how the stock market uses a stock ticker listing the last bid/offer prices for issues? That's because people need a benchmark to know what others are charging, what tactics to use, what the trend is, etc.
It's not so simple that "companies buy outrageously priced services and products". What's outrageous to one person is acceptable to another, because DIFFERENT customers have DIFFERENT needs, many of which are intangible. You can't purely quantify price on technical quality alone, though that's a major factor.
A perfect example: J2EE servers tend to be fairly costly, compared to jBoss (free). This is the subject of many a flamewar: why do people keep spending the $$ on IBM WebSphere or BEA WebLogic? There are a lot of people that are certain of the imminent world triumph of jBoss, but I'm not so sure (even though it's a solid product). There are a LOT of intangibles that go on when purchasing a mission-critical product. To keep this brief, I'll focus on one: TRUST.
Do you (as a Manager Director or VP of a company, responsible for the company's performance) trust the jBoss team? Do deliver quality, to continue making improvements, etc? It's an open source team without identifiable faces... so you try to find a face... and the leader, Marc Fleury is often associated with it. So when you say "do you trust jBoss", it's really a question of, "do you trust Marc Fleury?".
Alternatively, do you trust BEA? The owners of Tuxedo which has a reputation for reliability & scalability, and with a suppport staff that is always in the message boards helping people out, with major accounts among your peers, with guaranteed 24x7 support if need be, etc.
Similarily for Linux, it originally was do you trust Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox -- but is increasingly "do you trust IBM and RedHat and Oracle?"
Many people think "I don't trust those suits" when judging mySQL vs. Oracle vs. PostgreSQL, or [insert pissing contest here], but that's because you're not a suit. Suits trust other suits, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. They'll pay around the rate their peers are.
The replies to this message apparently are very skewed towards those that receive little or no training, or of training with little quality. I'd like to add a counter balance to that.
My background: I've been a trainer for two years for a small training & consulting company out of New York (though I've since moved on). I've trained (and consulted) globally, with my courses ranging from beginner to advanced Java, C++, Web Services, XML/XSLT, J2EE, EJB, and most recently the Microsoft 2-day VS.NET seminars. I've taught principal engineers and developers of products you may have heard of, as well as various other companies.
Is training worth it? It depends. The main benefits of training vs. books are:
a) you can't ask a book a question
b) books can't help you when their examples don't compile
c) you'd like to get an answer to that gnatty problem you've been experiencing in that DLL you've been screwing with for 3 days (i.e. free consulting advice)
d) some authors really can't write
e) some technologies are so new or specialized there isn't much in the way of quality books out there (i.e. advanced oracle performance tuning, advanced J2EE architecture, writing for an EAI framework like TIBCO, etc.)
Training is a way of imparting knowledge that the books have IN CONTEXT of the real world AND providing the extra knowledge that the books don't have.
Most training sucks, of course, because
a) it's not relevant to your day-to-day job
or
b) the buyer doesn't know what constitutes good training.
This really harkens back to the scourge of the land of IT: a lack of good managers. It's up to managers to know what training is needed & whether the vendor is of sufficient quality. It's also up to the managers to involve the team with this decision -- I fully agree with the premise of this article that those being trained should influence the training -- if you're not seen as being competent enough to know what you need, there's a real reality-deficiency occurring.
Given the above, what makes a good instructor for technical courses? IMHO, in order:
a1) advanced technical knowledge & expertise
a2) good teaching skills
b) patience
c) energy (you have to carry the crowd through the tough parts)
d) humility (you can sometimes be wrong)
They're all needed, though at bare minimum A1 & A2... if you have teaching skills but don't know much, you're not accomplishing anything except entertaining/babysitting a crowd for a few days. In an advanced crowd this will generate a lot of anger. Conversely, if you know a lot but have the communication skills of a potato chip, you'll still get a lot of angry people wanting to give you the boot.
Having said that, a good course with a good instructor can be a very rewarding experience, probably a major highlight of your career growth -- assuming you get the right course for the right reasons with a good instructor.
In perspective, a 5 day course can run between $1-3k a person, depending on the depth, level, and reputation of the instructor. That's not cheap. It's probably only worth it to go with the "world class" instructors, whether well known (like the folks at DevelopMentor, or Hotsos), or relatively unknown but promising (like my old company).
As for what industries regularily offer training -- generally in my experience, financial and insurance companies. There's always ongoing training there for new technologies, and most new IT hires get 4-12 weeks of training in business and technology.
hey, there's such a thing as GOOD euro death metal too. Emusic sells Entombed, Opeth, Carcass, and Morbid Angel, all of which are very good, assuming you like the style. Some decent Alternative and Goth too.
MHO, what school you go to doesn't have that much of an impact. Your natural ability, personality and willingness to learn aren't going to be changed by a post-secondary institution, and those are the things that really count.
Hey, I'm a Waterloo dropout, so I do agree. I'm just relating my experience that I've found more people with the above qualities at Waterloo than other universities during the time period 1996-2001. Maybe it's changed. Certainly some of he UW mythos has been shattered by the ego displayed by co-ops during the dot-com mania (give me perks, ft salary, etc.)
(Disclaimer: I'm a former Waterloo CS student. Left for my career without graduating around the beginning the dot-com bubble, still employed, no regrets.)
.NET rarely considered elegance an important facet of keeping software costs low. The only grads that have design skills and/or good business skills usually are self-taught.
I agree with your assessment that there's a mythos behind UW students that seems to be carried among other companies as well, particularily in professional service firms, whether smaller ones or larger (like Accenture). But this mythos isn't entirely without basis.
I would generalize your observation to include my own experiences interviewing and working with UW co-ops and graduates: many UW students often *do* interview better than most other graduates and/or interns. And they often do generate better-than-average results. Over the past 2 companies I've worked for on the U.S. west coast and the east coast -- management fell in love with UW students.
I would attribute this to what some might find surprising: many CS and Eng students at UW have very good communication skills relative to their peers in other schools. The co-op program requires them to be good, since they have to work in between heads-down course work. Naturally every class has legendary high-mark/anti-social students, but they wind up being professors anyway *grin*.
A secondary reason for UW student's success at Microsoft and PSFs is that UW tends to hammer programming skills into CS students, even if it kills them (as anyone who's taken Operating Systems will attest to).
Being relatively professional speakers, the best UW co-ops are usually both confident & technically savvy enough to be placed on the front-lines to do real work -- whether in front of a client for a contract, or @ Microsoft with the culture of debating ideas.
Usually the UW co-ops and/or graduates I have known have been better than many full-time employees at client sites. But not perfect. I find UW grads, like all grads, have a lot of learning to do in placing systems work in business context. There's also a general lack of both high and low-level design skills, and an overemphasis on tricky algorithms and/or cleverness. The cynic in me believes this makes them fit right into Microsoft, which until
So, in summary: there is a myth around waterloo students, but not entirely unwarrented. They're more experienced programmers than most regular interns from other schools, and often they can be better communicators.
"I have not met too many people who I think are good at both. There is only so much CPU power to go around in the head."
:)
While I agree there aren't too many that are good at both, that doesn't mean that one shouldn't aspire to it.
"It is usually the BS-artists who get hiring priority in my observation. "
A more constructive perspective is that the good communicators get hiring priority.
It is sad that good communication skills are often correlated with poor technical skills. It doesn't have to be this way.
See:
http://www.perforce.com/perforce/branch.html
Which explains the merge process in Perforce.
No, he's right: U.S. East Coast. You can fly from NYC to Tokyo nonstop in about 11 hours.
How can you be so sure that's what he meant in the quote? An economist, for example, has a very different understanding of the term "free", which was the point Gaijin42 was making.
I'll try to give a bit of an economic analysis of why "freeloading" isn't sustainable:
The "zero-price" of many Linux distributions available on FTP sites makes for an economic illusion. Not charging money for something implies that *someone* is paying for production costs. This is generally the time & effort of volunteers + the salaries & equipment for employed OSS vendor developers.
In economic terms, time & effort is a cost. At its rawest level, it's the continually incurred opportunity cost of OSS developers spending their time & effort on free software development vs. doing something else. Hence, it's not "free". Someone is making a sacrifice for you.
Now, the real issue with this is how to sustain the model. Capitalism has consumption & investment. OSS has the "gift" culture but also can use capitalism in some ways.
An OSS product is sustainable (i.e. alive & evolving) if the producers:
a) make money on it (somehow) and funnel it back into production [on hardware, desks, chairs, or even salaries]
b) get users to contribute to production with their time & effort (i.e. so more "itches" can be scratched, and development continues)
Obviously Linux has a bit of both. OSS started with B, but is now a lot more dependent on A -- in particular, many high-profile OSS programmers are employed by vendors using this model.
If you lose either of these, development ceases.
So, basically, as soon as YOU, the user, download Linux, you're leveraging all of the sunk costs of those that came before you. If you don't contribute back to it, you're doing nothing to sustain its development or it's evolution. OSS is dependent on a a certain percentage of users contributing back to the product, which keeps it alive. Lacking this, the product will sit in stasis. (Take a look at Freshmeat.net for countless examples of this: the original author got tired & moved on, and no one picked up the flame).
Linux, Apache, etc, will not fall into stasis: there's enough of a percentage that contributes to the product, mainly because of its increased VALUE to society over other free software products. You're going to get a lot of people ponying up the cost of that.
But for "general" GPL'ed software, i.e. new stuff coming out, if you want to keep it evolving, you probably should contribute. Or watch it fade, like countless projects have.
I recognize that you care only about meeting your own goals. I was just suggesting it's quite possible that others (opportunists) will economically profit off your invention if you don't.
If you don't care, that's fine.
As for your second paragraph about "images pumped by the market" telling me what to think, I believe you really haven't read much history....
By the way, most of your examples happened 30 years ago. These days, getting a company to stop hoarding money long enough to actually make progress at anything is the exception at best.
You've clearly got selective vision here. IBM has made tremendous strides in semiconductors and magnetic storage over the past several years. Bell Labs continues to come up with chips that improve the quality of digital phone conversations (eliminating the "lag" and "echo" on overseas connections). Pharmaceutical companies continue to generate some impressive innovations in drugs to treat cancer, diabetes, aids, etc.
That's even funnier than the article. What "steady wage?" You're kidding, right? Hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off every year, most for nothing more than doing a good job.
And unemployment continues to be at the lowest historical level coming out of a recession.
Given your obvious bias, you're really lacking in credibility here.
There's nothing wrong with your perspective to invention, but one thing to note is it appears you're going for the "bleeding heart inventor" approach, which is to say that you don't care if you profit off your invention, which is fine, but when it's introduced to the wider world it's almost certain if that others WILL profit from your idea instead of you. If you don't care fine, but I would think that most
As for your model of how the world gets changed, I would say you're sorrily simplifying it, and ignoring the impact of organizations on innovation & invention over the past 100 years.
Effectively, yes, you did violate the copyright. Mainly because it's probabilistically impossible to configure millions of random bits into a James Brown song, given the currently forseeable future of technology.
Tech people love to throw the "but it's all just bits" argument into a copyright debate. But the problem is that, NO, it's not all bits. It can be represented as bits, but it requires an analog (creative!) input to begin with. Since creativity is valued in our society, we give artists protection for a time.
The current law is ridiculously biased in favor of media giants, but we shouldn't throw copyright completely out because of that.
Thanks, I'll make a note of it. Tackling George R.R. Martin now...
Salvatore wrote the Dark Elf series of books in D&D's Forgotten Realms setting. I believe there are over three trilogies by now. When I was 13 years old, I found them actually quite good... that's probably because it was his target audience.
But then I recently picked up one of the latest Dark Elf books... ech. I couldn't get into it. The writing was just too bad. I guess this is what age does to you. The Star Wars books really aren't targetted at intelligent late-20 or 30-somethings. They're for teens who like D&D and Dragonlance (and adults who never grew out of it).
One thing I will give kudos to Salvatore for: he has a talent for describing fight scenes. I think the reviewer found this annoying, but that aspect of his books has traditionally been their saving grace: if you want to read a book of detailed fight scenes with a bit of plot in-between, pick up a Salvatore book. Remember my "13 year old" audience theory -- flowery writing and complex plots aren't necessarily cool to most. Lots of fights are. Not too many of my friends liked Tolkien in high school, but there sure were a lot of Dragonlance fans.
No doubt for a series like Star Wars, this probably looked like a good choice on paper.
"And I REFUSE to believe that DOS/Win3.1/Win32 was absolutely the best, most marketable product during that period...okay, it may have been the best, but was it "97% of the market" best?"
A lot of this had to do with IBM & not Microsoft. IBM PC's were 'the' standard in the 1980's for businesses. Apples were quite expensive, and did a number of moves that didn't impress IT divisions (the lemmings commercial was one).
If you want an IBM PC, you used a Microsoft operating system. DR-DOS, OS/2, and DesqView were competitors that had a lot of mindshare, at least in my community. When Windows 95 came out, most found it "good enough" (I stayed with OS/2, personally).
It's a big leap to suggest that an entire market is "dumb", there's usually a rational reason behind what may appear to be irrational behavior. In this case, it was using an IBM PC. The other major reason was the influence of the monopolistic practices Microsoft used to be the "default".
Monopolies aren't necesarily anti-capitalist; many economists don't worry about monopolists because they don't last beyond a decade or two.
" I just don't believe so--I mean look how quickly Linux has stormed the scene. Are we to assume that NO ONE else but Microsoft was so astute at making operating systems until some kid sat down at his PC? Something just DOESN'T make sense here."
I think again what many people do here is assume because they don't like the market's behavior, it must be dumb. Now I will say that the growth of Windows over the past 7 years is mainly due to the monopolization of operating systems on IBM PC's through anticompetitve means. On the other hand, Microsoft Office was arguably largely a market choice. *shrug*
So, I wouldn't be worried so much about "true capitalism". Think more about "real capitalism". There are people that abuse the system, and we arguably need referees to police that. It's just unfortunate that our referees changed political affiliations just as they were about to red card Microsoft.