Talented programmers will always be in short supply.
And interestingly enough, the new economy is all about talent. Follow what you love, become an individual force, become the absolute best at what you specialize in, and you will succeed.
Unfortunately, this doesn't leave much room for those low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So there's a lot of action that still needs to be done about moving those people up the hierarchy.
Employees have the right to organize to represent their interests. The right to force a company to pay appropriate wages, provide a safe working enviornment, etc. is crucial.
But these guys aren't trying to get that -- they're trying to go back to the old days, where philosophy majors answer the phones sipping their latte's while debating the finer points of Aristotilian thought.
I don't believe it is in any employee's best interest to organize when it's self-defeating -- i.e. it will cripple or destroy the company. Most labor unions in Europe have learned this over the past 200 years, and some U.S. unions are getting close to this realization. To block a company from exercising its responsibilty to cut costs when the company is bleeding is tantamount to suicide for both everyone involved -- which amounts to no more than petty revenge.
If Amazon has truly provided poor / illegal working conditions, then they should be punished severely -- but I'd first like to see lawsuits won to prove this. Otherwise, this small but vocal contingent of union backers will be relegated to a footnote of dot-com history.
I think you're tremendously simplifying the situation to state that management at Amazon don't have a clue to run a business. They obviously do know how to run a business -- they've taken what was in 1994 an insane idea, and turned themselves into the leading online retailer. They're also far from going under. No I'm not an investor in Amazon, but I am a satisfied customer.
He wanted to bring the company back to its early, heady days when philosophy majors eagerly manned the phones and managers worked hand in hand with frontline employees. Barclay didn't just consider Amazon's recent turn toward corporate hierarchy, rigid work rules, and outsourcing a personal betrayal; he considered it a betrayal of the company itself.
This guy is angry at Amazon because it couldn't create utopia. Doesn't this strike anyone at a tad bit unfair? There were massive political movements, much bigger and larger in historical importance than Amazon, whose purpose it was to create utopia.
Utopian politics has failed. "Salvation" will not come from society, or from a for-profit company.
What's more, the doomed Seattle division included some of Amazon's most senior employees--people like Barclay, a company old-timer at 33 months--whose institutional knowledge and superior skills supposedly made them indispensable to Amazon's mission of becoming the "earth's most customer-centric company."
This article has nothing to do with customers. It has everything to do with the opinions and grumblings of the Seattle employees.
Look, there are no *right* answers when it comes to cutting costs. Clearly the Seattle center had very qualified and talented people, but they were a DRAIN on company resources both in money and politics, from my understanding. Perhaps there's more to it than that, but clearly management had to make a trade off. Was it the right one? Probably too early to say. I usually don't support layoffs unless it means the company's existence is in jeopardy. Perhaps this was true in Amazon's case.
"As an employee," he wrote me, "any illusions I might have had about the nobility of Amazon.com have been shattered."
Companies definitely should have a higher goal beyond making money -- a goal that justifies their existence in terms of what they *do* beyond making money. Companies that are in business only to "make money" will have a difficult time of things (see GM since the 1970's -- still the world's biggest company, but still slowly dying.)
And profit is the measurement of the effectiveness of that work. A bankrupt company does no one any good. Wall Street gave Amazon a long time to operate in the red, but it slapped it with a ruler to say "get profitable -- now".
The nature of the corporation is that it is very rare be a pillar for "noble" causes. One can only be noble only if one is, and has traditionally been, a continually profitable company.
So yes, Alan Barclay & co. were hopelessly naive. So too, apparently, is Jonathan Cohn, the author of this piece.
The new, information-age economy required workers with greater skills than, say, your typical stock boy or secretary. To attract such people, companies would offer lavish benefits and unparalleled creative freedom. The regimented, top-down management structure of yesteryear would disappear, replaced by a new paradigm of fluid, democratic workplaces where even frontline workers received autonomy, high wages, and partial ownership of the company via stock options.
No, Jon, that's the romantic view of the new economy. People got really carried away with themselves. A lot of these issues really need to be thought through still.
We know the economy is changing. It's becoming more knowledge-based, which places emphasis on the brain instead of "making and moving things". Indeed, the real "scarcity" in the digital age is going to be talent and creativity.
The trick is that it's going to take time to figure out how to operate under these changes. Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the biggest problems we have right now -- and we're trying lots of ways to accomplish it, including workplace democracy, etc.
The trouble is, there are always downsides to these solutions. Workplace democracy, for instance, assumes that one can just vote managerial responsibility out of existence. This doesn't work in the real world -- there needs to be an entity in the organization that is responsible for performance.
Galli, who had spent the last 19 years at Black & Decker, wasted no time in imposing business discipline.
Certainly, Amazon has made major mistakes: bringing Galli on board was tantamount to placing a revolver against the head of the company's culture.
But at the same time, one needs to balance that with the need to be profitable. Galli probably was one of the few who knew how to impose cost conscious procedures on a company that needed them fast. What would have preserved the company's culture more would probably have been an internal movement towards cost consciousness.. but this would have taken a tremendous amount of time over hiring someone with the skills to do this -now-. Which would have been better? I think Wall Street had lost patience with Amazon's desire to be "different" and just wanted to see results, so Galli probably was the proper choice for the time.
As for his tactics, were they really that bad? Is there something particularily wrong with allowing people in New Delhi to answer email? This is providing workers in a third world country *much needed jobs* and giving Amazon a relief value for their skyrocketing costs. It's a win/win situation, with a tradeoff that it can screw over some employees. But how else does one get profitable unless it makes difficult tradeoffs?
Also, one must temper the union apologist rhetoric with the fact that the majority of workers @ Amazon.com were *NOT* in support of a union. This was an "enlightened" (ahem) minority that was supporting it.
If Michelle Gray never grew disillusioned, it's partly because she never developed illusions in the first place. She understood that capitalism can be cold, even in the new economy. A pretty jaded perspective? You bet. And it happens to be right.
Oh, please. This is one of those "Jerry Springer" moments, the ones at the end of the show where he looks at the camera and tries to make sense of the whole situation. Jonathan Cohn is blatantly trying belittle this person because she doesn't agree with his views that a union is a Good Thing. He's making light of the fact that the world is a complex place that requires complex and difficult decisions and trade-offs, with sometimes *no right answer*. A union wouldn't change that, it would merely provide an illusion.
Perhaps that's the whole point of his article -- it's somehow more intelligent and noble to have an romantic illusion of what the new economy is than to deal in reality. I don't know why, but I perfer dealing in reality -- it leads to fewer letdowns.
If you have dissatisfaction with the situation, then yes, you should try to change it.
The way to change it though, is to change people's preferences. Corporations will then change how they market, and what they market to.
So I suppose it's tempting to think that if you "change the corporations", you'll change the desires of people. But this is a fallacy. Corporations just listen or provide variations to what people want.
People want SUV's because it's fun driving from a higher vantage point, it carries more people, and they're fairly powerful. They don't care about the environment or gas consumption because they don't have a reason to care about it, as it doesn't normally effect their sphere of existence day to day. Some might feel guilty and write a cheque to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club twice a year, but that's the extent of their care for the environment. Now, the way energy prices are going, they WILL care about it soon enough -- as that will effect their day to day lives. And most people will go back to their Hondas, just like in the 1970s.
I believe AOL is the biggest online service out there. Is this because of the stunning quality of service? Is it because of the impressive intelligence of their tech support? No. It's because it is marketed down our throats,
Actually, I have a spare AOL account that I use, because it has highest "no hassle" factor of any ISP. I travel a lot, and if I want to connect to an ISP, I don't have to sit on support waiting for a local access number, my AOL client handles it for me.
Now 90% of my internet access isn't through AOL, it's through ISDN or ADSL at home or work, but when I travel, I'm happy I have AOL. So it's not so much about hype as it is about simplicity & convenience.
A mom and pop ISP (of which I subscribe to 2, just to show support) is more likely to concentrate on putting out a good service, where as a corporation is more likely to concentrate on marketing the hell out of a mediocre service buy preying on the natural weaknesses that govern the decision making throughout most of our society.
Look, I've belonged to several "mom n pop" ISPs in the mid-90's, and ALL of them *SUCKED* for service. They were severely maxed out. When one of the small ones bought out the rest and sort of became "medium sized", things got a little better, but not much. When Bell Canada's Sympatico moved in, service was *MUCH* better.
The big companies sometimes DO provide a better service.
You also seem to have a very warped idea about the idea of marketing. If someone doesn't know about your product, they're not going to buy it. Similarily, marketing is a balance between discovering unknown desires and exploiting known desires -- it's a very simplistic argument to say that the masses are "mind washed" by marketing.
Statistically, the #1 factor in the average person's decision on which car to buy is color. This is sad. Most people would rather have a [whatever_color] car than have a car that gets good gas mileage or one with an acceptable repair history.
Ahh, so you're the one to judge what's right and wrong to buy. Gotcha.
Just because people choose cars based on color as my first preference, but that doesn't mean they *ignore* the other stuff. I buy cars based on color as my first consideration, and but engine, fuel economy enter into that equation -- I'm not going to buy a Pinto just because it has a wonderful shade of red. I don't think most people would either.
It's the same sort of thinking that leads people to want to buy a gateway computer because it "has the internet." Corporations are evil because they thrive off and promote this kind of backward mentality.
What arrogance. You're judge something to be evil just because they don't sit up and cater to YOUR whims & beliefs.
The market doesn't have a backward mentality. It does have a mentality that's different from most highly technical people, since most people aren't highly technical.
Sure, you may say, this is sound business thinking. Well, I say, if this is a good corporate decision, then corporations are ulitimately evil for promoting the lowest common denominator in our society.
Yep, more unfettered arrogance that you know better than everyone else.
Corporations don't promote the lowest common denominator -- they exploit it. There's a difference. If, somehow, the lowest common denominator got smarter, they'd cater to that too. Their purpose is not to keep people dumb, it's to make money.
The whole point of the marketplace is to meet the needs & desires of the world's people. That includes the dumb asses, and the smart ones. There are plenty of companies that market to highly technical people (Andover?), or people with different tastes of cars other than color (BMW?).
Thirdly, do you honestly believe the world would all of a sudden get *SMARTER* if marketing was banned? Very, very, doubtful.
You're painting the world with a very broad and inaccurate brush that everything is marketed or catered to the dumb asses out there. While the majority of corporations follows that market because the most money is there, there are plenty of companies that cater to people with higher preferences.
I think the haircut and general hygiene is a good thing. And one should dress appropriately for appropriate scenarios, especially the first while at a job.
but once you've proven yourself over the first 6 months, I find one gets *more* respect for standing out from the crowd. This means having that sense of humor, liking cool music, etc. This isn't an easy path because it intimidates many people -- but it's a path that's worked for me (and I'm still young, but I consult for the banking industry, about as fuddy-duddy as one can get)
We're not creating artifical scarcity. The fact that most people can't or won't make music or software development their profession creates a scarcity of skilled developers or artists.
Of those who *WILL* make software development or music their profession, only a few are talented. Scarcity of talent.
Of those who are talented, and skilled, there will be a need for people with talent & skill in marketing, studio engineering, and management. These folks usually reside at a "recording label". Again, not an artifical scarcity.
Please people. The bits themselves are abundant. But you're ignoring what GOES INTO the configuration of bits.
Does this mean we should have copyright in its current form? Not necessarily. But we do need some kind of IP system to protect creators & allow the marketplace to distribute resources effectively.
Now to your argument -- Does this make us slaves to those that serve us? Mmm, in certain ways, if we ourselves don't have anything in demand to contribute to society. But now we're back down to ground-level principles: socialism vs. free market. Which I'd rather not get into.
Ad hominem arguments make you look sad.
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I develop in WebObjects and Cocoa. I know about them.
- Cocoa is still Obj-C. (AppKit and Foundation)
- EOF will be Java as of WO 5.0
- WO has not been Java for nearly a year. WO has been an ObjC/Java hybrid for quite some time, and will not be 100% Java until WO 5.0.
IBM killed OS/2 because few wanted it anymore. I used OS/2 for years. But I moved on, (to Linux). Now I've moved onto the Macintosh.
Apple's competitve advantage is in its hardware design and the asthetics of its operating system. Development frameworks are a competitive advantage for a narrow audience. Having said that, I believe the actual design of AppKit, EOF, and WOF are definitely valuable -- and they will be continually valuable whether accessed through ObjC or Java.
I shouldn't know more than people older than me, people with better degrees, etc. but usually they're the ones asking ME for the answers to basic day-to-day questions.
If I were you I'd be extremely careful of how I interpreted that. It could well be that they're asking you questions because the topic falls under your specialty rather than theirs. This occurs on your intellectual turf; that's why people hire consultants. If you went to visit them on their own "home ground" you might have a very different experience. Then it might be you asking lots of questions about what they consider basic knowledge.
Oh, there definitely are people here with a much stronger grasp of the business domain than myself. Or certain technologies. You're quite right that I have to be careful in judging what people know, and usually I assume people with experience are quite competent. What I am bringing up in this conversation is general "nagging thoughts" in the back of my head that come up time and time again when I see wierd gaps in people's knowledge that shouldn't be there given the experience they have.
For instance, I have people that have worked with a particular technology for years, but they have no idea how it works. Very often, people "programmed to an API", and went home. They never leveraged their experience to gain a deeper understanding of what they were using. Perhaps this "coasting" menatlity is lack of talent, or lack of enthusiasm. I don't know.
Of course, there are the 1 out of 5 people that do leverage their experience and deep understanding of what they're using. But it's still sad that it's 1 out of 5 people.
I think the reason I like XP is that it's different. It's the anti-methodology. It's not about ceremony or documentation, it's about coordinating people's attitudes, feelings, and fears into a framework that allows people to create quality software.
I must disagree. One man's coordination is another man's coercion, and when you're talking about coordinating people's attitudes and feelings that can be far more invasive than merely coordinating their actions. This whole thread has been an example of how strongly many XP proponents insist on adhering to every minor detail and nuance of the XP methodology
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't see XP proponents insisting on adhering to minor details. XP is a very tailorable / customizable process and I don't think any two teams do it the same way, or follow all of the practices.
I also think that my point about "coordinating attitudes & feelings" is less about coersion and more about understanding that most project failures are due to emotions, attitudes, and feelings. Fear, especially.
Most of the time we implement a process out of fear -- the develoeprs fear that we won't make the date, fear that we'll be asked to work overtime -- the customers fear they'll be lied to, or won't be able to make decisions about priorities.
XP says "acknowledge that fear up front", and aim the process towards cooling down those fears.
I've already tried to point out that a methodology which depends on a uniform higher-than-average level of skill/motivation among developers can be considered fragile. By definition, most teams are not composed of such developers.
Of course. It's still open debate whether XP requires higher-than-average developers, but generally I don't believe it does. One of the major goals of XP is to get average developers to work productively, with a senior developer or two coaching & guiding them. It does require developers with relatively high discipline, however, which is a potential fragility factor.
At OOPSLA 2000 in Minneapolis this past October, some of the people that were involved with XP's inception (Beck & Fowler, in particular) feel that XP *will not succeed* in most cases, mainly because of the cultural demands it places on the IT organization and the responsibility it demands of the customer.
The general agreement at this session was that "that's okay", because those that *do* use XP enjoy it, and are arguably turning out quality software with high productivity, and having fun while they do it. And that should be all that matters.
However, with business looking for further ways of improving efficiency, there's bound to be a tidal wave of opportunists looking to sell XP the "next great thing". XP probably isn't it, though it definitely is an extraordinarily effective process under particular circumstances.
Re:Rant: L'aveugle et le paralytique
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OS X on x86?
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PC hardware *blow* macintosh at any time.
Not so. "any time" ? Unlikely. Using altivec-enabled applications? Unlikely.
WebObjects... which was rewritten in java
Hasn't happened yet. Think you got your dates mixed up.
Linux/*BSD are way ahead of Darwin.
This doesn't seem true to me. Most of Darwin is based on FreeBSD.
OSX interface is unusable at best (I have trouble to feel NeXTstep throught this slow mess.)
Okay, now you're really grasping at straws here. Judging a BETA release for slowness is just silly. Trying to look for NeXT in what is a *mac* interface is fruitless. Certainly there were problems with the public beta's interface, but a lot of those problems were answered in the latest builds.
NeXT was in the process of dropping ObjC in favor of java, for fucking marketing reasons
Oh yes, marketing is evil. If you're a company, and no one wants to program for your product, the right thing to do is the technical thing and to go bankrupt supporting the cool-but-obscure language. Right.
Apple is taking an interesting chance with its continued support of ObjC. I'm glad they are, as a techie, but most people don't know/care about ObjC's flexibility. But they're hedging that bet by providing Cocoa/Java.
In general, I think the fact that millions of Mac users will be upgrading to OS X over the next year or two will perk up interest in the platform. I'm speaking as a recent wintel convert (for home use, at least).... there's no reason for me to use Wintel at home. And when OS X comes out, my daily work can be performed on it (since I program in UNIX and Java).
First of all, apologies for miscommunicating. The original post struck a bit of a nerve, so I don't express myself quite well.
I agree with you. Older programmers are, generally, very smart.
Young people generally do think they're smarter than they actually are.
Here, however, is my point:
- Speaking as a "young'un" I feel I have lots to learn from older/wiser programmers. Problem is that they're a rarity these days -- most people aren't much older, and certainly not much wiser. Do I say this out of arrogance? No, I say this out of pure observation. The few gurus I've had the pleasure of working with have been the exception, not the rule. Whether you really believe I'm fooling myself on this observation will have to be up to you.
- Most people that "worked through the ranks" aren't really much older, they're actually usually within their late 20's or early 30's. After that they move into management. And I don't believe that it's an industry trend to recognize this is a bad thing. Developers know, but management generally doesn't know (you hear it on Slashdot a lot, for instence). The reason programmers move on to management is because arguably, good managers are in *shorter* supply than good programmers. So management promotes whoever shows potential. At least, from my observation.
Now, a bit of an explanation of my position: I mentor and train people in C++ and Java, OO design, and transactional systems design, and I also help architect financial trading systems (where "architect" for me means "a developer with more influence".. I don't draw fancy bubbles and lines on a paper and call that architecture.)
yet I'm very often 5+ years younger than the people I'm teaching or working with. Usually most people don't believe me when I tell them my age. It *FRUSTRATES* the heck out of me at what I see at my various consulting engagements -- very few older programmers, very few senior programmers or architects, and generally very few people with solid understandings of software engineering, good implementation techniques, or design techniques.
I REALLY should not be the one to teach these people these things, but it's what I do.
- Young people are usually very arrogant & think they know everything. I know I could fall into this trap. That's why I make a habit of staring in the morning every day and saying: "You're young. You don't know shit." , it's also why I devour books, and why I use every scrap of experience I get to my advantage.
But my day-to-day experience seems to tell me that I'm not "crap". I shouldn't know more than people older than me, people with better degrees, etc. but usually they're the ones asking ME for the answers to basic day-to-day questions.
And this is not just about the newest tips & techniques -- this is about day-to-day, how do I code this better, how do I test or debug this better?
- I think in my case, experience has been invaluable to me, but being a voracious reader has helped speed along my progress.
Finally, about XP:
- Everyone has a right to healthy skepticism. I know my history -- I've seen the trends come and gone -- CASE tools, Object-Oriented Operating systems, AI, etc. I've also seen trends come that HAVE made a lasting impact: relational databases, GUIs, PCs, modems, and object orientation.
I've also seen the wave of methodologies that came out in the 90's that killed many forests but didn't help as many projects.
I think the reason I like XP is that it's different. It's the anti-methodology. It's not about ceremony or documentation, it's about coordinating people's attitudes, feelings, and fears into a framework that allows people to create quality software.
One of the frustrations with skeptics is when one paints it as "the same as all the other" failed methodologies, that it completely ignores that this one really *IS* different. Healthy skepticism is good; ignorant skepticism is not.
Some of the critiques from Tom Gilb, Craig Larman, etc, espected industry experts, are definite food for thought. But slashdot arguments that effectively say "don't read books!", or "it's bunk, just hire talented developers!" are just hogwash. If we didn't read books, we couldn't evolve our knowledge much. If we COULD hire talented developers, we wouldn't have a problem would we? While they're lots of skilled developers, there is a dearth of talent.
So how do you maximize what little talent there is? You use a process to align people's strengths and minimize their weaknesses. You explicitly state your fears, you measure your progress constantly, and you continually deliver value at whatever speed you're working at. That's what XP is about.
Of course there are limitations and drawbacks - XP does not have any evidence of scaling over 12 developers -- it's rather new, it requires a highly disciplined team, it needs the guiding hand of a "coach" or "architect", it needs the customer to speak "with one voice", etc.
Generally, when I advocate XP, I explain both sides. Especially in my consulting engagements. And it has worked so far -- I've gotten good results in my pilot attempts at using the process in various international banks that I've worked with.
Don't read books? You want us to think,but not with books?
Certainly, most books are tripe. Some (including XP) aren't -- they're based on well-worn experience.
And speaking for myself, this "working up the ranks" notion is being obliterated by people that have a higher learning capacity than those that *did* work their way up through the ranks.
They do this by a combination of books & practical experience.
Generally I think the #1 industry goal right now is to increase productivity of developers.. part of accomplishing this is setting up educational resources so they DON'T have to work through the ranks -- mainly because those that do generally become managers -- they don't remain programmers... yet what we need are good programmers.
.NET effectively puts a virtual machine on top of windows -- in that way, it's like Java.
But the really cool thing is the support it gives for Web Services. These things actually have little to do explicitly with.NET, and won't need to be tied to it.
Web Services are about:
SOAP - enveloping messages
XML Schemas - defining message formats
UDDI - finding service end-points
WSDL - describing service end-points.
You can do this on EJB, on Perl, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, anything that can parse XML.
Why would you want it over traditional RPC? Well the main reason is that traditional RPC has tight couplings to underlying code. One has to worry about:
- semantics (parameter positions)
- struct definitions (for pass-by-value)
- complexity of the runtime (CORBA, COM, DCE RPC, etc.)
SOAP on the other hand is a "semantic data stream", in that it shoves the meta-data with the data, so you get:
- semantics for free: just look up a parameter by a known tag
- structs for free: mapped to generic types automatically as opposed to CORBA/IIOP PBV which requires custom-coding
- an XML parser isn't complex at all, and the wire format is plain text, hence debuggable.
Note when I say "free", I mean, "I don't need to work as much". The obvious tradeoff for this productivity is A) performance, and B) compile-type type safety
... is it worth it? Probably. There've been many attempts at a ubiquitous "distributed component" model, but this one might work.
I think the point is that English is a very poor language to express precision and C is a very poor language to express "gestalt" or big picture issues.
For this reason, I think purpose statements and algorithm "walkalong" comments are crucial.
I think what I do feel is that I don't like useless contextual comments that either
a) state the obvious,
x = 1// set x to 1
or
b) tell me something WITHOUT rationale or explanation.
/* passing in null may cause problems */
calculatePricingContext(quoteContext, null);
I don't believe too many have mentioned the beauty of the Smalltalk class library. It was carefully crafted over many years and I don't believe there's any method with over 15 lines of code (except for the bit-blitting classes).
Take a look at one of the non-commerical versions of VisualWorks, or even Squeak (an open source variant). It's quite impressive, and teaches one a lot about good object orientation.
Refactoring is invariably a technical decision. It does not change the behavior of the program, and it allows us to work faster. There is very little associated cost with refactoring, assuming you build tests to back up your assertion that the system's behavior will not change (bugs and all) while refactoring.
Now when I say Refactoring, I'm not talking about "heads down, that's all I'm doing". I'm talking about Martin Fowler's view of it -- every day, a little bit at a time, to clean up the code and make it more readable / maintainable, while you're adding features or fixing bugs.
I think your exposure to development teams might be rather limited to think that there are always "maintainers" and "designers", and that maintainers are lower on the rung. I've seen two situations to counter that: one where the maintainers were *deliberately* the more talented bunch of programmers, since they have to deal with tougher situations than those with a "blank sheet". The other situation (far more common) is that the core coders also do the maintainence until they have a replacement.
Management does not hate refactoring, if it is done properly. They hate *rewrites*. A *rewrite* requires management decisions because it is in the realm of business - it is about throwing out the existing system. And it rarely works the way it's supposed to.
"Have a look at the auto-industry.. seen any real innovation, anything 'market shattering' there in the last 30 years? No."
Actually, yes. Tremendous innovation. I don't think you're a car buff. But, even anyone who's not a car buff would recognize that there are more reliable, affordable, and gas-efficient cars out there than ever before. This started because of innovation at Toyota and eventually carried over to other manufacturers.
"Havnt we all heard of the WTO? of the WIPO? FTAA? etc etc? What is happening is the Capatalist System is hitting a peak. It takes money to make money, and TransNationals are realizing it is easier to share in profit than really compete. "
Hmm. Last I checked, the WTO promotes global competition and the unions want it stopped because of that.
Note: I'm actually in favor of reducing greenhouse emissions. At the same time, I find it disconcertaining that a lot of environmental rhetoric has a tremendous amount of counter-cultural, anti-corporate, 'fuck the man'-type reasoning that I have a hard time taking seriously. I found these books to have moments of objectivity in them (and definte moments of bias at times, but who can really be free of it?)
If you were looking for scientific papers, sorry, I don't carry a library in my backyard.
Good rant. We really *should* be spending most of our time on MAKING new stuff in the future instead of PROTECTING old stuff because that's where true scarcity lies -- in imagination, talent, skill, and creativity.
Abundance means that I can always get what I want, if I want it. But if I want something that no one's created yet, I can't get it. That's scarcity. Meaning, I have to pay for someone's creative services.
For example, if I want Madonna's new album -- she's got to record it. And I should have to pay for it -- though at a much lesser price than the current model, since I'm paying her for her services as a singer / songwriter instead of a "CD".
Best teacher -- Larry Smith, macroeconomics, the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Without comparason, the most inspiring, intellegent and witty teacher I've had. Economics is *not* a dismal science.
I think OS X will be one of the best dev platforms for Java.
Also note that Swing was originally IFC, which was basically a Java copy of NeXT's AppKit.
Certainly if your goal is to write a pure java app, then that's what you'll do. But if your goal is to write a Mac app -- writing it in Java/Cocoa will be a big productivity booster. (ObjC would be arguably faster / more productive, but people seem to be afraid of the Smalltalk-like syntax).
But with Apple's dev tools, and companies like WebLogic and Oracle out there that "could" with minimal effort port their systems to OS X, I think the NeXT frameworks have an interesting future.
The more restrictions you place on a product, the less valuable it will be to consumers, and the less money they'll pay for it.
On the other hand, the less restrictions you place on a product, the more valuable it is to consumers, but you tend to sell less volume.
By pushing the further restrictions down our throats, they're taking a risk that the market won't care. Chances are the market WILL care -- VHS tapes, TIVO and TV are the norm these days and we're probably not going to change.
Look at DVD's -- the massive restrictions (region encoding, CSS, etc) haven't stopped them from taking off, even among the geeks because of the better quality of sound, picture, and extras.
Will DigitalTV have enough bells and whistles to wean people off of fair use? Probably not.
Despite the alarmist views of how this will lead to the end of the world, it won't. In fact, a lot of this comes down to economics (read the book "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian for a good understanding of the "mainstream" view of the economics of information and intellectual property).. they own their movies and TV Programming, and they can choose how to distribute it -- but they've rarely (not since the "time shifting" supreme court case) been caught in a market that (en masse) revolts on the restrictions. They need a blunt reminder (billions of dollars in lost revenue will do..)
An innovation is a product or service that responds to a market need. How does 1-click not fit under this? I want to buy books quicker -- 1 click is one of the features that keeps me going back to Amazon.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Talented programmers will always be in short supply.
And interestingly enough, the new economy is all about talent. Follow what you love, become an individual force, become the absolute best at what you specialize in, and you will succeed.
Unfortunately, this doesn't leave much room for those low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So there's a lot of action that still needs to be done about moving those people up the hierarchy.
Employees have the right to organize to represent their interests. The right to force a company to pay appropriate wages, provide a safe working enviornment, etc. is crucial.
But these guys aren't trying to get that -- they're trying to go back to the old days, where philosophy majors answer the phones sipping their latte's while debating the finer points of Aristotilian thought.
I don't believe it is in any employee's best interest to organize when it's self-defeating -- i.e. it will cripple or destroy the company. Most labor unions in Europe have learned this over the past 200 years, and some U.S. unions are getting close to this realization. To block a company from exercising its responsibilty to cut costs when the company is bleeding is tantamount to suicide for both everyone involved -- which amounts to no more than petty revenge.
If Amazon has truly provided poor / illegal working conditions, then they should be punished severely -- but I'd first like to see lawsuits won to prove this. Otherwise, this small but vocal contingent of union backers will be relegated to a footnote of dot-com history.
I think you're tremendously simplifying the situation to state that management at Amazon don't have a clue to run a business. They obviously do know how to run a business -- they've taken what was in 1994 an insane idea, and turned themselves into the leading online retailer. They're also far from going under. No I'm not an investor in Amazon, but I am a satisfied customer.
He wanted to bring the company back to its early, heady days when philosophy majors eagerly manned the phones and managers worked hand in hand with frontline employees. Barclay didn't just consider Amazon's recent turn toward corporate hierarchy, rigid work rules, and outsourcing a personal betrayal; he considered it a betrayal of the company itself.
This guy is angry at Amazon because it couldn't create utopia. Doesn't this strike anyone at a tad bit unfair? There were massive political movements, much bigger and larger in historical importance than Amazon, whose purpose it was to create utopia.
Utopian politics has failed. "Salvation" will not come from society, or from a for-profit company.
What's more, the doomed Seattle division included some of Amazon's most senior employees--people like Barclay, a company old-timer at 33 months--whose institutional knowledge and superior skills supposedly made them indispensable to Amazon's mission of becoming the "earth's most customer-centric company."
This article has nothing to do with customers. It has everything to do with the opinions and grumblings of the Seattle employees.
Look, there are no *right* answers when it comes to cutting costs. Clearly the Seattle center had very qualified and talented people, but they were a DRAIN on company resources both in money and politics, from my understanding. Perhaps there's more to it than that, but clearly management had to make a trade off. Was it the right one? Probably too early to say. I usually don't support layoffs unless it means the company's existence is in jeopardy. Perhaps this was true in Amazon's case.
"As an employee," he wrote me, "any illusions I might have had about the nobility of Amazon.com have been shattered."
Companies definitely should have a higher goal beyond making money -- a goal that justifies their existence in terms of what they *do* beyond making money. Companies that are in business only to "make money" will have a difficult time of things (see GM since the 1970's -- still the world's biggest company, but still slowly dying.)
And profit is the measurement of the effectiveness of that work. A bankrupt company does no one any good. Wall Street gave Amazon a long time to operate in the red, but it slapped it with a ruler to say "get profitable -- now".
The nature of the corporation is that it is very rare be a pillar for "noble" causes. One can only be noble only if one is, and has traditionally been, a continually profitable company.
So yes, Alan Barclay & co. were hopelessly naive. So too, apparently, is Jonathan Cohn, the author of this piece.
The new, information-age economy required workers with greater skills than, say, your typical stock boy or secretary. To attract such people, companies would offer lavish benefits and unparalleled creative freedom. The regimented, top-down management structure of yesteryear would disappear, replaced by a new paradigm of fluid, democratic workplaces where even frontline workers received autonomy, high wages, and partial ownership of the company via stock options.
No, Jon, that's the romantic view of the new economy. People got really carried away with themselves. A lot of these issues really need to be thought through still.
We know the economy is changing. It's becoming more knowledge-based, which places emphasis on the brain instead of "making and moving things". Indeed, the real "scarcity" in the digital age is going to be talent and creativity.
The trick is that it's going to take time to figure out how to operate under these changes. Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the biggest problems we have right now -- and we're trying lots of ways to accomplish it, including workplace democracy, etc.
The trouble is, there are always downsides to these solutions. Workplace democracy, for instance, assumes that one can just vote managerial responsibility out of existence. This doesn't work in the real world -- there needs to be an entity in the organization that is responsible for performance.
Galli, who had spent the last 19 years at Black & Decker, wasted no time in imposing business discipline.
Certainly, Amazon has made major mistakes: bringing Galli on board was tantamount to placing a revolver against the head of the company's culture.
But at the same time, one needs to balance that with the need to be profitable. Galli probably was one of the few who knew how to impose cost conscious procedures on a company that needed them fast. What would have preserved the company's culture more would probably have been an internal movement towards cost consciousness.. but this would have taken a tremendous amount of time over hiring someone with the skills to do this -now-. Which would have been better? I think Wall Street had lost patience with Amazon's desire to be "different" and just wanted to see results, so Galli probably was the proper choice for the time.
As for his tactics, were they really that bad? Is there something particularily wrong with allowing people in New Delhi to answer email? This is providing workers in a third world country *much needed jobs* and giving Amazon a relief value for their skyrocketing costs. It's a win/win situation, with a tradeoff that it can screw over some employees. But how else does one get profitable unless it makes difficult tradeoffs?
Also, one must temper the union apologist rhetoric with the fact that the majority of workers @ Amazon.com were *NOT* in support of a union. This was an "enlightened" (ahem) minority that was supporting it.
If Michelle Gray never grew disillusioned, it's partly because she never developed illusions in the first place. She understood that capitalism can be cold, even in the new economy. A pretty jaded perspective? You bet. And it happens to be right.
Oh, please. This is one of those "Jerry Springer" moments, the ones at the end of the show where he looks at the camera and tries to make sense of the whole situation. Jonathan Cohn is blatantly trying belittle this person because she doesn't agree with his views that a union is a Good Thing. He's making light of the fact that the world is a complex place that requires complex and difficult decisions and trade-offs, with sometimes *no right answer*. A union wouldn't change that, it would merely provide an illusion.
Perhaps that's the whole point of his article -- it's somehow more intelligent and noble to have an romantic illusion of what the new economy is than to deal in reality. I don't know why, but I perfer dealing in reality -- it leads to fewer letdowns.
If you have dissatisfaction with the situation, then yes, you should try to change it.
The way to change it though, is to change people's preferences. Corporations will then change how they market, and what they market to.
So I suppose it's tempting to think that if you "change the corporations", you'll change the desires of people. But this is a fallacy. Corporations just listen or provide variations to what people want.
People want SUV's because it's fun driving from a higher vantage point, it carries more people, and they're fairly powerful. They don't care about the environment or gas consumption because they don't have a reason to care about it, as it doesn't normally effect their sphere of existence day to day. Some might feel guilty and write a cheque to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club twice a year, but that's the extent of their care for the environment. Now, the way energy prices are going, they WILL care about it soon enough -- as that will effect their day to day lives. And most people will go back to their Hondas, just like in the 1970s.
I believe AOL is the biggest online service out there. Is this because of the stunning quality of service? Is it because of the impressive intelligence of their tech support? No. It's because it is marketed down our throats,
Actually, I have a spare AOL account that I use, because it has highest "no hassle" factor of any ISP. I travel a lot, and if I want to connect to an ISP, I don't have to sit on support waiting for a local access number, my AOL client handles it for me.
Now 90% of my internet access isn't through AOL, it's through ISDN or ADSL at home or work, but when I travel, I'm happy I have AOL. So it's not so much about hype as it is about simplicity & convenience.
A mom and pop ISP (of which I subscribe to 2, just to show support) is more likely to concentrate on putting out a good service, where as a corporation is more likely to concentrate on marketing the hell out of a mediocre service buy preying on the natural weaknesses that govern the decision making throughout most of our society.
Look, I've belonged to several "mom n pop" ISPs in the mid-90's, and ALL of them *SUCKED* for service. They were severely maxed out. When one of the small ones bought out the rest and sort of became "medium sized", things got a little better, but not much. When Bell Canada's Sympatico moved in, service was *MUCH* better.
The big companies sometimes DO provide a better service.
You also seem to have a very warped idea about the idea of marketing. If someone doesn't know about your product, they're not going to buy it. Similarily, marketing is a balance between discovering unknown desires and exploiting known desires -- it's a very simplistic argument to say that the masses are "mind washed" by marketing.
Statistically, the #1 factor in the average person's decision on which car to buy is color. This is sad. Most people would rather have a [whatever_color] car than have a car that gets good gas mileage or one with an acceptable repair history.
Ahh, so you're the one to judge what's right and wrong to buy. Gotcha.
Just because people choose cars based on color as my first preference, but that doesn't mean they *ignore* the other stuff. I buy cars based on color as my first consideration, and but engine, fuel economy enter into that equation -- I'm not going to buy a Pinto just because it has a wonderful shade of red. I don't think most people would either.
It's the same sort of thinking that leads people to want to buy a gateway computer because it "has the internet." Corporations are evil because they thrive off and promote this kind of backward mentality.
What arrogance. You're judge something to be evil just because they don't sit up and cater to YOUR whims & beliefs.
The market doesn't have a backward mentality. It does have a mentality that's different from most highly technical people, since most people aren't highly technical.
Sure, you may say, this is sound business thinking. Well, I say, if this is a good corporate decision, then corporations are ulitimately evil for promoting the lowest common denominator in our society.
Yep, more unfettered arrogance that you know better than everyone else.
Corporations don't promote the lowest common denominator -- they exploit it. There's a difference. If, somehow, the lowest common denominator got smarter, they'd cater to that too. Their purpose is not to keep people dumb, it's to make money.
The whole point of the marketplace is to meet the needs & desires of the world's people. That includes the dumb asses, and the smart ones. There are plenty of companies that market to highly technical people (Andover?), or people with different tastes of cars other than color (BMW?).
Thirdly, do you honestly believe the world would all of a sudden get *SMARTER* if marketing was banned? Very, very, doubtful.
You're painting the world with a very broad and inaccurate brush that everything is marketed or catered to the dumb asses out there. While the majority of corporations follows that market because the most money is there, there are plenty of companies that cater to people with higher preferences.
I think the haircut and general hygiene is a good thing. And one should dress appropriately for appropriate scenarios, especially the first while at a job.
but once you've proven yourself over the first 6 months, I find one gets *more* respect for standing out from the crowd. This means having that sense of humor, liking cool music, etc. This isn't an easy path because it intimidates many people -- but it's a path that's worked for me (and I'm still young, but I consult for the banking industry, about as fuddy-duddy as one can get)
mm. you don't think inertia had anything to do with that? most businesses used IBM's since the mid-80's.
oh, and, iMacs are $700 now. though granted, in 95 they were more.
We're not creating artifical scarcity. The fact that most people can't or won't make music or software development their profession creates a scarcity of skilled developers or artists.
Of those who *WILL* make software development or music their profession, only a few are talented. Scarcity of talent.
Of those who are talented, and skilled, there will be a need for people with talent & skill in marketing, studio engineering, and management. These folks usually reside at a "recording label". Again, not an artifical scarcity.
Please people. The bits themselves are abundant. But you're ignoring what GOES INTO the configuration of bits.
Does this mean we should have copyright in its current form? Not necessarily. But we do need some kind of IP system to protect creators & allow the marketplace to distribute resources effectively.
Now to your argument -- Does this make us slaves to those that serve us? Mmm, in certain ways, if we ourselves don't have anything in demand to contribute to society. But now we're back down to ground-level principles: socialism vs. free market. Which I'd rather not get into.
I develop in WebObjects and Cocoa. I know about them.
- Cocoa is still Obj-C. (AppKit and Foundation)
- EOF will be Java as of WO 5.0
- WO has not been Java for nearly a year. WO has been an ObjC/Java hybrid for quite some time, and will not be 100% Java until WO 5.0.
IBM killed OS/2 because few wanted it anymore. I used OS/2 for years. But I moved on, (to Linux). Now I've moved onto the Macintosh.
Apple's competitve advantage is in its hardware design and the asthetics of its operating system. Development frameworks are a competitive advantage for a narrow audience. Having said that, I believe the actual design of AppKit, EOF, and WOF are definitely valuable -- and they will be continually valuable whether accessed through ObjC or Java.
If I were you I'd be extremely careful of how I interpreted that. It could well be that they're asking you questions because the topic falls under your specialty rather than theirs. This occurs on your intellectual turf; that's why people hire consultants. If you went to visit them on their own "home ground" you might have a very different experience. Then it might be you asking lots of questions about what they consider basic knowledge.
Oh, there definitely are people here with a much stronger grasp of the business domain than myself. Or certain technologies. You're quite right that I have to be careful in judging what people know, and usually I assume people with experience are quite competent. What I am bringing up in this conversation is general "nagging thoughts" in the back of my head that come up time and time again when I see wierd gaps in people's knowledge that shouldn't be there given the experience they have.
For instance, I have people that have worked with a particular technology for years, but they have no idea how it works. Very often, people "programmed to an API", and went home. They never leveraged their experience to gain a deeper understanding of what they were using. Perhaps this "coasting" menatlity is lack of talent, or lack of enthusiasm. I don't know.
Of course, there are the 1 out of 5 people that do leverage their experience and deep understanding of what they're using. But it's still sad that it's 1 out of 5 people.
I must disagree. One man's coordination is another man's coercion, and when you're talking about coordinating people's attitudes and feelings that can be far more invasive than merely coordinating their actions. This whole thread has been an example of how strongly many XP proponents insist on adhering to every minor detail and nuance of the XP methodology
I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't see XP proponents insisting on adhering to minor details. XP is a very tailorable / customizable process and I don't think any two teams do it the same way, or follow all of the practices.
I also think that my point about "coordinating attitudes & feelings" is less about coersion and more about understanding that most project failures are due to emotions, attitudes, and feelings. Fear, especially.
Most of the time we implement a process out of fear -- the develoeprs fear that we won't make the date, fear that we'll be asked to work overtime -- the customers fear they'll be lied to, or won't be able to make decisions about priorities.
XP says "acknowledge that fear up front", and aim the process towards cooling down those fears.
I've already tried to point out that a methodology which depends on a uniform higher-than-average level of skill/motivation among developers can be considered fragile. By definition, most teams are not composed of such developers.
Of course. It's still open debate whether XP requires higher-than-average developers, but generally I don't believe it does. One of the major goals of XP is to get average developers to work productively, with a senior developer or two coaching & guiding them. It does require developers with relatively high discipline, however, which is a potential fragility factor.
At OOPSLA 2000 in Minneapolis this past October, some of the people that were involved with XP's inception (Beck & Fowler, in particular) feel that XP *will not succeed* in most cases, mainly because of the cultural demands it places on the IT organization and the responsibility it demands of the customer.
The general agreement at this session was that "that's okay", because those that *do* use XP enjoy it, and are arguably turning out quality software with high productivity, and having fun while they do it. And that should be all that matters.
However, with business looking for further ways of improving efficiency, there's bound to be a tidal wave of opportunists looking to sell XP the "next great thing". XP probably isn't it, though it definitely is an extraordinarily effective process under particular circumstances.
PC hardware *blow* macintosh at any time.
... which was rewritten in java
Not so. "any time" ? Unlikely. Using altivec-enabled applications? Unlikely.
WebObjects
Hasn't happened yet. Think you got your dates mixed up.
Linux/*BSD are way ahead of Darwin.
This doesn't seem true to me. Most of Darwin is based on FreeBSD.
OSX interface is unusable at best (I have trouble to feel NeXTstep throught this slow mess.)
Okay, now you're really grasping at straws here. Judging a BETA release for slowness is just silly. Trying to look for NeXT in what is a *mac* interface is fruitless. Certainly there were problems with the public beta's interface, but a lot of those problems were answered in the latest builds.
NeXT was in the process of dropping ObjC in favor of java, for fucking marketing reasons
Oh yes, marketing is evil. If you're a company, and no one wants to program for your product, the right thing to do is the technical thing and to go bankrupt supporting the cool-but-obscure language. Right.
Apple is taking an interesting chance with its continued support of ObjC. I'm glad they are, as a techie, but most people don't know/care about ObjC's flexibility. But they're hedging that bet by providing Cocoa/Java.
In general, I think the fact that millions of Mac users will be upgrading to OS X over the next year or two will perk up interest in the platform. I'm speaking as a recent wintel convert (for home use, at least).... there's no reason for me to use Wintel at home. And when OS X comes out, my daily work can be performed on it (since I program in UNIX and Java).
First of all, apologies for miscommunicating. The original post struck a bit of a nerve, so I don't express myself quite well.
I agree with you. Older programmers are, generally, very smart.
Young people generally do think they're smarter than they actually are.
Here, however, is my point:
- Speaking as a "young'un" I feel I have lots to learn from older/wiser programmers. Problem is that they're a rarity these days -- most people aren't much older, and certainly not much wiser. Do I say this out of arrogance? No, I say this out of pure observation. The few gurus I've had the pleasure of working with have been the exception, not the rule. Whether you really believe I'm fooling myself on this observation will have to be up to you.
- Most people that "worked through the ranks" aren't really much older, they're actually usually within their late 20's or early 30's. After that they move into management. And I don't believe that it's an industry trend to recognize this is a bad thing. Developers know, but management generally doesn't know (you hear it on Slashdot a lot, for instence). The reason programmers move on to management is because arguably, good managers are in *shorter* supply than good programmers. So management promotes whoever shows potential. At least, from my observation.
Now, a bit of an explanation of my position: I mentor and train people in C++ and Java, OO design, and transactional systems design, and I also help architect financial trading systems (where "architect" for me means "a developer with more influence".. I don't draw fancy bubbles and lines on a paper and call that architecture.)
yet I'm very often 5+ years younger than the people I'm teaching or working with. Usually most people don't believe me when I tell them my age. It *FRUSTRATES* the heck out of me at what I see at my various consulting engagements -- very few older programmers, very few senior programmers or architects, and generally very few people with solid understandings of software engineering, good implementation techniques, or design techniques.
I REALLY should not be the one to teach these people these things, but it's what I do.
- Young people are usually very arrogant & think they know everything. I know I could fall into this trap. That's why I make a habit of staring in the morning every day and saying: "You're young. You don't know shit." , it's also why I devour books, and why I use every scrap of experience I get to my advantage.
But my day-to-day experience seems to tell me that I'm not "crap". I shouldn't know more than people older than me, people with better degrees, etc. but usually they're the ones asking ME for the answers to basic day-to-day questions.
And this is not just about the newest tips & techniques -- this is about day-to-day, how do I code this better, how do I test or debug this better?
- I think in my case, experience has been invaluable to me, but being a voracious reader has helped speed along my progress.
Finally, about XP:
- Everyone has a right to healthy skepticism. I know my history -- I've seen the trends come and gone -- CASE tools, Object-Oriented Operating systems, AI, etc. I've also seen trends come that HAVE made a lasting impact: relational databases, GUIs, PCs, modems, and object orientation.
I've also seen the wave of methodologies that came out in the 90's that killed many forests but didn't help as many projects.
I think the reason I like XP is that it's different. It's the anti-methodology. It's not about ceremony or documentation, it's about coordinating people's attitudes, feelings, and fears into a framework that allows people to create quality software.
One of the frustrations with skeptics is when one paints it as "the same as all the other" failed methodologies, that it completely ignores that this one really *IS* different. Healthy skepticism is good; ignorant skepticism is not.
Some of the critiques from Tom Gilb, Craig Larman, etc, espected industry experts, are definite food for thought. But slashdot arguments that effectively say "don't read books!", or "it's bunk, just hire talented developers!" are just hogwash. If we didn't read books, we couldn't evolve our knowledge much. If we COULD hire talented developers, we wouldn't have a problem would we? While they're lots of skilled developers, there is a dearth of talent.
So how do you maximize what little talent there is? You use a process to align people's strengths and minimize their weaknesses. You explicitly state your fears, you measure your progress constantly, and you continually deliver value at whatever speed you're working at. That's what XP is about.
Of course there are limitations and drawbacks - XP does not have any evidence of scaling over 12 developers -- it's rather new, it requires a highly disciplined team, it needs the guiding hand of a "coach" or "architect", it needs the customer to speak "with one voice", etc.
Generally, when I advocate XP, I explain both sides. Especially in my consulting engagements. And it has worked so far -- I've gotten good results in my pilot attempts at using the process in various international banks that I've worked with.
Don't read books? You want us to think,but not with books?
.. part of accomplishing this is setting up educational resources so they DON'T have to work through the ranks -- mainly because those that do generally become managers -- they don't remain programmers... yet what we need are good programmers.
Certainly, most books are tripe. Some (including XP) aren't -- they're based on well-worn experience.
And speaking for myself, this "working up the ranks" notion is being obliterated by people that have a higher learning capacity than those that *did* work their way up through the ranks.
They do this by a combination of books & practical experience.
Generally I think the #1 industry goal right now is to increase productivity of developers
.NET effectively puts a virtual machine on top of windows -- in that way, it's like Java.
.NET, and won't need to be tied to it.
But the really cool thing is the support it gives for Web Services. These things actually have little to do explicitly with
Web Services are about:
SOAP - enveloping messages
XML Schemas - defining message formats
UDDI - finding service end-points
WSDL - describing service end-points.
You can do this on EJB, on Perl, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, anything that can parse XML.
Why would you want it over traditional RPC? Well the main reason is that traditional RPC has tight couplings to underlying code. One has to worry about:
- semantics (parameter positions)
- struct definitions (for pass-by-value)
- complexity of the runtime (CORBA, COM, DCE RPC, etc.)
SOAP on the other hand is a "semantic data stream", in that it shoves the meta-data with the data, so you get:
- semantics for free: just look up a parameter by a known tag
- structs for free: mapped to generic types automatically as opposed to CORBA/IIOP PBV which requires custom-coding
- an XML parser isn't complex at all, and the wire format is plain text, hence debuggable.
Note when I say "free", I mean, "I don't need to work as much". The obvious tradeoff for this productivity is A) performance, and B) compile-type type safety
... is it worth it? Probably. There've been many attempts at a ubiquitous "distributed component" model, but this one might work.
See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WebServices
I think the point is that English is a very poor language to express precision and C is a very poor language to express "gestalt" or big picture issues.
// set x to 1
For this reason, I think purpose statements and algorithm "walkalong" comments are crucial.
I think what I do feel is that I don't like useless contextual comments that either
a) state the obvious,
x = 1
or
b) tell me something WITHOUT rationale or explanation.
/* passing in null may cause problems */
calculatePricingContext(quoteContext, null);
Which is what 80% of commenting tends to be.
I don't believe too many have mentioned the beauty of the Smalltalk class library. It was carefully crafted over many years and I don't believe there's any method with over 15 lines of code (except for the bit-blitting classes).
Take a look at one of the non-commerical versions of VisualWorks, or even Squeak (an open source variant). It's quite impressive, and teaches one a lot about good object orientation.
Refactoring is invariably a technical decision. It does not change the behavior of the program, and it allows us to work faster. There is very little associated cost with refactoring, assuming you build tests to back up your assertion that the system's behavior will not change (bugs and all) while refactoring.
Now when I say Refactoring, I'm not talking about "heads down, that's all I'm doing". I'm talking about Martin Fowler's view of it -- every day, a little bit at a time, to clean up the code and make it more readable / maintainable, while you're adding features or fixing bugs.
I think your exposure to development teams might be rather limited to think that there are always "maintainers" and "designers", and that maintainers are lower on the rung. I've seen two situations to counter that: one where the maintainers were *deliberately* the more talented bunch of programmers, since they have to deal with tougher situations than those with a "blank sheet". The other situation (far more common) is that the core coders also do the maintainence until they have a replacement.
Management does not hate refactoring, if it is done properly. They hate *rewrites*. A *rewrite* requires management decisions because it is in the realm of business - it is about throwing out the existing system. And it rarely works the way it's supposed to.
(Moderate up +1, Funny.)
"Have a look at the auto-industry.. seen any real innovation, anything 'market shattering' there in the last 30 years? No."
Actually, yes. Tremendous innovation. I don't think you're a car buff. But, even anyone who's not a car buff would recognize that there are more reliable, affordable, and gas-efficient cars out there than ever before. This started because of innovation at Toyota and eventually carried over to other manufacturers.
"Havnt we all heard of the WTO? of the WIPO? FTAA? etc etc? What is happening is the Capatalist System is hitting a peak. It takes money to make money, and TransNationals are realizing it is easier to share in profit than really compete. "
Hmm. Last I checked, the WTO promotes global competition and the unions want it stopped because of that.
Nice troll.
The Satanic Gases. Lots of facts about global warming.
Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered.
Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet. And spare the criticism bias -- the same can be done for the U.N. organization that released the global warming alarm call.
The Ultimate Resource 2 Julian Simon's excellent work on population & global trends.
The State of Humanity
Note: I'm actually in favor of reducing greenhouse emissions. At the same time, I find it disconcertaining that a lot of environmental rhetoric has a tremendous amount of counter-cultural, anti-corporate, 'fuck the man'-type reasoning that I have a hard time taking seriously. I found these books to have moments of objectivity in them (and definte moments of bias at times, but who can really be free of it?)
If you were looking for scientific papers, sorry, I don't carry a library in my backyard.
Good rant. We really *should* be spending most of our time on MAKING new stuff in the future instead of PROTECTING old stuff because that's where true scarcity lies -- in imagination, talent, skill, and creativity.
Abundance means that I can always get what I want, if I want it. But if I want something that no one's created yet, I can't get it. That's scarcity. Meaning, I have to pay for someone's creative services.
For example, if I want Madonna's new album -- she's got to record it. And I should have to pay for it -- though at a much lesser price than the current model, since I'm paying her for her services as a singer / songwriter instead of a "CD".
Best teacher -- Larry Smith, macroeconomics, the University of Waterloo, Canada. Without comparason, the most inspiring, intellegent and witty teacher I've had. Economics is *not* a dismal science.
I think OS X will be one of the best dev platforms for Java.
Also note that Swing was originally IFC, which was basically a Java copy of NeXT's AppKit.
Certainly if your goal is to write a pure java app, then that's what you'll do. But if your goal is to write a Mac app -- writing it in Java/Cocoa will be a big productivity booster. (ObjC would be arguably faster / more productive, but people seem to be afraid of the Smalltalk-like syntax).
But with Apple's dev tools, and companies like WebLogic and Oracle out there that "could" with minimal effort port their systems to OS X, I think the NeXT frameworks have an interesting future.
The more restrictions you place on a product, the less valuable it will be to consumers, and the less money they'll pay for it.
On the other hand, the less restrictions you place on a product, the more valuable it is to consumers, but you tend to sell less volume.
By pushing the further restrictions down our throats, they're taking a risk that the market won't care. Chances are the market WILL care -- VHS tapes, TIVO and TV are the norm these days and we're probably not going to change.
Look at DVD's -- the massive restrictions (region encoding, CSS, etc) haven't stopped them from taking off, even among the geeks because of the better quality of sound, picture, and extras.
Will DigitalTV have enough bells and whistles to wean people off of fair use? Probably not.
Despite the alarmist views of how this will lead to the end of the world, it won't. In fact, a lot of this comes down to economics (read the book "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian for a good understanding of the "mainstream" view of the economics of information and intellectual property).. they own their movies and TV Programming, and they can choose how to distribute it -- but they've rarely (not since the "time shifting" supreme court case) been caught in a market that (en masse) revolts on the restrictions. They need a blunt reminder (billions of dollars in lost revenue will do..)
An innovation is a product or service that responds to a market need. How does 1-click not fit under this? I want to buy books quicker -- 1 click is one of the features that keeps me going back to Amazon.com.
love is a fist.