We love to compare how poorly our schools do against schools in Japan or Europe, yet they DO NOT TEACH dirtbags when we "mainstream" them due to political pressure.
This is simply not true. I teach in Japan. I work in the 5th lowest ranking school in the prefecture. We accept students that get 0 on the entrance exam. Yes, 0. We also accept students who do extremely well, but would rather go to a local school than travel to a higher level school. So I have students who struggle a lot academically in the same classes with gifted students.
The biggest difference is that high level students can choose to go to a high level school if they do well on the entrance exams. Also, in our school we try to stream the students based on whether they desire to go to university or not. Those who do not take more business oriented courses (accounting, bookeeping, computer use, etc). Often the lower level students choose this route.
But I can tell you that I face the same challenges that western school teachers face. And *most* Japanese schools are the same. The high level schools are small in number because the high level students are in the minority. So for every overachieving stressed out keener school, there are 4 schools like mine (well, generally higher academic level than mine, but similar).
In fact, the streaming causes problems for our school because we have students with obvious behavioral problems (which are also in the minority). They distract the students who, while not always the most gifted, still have a good chance at university. The absolute best way to allow the better students to succeed is to make sure the students with problems don't adversely impact them -- i.e., by bringing up their level.
It is a serious problem and I don't have all the answers. But I know enough to say for certain that it's an incredibly difficult issue to solve. Your glib rant notwithstanding, I don't think we're going to find easy answers.
OK, this was posted a long time ago, but I thought I'd respond anyway. You can't make lessons fun for everyone. Especially with big class sizes (some of my classes have 43 students!) you are just going to get a handful of students that aren't interested that day. And even 3 or 4 students can totally disrupt an entire class.
While I agree that teachers should be making entertaining classes (and they should be given more prep-time to accomplish that goal), that won't solve discipline issues in a classroom.
I actually use operant conditioning on my students. My favorite technique is (as it should be) positive reinforcement. But you have to be able to understand where to use the other techniques as well. I actually try my best to positively reinforce each student in my class every 5 minutes or so when I see them doing something I like. That means I have to do it several hundred times a class for my big classes (I'm literally running around the room in these ones).
I believe this is the best method to create a classroom culture where students willingly follow the classroom rules (and not just out of fear). Once they get the idea, the fun aspect tends to take care of itself. Disrupted classes are actually no fun for anyone (even the disruptors). I find that there's a nice positive feedback loop where having people do the thing they are supposed to results in them having more fun (and even learning something!).
I actually believe that starting from the position of trying to create fun classes rather than creating an atmosphere where fun classes can happen is actually self defeating.
The question of whether or not it's being a "control freak" is interesting. All teaching requires guiding students to places where they haven't been before. I don't believe it is necessary to control the students. But it's hard to guide without having some expectation that the student will follow.
NSERC has a long history of using public money to do basic research and allowing the researchers to spin off private companies. The rationale is that there is a difference between basic research and commercial development.
The idea is that they encourage commercial development by allowing the IP to belong to the researchers/institutions that do the research. So it is in their best interest to find applications or people willing to apply the IP.
For the record, I heartily disagree with the practice. While it makes some kind of kooky sense with things like medical treatments (do the basic research and then the researchers go private for clinical trials, etc), for software it's terrible.
For software *all* of the development is done on the public dime. When they are ready to sell the damn thing they go public. There is *no* private development at all. I find this highly objectionable. However convincing others of this has proven tricky... sigh...
Actually, I think this is a lazy cop-out by people who don't want to do the work of getting the answer.
You are right. I was lazy.
There are several problems with measuring productivity:
1) We have no good measure of objectively assessing the ability of the team members before they start. We don't even have a unit of measurement to report it in.
2) We have no good measure of objectively assessing how well team members will be able to work together before they start. Again we don't even have a unit of measurement.
3) We have no good measure of objectively assessing how complex a problem is before the team members start. Again... lack of units, blah, blah
4) We have no repeatability of problems. Since we can't measure the ability of the team members, nor the ability of the members to work together, we can't simply give the same problem to a several groups using different methodologies and see which one works better. Caveat: we could ignore this problem if we are willing to repeat the problem a HUGE number of times (probably 200 to 300 times would be sufficient)
5) We can not have the same team trying different methodologies. Their ability to work together will change over time in ways we can't measure (although it certainly would be something we'd like to measure since it's part of the point of some agile processes)
6) Even if we have teams doing the same problems, we are interested in non-trivial problems. Thus they will certainly come up with different solutions. Part of the methodologies deals with requirements collection after all. So we must find a way to relate the effectiveness of the solution and weigh it against productivity. Again, no units, yada, yada, yada...
7) We have no objective measure of productivity itself (except maybe the infamous KLOCs).
8) Again we are interested in large difficult problems -- ones that take at least 8 months of work. So even if we do the best that we can, do *you* have enough money to fund 200 6 person teams for 8 months?
These aren't just difficult questions. They are questions that have been posed in the literature over and over again for the past 30 years. There are *no* answers (that I know of anyway). And unfortunately your links shed absolutely no light on the matter either:-(
When I said that measuring productivity in terms of methodology was difficult, I was understating things by a long way. I actually don't think it will ever be possible to measure well.
Good management can build a good solid team and help them develop a working method that is best for the team. It can be a critical factor in success. Unfortunately, good management is pretty damn rare, more's the pity.
I agree with your post. But I want to quibble about one thing. I think there will always be a place for large corporations in software. And, in fact, they have some specific advantages in free software.
In order to make money with free software and be a pure software company, you pretty much have to be doing custom development. But to do that you need customers. Large companies who can keep a sales force around are likely to have an advantage. And they can keep programmers available for new initiatives, similar to the way most "body shops" operate now.
I think the biggest challenge for this to happen is to convince customers that it's cheaper to outsource an entire project based on free software than it is to do it in house and hire consultants. I actually don't think this should be that hard of a sell, but there is always resistance to moving things outside of your managerial control.
I think there's also an opportunity to make some money selling unrelated changes. You often have guys "on the beach" in consulting companies. Have these guys work on the software the company specializes in, but sell "votes" for a couple of bucks on what to do. This could bring in a small revenue stream from smaller organizations, or individuals. I am aware that this approach has been tried and failed miserably, but I'm convinced there's a way to make it bring in *some* income (just not the bread and butter).
This is probably out of date, but when I first started it was still fairly difficult for women to get management roles in a lot of fields. This was different from computer companies where (at least as far as people I've talked to are concerned) promotion prospects were pretty equitable.
I've met many women computer programmers who *only* entered the field because they wanted to get into management. They were driven, goal oriented and worked hard. As such they were very capable in their roles.
This is not to suggest that there aren't women who are interested in programming. I have met many such women. And perhaps more could be made to understand that it's a good field. But the vast majority of women I've worked with had no real interest in programming. And the vast majority of them were fantastic (mainly because they worked hard and got things done).
So, I'm not sure that it really is the case that only top women are going into CS. I think it's simply that their attitude is geared more towards success.
My biggest objection is the lack of credible proof that it actually works any better than the tried an true software methodologies.
But can you provide proof that the "tried and true software methodologies" work?
Our biggest problem in process improvement is that we can't easily measure productivity. If we could, then it would be a walk in the park to determine if one way of doing things was better than another. Instead we can say that project A was successful at meeting its targets while project B was not. Even then management always games the system to claim that their projects were successful. How else would they get promoted?
Lately I've been hearing from a lot of people who claim to agree with agile principles and therefore feel that they must be agile. Whether or not they actually achieve results seems to be secondary. A good example would be, does your team *actually* welcome changing requirements? If not, then I would argue that you aren't agile.
If you read through the agile principles and think to yourself, what would you do to actually achieve this, I hope that people start to realize that becoming agile isn't trivial. In fact, I think many people would argue that it's impossible. Having worked on a couple of teams that were actually agile in this respect, I disagree.
I think scepticism is healthy. But when we're comparing development methodologies it's hard to find ways of comparison. Even though I'm retired from professional programming, if I were to take it up again I wouldn't work in a more traditional setting. Especially one of the XP teams I worked on, while not being particularly exceptional in terms of talent, was one of the most amazing experiences of my career. I highly recommend others to try to get the same feeling. But it is by no means easy.
I think the point was that Sun could easily sell solutions with MySQL without buying the company. So in essence they spent $1 billion on the name.
If they think it will bring in that amount of profit in contracts, then I guess it's worth it. But I wonder if they have the staff left to do that kind of volume. Just some back of the envelope calculations:
10% profit over loaded labour rate
$100K loaded labour rate (in order to undercut in-house development)
equals 10K profit per man-year of development.
or 100K man years of development to break even. Nope... I can't see it working out.
Sorry. No windows here... I've only played the games that work under Linux. But I'd love to take a look at some of the other ones too. What I can't believe is how many of them he's written... Real dedication.
These are 2d retro games. But the level of creativity is astounding. I found some of them to be a bit weird, but others are total gems. Mu-cade has got to be my favorite. It took me a long time to get into it, but once I did I realized how deep this game is. You can literally spend 10s of hours devising new strategies. And the games generally last less than 5 minutes which means that it's great for people who don't have all day to game.
Large companies back open source software because the software has created a business opportunity for them. If the business opportunity is no longer viable, then the software development may very well stall. While this is a large problem for proprietary development, it is no problem for open source.
When a company backs open source development, it is not charging for licenses of software. They have another revenue stream. So regardless of what that revenue stream is, they are not making money directly off the sale of a single piece of software. This is very important.
There are 2 primary reasons why a piece of software might not stay viable. The first is that it is no longer needed. There are some one-shot pieces of software that are used once and never used again. In this case, probably the company backing the software wrote it on contract. If they did well, they will surely get new contracts. So no problem.
The second reason is that there is something better our there. Now this is really where open source software shines. If the competitor is also open source, the company backing the software can simply switch horses. Software B is better that A? OK, we're going to support B now and suggest that people switch.
Actually, you see this all the time. For instance, Canonical will switch from Pidgon to Epiphany in the next release. Maybe Pidgon dies. Well, if Epiphany is better, then what's the harm? Canonical makes money from building a distribution, not selling software. Companies like Dell pay them to choose the software that will work best for their customers.
So I don't see any reason to worry about corporate support being withdrawn. If corporations have less money to throw around, maybe there will be a shakedown in what projects are supported, but this will just mean more focus. If *all* corporate support was withdrawn then it would mean something very strange was happening. It would mean that open source software was no longer providing business opportunities. I can't imagine what would cause such a thing to happen.
After all, there was a time when most free software was written by individuals. Corporations jumped on the bandwagon because it was good for them. What has changed (or will change) to stop that from being the case?
Sigh... Or even better -- buses that came back from the train station to small towns in the inaka past 8:00 PM.
I've come to the conclusion that transportation in Japan is intentionally slow in order to maintain all the individual cultures in the small towns. When you read about these super fast trains, what you don't realize is that visiting your friend in the neighboring town 40km away is virtually impossible. Even if you have a car, it's quite difficult and slow.
It does make you scratch your head and wonder why they spend *that* much money on something only a few people will use...
What's interesting is that, like open source, you can do just that now if you want. Organize yourself on a voluntary basis. And just like the internet enabled coordination of people who wouldn't ordinarily know about each other in kernel development, so too can it enable you to organize with others that are of like mind.
The tricky bit is having something useful to be organized for. It's all great to get people together to "do something great" (the cheer of a million dead source forge projects). But to start with a seed of a good idea and actually carry it through -- that's rare.
I hope someone does it, because just like the linux kernel, the person starting such a thing definitely won't be me!
What I find interesting is the role of Greenspan in all of this. During the late 90s and the beginning of the 2000s I listened to his little speeches every time he changed (or not) monetary policy. And at the time I thought he was saying, "OK, I've lowered interest rates again. You know I can't keep doing this. We have to change how we're dealing with this. This is just a temporary measure."
By about 2003 I stopped listening because I figured he was being thwarted by other people. When the disaster happened I was actually very surprised to hear blame placed on him. I thought, "Hey, he's been telling you guys there's a problem for a decade. Why was nobody listening?".
But, when I read what he's written now in retrospect, I see nothing of what I thought I heard him say. I can't decide if I just misunderstood him at the time, or if he's just being political. I guess it doesn't matter. But then I also thought the same thing about Colin Powell...
Just thought I'd chime in with an example of where threads are often used, but unnecessary: UI.
You often have a situation where you have a UI, that in addition to collecting your mouse clicks and keystrokes, is monitoring something in the background. Often people use a thread to periodically check the thing and report it's progress to the UI.
This can easily be avoided using the reactor pattern. You simply add a short callback to the main loop of the GUI toolkit -- often it is called "OnIdle()" or some such thing. The callback polls the thing you are interested in and updates the GUI.
I actually use this technique to do real processing too. For instance, if I need to parse a really big file in the background, I will write some code that parses a bit at a time and insert it into the idle loop. It essentially works the same as a really low priority thread -- everything in the UI happens and when it's finished, you get to do your processing. Just be careful to keep your processing short.
The very nice thing about doing things this way is that you don't have to worry so much about concurrency. And it keeps your UI snappy.
And yet there are hundreds of artists on Jamendo (for instance) also doing this. The big acts make big news because they are big. The small acts don't make news at all (because who cares).
There will be a time when an act becomes big simply because of their distribution choices. Perhaps it has already happened (Grateful Dead).
Simply put, if you like their music and you like their business and you've got the cash -- support them. It helps everyone. Even if they became big the old way, they can't change the past.
Having auditioned for an amateur band and listened to their recorded music, I can tell you that good production quality is very important for the resulting listening experience. So some of the assholes are actually of value;)
But you can hire good sound engineers and a good production studio. The issue we run into is that we have essentially loan sharks who front the money for the recording on the proviso that they get virtually everything that comes in.
OK, a lot of musicians get sucked into the whole "I'm going to strike it rich" scam. I feel sorry for them. But I feel sorrier for the musicians who understand that they have to work a little bit at a time to raise the capital for a quality recording, only to find that they can't sell it because the distributors own everybody. These days we can walk around the distributors and cut them out of the deal. Musicians don't have to sign ridiculous deals just to sell their music.
The top bands will always want to have quality sound engineering. Sound engineers will have jobs. But people are going to have to work their way to the top and build a business rather than be vaulted there by some thug who takes 95% off the top.
Actually, it used to be that commissions on trades were so high that nobody other than people with seats on the exchange could really day-trade. Those people could (and did) play some nasty shenanigans with stocks, but it was easier to control them because there were only a few of them.
Now, of course, with automation, etc trade commissions are extremely small (and in some cases non-existent). Any moron with a little bit of money can turn into a professional gambler. The problem is that it can destabilize the market. Things can rocket out of control.
There is the famous story of Joe Kennedy getting out of the market before the big '29 crash because a shoe shine boy gave him stock advice. The market is overinflated when poor people gamble on the market. When the market turns, they will take their money out -- leading to a crash.
My feeling is that most day trading should be illegal. If you make a trade, then perhaps you should be stopped from further trades on that security for something like a few days. If you have a margin, perhaps you should be required to carry a certain amount of cash (or cash equivalent) to cover margin calls for a certain time.
I definitely haven't thought this through, so maybe it's impossible. But I think the current situation is really leading to massive problems in the future (in fact, unless things change, I'm wondering if the stock market *will* see any substantial gains in the next 20 years or so -- I certainly don't have any money in it right now).
I wish I had mod points.... (I never use the ones I get and when I see a post that deserves modding up I never have points).
Often people don't understand the business of free/open source software. The key is maintaining relationships. Relationships create opportunities for work. Work pays the bills. If you do good work, you build more relationships. Software freedom allows you to build many relationships while you are being paid by one person. It's a useful loop with positive feedback. The more you do, the more you can potentially benefit.
Accepting this kind of deal means taking yourself out of that loop. If you have spent time building up your reputation, then you need to be compensated for that. You have to consider that you must be compensated for all the work that you won't be able to do in the future -- for all the relationships you won't be able to make.
I agree that unless it's a huge amount of money, it's not worth it. In fact, I wouldn't do it at all unless I had no other choices. Agreeing to put yourself in a bad position in order to receive money is a recipe for unhappiness (especially if your employer gets used to pushing you around with money). Life is SO much better if you find a way to receive money AND improve your situation at the same time.
This is an honest question. How do I replace Gmail? Here's my problem:
I want email. If I use my ISP's mail service, I can't change ISP's without notifying everyone one earth what my new email adress is (i.e., I get locked in). If I set up my own mail server I can't email a lot of people because my machine isn't on their whitelist. In fact, the typical block of adresses I'm going to be getting from my ISP is likely to be blacklisted.
It seems I *have* to go with a big central mail provider. If there is an alternative, I'd like to hear about it.
Yes, I'm going to agree. I've interviewed a lot of people. And I have one rule: I never interview someone unless I think I might hire them. If I look at the resume and think, "This person has potential", then they get an interview. At this point its their job to lose.
While the people who are responding to you may have said that your tech support background was the reason, it's probably just because they don't want to make you feel bad. They already know about your background before they interview you. Interviewing is a real pain in the ass. Nobody is going to look at a resume and think, "Hmm... here's someone we really don't want. But, hey, let's interview him for fun."
When I first started out I had exactly the same problem. I got tons of interviews and no job offers. Actually it wasn't until I got my first job (apparently there was some dissent about hiring me, but I squeaked in) that somebody told me how bad I was at interviewing.
Interviewing is a skill that you can learn. There are lots of good books in the library that will give you good pointers. Practicing with others is also a good idea, but I highly recommend doing some reading so that you can understand what's going on in an interview.
I always wonder when people say this kind of thing because I never find Japan to seem overly crowded. So I looked it up.
Japan *does* have roughly 10 times the population density of the US (339/km2 vs 31/km2). But in comparison to Europe, it's not really very different. For instance the Netherlands and Belgium have higher population densities (395 and 341). The UK has similar density at 246.
But I think especially when we're talking about fiber rollout, we're mostly talking about doing so in *cities*. In this case, the US, Japan and even Canada (at 3.2/km2) are going to have similar population densities. So I have a hard time thinking that this rollout in Japan is going to be significantly less expensive than it would be in the US.
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We love to compare how poorly our schools do against schools in Japan or Europe, yet they DO NOT TEACH dirtbags when we "mainstream" them due to political pressure.
This is simply not true. I teach in Japan. I work in the 5th lowest ranking school in the prefecture. We accept students that get 0 on the entrance exam. Yes, 0. We also accept students who do extremely well, but would rather go to a local school than travel to a higher level school. So I have students who struggle a lot academically in the same classes with gifted students.
The biggest difference is that high level students can choose to go to a high level school if they do well on the entrance exams. Also, in our school we try to stream the students based on whether they desire to go to university or not. Those who do not take more business oriented courses (accounting, bookeeping, computer use, etc). Often the lower level students choose this route.
But I can tell you that I face the same challenges that western school teachers face. And *most* Japanese schools are the same. The high level schools are small in number because the high level students are in the minority. So for every overachieving stressed out keener school, there are 4 schools like mine (well, generally higher academic level than mine, but similar).
In fact, the streaming causes problems for our school because we have students with obvious behavioral problems (which are also in the minority). They distract the students who, while not always the most gifted, still have a good chance at university. The absolute best way to allow the better students to succeed is to make sure the students with problems don't adversely impact them -- i.e., by bringing up their level.
It is a serious problem and I don't have all the answers. But I know enough to say for certain that it's an incredibly difficult issue to solve. Your glib rant notwithstanding, I don't think we're going to find easy answers.
OK, this was posted a long time ago, but I thought I'd respond anyway. You can't make lessons fun for everyone. Especially with big class sizes (some of my classes have 43 students!) you are just going to get a handful of students that aren't interested that day. And even 3 or 4 students can totally disrupt an entire class.
While I agree that teachers should be making entertaining classes (and they should be given more prep-time to accomplish that goal), that won't solve discipline issues in a classroom.
I actually use operant conditioning on my students. My favorite technique is (as it should be) positive reinforcement. But you have to be able to understand where to use the other techniques as well. I actually try my best to positively reinforce each student in my class every 5 minutes or so when I see them doing something I like. That means I have to do it several hundred times a class for my big classes (I'm literally running around the room in these ones).
I believe this is the best method to create a classroom culture where students willingly follow the classroom rules (and not just out of fear). Once they get the idea, the fun aspect tends to take care of itself. Disrupted classes are actually no fun for anyone (even the disruptors). I find that there's a nice positive feedback loop where having people do the thing they are supposed to results in them having more fun (and even learning something!).
I actually believe that starting from the position of trying to create fun classes rather than creating an atmosphere where fun classes can happen is actually self defeating.
The question of whether or not it's being a "control freak" is interesting. All teaching requires guiding students to places where they haven't been before. I don't believe it is necessary to control the students. But it's hard to guide without having some expectation that the student will follow.
NSERC has a long history of using public money to do basic research and allowing the researchers to spin off private companies. The rationale is that there is a difference between basic research and commercial development.
The idea is that they encourage commercial development by allowing the IP to belong to the researchers/institutions that do the research. So it is in their best interest to find applications or people willing to apply the IP.
For the record, I heartily disagree with the practice. While it makes some kind of kooky sense with things like medical treatments (do the basic research and then the researchers go private for clinical trials, etc), for software it's terrible.
For software *all* of the development is done on the public dime. When they are ready to sell the damn thing they go public. There is *no* private development at all. I find this highly objectionable. However convincing others of this has proven tricky... sigh...
Actually, I think this is a lazy cop-out by people who don't want to do the work of getting the answer.
You are right. I was lazy.
There are several problems with measuring productivity:
1) We have no good measure of objectively assessing the ability of the team members before they start. We don't even have a unit of measurement to report it in.
2) We have no good measure of objectively assessing how well team members will be able to work together before they start. Again we don't even have a unit of measurement.
3) We have no good measure of objectively assessing how complex a problem is before the team members start. Again... lack of units, blah, blah
4) We have no repeatability of problems. Since we can't measure the ability of the team members, nor the ability of the members to work together, we can't simply give the same problem to a several groups using different methodologies and see which one works better. Caveat: we could ignore this problem if we are willing to repeat the problem a HUGE number of times (probably 200 to 300 times would be sufficient)
5) We can not have the same team trying different methodologies. Their ability to work together will change over time in ways we can't measure (although it certainly would be something we'd like to measure since it's part of the point of some agile processes)
6) Even if we have teams doing the same problems, we are interested in non-trivial problems. Thus they will certainly come up with different solutions. Part of the methodologies deals with requirements collection after all. So we must find a way to relate the effectiveness of the solution and weigh it against productivity. Again, no units, yada, yada, yada...
7) We have no objective measure of productivity itself (except maybe the infamous KLOCs).
8) Again we are interested in large difficult problems -- ones that take at least 8 months of work. So even if we do the best that we can, do *you* have enough money to fund 200 6 person teams for 8 months?
These aren't just difficult questions. They are questions that have been posed in the literature over and over again for the past 30 years. There are *no* answers (that I know of anyway). And unfortunately your links shed absolutely no light on the matter either :-(
When I said that measuring productivity in terms of methodology was difficult, I was understating things by a long way. I actually don't think it will ever be possible to measure well.
Good management can build a good solid team and help them develop a working method that is best for the team. It can be a critical factor in success. Unfortunately, good management is pretty damn rare, more's the pity.
I agree with your post. But I want to quibble about one thing. I think there will always be a place for large corporations in software. And, in fact, they have some specific advantages in free software.
In order to make money with free software and be a pure software company, you pretty much have to be doing custom development. But to do that you need customers. Large companies who can keep a sales force around are likely to have an advantage. And they can keep programmers available for new initiatives, similar to the way most "body shops" operate now.
I think the biggest challenge for this to happen is to convince customers that it's cheaper to outsource an entire project based on free software than it is to do it in house and hire consultants. I actually don't think this should be that hard of a sell, but there is always resistance to moving things outside of your managerial control.
I think there's also an opportunity to make some money selling unrelated changes. You often have guys "on the beach" in consulting companies. Have these guys work on the software the company specializes in, but sell "votes" for a couple of bucks on what to do. This could bring in a small revenue stream from smaller organizations, or individuals. I am aware that this approach has been tried and failed miserably, but I'm convinced there's a way to make it bring in *some* income (just not the bread and butter).
This is probably out of date, but when I first started it was still fairly difficult for women to get management roles in a lot of fields. This was different from computer companies where (at least as far as people I've talked to are concerned) promotion prospects were pretty equitable.
I've met many women computer programmers who *only* entered the field because they wanted to get into management. They were driven, goal oriented and worked hard. As such they were very capable in their roles.
This is not to suggest that there aren't women who are interested in programming. I have met many such women. And perhaps more could be made to understand that it's a good field. But the vast majority of women I've worked with had no real interest in programming. And the vast majority of them were fantastic (mainly because they worked hard and got things done).
So, I'm not sure that it really is the case that only top women are going into CS. I think it's simply that their attitude is geared more towards success.
My biggest objection is the lack of credible proof that it actually works any better than the tried an true software methodologies.
But can you provide proof that the "tried and true software methodologies" work?
Our biggest problem in process improvement is that we can't easily measure productivity. If we could, then it would be a walk in the park to determine if one way of doing things was better than another. Instead we can say that project A was successful at meeting its targets while project B was not. Even then management always games the system to claim that their projects were successful. How else would they get promoted?
Lately I've been hearing from a lot of people who claim to agree with agile principles and therefore feel that they must be agile. Whether or not they actually achieve results seems to be secondary. A good example would be, does your team *actually* welcome changing requirements? If not, then I would argue that you aren't agile.
If you read through the agile principles and think to yourself, what would you do to actually achieve this, I hope that people start to realize that becoming agile isn't trivial. In fact, I think many people would argue that it's impossible. Having worked on a couple of teams that were actually agile in this respect, I disagree.
I think scepticism is healthy. But when we're comparing development methodologies it's hard to find ways of comparison. Even though I'm retired from professional programming, if I were to take it up again I wouldn't work in a more traditional setting. Especially one of the XP teams I worked on, while not being particularly exceptional in terms of talent, was one of the most amazing experiences of my career. I highly recommend others to try to get the same feeling. But it is by no means easy.
I think the point was that Sun could easily sell solutions with MySQL without buying the company. So in essence they spent $1 billion on the name.
If they think it will bring in that amount of profit in contracts, then I guess it's worth it. But I wonder if they have the staff left to do that kind of volume. Just some back of the envelope calculations:
10% profit over loaded labour rate
$100K loaded labour rate (in order to undercut in-house development)
equals 10K profit per man-year of development.
or 100K man years of development to break even. Nope... I can't see it working out.
Sorry. No windows here... I've only played the games that work under Linux. But I'd love to take a look at some of the other ones too. What I can't believe is how many of them he's written... Real dedication.
Probably everyone here knows about Kenta Cho, but in case you don't:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html
These are 2d retro games. But the level of creativity is astounding. I found some of them to be a bit weird, but others are total gems. Mu-cade has got to be my favorite. It took me a long time to get into it, but once I did I realized how deep this game is. You can literally spend 10s of hours devising new strategies. And the games generally last less than 5 minutes which means that it's great for people who don't have all day to game.
BBC World Service podcasts are available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/station/worldservice/
I looked at a couple of them (including the World News) and they were all MP3.
I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but at least it's a start.
Large companies back open source software because the software has created a business opportunity for them. If the business opportunity is no longer viable, then the software development may very well stall. While this is a large problem for proprietary development, it is no problem for open source.
When a company backs open source development, it is not charging for licenses of software. They have another revenue stream. So regardless of what that revenue stream is, they are not making money directly off the sale of a single piece of software. This is very important.
There are 2 primary reasons why a piece of software might not stay viable. The first is that it is no longer needed. There are some one-shot pieces of software that are used once and never used again. In this case, probably the company backing the software wrote it on contract. If they did well, they will surely get new contracts. So no problem.
The second reason is that there is something better our there. Now this is really where open source software shines. If the competitor is also open source, the company backing the software can simply switch horses. Software B is better that A? OK, we're going to support B now and suggest that people switch.
Actually, you see this all the time. For instance, Canonical will switch from Pidgon to Epiphany in the next release. Maybe Pidgon dies. Well, if Epiphany is better, then what's the harm? Canonical makes money from building a distribution, not selling software. Companies like Dell pay them to choose the software that will work best for their customers.
So I don't see any reason to worry about corporate support being withdrawn. If corporations have less money to throw around, maybe there will be a shakedown in what projects are supported, but this will just mean more focus. If *all* corporate support was withdrawn then it would mean something very strange was happening. It would mean that open source software was no longer providing business opportunities. I can't imagine what would cause such a thing to happen.
After all, there was a time when most free software was written by individuals. Corporations jumped on the bandwagon because it was good for them. What has changed (or will change) to stop that from being the case?
Sigh... Or even better -- buses that came back from the train station to small towns in the inaka past 8:00 PM.
I've come to the conclusion that transportation in Japan is intentionally slow in order to maintain all the individual cultures in the small towns. When you read about these super fast trains, what you don't realize is that visiting your friend in the neighboring town 40km away is virtually impossible. Even if you have a car, it's quite difficult and slow.
It does make you scratch your head and wonder why they spend *that* much money on something only a few people will use...
What's interesting is that, like open source, you can do just that now if you want. Organize yourself on a voluntary basis. And just like the internet enabled coordination of people who wouldn't ordinarily know about each other in kernel development, so too can it enable you to organize with others that are of like mind.
The tricky bit is having something useful to be organized for. It's all great to get people together to "do something great" (the cheer of a million dead source forge projects). But to start with a seed of a good idea and actually carry it through -- that's rare.
I hope someone does it, because just like the linux kernel, the person starting such a thing definitely won't be me!
What I find interesting is the role of Greenspan in all of this. During the late 90s and the beginning of the 2000s I listened to his little speeches every time he changed (or not) monetary policy. And at the time I thought he was saying, "OK, I've lowered interest rates again. You know I can't keep doing this. We have to change how we're dealing with this. This is just a temporary measure."
By about 2003 I stopped listening because I figured he was being thwarted by other people. When the disaster happened I was actually very surprised to hear blame placed on him. I thought, "Hey, he's been telling you guys there's a problem for a decade. Why was nobody listening?".
But, when I read what he's written now in retrospect, I see nothing of what I thought I heard him say. I can't decide if I just misunderstood him at the time, or if he's just being political. I guess it doesn't matter. But then I also thought the same thing about Colin Powell...
Am I alone in this?
Not praising the worthy prevents contention,
Not esteeming the valuable prevents theft,
Not displaying the beautiful prevents desire.
In this manner the sage governs people:
Emptying their minds,
Filling their bellies,
Weakening their ambitions,
And strengthening their bones.
If people lack knowledge and desire
Then they can not act;
If no action is taken
Harmony remains.
Just thought I'd chime in with an example of where threads are often used, but unnecessary: UI.
You often have a situation where you have a UI, that in addition to collecting your mouse clicks and keystrokes, is monitoring something in the background. Often people use a thread to periodically check the thing and report it's progress to the UI.
This can easily be avoided using the reactor pattern. You simply add a short callback to the main loop of the GUI toolkit -- often it is called "OnIdle()" or some such thing. The callback polls the thing you are interested in and updates the GUI.
I actually use this technique to do real processing too. For instance, if I need to parse a really big file in the background, I will write some code that parses a bit at a time and insert it into the idle loop. It essentially works the same as a really low priority thread -- everything in the UI happens and when it's finished, you get to do your processing. Just be careful to keep your processing short.
The very nice thing about doing things this way is that you don't have to worry so much about concurrency. And it keeps your UI snappy.
And yet there are hundreds of artists on Jamendo (for instance) also doing this. The big acts make big news because they are big. The small acts don't make news at all (because who cares).
There will be a time when an act becomes big simply because of their distribution choices. Perhaps it has already happened (Grateful Dead).
Simply put, if you like their music and you like their business and you've got the cash -- support them. It helps everyone. Even if they became big the old way, they can't change the past.
Having auditioned for an amateur band and listened to their recorded music, I can tell you that good production quality is very important for the resulting listening experience. So some of the assholes are actually of value ;)
But you can hire good sound engineers and a good production studio. The issue we run into is that we have essentially loan sharks who front the money for the recording on the proviso that they get virtually everything that comes in.
OK, a lot of musicians get sucked into the whole "I'm going to strike it rich" scam. I feel sorry for them. But I feel sorrier for the musicians who understand that they have to work a little bit at a time to raise the capital for a quality recording, only to find that they can't sell it because the distributors own everybody. These days we can walk around the distributors and cut them out of the deal. Musicians don't have to sign ridiculous deals just to sell their music.
The top bands will always want to have quality sound engineering. Sound engineers will have jobs. But people are going to have to work their way to the top and build a business rather than be vaulted there by some thug who takes 95% off the top.
Actually, it used to be that commissions on trades were so high that nobody other than people with seats on the exchange could really day-trade. Those people could (and did) play some nasty shenanigans with stocks, but it was easier to control them because there were only a few of them.
Now, of course, with automation, etc trade commissions are extremely small (and in some cases non-existent). Any moron with a little bit of money can turn into a professional gambler. The problem is that it can destabilize the market. Things can rocket out of control.
There is the famous story of Joe Kennedy getting out of the market before the big '29 crash because a shoe shine boy gave him stock advice. The market is overinflated when poor people gamble on the market. When the market turns, they will take their money out -- leading to a crash.
My feeling is that most day trading should be illegal. If you make a trade, then perhaps you should be stopped from further trades on that security for something like a few days. If you have a margin, perhaps you should be required to carry a certain amount of cash (or cash equivalent) to cover margin calls for a certain time.
I definitely haven't thought this through, so maybe it's impossible. But I think the current situation is really leading to massive problems in the future (in fact, unless things change, I'm wondering if the stock market *will* see any substantial gains in the next 20 years or so -- I certainly don't have any money in it right now).
I wish I had mod points.... (I never use the ones I get and when I see a post that deserves modding up I never have points).
Often people don't understand the business of free/open source software. The key is maintaining relationships. Relationships create opportunities for work. Work pays the bills. If you do good work, you build more relationships. Software freedom allows you to build many relationships while you are being paid by one person. It's a useful loop with positive feedback. The more you do, the more you can potentially benefit.
Accepting this kind of deal means taking yourself out of that loop. If you have spent time building up your reputation, then you need to be compensated for that. You have to consider that you must be compensated for all the work that you won't be able to do in the future -- for all the relationships you won't be able to make.
I agree that unless it's a huge amount of money, it's not worth it. In fact, I wouldn't do it at all unless I had no other choices. Agreeing to put yourself in a bad position in order to receive money is a recipe for unhappiness (especially if your employer gets used to pushing you around with money). Life is SO much better if you find a way to receive money AND improve your situation at the same time.
That's why I like free/open source software.
This is an honest question. How do I replace Gmail? Here's my problem:
I want email. If I use my ISP's mail service, I can't change ISP's without notifying everyone one earth what my new email adress is (i.e., I get locked in). If I set up my own mail server I can't email a lot of people because my machine isn't on their whitelist. In fact, the typical block of adresses I'm going to be getting from my ISP is likely to be blacklisted.
It seems I *have* to go with a big central mail provider. If there is an alternative, I'd like to hear about it.
Thank you for that description. I'm not a web developer, but I occasionally build web applications for my own personal use. This is really helpful!
Yes, I'm going to agree. I've interviewed a lot of people. And I have one rule: I never interview someone unless I think I might hire them. If I look at the resume and think, "This person has potential", then they get an interview. At this point its their job to lose.
While the people who are responding to you may have said that your tech support background was the reason, it's probably just because they don't want to make you feel bad. They already know about your background before they interview you. Interviewing is a real pain in the ass. Nobody is going to look at a resume and think, "Hmm... here's someone we really don't want. But, hey, let's interview him for fun."
When I first started out I had exactly the same problem. I got tons of interviews and no job offers. Actually it wasn't until I got my first job (apparently there was some dissent about hiring me, but I squeaked in) that somebody told me how bad I was at interviewing.
Interviewing is a skill that you can learn. There are lots of good books in the library that will give you good pointers. Practicing with others is also a good idea, but I highly recommend doing some reading so that you can understand what's going on in an interview.
I always wonder when people say this kind of thing because I never find Japan to seem overly crowded. So I looked it up.
Japan *does* have roughly 10 times the population density of the US (339/km2 vs 31/km2). But in comparison to Europe, it's not really very different. For instance the Netherlands and Belgium have higher population densities (395 and 341). The UK has similar density at 246.
But I think especially when we're talking about fiber rollout, we're mostly talking about doing so in *cities*. In this case, the US, Japan and even Canada (at 3.2/km2) are going to have similar population densities. So I have a hard time thinking that this rollout in Japan is going to be significantly less expensive than it would be in the US.