Come on, this is ridiculous. Every half-competent IT staffer in the country understands the value in free products ranging from IE to gcc.
The understanding that some very good programming is available free is so pervasive that I actually don't believe you and I think you are extrapolating what you think is an "interesting" argument into a series of imagined meetings. If not, give me specifics to disprove me.
Good post, and on top of the bad will they are creating, Sun is doomed in the market.
Linux is peeling away their low end (notwithstanding their effort to derail the linux rack market by buying and then effectively scuttling Cobalt), and IBM is shaking down their top end.
Microsoft continues to confound Sun, even as McNealy turns up the vitriol. Scott - let me make this brief - you cannot beat Microsoft. Stop trying. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs - play nice or route around them, but don't try to take them on directly. They're tougher and wealthier and more influential than you.
Hardware is getting cheaper, and software is becoming a commodity. Services are the last high margin business left, and Sun isn't a big player.
The original screed is so chock full of generalizations, exceptions, arguments and counter-arguments its nearly impossible to tell what this expert in communicating is trying to say...other than he thinks people who smell like him are smarter than people who don't.
BTW: when you go to your manager to "communicate" I suggest you refrain from using the words....
Yet Steve Ballmer is a loudmouth with a temper who berates employees and not only leads the world's most powerful tech company, but he is also one of the wealthiest people in the world.
For every "communicator" I can show you a goose-stepper who gets results (and vice versa).
Re:So many absurd generalizations, so little time.
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 2
But your post is simplistic. Management is driven largely by the domain. Managing a group of software developers is not the same as managing a group of machinists or a group of bakers or an assembly line. Each requires domain experience. This is why most commerce grads work in marketing, advertising, and accounting - this is where they have domain experience. Not all senior execs have domain experience but they often have key partners who do - look at Lou Gerstner at IBM for example.
Commerce undergrads are not "trained managers" in any case, they are trained accountants and advertising folks who take rudimentary management theory.
So many absurd generalizations, so little time.
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Engineers are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Libral Arts graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Computer Science graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
History graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
These are ridiculous generalizations that have absolutely no bearing in the "real world". Check out the backgrounds of the great corporate leaders of the last half-century. Read "Good to Great" or another book that describes their qualities.
Where they all "commerce graduates"? Was there an engineer in there? An arts grad? How did that happen? They weren't "supposed" to be there?
You are taking a deterministic approach that says the degree you choose when you are seventeen determines if you ever have the capacity to lead. How absurd.
You may pass it off as a troll, but in there is a nugget of truth - people living in the "colonies" during the time of the revolutionary war lived in a much much different world and their views reflect that.
Most people then lived in rural areas with little or no contact with government of any kind on a regular basis. Self-reliance wasn't a virtue, it was a way of life. Isolation was the norm, not the exception.
If Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson lived in a world where technologies presented instant and grave dangers to random individuals, you can be assured their writings would reflect that.
Want a society without surveillance? Try going back to 1975. Any time after that, and you get into the era of purchasing databases, phone lists, credit card tracking, and rudimentary video surveillance.
What is happening now is simply the culmination of the long ongoing process to surveil society totally.
Since its inevitable, you might as well look at the good side - retinal scanners may cut lines at airports from four hours to one hour. Would you rather stand in line four times as long to protect the sanctity of your retinal image?
Sure! Immerse yourself in a dying, idiosyncratic language that has little support, few examples of outstanding commercial successes, and a tiny support community. Spend months relearning everything you know about CS theory just so you can implement quicksort in two lines less than you would have in language X.
Congrats! You are now a purveyor and advocate of a minority language. Take a seat beside the COBOL programmers trying to eek a retirement out of the last contract they can land.
Ruby simply didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of Perl, Java or Python. Its elegant but not groundbreaking, and frankly the market for programming languages is already overpopulated.
Regardless of its strengths, the number of Python programmers in proportion to Java, Perl and VB programmers is small. So you are going to pay more to develop Python code if you can get people at all. And then you have to worry about replacing them, which might get tougher once C# gets into the mix and dilutes the talent pool further.
It just isn't worth it in the long run to go with a minority language, even if it has features that are elegant. Yes this is dismal, but at some point the market for programming languages was going to become a two horse race. C'est la vie.
If it is actually best suited for this problem, then the other employees should LEARN it.
And while your programmers are all off on a three week course, your competition is releasing a slightly less elegant, but functionally equivalent soltuion before you are, because they just used the language they knew. Congrats, you're out of business!
Choosing the language is a huge economic decision in any project. The language that is most suited to solve the problem may not be the tool that most is the most economical in the long run. Take some exotic minority languages - lisp, prolog, etc. Sure they may seem appealing for solving a group of problems, then you realize that since harldy anyone practices them for a living anymore, you are paying 2x for support over its lifetime, if you can find staff at all.
Often it simply doesn't pay to use a minority language, even if it seems better suited to the problem.
By your thinking, we should all stop using Unix because most people don't use it
Well, within the unix market itself this trend is in fact happening as linux kills off minority unixes (which may in fact have advantages over linux in some areas). The market can support two OSs - and its obvious that those will be Win32 and linux. Other OSs may be stronger, but it doesn't matter anymore, the computing market does not favor the minority solution in the long run.
Smart managers will let their programmers use whatever gets the job done.
So if a solitary programmer decides Prolog is their favorite language, they should just go ahead and use it? What if no one else in the office knows Prolog? You end up with read-only code because no one had the foresight to understand that minority languages are a dead-end in a team environment.
The powers that be have decided - statically typed, object-oriented languages are what you are going to work with, not because they are better or more productive but for two reasons:
1. Its what "everyone else" is perceived to be using,
2. Programming cannot be suitably be turned into a MacJob until the variance in the toolset is reduced.
Microsoft's.Net and Java are going to occupy 70% of the brainspace for programming in the next ten years, and these languages conform to my description above.
Sure, Lisp is cool - its also dead in the market, so stop trying to resurrect it based on its coolness. No one cares.
The market for alternative operating systems has completely dried up, so you should really be asking what will be in future versions of Windows and Linux, because unless there is a huge surge in OS research, these are going to be all thats left in ten years.
The prevailing talk among the oucrts is that BT is going down a dead-end and no court is particularly interested in pursuing an obvious legal morass. Added to which it is widely known that Xerox has a strong case for prior art.
IP holders aren't interested in any of these proposals. They're only interested in dichotomizing the world into customers who are gouged, and pirates who are prosecuted.
What is their motivation for changing their licensing?? You can argue that a flexible license would reduce piracy, but frankly these compaies are already doing a good job of shutting down major piracy services. I just don't see any motivation for change.
Slashdot Mirror
The understanding that some very good programming is available free is so pervasive that I actually don't believe you and I think you are extrapolating what you think is an "interesting" argument into a series of imagined meetings. If not, give me specifics to disprove me.
Linux is peeling away their low end (notwithstanding their effort to derail the linux rack market by buying and then effectively scuttling Cobalt), and IBM is shaking down their top end.
Microsoft continues to confound Sun, even as McNealy turns up the vitriol. Scott - let me make this brief - you cannot beat Microsoft. Stop trying. Take a lesson from Steve Jobs - play nice or route around them, but don't try to take them on directly. They're tougher and wealthier and more influential than you.
Hardware is getting cheaper, and software is becoming a commodity. Services are the last high margin business left, and Sun isn't a big player.
False. He's been there from the very earliest days.
Your point, on the other hand, sums it up well.
Yet Steve Ballmer is a loudmouth with a temper who berates employees and not only leads the world's most powerful tech company, but he is also one of the wealthiest people in the world.
For every "communicator" I can show you a goose-stepper who gets results (and vice versa).
Commerce undergrads are not "trained managers" in any case, they are trained accountants and advertising folks who take rudimentary management theory.
Libral Arts graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
Computer Science graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
History graduates are not supposed to manage people, nor do they have the proper education to do so.
These are ridiculous generalizations that have absolutely no bearing in the "real world". Check out the backgrounds of the great corporate leaders of the last half-century. Read "Good to Great" or another book that describes their qualities.
Where they all "commerce graduates"? Was there an engineer in there? An arts grad? How did that happen? They weren't "supposed" to be there?
You are taking a deterministic approach that says the degree you choose when you are seventeen determines if you ever have the capacity to lead. How absurd.
Because only one thing counts in this business gents...get them to sign on the line which is dotted.
Most people then lived in rural areas with little or no contact with government of any kind on a regular basis. Self-reliance wasn't a virtue, it was a way of life. Isolation was the norm, not the exception.
If Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson lived in a world where technologies presented instant and grave dangers to random individuals, you can be assured their writings would reflect that.
What is happening now is simply the culmination of the long ongoing process to surveil society totally.
Since its inevitable, you might as well look at the good side - retinal scanners may cut lines at airports from four hours to one hour. Would you rather stand in line four times as long to protect the sanctity of your retinal image?
"Better" doesn't matter. In how many markets for any type of product does "best" win????
Lisp is dead, even if its better. Learning it now is a waste of time.
Its amusing to note how not one person on this article makes any mention of economic factors. Sure, go ahead, use ML. See you in two years.
Congrats! You are now a purveyor and advocate of a minority language. Take a seat beside the COBOL programmers trying to eek a retirement out of the last contract they can land.
Ruby simply didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of Perl, Java or Python. Its elegant but not groundbreaking, and frankly the market for programming languages is already overpopulated.
It just isn't worth it in the long run to go with a minority language, even if it has features that are elegant. Yes this is dismal, but at some point the market for programming languages was going to become a two horse race. C'est la vie.
And while your programmers are all off on a three week course, your competition is releasing a slightly less elegant, but functionally equivalent soltuion before you are, because they just used the language they knew. Congrats, you're out of business!
Sorry, Slashdot post length won't allow it. Your post doesn't demonstrate anything.
Often it simply doesn't pay to use a minority language, even if it seems better suited to the problem.
Well, within the unix market itself this trend is in fact happening as linux kills off minority unixes (which may in fact have advantages over linux in some areas). The market can support two OSs - and its obvious that those will be Win32 and linux. Other OSs may be stronger, but it doesn't matter anymore, the computing market does not favor the minority solution in the long run.
So if a solitary programmer decides Prolog is their favorite language, they should just go ahead and use it? What if no one else in the office knows Prolog? You end up with read-only code because no one had the foresight to understand that minority languages are a dead-end in a team environment.
1. Its what "everyone else" is perceived to be using,
2. Programming cannot be suitably be turned into a MacJob until the variance in the toolset is reduced.
Microsoft's .Net and Java are going to occupy 70% of the brainspace for programming in the next ten years, and these languages conform to my description above.
Sure, Lisp is cool - its also dead in the market, so stop trying to resurrect it based on its coolness. No one cares.
The market for alternative operating systems has completely dried up, so you should really be asking what will be in future versions of Windows and Linux, because unless there is a huge surge in OS research, these are going to be all thats left in ten years.
You are thinking of Ted Nelson, the self-described "father of hypertext".
I wouldn't get too worried about this.
What is their motivation for changing their licensing?? You can argue that a flexible license would reduce piracy, but frankly these compaies are already doing a good job of shutting down major piracy services. I just don't see any motivation for change.