Plot out my day, typically I have between 8 to 12 hours of planned meetings every day. I decide which ones I will attend, which I will have someone in my org attend and which ones will not be attended. They go into my "book."
Then I look in my "book" at what I accomplished yesterday and moved any important unaccomplished tasks from yesterday to today. At the same time I look at my meeting list for today and add any items that need accomplishing (I will get more items as the day wears on, but these are the important things, the long term goals that don't get constant "oh god oh god oh god the world is on fire" focus and you can lose them if you are not diligent.)
Then I start to wander around the floor to find people and ask them how things are going and getting feel for what they are up to, since I get in about a half hour before they do I catch them before they are doing anything important. I also have 2/3rds of my folks spread around the world so I tend to use instant messenger to talk to them as well, our European folks typically have a few more hours to go and our Indian ones will stay up late to catch me at 8 am.
Then I head downstairs for a diet pepsi and then typically take my first call of the day. I spend the rest of the day meeting all the time focused on my goals to make sure I clear off as many as I can in a day.
Rush Limbaugh (which is who we are talking about here) had publically stated what should happen to all drug abusers, it wasn't until he had a substance abuse problem did he realize how perhaps this might happen to a person. The reason this was news was not becuase he had an drug problem (plenty of right and left wing public personalities check into and out of rehab all the time.) Rush had set himself up as a moral paragon and then was exposed to be somewhat less than that.
Now as to the legal beating he took (where the prosecuters used his private medical records to try to prove he was doctor shopping was a clearly a step too far.) I bet Rush still rails on the ACLU who did step up to defend his position though. What did happen in Rush's case could be best described as schadenfreude.
As to congress... Come on. It is as though everyone slept though Civics class. Our gubbiment was built on conflict. The admin can't just send cops in to arrest the legislative branch. Each arm is co-equal. So they could not find 10k in Jefferson's fridge, what made them think they would find it in his office? It isn't like the need to find that 10k to convict the guy.
You know if this were true my inbox would not be full of hot girl on girl action girls who want to meet me, and the other come-ons. I will agree that most legitmate porn vendors who have an acutal business plan that involves selling porn to consenting adults probably will register with the filters to help make sure it does not get in the hands of kids. But are they really most of the porn vendors out there? I tend to think not.
It seems to me this is really a non issue. First off, somehow you must do both of these tasks (track code versions and track defects) currently. Otherwise how do you get your job done? Version Control is pretty simple, just set it up. I assume you have your source in some shared area and your boss goes in and messes around from time to time in there. It is not hard to either write a script to find that or run commit from time to time from the shared dir to catch his changes. At the very least run a commit from the common area before you push out your changes to spot any potential merge issues.
I don't know how anyone writes software without version control, but I work with people who think it is not necessary. What they do is spend most of their day trying to figure out how to be more lax with this than those of us who want tighter controls (after all I don't even build my software we have a guy who does this to make sure if any of us leave the build process can repeated.) There are still problems with this as there are techniques but we are working on fixing that too. It makes me crazy when I get a demo of feature X and say I like that and the guy can't get back to X at some later point.
Now as to defect tracking... I don't think it is necessary to have a tool to track it. I work on a really big system and we have to do it becuase there are hundreds of developers who use our tools, which are developed by tens of developers across multiple timezones. No one can keep all that in their mind. But on smaller projects that we spin out we leave it up to the developers working on it as to how they will track defects. They range from complex systems that track all work to my personal small project fav "The Jahnke List (TM)." The Jahnke List works like this. I only worry about 5 things at any one time. The 5 things I work on are the 5 things people ask me the most about on that project. As such I hit the big problems lotsa little ones slip through the cracks but who cares they are little problems. I keep the list written down and in plain sight which allows folks to adjust priority and suggest things for the list.
They all work becuase people make them work. Unlike version control, which is like putting on a seatbelt. Defect tracking is more like directions on how to get where you are going. Some folks print out maps with notes on them and mark off milestones as they pass them so they know how complete they are. Others get vague idea where they are going and rely upon something to happen as they get close to get them where they need to be. After all you are looking for is the point where severe defects have fallen compared to new features as a signal to release. Most developers who work on a system have a good sense for this anyway, a defect tracker in this case makes the boss happy (it quantifies the risk aspect to compare to the reward.)
But either way in your case, since the system you currently use isn't very formal at all, adding rigor to it should not be hard without interrupting what you currently do. What gets interesting is trying to place agile methodologies into a strict waterfall process. But this is the opposite problem.
As to the folks who say quit. I must say I agree. Find a new gig, one that realizes what you do is a valuable asset that needs a minimum amount of protection. Becuase the first time things go to hell for whatever reason, you are in for a VERY uncomfortable ride, and you may be forced to look for a new job anyway, so avoid the desperation of looking for a job after having been fired/laid off/shellshocked.
It does suprise me that that folks don't take a step back and consider what Opera is doing here. While I was still at Motorola they were working with us and IBM on MultiModal interfaces which is what this things is.
And I and many others think it makes a lot of sense. Presentations are a good example of helping people understand the problems Multimodal is meant to solve. Obviously we were interested in the fact that devices got smaller with each passing year and no matter how we tried there were still 26 chars in the alphabet.
Multimodal is still a very new technique and a lot of work has to be done to define how it should work. Just like on phones when you start speaking you expect the other person to stop these interfaces evolvoed over a period of time, they are in many ways so subtle you won't notice them until you do them wrong and say... Hmmm that isn't right lets try this.
I know some of the earliest Multimodal interfaces we had were tied to the Broadband TV stuff that Motorola's recently purchased Geneal Inst group did. So the idea was pick up your nextel phone and using PTT tell the TV to list all the shows currently playing with Cary Grant in them. These kinds of queries are easy to write for voice and are quite powerful.
Obviously the nextel phone was the wrong input for it, but it shows the strength of Multimodal. I could fill out voice dialogs using email or SMS pages if I wanted.
The first version of the Motorola Multimodal Fusion Server worked on the NexTel network and not only was able to combine modalities on different machines but was the first example of Distributed Speech Recognition on a public network, and I am positive a lot of the stuff we did 2 years ago in our labs will find it's way onto your PDA and cell phone soon. Opera is giving you a frist crack at it.
All the bozo's from Ameritech had to do was attend the second WWW Conference at the University of Chicago and watch a pair of ex coworks display the "Phonecia" system.
Then run home and patent it. Hell I even had a system that did this before I got to the U of C that I developed in 1994 as well.
When I finished school I moved to Arizona in '87 or so to be near my sweetie (who is still my sweetie.) I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life so I got a temp job digging ditches for the U of A's Environmental Research Lab (ERL) which was out by the Tucson International Airport. If you ever dug a ditch in Arizona you can appreciate what a sucky job this was, the calcified sediment is something to behold, but I was never in better shape in my life.
Anyway, the job was pretty mindless and it gave me plenty of time to consider what I wanted to do with my life. When one day my boss told me to get in the van he had a job for me, in previous times this meant a trip to the chancellors house to dig ditches for him. So I got in the van and we drove up to Oracle where they were building the BioSphere II. Man was it cool, but it was my lot in life to dig a bunch of ditches for communcations lines and power lines and such. I was there a few days. I only dug ditches for a few months or so.
I decided that computers might be a good place to direct my energies I got a job in an R & D group. But I do think back on my time with a shovel when ever I look at my somewhat rotund figure. Although all the pictures my wife has of me during that time are of me sleeping in my chair. I was tired a lot.
I did get to do some more work for them later while at the University of Arizona in the Molecular & Cellular Biology Department. It was while the goofballs were still in charge. I was really disappointed to learn how nutty those guys were, but I guess I should have expected it. I was very happy when Columbia stepped up when it all fell apart but I was disappointed they never really did much with it.
Just curious where you think horsepower comes from. It is the torque. You can only spin a mechanical system so fast, if there is no torque behind it you won't get horsepower.
The F1 cars have low torque but super high RPM's. They also have millions to throw at the problem. If you are gonna street race get as much displacement and stroke as you can.
There are companies who will for a percentage of your take submit patents on your behalf. Yea, I know you give up some back end, may have to give up on the front end as well, but it should be cheaper.
Personally if you have a unique and novel idea that you think might be worth some money some day I don't see why you are balking at legal fees. I would give the attorneys a call again, and see if you can do some of the work and let them do the bits you are not comfortable with.
Anyone can submit a patent. You can change parts of the patent once it is submitted (just about everything but the claims I think, if you quote me you are a fool.)
What I would do is:
1) Go to the USPTO and look at a bunch of patents.
2) Make a really good stab at copying what they have done.
3) Do an as exhaustive search as you can, citing patents that might infringe upon your patent as well as patents your patent my depend upon.
4) Go to the patent attorney with that and then let them do what you haven't done,
5) File it.
It will still cost you some money, but since you will have done most of the work yourself. It should not be too expensive. If you really want to know how to file a patent get a job at a company where intellecutal property is a big deal. Let them patent a few of your ideas and make sure to sit in on all the meetings that pertain to your patent. Quit and then start filing your own.
Ohhhhhhhhh scary... How in the world did you find all that out Mr. Anonymous? Seems like you want me to join your little cabal more than you are letting on.
You are the one ignoring the facts... Again all you can do (anonymously no less) tell me that I am a reactionary... You can't be bothered to come up with a nom de net and you think you won??
I suppose your genetic disposition to idiocy keeps the bozone layer so thick around your head that you would not know a good idea if it shot you in the temple.
Come on anonymous... Show me how tough you are again.
Huh? "willful misinterpretation and frank paranoia"?
Tell me what was misinterperted. He likes to tell his fans he doesn't want to talk to them becuase it steals time from his work. He said he talks to convicted pedophiles (I assume they are convicted, given I assume he is talking to prisoners and not guards.)
How is this misrepresented? It is what he said. It is in black and white, how can you look at these facts and praise him for having stated them?
Sorry you feel that way about your kids, but why would I want to be responsible for your fucked up offspring? If you left them alone with me I would probably shoot them in the head to do my part in ridding the world of your obviously defective genes.
Perhaps he was honest, but puulleeze, in every novel I have read by this guy he whines incessantly about how fans just eat up his time. He can't possibly find time to chat with us at shows or in email or with letters. And yet, he manages to find time to be penpals with convicted Pedophiles.
When I was 13 his stories were OK. Dating 13 year old girls and trying to get into their pants was OK too. But at 23 it isn't, and at 46 it just sounds perverse. He does think women are objects, which is cool I guess, but his attitude's honesty isn't anything to laud. A dirty old man is a dirty old man regardless of how well he tries to hide it.
Then why get the degree at all? Why not sit back and persue the parts of computer science that you like in your own spare time? Why take classes, be used as slave labor by faculty advisors and worry about tests. No class I have never been in has been able to effectively work through any book assigned. Parts are skipped, other parts are focused on too much. In the Rennisance many many many educated men learned a great deal without collecting degrees.
Do you have an undergraduate degree? If so many universities are offering "Professional" Masters Degrees which usually can be completed in a year by highly competant people if they don't mind putting life on hold while they get it (as well as lose a lot of sleep and do a mediocre job at work for that time.) Classes are for the most part at night and on weekends.
The upside is that your employer may pay for it, the programs can also be spread over a couple of years as well. When you are finished you have a real Masters Degree in Computer Science.
If you don't have an undergraduate degree you need to realize that there is a lot more to it than just taking CS courses. All accredited universities and colleges attempt to teach you more than one thing. You need to take classes that do not apply to your degree to make you a more rounded person. A good think IMHO.
There are universities which will fast track you on undergraduate degrees. Places like the University of Phoenix, which are all over the damn place. But even still finishing a degree will take on the order of 3 to 4 years (most undergraduate degrees currently take 5 years), but the cirriculum is designed to accomodate people who are working during the day, classes are held at night and on weekends.
That being said is many universities are being more progressive about enrollment and are attempting to make classes more accessable to working students. I dunno where you live, but if it is in a somewhat large metropolitan area it is quite likely a traditional 4 year university will have programs to accomodate you.
There are even universites which offer Distance Learning classes. I tend to dismiss these program however, as the most important thing you will do in school is forge relationships with the people you are there with. Studying in groups is much more effective than doing it alone, you will retain more and expand your circle of friends.
Finally your only 24 for crissakes. What difference does it make if it takes 4 years to get a degree? You don't have to quit your job to get educated, a cousin of mine has been going to school at night for the last 15 years right now he is working on an MBA, he has some other masters degree as well, he just like going to school.
I don't know what you do in the evening but if it is like most people you watch TV why not just go back to school take a few years get the degree you want. As I said the plus side is many employers will pay for this, certainly with in the consulting community I am sure they would be happy to pay for a CS Degree, although some just want you to get an MBA.
Just go do it, it will take some time, but that is something you have a LOT of right now, believe it or not.
I want to start by saying, before you do ANYTHING make it a priority for your team to start writing test cases and implementing them. If you are going to change your system you want your tests to find the problems not your users. Once you have a test suite that effectively tests your system (you will be surpised how quickly these tests will lead to enhancements in your software BTW) then you need to decide if you really want to maintain two seperate teams.
One team will be doing maintainence on your old system that is in use. You can't not keep this team in place, you have to keep customers happy while you do the new thang. You need the second team developing the new sytem (their job will be difficult with good tests, but impossible with out them.) Without tests they will have something that looks kinda like the old thing, but behave differently in a million small ways, some without a doubt will be better, many will not.
The other thing, and more sensible IMHO, is to tell pairs of programmars, to spend some hours each week working on the system together. Pairs becuase this is an excellent opportunity for people with deep knowledge of their systems to share it with other memebers of the team as they ferret out ways to refactor the code so more of it can be shared.
One day a week you can have a team working on some part, documenting spaghetti code, or pulling out examples of where code was cut and pasted and create a function which is called from both places. The stated goal should be fore each team to remove some number of lines of overall code from the project each week.
Remember the metric is the more lines of code you have the more errors you have, make it a mandate for your team to be removing code as well as adding, actually on our team we don't brag about how many lines we added in a week, we brag about how many we removed.
Anyway, the idea is by getting teams to do pair programming looking a specfic areas with good tests you can whip your code into shape pretty fast, and spread the knowledge of the system around as well. AND instead of a jarring change when you unveil the new system you can have gradual changes as fixes are tested and added.
Obviously if your overall architecture is broken and can't move forward this won't work. But it seems to me you are not fully convinced of that fact yet. At the very least by having teams look at code they may not be overaly famililar with you might find that team members can cross pollinate and share good ideas.
The viral nature of the GPL is anti-capitalist. It removes control of work from the creator and gives it to the community at large. Stallman is a kook, a kook that had a powerful message and a dogged rough edged style of delivering it. And as such is still a valuable member of our community.
But to say that the end users freedoms are not only as important as the developers but superceeds them as well is just plain hogwash.
Some software is opensourced becuase no one will buy it. Some is opensourced becuase one person does not have the ability to do it all and hopes there are people who will help them. Some software is opensourced becuase they want peer review, smart people looking at it and making it better. And some software is opensourced becuase the developers are hunting for an audience. Very little software is opensourced becuase the users deserve the software that is being produced, BUT we need these people as well, they are important.
But I will not let that last group tell me that becuase they did it I must do it as well. I have a mortgage to pay and a family to support. Many "OpenSource" companies are working on closed soure versions of their software becuase the open ones don't make money. Mainly becuase the end users don't want good quality software, they don't want software that solves their problems. They just want free software. And so why should I as a developer give a shit about their freedoms with my work?
Apparently you have never worked for gubbiment at any level, committees are how things are done, consensus. Isn't the always the best way to get things done, but remember the person who you must please most got his/her job in an election. As such they MUST have some input. Universities work this way as well, but becuase faculty contribute to departments via outside funding.
So having said that, when I was tangentially involved in a similar fiasco, the reporting went like thus. The actual nuts and bolts of the operation went via IT. The programmars and machine administration was done via IT content specialists were in Marketing (actually they were departmental admins, but liked it when we told them they were Marketers.)
We had a template all departments were supposed to conform to, none of them liked it, but the template had it's own process which was a big ass committee and was updated on average every 9 months. This way if there were complaints about how the template looked there was a committee to redress it, and we had a stable spec from which to operate. It also effectively lets you turn away requests to do one offs, which are time wasters, you can just point to the spec and point out that what user XYZ wants can't currently be done and to bring it up at the next template meeting.
The IT guys were responsible for maintaining the template, keeping it consistant with what the template committee wanted (if you wanna hear boring some of those meetings were real dooozies, arguments bout font size and exactly how things should be named, as well as what EXACT colors should be used for what banners.) Anyway becuase we used a templated approach the content folks just opened up the editor which was online and inserted the data they needed. When the template was changed they did not have to reenter data it was just plugged into the template.
By doing this we put a clear line of seperation between what was content and what was IT and no one ever got too bent out of shape about it. But like I said what helped the most is that what things looked like was defined from the start and it was then our responsibility as IT to provide both the tools and server support for the content people, they could do it if they wanted but 9 times out of 10 they just came down with drawings and floppy discs and let one of our own interns plug it all in.
IT was happy becuase my programmers had a well defined set of tasks to work on, not an ever growing long list of one offs that had to be done for X, Y or Z. We did have a lot of push back when we moved from departments doing their own thing and moving into the template so we used a carrot and stick approach. We told them we would take their current system and convert it to the template form. We would then tell them once converted we would no longer support their old web infrastructure. If it was on our machines we turned it off, if it was on their we never came to fix the problems.
The deparments liked it becuase they could participate in what the template looked like and we did most of the work. They had a set of tools which let them modify the data whenever they wanted.
In all I have been gone a few years the process is still in place no one loves it but it has not devolved into pure chaos again either.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing I do when I get in is:
Plot out my day, typically I have between 8 to 12 hours of planned meetings every day. I decide which ones I will attend, which I will have someone in my org attend and which ones will not be attended. They go into my "book."
Then I look in my "book" at what I accomplished yesterday and moved any important unaccomplished tasks from yesterday to today. At the same time I look at my meeting list for today and add any items that need accomplishing (I will get more items as the day wears on, but these are the important things, the long term goals that don't get constant "oh god oh god oh god the world is on fire" focus and you can lose them if you are not diligent.)
Then I start to wander around the floor to find people and ask them how things are going and getting feel for what they are up to, since I get in about a half hour before they do I catch them before they are doing anything important. I also have 2/3rds of my folks spread around the world so I tend to use instant messenger to talk to them as well, our European folks typically have a few more hours to go and our Indian ones will stay up late to catch me at 8 am.
Then I head downstairs for a diet pepsi and then typically take my first call of the day. I spend the rest of the day meeting all the time focused on my goals to make sure I clear off as many as I can in a day.
Rush Limbaugh (which is who we are talking about here) had publically stated what should happen to all drug abusers, it wasn't until he had a substance abuse problem did he realize how perhaps this might happen to a person. The reason this was news was not becuase he had an drug problem (plenty of right and left wing public personalities check into and out of rehab all the time.) Rush had set himself up as a moral paragon and then was exposed to be somewhat less than that.
Now as to the legal beating he took (where the prosecuters used his private medical records to try to prove he was doctor shopping was a clearly a step too far.) I bet Rush still rails on the ACLU who did step up to defend his position though. What did happen in Rush's case could be best described as schadenfreude.
As to congress... Come on. It is as though everyone slept though Civics class. Our gubbiment was built on conflict. The admin can't just send cops in to arrest the legislative branch. Each arm is co-equal. So they could not find 10k in Jefferson's fridge, what made them think they would find it in his office? It isn't like the need to find that 10k to convict the guy.
Jer,
You know if this were true my inbox would not be full of hot girl on girl action girls who want to meet me, and the other come-ons. I will agree that most legitmate porn vendors who have an acutal business plan that involves selling porn to consenting adults probably will register with the filters to help make sure it does not get in the hands of kids. But are they really most of the porn vendors out there? I tend to think not.
It seems to me this is really a non issue. First off, somehow you must do both of these tasks (track code versions and track defects) currently. Otherwise how do you get your job done? Version Control is pretty simple, just set it up. I assume you have your source in some shared area and your boss goes in and messes around from time to time in there. It is not hard to either write a script to find that or run commit from time to time from the shared dir to catch his changes. At the very least run a commit from the common area before you push out your changes to spot any potential merge issues.
I don't know how anyone writes software without version control, but I work with people who think it is not necessary. What they do is spend most of their day trying to figure out how to be more lax with this than those of us who want tighter controls (after all I don't even build my software we have a guy who does this to make sure if any of us leave the build process can repeated.) There are still problems with this as there are techniques but we are working on fixing that too. It makes me crazy when I get a demo of feature X and say I like that and the guy can't get back to X at some later point.
Now as to defect tracking... I don't think it is necessary to have a tool to track it. I work on a really big system and we have to do it becuase there are hundreds of developers who use our tools, which are developed by tens of developers across multiple timezones. No one can keep all that in their mind. But on smaller projects that we spin out we leave it up to the developers working on it as to how they will track defects. They range from complex systems that track all work to my personal small project fav "The Jahnke List (TM)." The Jahnke List works like this. I only worry about 5 things at any one time. The 5 things I work on are the 5 things people ask me the most about on that project. As such I hit the big problems lotsa little ones slip through the cracks but who cares they are little problems. I keep the list written down and in plain sight which allows folks to adjust priority and suggest things for the list.
They all work becuase people make them work. Unlike version control, which is like putting on a seatbelt. Defect tracking is more like directions on how to get where you are going. Some folks print out maps with notes on them and mark off milestones as they pass them so they know how complete they are. Others get vague idea where they are going and rely upon something to happen as they get close to get them where they need to be. After all you are looking for is the point where severe defects have fallen compared to new features as a signal to release. Most developers who work on a system have a good sense for this anyway, a defect tracker in this case makes the boss happy (it quantifies the risk aspect to compare to the reward.)
But either way in your case, since the system you currently use isn't very formal at all, adding rigor to it should not be hard without interrupting what you currently do. What gets interesting is trying to place agile methodologies into a strict waterfall process. But this is the opposite problem.
As to the folks who say quit. I must say I agree. Find a new gig, one that realizes what you do is a valuable asset that needs a minimum amount of protection. Becuase the first time things go to hell for whatever reason, you are in for a VERY uncomfortable ride, and you may be forced to look for a new job anyway, so avoid the desperation of looking for a job after having been fired/laid off/shellshocked.
Jer,
It does suprise me that that folks don't take a step back and consider what Opera is doing here. While I was still at Motorola they were working with us and IBM on MultiModal interfaces which is what this things is.
And I and many others think it makes a lot of sense. Presentations are a good example of helping people understand the problems Multimodal is meant to solve. Obviously we were interested in the fact that devices got smaller with each passing year and no matter how we tried there were still 26 chars in the alphabet.
Multimodal is still a very new technique and a lot of work has to be done to define how it should work. Just like on phones when you start speaking you expect the other person to stop these interfaces evolvoed over a period of time, they are in many ways so subtle you won't notice them until you do them wrong and say... Hmmm that isn't right lets try this.
I know some of the earliest Multimodal interfaces we had were tied to the Broadband TV stuff that Motorola's recently purchased Geneal Inst group did. So the idea was pick up your nextel phone and using PTT tell the TV to list all the shows currently playing with Cary Grant in them. These kinds of queries are easy to write for voice and are quite powerful.
Obviously the nextel phone was the wrong input for it, but it shows the strength of Multimodal. I could fill out voice dialogs using email or SMS pages if I wanted.
The first version of the Motorola Multimodal Fusion Server worked on the NexTel network and not only was able to combine modalities on different machines but was the first example of Distributed Speech Recognition on a public network, and I am positive a lot of the stuff we did 2 years ago in our labs will find it's way onto your PDA and cell phone soon. Opera is giving you a frist crack at it.
Jer,
Exactly which RFC defines the number of mouse buttons standard?
Jer,
Forgot the link. http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/ Campus.Infosys/kruper/lavenant.html
All the bozo's from Ameritech had to do was attend the second WWW Conference at the University of Chicago and watch a pair of ex coworks display the "Phonecia" system.
Then run home and patent it. Hell I even had a system that did this before I got to the U of C that I developed in 1994 as well.
Jer,
When I finished school I moved to Arizona in '87 or so to be near my sweetie (who is still my sweetie.) I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life so I got a temp job digging ditches for the U of A's Environmental Research Lab (ERL) which was out by the Tucson International Airport. If you ever dug a ditch in Arizona you can appreciate what a sucky job this was, the calcified sediment is something to behold, but I was never in better shape in my life.
Anyway, the job was pretty mindless and it gave me plenty of time to consider what I wanted to do with my life. When one day my boss told me to get in the van he had a job for me, in previous times this meant a trip to the chancellors house to dig ditches for him. So I got in the van and we drove up to Oracle where they were building the BioSphere II. Man was it cool, but it was my lot in life to dig a bunch of ditches for communcations lines and power lines and such. I was there a few days. I only dug ditches for a few months or so.
I decided that computers might be a good place to direct my energies I got a job in an R & D group. But I do think back on my time with a shovel when ever I look at my somewhat rotund figure. Although all the pictures my wife has of me during that time are of me sleeping in my chair. I was tired a lot.
I did get to do some more work for them later while at the University of Arizona in the Molecular & Cellular Biology Department. It was while the goofballs were still in charge. I was really disappointed to learn how nutty those guys were, but I guess I should have expected it. I was very happy when Columbia stepped up when it all fell apart but I was disappointed they never really did much with it.
Jer,
Just curious where you think horsepower comes from. It is the torque. You can only spin a mechanical system so fast, if there is no torque behind it you won't get horsepower.
The F1 cars have low torque but super high RPM's. They also have millions to throw at the problem. If you are gonna street race get as much displacement and stroke as you can.
ReplayTV's model is to sell the device not the subscription. Which of the two (TiVo or ReplayTV) is doing better?
There are companies who will for a percentage of your take submit patents on your behalf. Yea, I know you give up some back end, may have to give up on the front end as well, but it should be cheaper.
Personally if you have a unique and novel idea that you think might be worth some money some day I don't see why you are balking at legal fees. I would give the attorneys a call again, and see if you can do some of the work and let them do the bits you are not comfortable with.
Anyone can submit a patent. You can change parts of the patent once it is submitted (just about everything but the claims I think, if you quote me you are a fool.)
What I would do is:
1) Go to the USPTO and look at a bunch of patents.
2) Make a really good stab at copying what they have done.
3) Do an as exhaustive search as you can, citing patents that might infringe upon your patent as well as patents your patent my depend upon.
4) Go to the patent attorney with that and then let them do what you haven't done,
5) File it.
It will still cost you some money, but since you will have done most of the work yourself. It should not be too expensive. If you really want to know how to file a patent get a job at a company where intellecutal property is a big deal. Let them patent a few of your ideas and make sure to sit in on all the meetings that pertain to your patent. Quit and then start filing your own.
Jer,
Ohhhhhhhhh scary... How in the world did you find all that out Mr. Anonymous? Seems like you want me to join your little cabal more than you are letting on.
Is it a quiz? I mean will you let me into your child-molesting gang if I can answer correctly?
Looks like you need it quite badly. So badly in fact that you ignore facts that stare you in the face.
Mr Anonymous sure showed me there.... Still doesn't changge the fact, and it is a fact, that Piers would rather talk to a pederast than a fan.
You are the one ignoring the facts... Again all you can do (anonymously no less) tell me that I am a reactionary... You can't be bothered to come up with a nom de net and you think you won??
I suppose your genetic disposition to idiocy keeps the bozone layer so thick around your head that you would not know a good idea if it shot you in the temple.
Come on anonymous... Show me how tough you are again.
Huh? "willful misinterpretation and frank paranoia"?
Tell me what was misinterperted. He likes to tell his fans he doesn't want to talk to them becuase it steals time from his work. He said he talks to convicted pedophiles (I assume they are convicted, given I assume he is talking to prisoners and not guards.)
How is this misrepresented? It is what he said. It is in black and white, how can you look at these facts and praise him for having stated them?
Sorry you feel that way about your kids, but why would I want to be responsible for your fucked up offspring? If you left them alone with me I would probably shoot them in the head to do my part in ridding the world of your obviously defective genes.
Perhaps he was honest, but puulleeze, in every novel I have read by this guy he whines incessantly about how fans just eat up his time. He can't possibly find time to chat with us at shows or in email or with letters. And yet, he manages to find time to be penpals with convicted Pedophiles.
When I was 13 his stories were OK. Dating 13 year old girls and trying to get into their pants was OK too. But at 23 it isn't, and at 46 it just sounds perverse. He does think women are objects, which is cool I guess, but his attitude's honesty isn't anything to laud. A dirty old man is a dirty old man regardless of how well he tries to hide it.
Then why get the degree at all? Why not sit back and persue the parts of computer science that you like in your own spare time? Why take classes, be used as slave labor by faculty advisors and worry about tests. No class I have never been in has been able to effectively work through any book assigned. Parts are skipped, other parts are focused on too much. In the Rennisance many many many educated men learned a great deal without collecting degrees.
Jer,
Do you have an undergraduate degree? If so many universities are offering "Professional" Masters Degrees which usually can be completed in a year by highly competant people if they don't mind putting life on hold while they get it (as well as lose a lot of sleep and do a mediocre job at work for that time.) Classes are for the most part at night and on weekends.
The upside is that your employer may pay for it, the programs can also be spread over a couple of years as well. When you are finished you have a real Masters Degree in Computer Science.
If you don't have an undergraduate degree you need to realize that there is a lot more to it than just taking CS courses. All accredited universities and colleges attempt to teach you more than one thing. You need to take classes that do not apply to your degree to make you a more rounded person. A good think IMHO.
There are universities which will fast track you on undergraduate degrees. Places like the University of Phoenix, which are all over the damn place. But even still finishing a degree will take on the order of 3 to 4 years (most undergraduate degrees currently take 5 years), but the cirriculum is designed to accomodate people who are working during the day, classes are held at night and on weekends.
That being said is many universities are being more progressive about enrollment and are attempting to make classes more accessable to working students. I dunno where you live, but if it is in a somewhat large metropolitan area it is quite likely a traditional 4 year university will have programs to accomodate you.
There are even universites which offer Distance Learning classes. I tend to dismiss these program however, as the most important thing you will do in school is forge relationships with the people you are there with. Studying in groups is much more effective than doing it alone, you will retain more and expand your circle of friends.
Finally your only 24 for crissakes. What difference does it make if it takes 4 years to get a degree? You don't have to quit your job to get educated, a cousin of mine has been going to school at night for the last 15 years right now he is working on an MBA, he has some other masters degree as well, he just like going to school.
I don't know what you do in the evening but if it is like most people you watch TV why not just go back to school take a few years get the degree you want. As I said the plus side is many employers will pay for this, certainly with in the consulting community I am sure they would be happy to pay for a CS Degree, although some just want you to get an MBA.
Just go do it, it will take some time, but that is something you have a LOT of right now, believe it or not.
Jer,
I want to start by saying, before you do ANYTHING make it a priority for your team to start writing test cases and implementing them. If you are going to change your system you want your tests to find the problems not your users. Once you have a test suite that effectively tests your system (you will be surpised how quickly these tests will lead to enhancements in your software BTW) then you need to decide if you really want to maintain two seperate teams.
One team will be doing maintainence on your old system that is in use. You can't not keep this team in place, you have to keep customers happy while you do the new thang. You need the second team developing the new sytem (their job will be difficult with good tests, but impossible with out them.) Without tests they will have something that looks kinda like the old thing, but behave differently in a million small ways, some without a doubt will be better, many will not.
The other thing, and more sensible IMHO, is to tell pairs of programmars, to spend some hours each week working on the system together. Pairs becuase this is an excellent opportunity for people with deep knowledge of their systems to share it with other memebers of the team as they ferret out ways to refactor the code so more of it can be shared.
One day a week you can have a team working on some part, documenting spaghetti code, or pulling out examples of where code was cut and pasted and create a function which is called from both places. The stated goal should be fore each team to remove some number of lines of overall code from the project each week.
Remember the metric is the more lines of code you have the more errors you have, make it a mandate for your team to be removing code as well as adding, actually on our team we don't brag about how many lines we added in a week, we brag about how many we removed.
Anyway, the idea is by getting teams to do pair programming looking a specfic areas with good tests you can whip your code into shape pretty fast, and spread the knowledge of the system around as well. AND instead of a jarring change when you unveil the new system you can have gradual changes as fixes are tested and added.
Obviously if your overall architecture is broken and can't move forward this won't work. But it seems to me you are not fully convinced of that fact yet. At the very least by having teams look at code they may not be overaly famililar with you might find that team members can cross pollinate and share good ideas.
Jer,
The viral nature of the GPL is anti-capitalist. It removes control of work from the creator and gives it to the community at large. Stallman is a kook, a kook that had a powerful message and a dogged rough edged style of delivering it. And as such is still a valuable member of our community.
But to say that the end users freedoms are not only as important as the developers but superceeds them as well is just plain hogwash.
Some software is opensourced becuase no one will buy it. Some is opensourced becuase one person does not have the ability to do it all and hopes there are people who will help them. Some software is opensourced becuase they want peer review, smart people looking at it and making it better. And some software is opensourced becuase the developers are hunting for an audience. Very little software is opensourced becuase the users deserve the software that is being produced, BUT we need these people as well, they are important.
But I will not let that last group tell me that becuase they did it I must do it as well. I have a mortgage to pay and a family to support. Many "OpenSource" companies are working on closed soure versions of their software becuase the open ones don't make money. Mainly becuase the end users don't want good quality software, they don't want software that solves their problems. They just want free software. And so why should I as a developer give a shit about their freedoms with my work?
Jer,
Apparently you have never worked for gubbiment at any level, committees are how things are done, consensus. Isn't the always the best way to get things done, but remember the person who you must please most got his/her job in an election. As such they MUST have some input. Universities work this way as well, but becuase faculty contribute to departments via outside funding.
So having said that, when I was tangentially involved in a similar fiasco, the reporting went like thus. The actual nuts and bolts of the operation went via IT. The programmars and machine administration was done via IT content specialists were in Marketing (actually they were departmental admins, but liked it when we told them they were Marketers.)
We had a template all departments were supposed to conform to, none of them liked it, but the template had it's own process which was a big ass committee and was updated on average every 9 months. This way if there were complaints about how the template looked there was a committee to redress it, and we had a stable spec from which to operate. It also effectively lets you turn away requests to do one offs, which are time wasters, you can just point to the spec and point out that what user XYZ wants can't currently be done and to bring it up at the next template meeting.
The IT guys were responsible for maintaining the template, keeping it consistant with what the template committee wanted (if you wanna hear boring some of those meetings were real dooozies, arguments bout font size and exactly how things should be named, as well as what EXACT colors should be used for what banners.) Anyway becuase we used a templated approach the content folks just opened up the editor which was online and inserted the data they needed. When the template was changed they did not have to reenter data it was just plugged into the template.
By doing this we put a clear line of seperation between what was content and what was IT and no one ever got too bent out of shape about it. But like I said what helped the most is that what things looked like was defined from the start and it was then our responsibility as IT to provide both the tools and server support for the content people, they could do it if they wanted but 9 times out of 10 they just came down with drawings and floppy discs and let one of our own interns plug it all in.
IT was happy becuase my programmers had a well defined set of tasks to work on, not an ever growing long list of one offs that had to be done for X, Y or Z. We did have a lot of push back when we moved from departments doing their own thing and moving into the template so we used a carrot and stick approach. We told them we would take their current system and convert it to the template form. We would then tell them once converted we would no longer support their old web infrastructure. If it was on our machines we turned it off, if it was on their we never came to fix the problems.
The deparments liked it becuase they could participate in what the template looked like and we did most of the work. They had a set of tools which let them modify the data whenever they wanted.
In all I have been gone a few years the process is still in place no one loves it but it has not devolved into pure chaos again either.
Jer,
Oh yea.... I wonder where the Mars Orbiter and PolarLander are about now...