I can assure you that the cost of operating a radio station is not the DJ's salary. The amount of wooing that a account manager has to do in order to get a new account is insane. I worked at a small station and our account manager worked about 80 hours a week and about 60 of those were off-site visits to advertisers. She did insane things to make the advertisers happy. I remember her making all kinds of pies, cakes, and other baked goods to take them. At one point she even went out and picked a customer up and took him to pick up his car at the shop. Another time she helped someone paint their house. It was nuts! Now, the ad agencys are wanting to charge more money for the ads themselves, this means less money for the stations unless they come up with another revenue stream. This isn't good.
As for anyone thinking DJs are somehow involved, here is something to put their place in the radio heirarchy in perspective.
There was a cartoon I saw once which showed the real hierarchy within a radio station. There were three vehicles in the parking lot. The first was a HUGE luxury car. It was parked in the spot reserved for the station manager. The second was a mid-size sedan, it was parked in the spot for the accounts manager. The third was a Razor scooter which was parked in the spot for the DJ. That's about right. Even though they're the personalities who make the radio interesting, they aren't the real stars.
To all the young and upcoming programmers out there, please accept my advice following, I think you would be wise to read it carefully.
1. Employment: NEVER write your own software while you are an employee of someone else, EVEN if you do it in your own time
Well when the hell are we supposed to do it then? I can't live without my job, how am I supposed to support myself? I can see this for students or people who still live with their parents, but for young programmers like me, just out of school, it's not possible to work for ourselves. We just don't have the resources.
What would solve this problem? Well, first of all, less draconian IP agreements with our employers. I don't see that happening for the majority of people, so how about some more applied schoolwork to help young people get a portfolio together. With a reasonable portfolio the young programmers could help negotiate better terms for themselves upon entry into the job market. I had something like this because of extensive involvement in outside projects at college and things on my resume like published papers which made me more attractive to my company so I could negotiate terms of employment. Very few other graduates have this, primarially because of lack of programs/encouragement on the part of educators.
Or, if the article is true, and there is a medium where light has a negative index of refraction when leaving a vacuum going into this medium, then we'll just have to re-vamp our idea of the maximum lightspeed. Speed of light in a vacuum might have been the old record-holder and this be the new record-holder. Still, the speed of light is the speed limit for the universe, it's just determining the medium where light travels the fastest that's the problem. Previously it was a vacuum, maybe now it's this composite material, or cesium gas. I think we just haven't found the "full speed" of light.
Point to some of these "studies" in your comments in the future. Don't make unfounded assertions based on "studies" you have read without allowing us the priveledge of reading them as well.
ie. is it goatsex that is leading the way?
Or is it plain Jane erotica?
Or do people simply not care as long as it's free?
That's the kind of metrics I care about. Maybe we could loosen the religious right's hold on America if we could show that, indeed, most people in this country are depravedlunatics. After all we are a DEMOCRACY right?
Until you piss your partner off and he decides to thwart your "style" by never using "Enter" All of a sudden your programs look like crap because it's one 50,000 character line. Who ownz who now biyatch!
And I bet they find a way to cut that cost as well.
Steven
I have problems with this methodology's QA approac
on
"Extreme" Programming
·
· Score: 1
Programmers must write tests for their own programs before they begin coding. These tests are used instead of an independent "quality assurance," or testing, group--a technique that will save time, according to
Extreme's advocates.
We know that programmers can fake things damn well. I know that "demo" versions usually work very well, I would have serious problems, as a Professional Test Engineer, with allowing programmers to write their own test scenarios. I have the bad feeling that these scenarios would test beautifully but a little outside of this box and they'll break. As a programmer and as a tester, I have some issues with this type of QA. The rest of it I agree with, but letting the programmers define their own test scenarios is a recipe for disaster once you get this into the mainstream and get the programmers with lower work ethics producing an appreciable amount of software. The group of programmers who just "make it work" and who fake it, and we all know they exist, hell some of us may be them, will produce absolute crap when allowed to write their own test scenarios, but that scenario will work beau-tee-fully. I don't trust the programming community as a whole with this type of Quality Assurance methodology.
Sigh. Here I was joking about the poor marketing phraseology on their site and someone comes along and takes me seriously. All I wanted was a +1 funny and you take my comment seriously and get a +4 insightful. Suck.
Sure, I understand the need to be reimbursed for some of your costs, bandwidth isn't free neither are your servers or the upkeep thereof. BUT, and yes there is always a but, where does it end? Since you're not really developing this code, I don't really want to pay you for the code. I don't have a problem paying you for the server time/bandwidth or even for server upkeep, but when some of that money goes into your developer's pockets and none goes into the community's pockets, then I have a problem. I'm not going to argue what is and isn't permissible under the GPL, I'm going to say what I believe is right and what is wrong.
Paying you for the bandwidth/equipment/maintenance so I can download the code; Fine.
Paying your developers and paying for the bandwidth/equipment/maintenance so I can download the code while the developers who aren't your employees get nothing; Nope.
Basically, either pay everyone involved in the creation the product you're charging for, or only charge for what your out of pocket expenses for the access to your files are. At 15$ a download, I'm not convinced your communication lines and server maintenance is all we're paying you for. If you can show a cost breakdown proving that you're not shortchanging the community, then I have no problem with it.
I'd really like to map this guy's stories to the releases of MtG. It looks like the rude awakening for Adkinson came right around the time of Fallen Empires. I'd really like to have some kind of matchup of the internal state of WotC lined up against their released products. I well remember the terrible time for MtG around Fallen Empires/Ice Age/Homelands and I'd really like to know if the really crappy cards and late release times could be tracked back to unrest in the Batcave. If it meant that we could get some more sets like Alliances(it rocked!) then I'd be willing to take up a collection to help some of the Wizards geeks get laid again.
Steven
King of Casual Play
The One and Only Defender of Cards that Blow(and it's a BIG job!)
BilldaCat is none other than Chad(the bad) Day, co founder of e-league. He was one of the first to help capitalize on the internet playing of MtG. He's pretty much right about the state of Magic for most players. They're pretty sick of having the pro tour and professional Magic get all the attention where the games in our kitchens are still the way most play. Chad is just one of the many who got burned out on tournament Magic, but for a while he was one of the internet MtG communities brightest stars. Well, until that nasty incident with Psylum and e-league.
Steven
Auto-Installers are the real problem
on
New Linux Worm
·
· Score: 1
I use Suse Linux at home. Now I don't want to start a distribution war, but I found it to be very easy to install and get working right out of the box. It also has a good reputation for user-friendlyness. However, it installs, by default, several nasty services that I don't want, including a couple of webservers. I know that Linux won't hit the mainstream until we can make it easy enough for Joe Sixpack to install everything he needs, but geez, we don't need to have such a wide variety of services in the default install. Have a way to start these services if we want them, but not until then.
Remember the Sony VP?
"We will block Napster at source... We will firewall it at the ISP we will firewall it at your PC."
This is the first step. When Joe Sixpack buys his shiny new Dell and can't get to Napster(or any other thing the content people have put pressure on the censorware makers to block) he'll probably just give up and do something else. As long as the lists of what is blocked and why are closed, the average user will have no idea why they can't hit some sites. How long will it be before they simply breed the defiance out of most of the consumers?
Luckily I live in the state of TX and I can call my legislator and tell him to vote against this bill. Any fellow Texans, please join in.
In posing this question to the slashdot community I'm sure to receive some blistering flames claiming that I'm too narrow minded in my view of what innovation is. But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.
I'm sure a lot of people would gladly live without, and even more people be alive without, mechanized warfare.
Why? By the time you get done shopping your car will have driven to the local gas station, filled itself up, run through the carwash, and picked you up some take-out. Then it will be sitting at the entrance to the store so you don't have to walk very far, but will move whenever a meter maid approaches. The AC/Heater will be on and the temperature exactly right. Oh, and the car will fly.
The entire project took the four of us all weekend to complete (Friday night to Monday morning, with a normal amount of sleep each night!).
The bold is my emphasis. This is unbelieveable. Putting aside all technical considerations, these guys actually slept during a project! This could be a serious breakthrough! Maybe now I can point to them and tell my boss, "Hey, they got to go home and sleep, and look at the fantastic job they did with that car. Don't you want those kind of results? Yes? Ok, I'm not working this weekend."
Actually, they have found new positions within the company for most of the developers, but there are, according to the press release, nine who will be let go. I know O'Rielly isn't a large company, but I don't equate sadly letting nine people go, with promises of helping them find their next position, with the kind of layoffs I assosciate with "downsizing."
Larry Wall has been employed by O'Rielly for some time as an in-house developer and visionary. Wall has described their relationship as that of an artisan and patron like in the 16th century. How does Larry fit in now that Tim has moved away from software development?
Slashdot Mirror
I can assure you that the cost of operating a radio station is not the DJ's salary. The amount of wooing that a account manager has to do in order to get a new account is insane. I worked at a small station and our account manager worked about 80 hours a week and about 60 of those were off-site visits to advertisers. She did insane things to make the advertisers happy. I remember her making all kinds of pies, cakes, and other baked goods to take them. At one point she even went out and picked a customer up and took him to pick up his car at the shop. Another time she helped someone paint their house. It was nuts! Now, the ad agencys are wanting to charge more money for the ads themselves, this means less money for the stations unless they come up with another revenue stream. This isn't good.
As for anyone thinking DJs are somehow involved, here is something to put their place in the radio heirarchy in perspective.
There was a cartoon I saw once which showed the real hierarchy within a radio station. There were three vehicles in the parking lot. The first was a HUGE luxury car. It was parked in the spot reserved for the station manager. The second was a mid-size sedan, it was parked in the spot for the accounts manager. The third was a Razor scooter which was parked in the spot for the DJ. That's about right. Even though they're the personalities who make the radio interesting, they aren't the real stars.
Steven
To all the young and upcoming programmers out there, please accept my advice following, I think you would be wise to read it carefully.
1. Employment: NEVER write your own software while you are an employee of someone else, EVEN if you do it in your own time
Well when the hell are we supposed to do it then? I can't live without my job, how am I supposed to support myself? I can see this for students or people who still live with their parents, but for young programmers like me, just out of school, it's not possible to work for ourselves. We just don't have the resources.
What would solve this problem? Well, first of all, less draconian IP agreements with our employers. I don't see that happening for the majority of people, so how about some more applied schoolwork to help young people get a portfolio together. With a reasonable portfolio the young programmers could help negotiate better terms for themselves upon entry into the job market. I had something like this because of extensive involvement in outside projects at college and things on my resume like published papers which made me more attractive to my company so I could negotiate terms of employment. Very few other graduates have this, primarially because of lack of programs/encouragement on the part of educators.
Steven
How can you tell if a slug is happy?
When their eyestalks stick straight up, of course.
Steven
Or, if the article is true, and there is a medium where light has a negative index of refraction when leaving a vacuum going into this medium, then we'll just have to re-vamp our idea of the maximum lightspeed. Speed of light in a vacuum might have been the old record-holder and this be the new record-holder. Still, the speed of light is the speed limit for the universe, it's just determining the medium where light travels the fastest that's the problem. Previously it was a vacuum, maybe now it's this composite material, or cesium gas. I think we just haven't found the "full speed" of light.
Steven
Point to some of these "studies" in your comments in the future. Don't make unfounded assertions based on "studies" you have read without allowing us the priveledge of reading them as well.
Steven
ie. is it goatsex that is leading the way?
Or is it plain Jane erotica?
Or do people simply not care as long as it's free?
That's the kind of metrics I care about. Maybe we could loosen the religious right's hold on America if we could show that, indeed, most people in this country are depraved lunatics. After all we are a D E M O C R A C Y right?
Steven
Until you piss your partner off and he decides to thwart your "style" by never using "Enter" All of a sudden your programs look like crap because it's one 50,000 character line. Who ownz who now biyatch!
Steven
Doors? Your offices have doors? God I wish mine did. I'd hack all night and day if I could shut out all the idiocy around me.
Steven
And I bet they find a way to cut that cost as well.
Steven
Programmers must write tests for their own programs before they begin coding. These tests are used instead of an independent "quality assurance," or testing, group--a technique that will save time, according to
Extreme's advocates.
We know that programmers can fake things damn well. I know that "demo" versions usually work very well, I would have serious problems, as a Professional Test Engineer, with allowing programmers to write their own test scenarios. I have the bad feeling that these scenarios would test beautifully but a little outside of this box and they'll break. As a programmer and as a tester, I have some issues with this type of QA. The rest of it I agree with, but letting the programmers define their own test scenarios is a recipe for disaster once you get this into the mainstream and get the programmers with lower work ethics producing an appreciable amount of software. The group of programmers who just "make it work" and who fake it, and we all know they exist, hell some of us may be them, will produce absolute crap when allowed to write their own test scenarios, but that scenario will work beau-tee-fully. I don't trust the programming community as a whole with this type of Quality Assurance methodology.
Steven
Sigh. Here I was joking about the poor marketing phraseology on their site and someone comes along and takes me seriously. All I wanted was a +1 funny and you take my comment seriously and get a +4 insightful. Suck.
Steven
Please visit our booth in Hall 13, C08. We are in the booth of Transmeta, the maker of the low powered CPU in the PaceBook
Man, that phrase is so unfortunate to have on your front page! Who is willing to have a low powered CPU?
Steven
Sure, I understand the need to be reimbursed for some of your costs, bandwidth isn't free neither are your servers or the upkeep thereof. BUT, and yes there is always a but, where does it end? Since you're not really developing this code, I don't really want to pay you for the code. I don't have a problem paying you for the server time/bandwidth or even for server upkeep, but when some of that money goes into your developer's pockets and none goes into the community's pockets, then I have a problem. I'm not going to argue what is and isn't permissible under the GPL, I'm going to say what I believe is right and what is wrong.
Paying you for the bandwidth/equipment/maintenance so I can download the code; Fine.
Paying your developers and paying for the bandwidth/equipment/maintenance so I can download the code while the developers who aren't your employees get nothing; Nope.
Basically, either pay everyone involved in the creation the product you're charging for, or only charge for what your out of pocket expenses for the access to your files are. At 15$ a download, I'm not convinced your communication lines and server maintenance is all we're paying you for. If you can show a cost breakdown proving that you're not shortchanging the community, then I have no problem with it.
Steven
I'd really like to map this guy's stories to the releases of MtG. It looks like the rude awakening for Adkinson came right around the time of Fallen Empires. I'd really like to have some kind of matchup of the internal state of WotC lined up against their released products. I well remember the terrible time for MtG around Fallen Empires/Ice Age/Homelands and I'd really like to know if the really crappy cards and late release times could be tracked back to unrest in the Batcave. If it meant that we could get some more sets like Alliances(it rocked!) then I'd be willing to take up a collection to help some of the Wizards geeks get laid again.
Steven
King of Casual Play
The One and Only Defender of Cards that Blow(and it's a BIG job!)
Oh, and Chad, we miss you on the wackylist man.
Steven
King of Casual Play
The One and Only Defender of Cards That Blow
BilldaCat is none other than Chad(the bad) Day, co founder of e-league. He was one of the first to help capitalize on the internet playing of MtG. He's pretty much right about the state of Magic for most players. They're pretty sick of having the pro tour and professional Magic get all the attention where the games in our kitchens are still the way most play. Chad is just one of the many who got burned out on tournament Magic, but for a while he was one of the internet MtG communities brightest stars. Well, until that nasty incident with Psylum and e-league.
Steven
I use Suse Linux at home. Now I don't want to start a distribution war, but I found it to be very easy to install and get working right out of the box. It also has a good reputation for user-friendlyness. However, it installs, by default, several nasty services that I don't want, including a couple of webservers. I know that Linux won't hit the mainstream until we can make it easy enough for Joe Sixpack to install everything he needs, but geez, we don't need to have such a wide variety of services in the default install. Have a way to start these services if we want them, but not until then.
Steven
Remember the Sony VP?
"We will block Napster at source... We will firewall it at the ISP we will firewall it at your PC."
This is the first step. When Joe Sixpack buys his shiny new Dell and can't get to Napster(or any other thing the content people have put pressure on the censorware makers to block) he'll probably just give up and do something else. As long as the lists of what is blocked and why are closed, the average user will have no idea why they can't hit some sites. How long will it be before they simply breed the defiance out of most of the consumers?
Luckily I live in the state of TX and I can call my legislator and tell him to vote against this bill. Any fellow Texans, please join in.
Steven
Grrr, one of these days I'll learn to close a tag.
Steven
In posing this question to the slashdot community I'm sure to receive some blistering flames claiming that I'm too narrow minded in my view of what innovation is. But think carefully, can you really name something developed in the last nine years that came out of left field, shook the world by its roots, gained acceptance and you can't live without it? I consider innovations to be things such as the wheel, fire, airplanes, mechanized warfare, the radio, television, PC, and the Internet.
I'm sure a lot of people would gladly live without, and even more people be alive without, mechanized warfare.
Steven
Funny, I always thought Aerosmith was a coke machine.
Steven
Why? By the time you get done shopping your car will have driven to the local gas station, filled itself up, run through the carwash, and picked you up some take-out. Then it will be sitting at the entrance to the store so you don't have to walk very far, but will move whenever a meter maid approaches. The AC/Heater will be on and the temperature exactly right. Oh, and the car will fly.
Steven
The entire project took the four of us all weekend to complete (Friday night to Monday morning, with a normal amount of sleep each night!).
The bold is my emphasis. This is unbelieveable. Putting aside all technical considerations, these guys actually slept during a project! This could be a serious breakthrough! Maybe now I can point to them and tell my boss, "Hey, they got to go home and sleep, and look at the fantastic job they did with that car. Don't you want those kind of results? Yes? Ok, I'm not working this weekend."
Steven
Actually, they have found new positions within the company for most of the developers, but there are, according to the press release, nine who will be let go. I know O'Rielly isn't a large company, but I don't equate sadly letting nine people go, with promises of helping them find their next position, with the kind of layoffs I assosciate with "downsizing."
Steven
Larry Wall has been employed by O'Rielly for some time as an in-house developer and visionary. Wall has described their relationship as that of an artisan and patron like in the 16th century. How does Larry fit in now that Tim has moved away from software development?
Steven