Not really. On the all the doors of the offices of our business, we have these things called locks that we can use to restrict who can or can't go through a certain door, although why should our company have to go through the trouble of using keys and locking doors just because one person insists on going places he shouldn't?
Quoting the AC that I am replying to in case the post doesn't make Score:2...
The ASP I work for also has always had an "open data" policy; you leave, we will gladly do a DB dump for you and send it on a CD or two. (The data dictionary is a little skimpy, but the tables and columns are consistently named and nobody's said the dump is inadequate). We're also going to start supplying periodic extracts as (somewhat de-normalized) MySQL DB files. It's their data, they can have it.
All I can say is: amen, brother.
I honestly believe that it is the type of action that will:
Uproot deep seated legacy systems
Give people the confidence to take action
Spur amazing competition, and thus innovation
Move us into the next generation, the true promise of the web (and beyond) service model
Perhaps I'm dreaming. Could be easily. But now is the time. Money is tight. The bottom line means more than ever. The boom of the.com is gone, and as I read earlier on/., it is only a matter of time before the hold outs run out of their stacks of cash. Couple that with the slow economy, which drives business to look for better solutions (I believe that when money is flowing, it is less important to spend extra money than it is the change and save money).
Certain software is commidity. Office. Operating Systems. You can go down to the corner store (or website) and get either for cheap. But the problem is that generic software is not a specific solution. It takes money and 'services' to move towards software that accents a given business plan and rules.
I believe that is where the small, fast, quick, cash-strapped, innovative developer will at the least make money. It could be that as the cycle continues, many of these will get purchased, but that is natural cycle of our open economy.
Some one is going to make money becuase of this low point in the economy, and it isn't just going to be those who already have the cash.
I'm the parent post you responded to, and I want to respond: actually, yes, one of the key features of the 'service model' internet based software that I develope is the guarantee that my clients can, at any time, through several different very well document interfaces (SOAP, html tables, CVS, custom SQL read-only queries) pull their data out of my application.
I felt it was a gamble, and it has been. Very public API allow competition to easy write routines to suck your data out and steal customers. But the benefits and customer satisfaction have easily outwayed any negative aspects AND loss of revenue.
Granted, I'm in a niche market, with a small number (7) of very serious competitors. Maybe I'm lucky. But I do know this: already, my open approach has allowed people to integrate other software packages and 'services' with mine, allowing them to save time and money. They pay attention to this, and due to the open nature of our relationship, they share this info with me, and I recommend it to other clients. I've even formed relationships with other services that my clients use, and we make sure we can work together. I've found that due to the openness of my process, not only is my service a 'service' it is also a data deposit, because people have become confident that they can move data about as they please, and I have made it easy for them to do so.
Market forces are definately part of the big picture, but companies are self-preserving entities. The goal of any business is to make money and that does not translate into quality software. I found this interesting:
For starters, give up the "not-built-here" dogma that has kept some software makers from working with new, easy-to-use programming building blocks made by Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM. That reluctance also has made some companies slow to adopt standardized programming technologies like the Extensible Markup Language, which makes it easier for different kinds of software to work together.
It amazes me when I work with software 'solutions' that have cost millions of dollars that have no interface in or out of them other than the specific stuff provided by the vendor. I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
I think we will see the service model slay many of these large monolithic enviroments, but the transition is going to be very painful... the infrastructure and data investment is going to be a large, expensive hurdle to overcome.
I've done both LSD and psilocybin in quite large doses (ok, warning: I worked up to those doses. Doing psychedelic drugs is a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do. Don't do it, you have been warned.) LSD was interesting and produces interesting hallucinations... but it was geometric and straight lined.
On the other hand, psilocybin, to me, is an organic fractal entity unto itself. The immediate difference from LSD for me was the process of 'coming down'. Coming down was never a 'downer', and I eventually came to call that faze 'lightening thought'. It is some what hard to describe, but it was like my thought process became parallel... multiple threads of thoughts interacting, finding relations and parallels between conflicting and simultaneous concepts and ideas. I would have a thought, which would create a question, which would be analyzed, broken down, used to generate other questions (which would be place on a stack for later use), and then processed to conclusion which would be used in later thought.
All this was effortless. The 'id' part of my consciousness more or less just sat back and 'watched' all this take place. It was as if the individual talents (math, memory, speech, socail interactions, movement, physics,etc) were each working and had a 'voice' independent of each other and of my id.
I found the effect would happen best when I was basically in a sensory depravation state. Dark, cool room, low level of white noise.
It never lasted long enough, and it was something I can never reproduce sober, even with long meditations, even when I have broken through and had non-standard-reality results with those meditations.
On interesting thing I did once during this state... it was in college, and my roommate was working on a high-level CSC problem, and was getting an odd runtime error. I sat down at his code (I think he was using dos-based borland c++, all his code in one file) and started scrolling from the top of his file. My mind aborbed and analyzed the code as fast as it ran down the screen. I went through the code as fast as the editor could scrool it, until a line popped out at me. I pointed it the line to him and got up. He spent a few minutes changing things, and then declared that I was right, the error was in that line... and he didn't understand what had just happened =).
Another disclamer. I don't do drugs any more. I ultimately decided that drugs take more from you than they give. It is not a fair trade. While the experience I have gathered are amazing, there are much better ways to collect great experience in your life... do something physical, push your body in healthy ways...
Actually, you can still see the Missouri as it looked when Lewis and Clark saw it. There is a 'wild section' of river in south east south dakota that goes from below the Gavins Point damn at Yankton, SD to about Sioux City, IA.
Not a huge stretch of river, but it is an awefully cool place... moving sand bars, lots of submerged trees trunks, and swift waters make it a challenging place, too. I canoe it on a regular basis, and the river never fails to show me who's boss. The Missouri is a cold river, esp in April =).
Oh, and I've regularly enjoyed the lakes created by the damns in South Dakota, too... they're great places to camp and fish.
Eugene Hudson, chairman of DoD's physical security equipment action group, said because of continuing concern of terrorism, the focus of the demonstration was to give government and civilian officials a firsthand look at readily available technology to meet their force protection needs.
Damn, I thought, a RoboCop suit already! Wow! Then I read:
For example, one company, Med-Eng Systems, Inc., showed off its "RoBoCop"-like suit made of thick layers of Kevlar for protection against heat, flames, blast fragmentation and impact. It weighs about 40 pounds and comes with a special undergarment, boots and gloves to protect wearers against chemical, biological and radiological exposure.
Ugh... yeah. That's cool. Damn impressive even... but ROBOCOP?!? These guys obviously didn't watch the movie...:-)
"This is not about changing the price. This is about providing added value and enhancements to customers, and we want to do a great job communicating that," Johnson said. The company expects its sales force to be versed in the latest program changes by September.
I love this sh*t. Here we have an open confession that 'we want to do a great job communicating that'. This is great proof that the only serious change is that microsoft is goining to add an 'added value' and then ramp up it's PR engine, something they are very skilled at doing. I can only hope their PR failure with this matches the PR failure of.NET, where by nobody has any idea what the f*ck is going on.
At first it was thought that there might be just one unique solution to the equations, just one possible three-dimensional universe with one possible 'vacuum state' and one set of laws. But it seems now, according to the experts, that there could be a huge number.
In fact Lenny Susskind claims that there could be more possible types of universe than there are atoms in our universe--a quite colossal variety. The system of universes could be even more intricate and complex than the biosphere of our planet. This really is a mind-blowing concept, especially when we bear in mind that each of those universes could themselves be infinite.
Note the bolded part of this quote... there could be a multiverse where most slashdotters have sex on a regular basis.! The best news geeks have ever heard!
Ugh, I don't know about you, but while I definately take into account the criminal history of those I hire, I'm more likely to hire the person with right qualities for the job... even if those qualities come from an illegal activity. You have to remember, the point of a public corp. isn't to obey the law, it is to make a profit.
Amen, brother... I get sick of working with some form of microsoft technology with any depth, because I know that eventually I will be coding on a work around for a work around for a work around... sometimes many layers deep.
Agreed... not unlike when the euro came out. right away it dropped way below the dollar, but I felt that at that point, it was a great investment because there was no way in HELL they we're going to let the euro fail. look where the dollar - euro ratio lies now, and what the future holds for the value of both.
- The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year
when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but
recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word
never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria.
The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of
the dollar". All of this is without war.
Hello global economic disaster. The article is worth a read just to get some perspective on what everyone else things of america.
Hmm... I would liken this more to a label that warns you, 'yes, this car has an air bar', or 'no, this car does not have air bags.' Or maybe, 'yes, this VCR has the ability to record'... anyway, it's not subjective. It is a boolean value... yes or no, true or false, etc... something you could find out by looking at the package, in this case, they just want to make it very obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's an understatement... from the front page of their site, go to If you would like to help out with the OSER project, please see this page and then click on If you want to contribute code, please see Writing code and then you get...
TODOYeah, they might need some help... =)
Honestly, sounds like a great project, but for the love, people...
To paraphrase your concept into the real world:
Not really. On the all the doors of the offices of our business, we have these things called locks that we can use to restrict who can or can't go through a certain door, although why should our company have to go through the trouble of using keys and locking doors just because one person insists on going places he shouldn't?
Duh. Think about it.
Quoting the AC that I am replying to in case the post doesn't make Score:2...
All I can say is: amen, brother.
I honestly believe that it is the type of action that will:
Perhaps I'm dreaming. Could be easily. But now is the time. Money is tight. The bottom line means more than ever. The boom of the .com is gone, and as I read earlier on /., it is only a matter of time before the hold outs run out of their stacks of cash. Couple that with the slow economy, which drives business to look for better solutions (I believe that when money is flowing, it is less important to spend extra money than it is the change and save money).
Certain software is commidity. Office. Operating Systems. You can go down to the corner store (or website) and get either for cheap. But the problem is that generic software is not a specific solution. It takes money and 'services' to move towards software that accents a given business plan and rules.
I believe that is where the small, fast, quick, cash-strapped, innovative developer will at the least make money. It could be that as the cycle continues, many of these will get purchased, but that is natural cycle of our open economy.
Some one is going to make money becuase of this low point in the economy, and it isn't just going to be those who already have the cash.
I'm the parent post you responded to, and I want to respond: actually, yes, one of the key features of the 'service model' internet based software that I develope is the guarantee that my clients can, at any time, through several different very well document interfaces (SOAP, html tables, CVS, custom SQL read-only queries) pull their data out of my application.
I felt it was a gamble, and it has been. Very public API allow competition to easy write routines to suck your data out and steal customers. But the benefits and customer satisfaction have easily outwayed any negative aspects AND loss of revenue.
Granted, I'm in a niche market, with a small number (7) of very serious competitors. Maybe I'm lucky. But I do know this: already, my open approach has allowed people to integrate other software packages and 'services' with mine, allowing them to save time and money. They pay attention to this, and due to the open nature of our relationship, they share this info with me, and I recommend it to other clients. I've even formed relationships with other services that my clients use, and we make sure we can work together. I've found that due to the openness of my process, not only is my service a 'service' it is also a data deposit, because people have become confident that they can move data about as they please, and I have made it easy for them to do so.
Market forces are definately part of the big picture, but companies are self-preserving entities. The goal of any business is to make money and that does not translate into quality software. I found this interesting:
It amazes me when I work with software 'solutions' that have cost millions of dollars that have no interface in or out of them other than the specific stuff provided by the vendor. I'd kill for direct access to the underlying DB or a nice clear way of moving data in and out, or a great way to make custom GUI... but the company is more concerned with ensuring that we are locked in FOREVER than with providing the tools we could use to make their software more friendly to our over all IT enviroment.
I think we will see the service model slay many of these large monolithic enviroments, but the transition is going to be very painful... the infrastructure and data investment is going to be a large, expensive hurdle to overcome.
I've done both LSD and psilocybin in quite large doses (ok, warning: I worked up to those doses. Doing psychedelic drugs is a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do. Don't do it, you have been warned.) LSD was interesting and produces interesting hallucinations... but it was geometric and straight lined.
On the other hand, psilocybin, to me, is an organic fractal entity unto itself. The immediate difference from LSD for me was the process of 'coming down'. Coming down was never a 'downer', and I eventually came to call that faze 'lightening thought'. It is some what hard to describe, but it was like my thought process became parallel... multiple threads of thoughts interacting, finding relations and parallels between conflicting and simultaneous concepts and ideas. I would have a thought, which would create a question, which would be analyzed, broken down, used to generate other questions (which would be place on a stack for later use), and then processed to conclusion which would be used in later thought.
All this was effortless. The 'id' part of my consciousness more or less just sat back and 'watched' all this take place. It was as if the individual talents (math, memory, speech, socail interactions, movement, physics,etc) were each working and had a 'voice' independent of each other and of my id.
I found the effect would happen best when I was basically in a sensory depravation state. Dark, cool room, low level of white noise.
It never lasted long enough, and it was something I can never reproduce sober, even with long meditations, even when I have broken through and had non-standard-reality results with those meditations.
On interesting thing I did once during this state... it was in college, and my roommate was working on a high-level CSC problem, and was getting an odd runtime error. I sat down at his code (I think he was using dos-based borland c++, all his code in one file) and started scrolling from the top of his file. My mind aborbed and analyzed the code as fast as it ran down the screen. I went through the code as fast as the editor could scrool it, until a line popped out at me. I pointed it the line to him and got up. He spent a few minutes changing things, and then declared that I was right, the error was in that line... and he didn't understand what had just happened =).
Another disclamer. I don't do drugs any more. I ultimately decided that drugs take more from you than they give. It is not a fair trade. While the experience I have gathered are amazing, there are much better ways to collect great experience in your life... do something physical, push your body in healthy ways...
Actually, you can still see the Missouri as it looked when Lewis and Clark saw it. There is a 'wild section' of river in south east south dakota that goes from below the Gavins Point damn at Yankton, SD to about Sioux City, IA.
Not a huge stretch of river, but it is an awefully cool place... moving sand bars, lots of submerged trees trunks, and swift waters make it a challenging place, too. I canoe it on a regular basis, and the river never fails to show me who's boss. The Missouri is a cold river, esp in April =).
Oh, and I've regularly enjoyed the lakes created by the damns in South Dakota, too... they're great places to camp and fish.
Damn, I thought, a RoboCop suit already! Wow! Then I read:
Ugh... yeah. That's cool. Damn impressive even... but ROBOCOP?!? These guys obviously didn't watch the movie... :-)
From the article:
I love this sh*t. Here we have an open confession that 'we want to do a great job communicating that'. This is great proof that the only serious change is that microsoft is goining to add an 'added value' and then ramp up it's PR engine, something they are very skilled at doing. I can only hope their PR failure with this matches the PR failure of .NET, where by nobody has any idea what the f*ck is going on.
Yes, you can.
Note the bolded part of this quote... there could be a multiverse where most slashdotters have sex on a regular basis.! The best news geeks have ever heard!
The camera pans across a room, boxes, packing materials, and possesions scattered about in no particular order...
...and here we have Aunt Alice packing up Mom's favorite lamp. "hey Alice, how's the move treating you?', echoes the voice behind the camera...
"well, I know this is a gift from your Dad to Mom, and I know she'd just die! if the movers broke it"
***
Sounds rather like a rather boring way to celebrate to me... =)
Ugh, I don't know about you, but while I definately take into account the criminal history of those I hire, I'm more likely to hire the person with right qualities for the job... even if those qualities come from an illegal activity. You have to remember, the point of a public corp. isn't to obey the law, it is to make a profit.
Hosting apache on windows is like hosting cheerios in beer.
Here's a list of the multi media players it seems they are using.
Damn, record slash dot, 5 posts on the page, and it is gone!
Mirrors? Copy of the article? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The normal audigy has the firewire and ability to network two PCs via it, also!
I wonder if the drivers from the kx project can bypass this limitation?
I seem to remember reading that this is the case... can anyone back me up on this?
Amen, brother... I get sick of working with some form of microsoft technology with any depth, because I know that eventually I will be coding on a work around for a work around for a work around... sometimes many layers deep.
Uhh... state employees... I highly doubt any significant amount of them have been using Windows XP or Office XP on a regular basis.
Agreed... not unlike when the euro came out. right away it dropped way below the dollar, but I felt that at that point, it was a great investment because there was no way in HELL they we're going to let the euro fail. look where the dollar - euro ratio lies now, and what the future holds for the value of both.
Screw all that, RTFA...
Hello global economic disaster. The article is worth a read just to get some perspective on what everyone else things of america.
me fale collage? that unpossilbe!
I thought a trade secret didn't have protections... thus the term 'secret'. Once the secret is out, it's out.
Hmm... I would liken this more to a label that warns you, 'yes, this car has an air bar', or 'no, this car does not have air bags.' Or maybe, 'yes, this VCR has the ability to record'... anyway, it's not subjective. It is a boolean value... yes or no, true or false, etc... something you could find out by looking at the package, in this case, they just want to make it very obvious.