You take a big risk if you agree to a fixed price contract
Here's what I do to negotiate this risk:
First, I create a highly detailed plan, explaining every step as well as estimated time of each step. I make it excruciatingly clear what I consider the expectations of the project to be, and what I will and will not be responsible for. To estimate the time for each item, I try to imagine how quick I could do the project, and how long a worst-case scenario would take. I chose a number a little over the half-way point, maybe 60%-65% of the range. I figure, while a half-way number would give a good average time, I need to raise it a little for client-related difficulties. Communication lags, meetings/discussions, etc. I also figure that if it goes closer to my worst-case scenario, it's typically my fault and I shouldn't be charging the client.
They MUST sign off on this plan.
The most important step is, if they come back with ANY alterations to the detailed plan you gave them, you will charge them an hourly rate in addition to the project, for being out-of-spec. Don't give them the impression you're punishing them for wasting your time -- just let them know that your agreed-upon price only excluded exactly what you had in the plan.
By far the most difficult part of this advice is to be a hard-ass with the client. As much as I want to heed my own advice, it is often very difficult for me to say no to little changes. Just remember, little changes add up. Be the businessman.
Ouch. Sounds like your company is jumping on the bandwagon without checking with the driver to see where it's going.
Of course, this assumes that the controlling interests in your company are smart enough in the field to recognize shoddy work or not. Bugs are bugs, but a lot of the problems are internal -- such as poor, undocumented code that, from virtue of its own crapiness, result in increased costs of updates and management.
My advice is 1) before they shut down your facility, document the entire experience, samples of quality code, ease of communication, east of testing, etc. Later on you can validate your complaints with real-world examples.
2) as much as you might not like management, make every effort to separate yourself from the programming side (don't go fixing the code yourself). This will both save you from any blame that might eventually get passed around, and keep you from winding up in a dual role of manager and programmer, although only getting paid for one.
3) Especially if things look like they're not working out well! Keep careful track of all costs (as many as you can get your hands on) before and after. The current cost of running the facility, the cost of closing the facility, cost of moving people, cost of the new development, cost of debugging/testing/etc. the outsourced development, and the estimated cost of restarting your development facility. The goal is, before too long, going to the upper management and having black-and-white proof charted out, and being able to say, "Due to increased problems with our development pipeline, our theoretical savings have become additional costs. Unless this activity is stopped by %%DATE%%, out benefits will become costs and will continue to degrade. The quality of our product will diminish, and our returns will dissappear into the red."
Once night in downtown Chicago, a begger and his girlfriend came up to my wife (then my fiance) and me as we were walking to a subway stop. He gave his story and asked for some money. I was under considerable financial pressure myself, so I vented...
"Well, I'd like some money myself. I've got four credit cards that I maxed out paying rent while looking for a job, and just graduated college. So I owe $14,000 to credit card companies, $18,000 to my school loans, I still owe $15,000 on my car, and I owe my dad several thousand on top of that. I'm not in too good shape here."
The guy and his girlfriend stopped and gave each other this look. The guy said solemnly, "Man, you in worse shape than me." And they walked off shaking their heads.
Exactly, and employers don't like this either. I worked at a place once where another employee had obviously padded his resume (or an agency had padded his resume for him). After two weeks, he was still trying to read "Learn... in 24 hours" while nobody was looking, and they fired him.
Sure, it isn't hard to learn yet another language, but you shouldn't learn it at a job where they expect you to be useful right away. I think "How long would it take you to learn Portuguese?" was a good question. If you go to Brazil with an English->Portuguese phrase book, you'll be able to ask for a bathroom or a taxi after a short period of time. But don't think you can show up with zero Portuguese and be writing a dissertation next week.
That's a great way of encouraging people to spend more money -- make things more expensive!
qualities of an "adult comic"
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Neil,
As a designer, I love comics as a medium because they so intricately combine visual style and compelling storylines. Thank you for your efforts to brings comics to an adult audience! But does 'adult audience' necessarily mean kid-unfriendly? Your (wonderful) comics contain violence, nudity, etc. When writing, were these elements considered necessary to appeal to adults, or were they simply side-effects of the storyline?
Do you think that the connection between comics and children/teens is so strong that some kind of shock value must be added as a "this really is for adults" label? Do you think adults would react to comics with an adult-level story, that is kid-friendly as well?
Thanks, and don't stop working to get Good Omens on the big screen! (I vote for David Hyde Pierce as Aziraphale)
I think it can be argued that the algorithm that has created this music has, in a sense, encrypted the popular music it was derived from. If the RIAA can detect their copyrighted music in the newly generated music, it must mean they have circumvented that music's encryption. Say hello to the DMCA, Hillary.
But if you don't want to go with the fire w/ fire method, you could also call the newly generated music a parody of popular music -- it is, as you said, derivatives of their property -- and protect it that way. .
This would be like somebody taping a sign to the front door of a video store that says, "The lock has fallen out of this door. You should fix this, or thieves could enter in the middle of the night and steal from you." I suppose to complete the analogy, you should assume that the shop owner does not have the correct tool to fix the lock.
In both cases, making a general alert -- while maybe not the best thing to do (a private note to the owner would always be a better idea) -- still doesn't amount to anything more than commentary on a situation. And just because the shop owner could not fix the situation himself, does not make you responsible for the situation itself.
Now, turn that around, and say that the note was sent privately to a would-be-burglar, and if the person sending the note was aware that this was a would-be-burglar, then the person would be accessory to the theft.
Now here's the far-fetched analogy, just to point out parallels...
Say a bank robber was planning on robbing First City Bank in Pretendville. You are walking down the street when this bank robber passes you, flustered and nervous. "Where's First City Bank?" he asks. You tell him, "two blocks that way, then make a left, can't miss it." You've just revealed information which can potentially be used for a theft. Since the bank was, at the time, protected from the theft by having a location unknown by the robber, you just impaired the integrity of the bank's security. Bam. 16 months....
As far as sedating one, think about the challenge - these appear to be social, agressive, and very large animals. Doubtless they would take a very dim view on anyone shooting one of their relatives
Not to mention, some mammalian groups have been known to abandon a member that has fallen behind and been 'contaminated' by researchers. After abandoning, these groups can become hostile towards the new outsider and will fight before letting the poor creature back in the group. I wouldn't doubt this is one of the considerations with sedating one of these animals. .
There was a quote I saw posted here a while back that I had to save. I wish I could tell you the original poster, but I can't. This is from Robert A. Heinlein, published in Life-Line in 1939 -- that's right, 1939:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman
Well let's take a look. IPv6 looks like this:
2001:0418:000C:0003:0000:CF00:C0A8:2E2E
So the highest number is 16^32, right? Which is roughly 3.4028 x 10^38.
Which is a little over 340 undecillion. Want it exact? It's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand, 456.
They're not likely to get any of my business, they don't even have "classical" as one of the category selections! You have to search through manually, to the VERY confusing titles.
For instance, when searching for Rachmaninoff, I see an Arthur Rubinstein collection of Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op.16 in A Minor. I'm not familiar with this particular piece, and all I have to work with are:
Adagio Allegro molto Allegro moderato
1. How am I supposed to know what order these are to be played in? 2. These weren't even concurrent in the results -- there are three movements from another piece in between the Allegro molto and the Allegro moderator. How am I even supposted to know this is all of the movements, without checking another resource? 3. The cd this is on contains one concerto by Grieg and one by Rachmaninoff. There is no indication which is which!! Unless I consulted an outside resource, I would have to buy movements from both pieces to find which is which.
Granted, there aren't many like me, that don't listen to much other than classical. But I would expect a little more help. .
well the wireless part is pretty good, but the actual process has been in use for a while. for many years now at Walmart, you could take a video tape (then DVD) or a CD to a barcode scanner and get a sample of the video/music. This is the same thing....
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Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Is it just me or does it seem like almost everything Dubya does is intended to lower the quality of life for the average American?
not exactly -- what Dubya is trying to do is broaden the gap between the higher class and the lower class. the fewer people there are in (his) higher class, the less of the tax burden they have to carry, and the more it can be distributed to those (masses) in the lower class.
C'mon guys, here's where you have the advantage because you can do something that big-shot software companies can't. Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game. re-release it as a "different game" and under a different company logo if you have to.
the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.
For all you hacks out there that ever wondered if you would get caught doing this, here's your answer. Have fun. But whatever you do, do more than $5,000 in damage.
Because maybe then somebody will listen. .
Re:What does the NDA encompass?
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 1
well since the poster has written an article about the code, yet hasn't mentioned the NDA, the NDA obviously restricts people from discussing the NDA.
The first thing that attracted me to Google, even before witnessing the quality of the search algorithm, was the sheer bareness of their main page. I heartily applaud any website that keeps their main page under 15Kb. Even more important, I applaud any website that values the goals of the users so much that their main page is essentially a single function with no fluff. I also applaud any website that maintains a zero ad banner and popup rule.
MS will never be able to compete with this. I would be very surprised if their main page will weigh in under 75Kb. It will be 90% fluff. And there will be ads all over it!
So how is this the room of the future? This all sounds like stuff that's around already. The only part that's somewhat unusual is the biometric safe -- but when there are already biometric PDAs on the market, it's just not as impressive.
The Hotel Room of the Rich, maybe, but not Future. Sounds like Lasky was desperate to add some hype to a story.
A Hotel Room of the Future should be something that attempts to guess and then mimic how future innovations would tie in with the setting. (mimic being the keyword, because the object here is to show what hasn't been produced yet)
For instance, a room where the fabric-upholstered walls were made of ultra-thin flexible LCD sheets, and displayed a database of exotic settings. (faked for display with a simple projector) And a AI assistant that could order food from various restaurants, book theater tickets, or call a cab. (faked for display with a pre-recorded sequence) And a three-dimensional television set. (faked for display with iMax technology, requiring the use of glasses for demonstration)
Then I would be convinced that I was in a room of the future, or at least a mockup room of the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Like MacDonald's recent hip-makeover marketing efforts
Yeah, but I really despise the new McDonald's 'hip' commercials! If Microsoft wants to do the same thing, I'll probably wind up hating...
oh wait, nevermind
You take a big risk if you agree to a fixed price contract
Here's what I do to negotiate this risk:
First, I create a highly detailed plan, explaining every step as well as estimated time of each step. I make it excruciatingly clear what I consider the expectations of the project to be, and what I will and will not be responsible for. To estimate the time for each item, I try to imagine how quick I could do the project, and how long a worst-case scenario would take. I chose a number a little over the half-way point, maybe 60%-65% of the range. I figure, while a half-way number would give a good average time, I need to raise it a little for client-related difficulties. Communication lags, meetings/discussions, etc. I also figure that if it goes closer to my worst-case scenario, it's typically my fault and I shouldn't be charging the client.
They MUST sign off on this plan.
The most important step is, if they come back with ANY alterations to the detailed plan you gave them, you will charge them an hourly rate in addition to the project, for being out-of-spec. Don't give them the impression you're punishing them for wasting your time -- just let them know that your agreed-upon price only excluded exactly what you had in the plan.
By far the most difficult part of this advice is to be a hard-ass with the client. As much as I want to heed my own advice, it is often very difficult for me to say no to little changes. Just remember, little changes add up. Be the businessman.
Ouch. Sounds like your company is jumping on the bandwagon without checking with the driver to see where it's going.
Of course, this assumes that the controlling interests in your company are smart enough in the field to recognize shoddy work or not. Bugs are bugs, but a lot of the problems are internal -- such as poor, undocumented code that, from virtue of its own crapiness, result in increased costs of updates and management.
My advice is 1) before they shut down your facility, document the entire experience, samples of quality code, ease of communication, east of testing, etc. Later on you can validate your complaints with real-world examples.
2) as much as you might not like management, make every effort to separate yourself from the programming side (don't go fixing the code yourself). This will both save you from any blame that might eventually get passed around, and keep you from winding up in a dual role of manager and programmer, although only getting paid for one.
3) Especially if things look like they're not working out well! Keep careful track of all costs (as many as you can get your hands on) before and after. The current cost of running the facility, the cost of closing the facility, cost of moving people, cost of the new development, cost of debugging/testing/etc. the outsourced development, and the estimated cost of restarting your development facility. The goal is, before too long, going to the upper management and having black-and-white proof charted out, and being able to say, "Due to increased problems with our development pipeline, our theoretical savings have become additional costs. Unless this activity is stopped by %%DATE%%, out benefits will become costs and will continue to degrade. The quality of our product will diminish, and our returns will dissappear into the red."
Good luck
Once night in downtown Chicago, a begger and his girlfriend came up to my wife (then my fiance) and me as we were walking to a subway stop. He gave his story and asked for some money. I was under considerable financial pressure myself, so I vented...
"Well, I'd like some money myself. I've got four credit cards that I maxed out paying rent while looking for a job, and just graduated college. So I owe $14,000 to credit card companies, $18,000 to my school loans, I still owe $15,000 on my car, and I owe my dad several thousand on top of that. I'm not in too good shape here."
The guy and his girlfriend stopped and gave each other this look. The guy said solemnly, "Man, you in worse shape than me." And they walked off shaking their heads.
Exactly, and employers don't like this either. I worked at a place once where another employee had obviously padded his resume (or an agency had padded his resume for him). After two weeks, he was still trying to read "Learn ... in 24 hours" while nobody was looking, and they fired him.
Sure, it isn't hard to learn yet another language, but you shouldn't learn it at a job where they expect you to be useful right away. I think "How long would it take you to learn Portuguese?" was a good question. If you go to Brazil with an English->Portuguese phrase book, you'll be able to ask for a bathroom or a taxi after a short period of time. But don't think you can show up with zero Portuguese and be writing a dissertation next week.
After accepting the position, he went into a 5 minute discourse explaining that next time I should have...
He must not have had a very high opinion of your permanence with the company if he was lecturing you about 'next time' minutes after hiring you!
That's a great way of encouraging people to spend more money -- make things more expensive!
Neil,
As a designer, I love comics as a medium because they so intricately combine visual style and compelling storylines. Thank you for your efforts to brings comics to an adult audience! But does 'adult audience' necessarily mean kid-unfriendly? Your (wonderful) comics contain violence, nudity, etc. When writing, were these elements considered necessary to appeal to adults, or were they simply side-effects of the storyline?
Do you think that the connection between comics and children/teens is so strong that some kind of shock value must be added as a "this really is for adults" label? Do you think adults would react to comics with an adult-level story, that is kid-friendly as well?
Thanks, and don't stop working to get Good Omens on the big screen! (I vote for David Hyde Pierce as Aziraphale)
-david
Hmmm, a section defining HTTP: 80 pages
Pure coincidence? I think not.
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I think it can be argued that the algorithm that has created this music has, in a sense, encrypted the popular music it was derived from. If the RIAA can detect their copyrighted music in the newly generated music, it must mean they have circumvented that music's encryption. Say hello to the DMCA, Hillary.
But if you don't want to go with the fire w/ fire method, you could also call the newly generated music a parody of popular music -- it is, as you said, derivatives of their property -- and protect it that way.
.
This would be like somebody taping a sign to the front door of a video store that says, "The lock has fallen out of this door. You should fix this, or thieves could enter in the middle of the night and steal from you." I suppose to complete the analogy, you should assume that the shop owner does not have the correct tool to fix the lock.
In both cases, making a general alert -- while maybe not the best thing to do (a private note to the owner would always be a better idea) -- still doesn't amount to anything more than commentary on a situation. And just because the shop owner could not fix the situation himself, does not make you responsible for the situation itself.
Now, turn that around, and say that the note was sent privately to a would-be-burglar, and if the person sending the note was aware that this was a would-be-burglar, then the person would be accessory to the theft.
Now here's the far-fetched analogy, just to point out parallels...
Say a bank robber was planning on robbing First City Bank in Pretendville. You are walking down the street when this bank robber passes you, flustered and nervous. "Where's First City Bank?" he asks. You tell him, "two blocks that way, then make a left, can't miss it." You've just revealed information which can potentially be used for a theft. Since the bank was, at the time, protected from the theft by having a location unknown by the robber, you just impaired the integrity of the bank's security. Bam. 16 months....
(ok, that was a stretch)
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Not to mention, some mammalian groups have been known to abandon a member that has fallen behind and been 'contaminated' by researchers. After abandoning, these groups can become hostile towards the new outsider and will fight before letting the poor creature back in the group. I wouldn't doubt this is one of the considerations with sedating one of these animals.
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There was a quote I saw posted here a while back that I had to save. I wish I could tell you the original poster, but I can't. This is from Robert A. Heinlein, published in Life-Line in 1939 -- that's right, 1939:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
Hear, hear.
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It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost
Isn't that the basis for just about every post-apocalypse story out there? It's scary to think that we are already seeing signs of it.
Even fictional characters think the DMCA is evil!
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IPv6 will increase the supply of addresses from 4 billion today to a number in excess of 35 trillion that is "so big that there's not a word for the number," says Cody Christman
Well let's take a look. IPv6 looks like this:
2001:0418:000C:0003:0000:CF00:C0A8:2E2E
So the highest number is 16^32, right? Which is roughly 3.4028 x 10^38.
Which is a little over 340 undecillion. Want it exact? It's 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand, 456.
Plenty for everybody!
Check out more names of big numbers.
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They're not likely to get any of my business, they don't even have "classical" as one of the category selections! You have to search through manually, to the VERY confusing titles.
For instance, when searching for Rachmaninoff, I see an Arthur Rubinstein collection of Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op.16 in A Minor. I'm not familiar with this particular piece, and all I have to work with are:
Adagio
Allegro molto
Allegro moderato
1. How am I supposed to know what order these are to be played in?
2. These weren't even concurrent in the results -- there are three movements from another piece in between the Allegro molto and the Allegro moderator. How am I even supposted to know this is all of the movements, without checking another resource?
3. The cd this is on contains one concerto by Grieg and one by Rachmaninoff. There is no indication which is which!! Unless I consulted an outside resource, I would have to buy movements from both pieces to find which is which.
Granted, there aren't many like me, that don't listen to much other than classical. But I would expect a little more help.
.
well the wireless part is pretty good, but the actual process has been in use for a while. for many years now at Walmart, you could take a video tape (then DVD) or a CD to a barcode scanner and get a sample of the video/music. This is the same thing....
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Is it just me or does it seem like almost everything Dubya does is intended to lower the quality of life for the average American?
not exactly -- what Dubya is trying to do is broaden the gap between the higher class and the lower class. the fewer people there are in (his) higher class, the less of the tax burden they have to carry, and the more it can be distributed to those (masses) in the lower class.
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searching on Google led me to a discussion at umr.edu
Spoofed TCP SYNs w/Winsize 55808 (was: Help with an odd log file...)
It shows a log file with the 55808 data in it, in case anyone is interested in seeing the actual data
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C'mon guys, here's where you have the advantage because you can do something that big-shot software companies can't. Just make a few minor changes in the game artwork, and rename the game. re-release it as a "different game" and under a different company logo if you have to.
the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.
fly like a butterfly....
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For all you hacks out there that ever wondered if you would get caught doing this, here's your answer. Have fun. But whatever you do, do more than $5,000 in damage.
Because maybe then somebody will listen.
.
well since the poster has written an article about the code, yet hasn't mentioned the NDA, the NDA obviously restricts people from discussing the NDA.
.
The first thing that attracted me to Google, even before witnessing the quality of the search algorithm, was the sheer bareness of their main page. I heartily applaud any website that keeps their main page under 15Kb. Even more important, I applaud any website that values the goals of the users so much that their main page is essentially a single function with no fluff. I also applaud any website that maintains a zero ad banner and popup rule.
MS will never be able to compete with this. I would be very surprised if their main page will weigh in under 75Kb. It will be 90% fluff. And there will be ads all over it!
Google wins.
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This just goes to show that the RIAA is in it just for the money -- it doesn't care whether people do "the right thing" or not.
I just wish something would take the initiative and hit them with a barratry suit.
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So how is this the room of the future? This all sounds like stuff that's around already. The only part that's somewhat unusual is the biometric safe -- but when there are already biometric PDAs on the market, it's just not as impressive.
The Hotel Room of the Rich, maybe, but not Future. Sounds like Lasky was desperate to add some hype to a story.
A Hotel Room of the Future should be something that attempts to guess and then mimic how future innovations would tie in with the setting. (mimic being the keyword, because the object here is to show what hasn't been produced yet)
For instance, a room where the fabric-upholstered walls were made of ultra-thin flexible LCD sheets, and displayed a database of exotic settings. (faked for display with a simple projector) And a AI assistant that could order food from various restaurants, book theater tickets, or call a cab. (faked for display with a pre-recorded sequence) And a three-dimensional television set. (faked for display with iMax technology, requiring the use of glasses for demonstration)
Then I would be convinced that I was in a room of the future, or at least a mockup room of the future.
.