"Does this make any kind of sense to anyone? Why would a company prefer to spend $15,000 on a project instead of $5,000."
Disclosure: I am a student, not a contractor or consultant. I have worked closely with Professional Engineers and managers who have worked with as and with a variety of consultants and contractors so I have picked up a few tidbits of knowledge.
I think that expensive consultants and contractors with fancy contracts, names, etc give a sense of implied value. The businesspeople who hire them do know a lot about business but not software development, and thus cannot gauge the real value of a project in terms of a software developer's time until they either do some development themselves or get screwed over enough times by consultants.
The story below has been modified slightly to protect the innocent, but the meanings/morals in it are unchanged.
Now a certain very large company I worked for recently had hired, before I had come on board, a well known worldwide consulting firm to develop some software for them. And the end of this and with ~$20k paid to the consultants (which was at about the time I was hired,) the company I worked for was quite unhappy with the work the consultants had done. They already knew they would be unhappy about half way through the project. Although (according to my sources) the consultants had built what was asked, it was at first insanely buggy, and even after the bugs were fixed, the entire design behind it was flawed.
That is one reason why I was hired. The company had learned its lesson and redefined its criteria and constraints. Then, working as a ~$20/h university student, I built something much closer to what the company wanted and they seem to be quite pleased.
So here is the moral of the story as I see it: One main reason (but not the only reason) why companies will pay too much for software is because the don't understand software development values and what makes something easy or hard to develop. Only by getting screwed over a few times (i.e. by trial and error) will businesspeople and managers really learn how to gauge the value of software development. Until that time, they will believe that high cost == high value.
"Did you come up with it off the top of your head or is there any more thinking around this concept documented anywhere?"
Thank you kindly for your comments! I am also a media critic (mostly an armchair media critic, mind you) and have been thinking about setting up some sort of ad-critiquing site for use as my personal soapbox for some time.
The comment above mostly was just made up as I read the article and wrote the comment. The actual number '1 cent' came loosely from an article (I forget where exactly) I read in the late 90s that proposed a charge of 1 cent for viewing a web page so that the creator could be compensated.
But applying it to ads and the system of addition and subtraction based upon the value of profiling was my idea. I don't actually know if there's more extensive research documented about a system where ads are 'traded' for money and vice versa based on value.
"PBS, digital movie channels, HBO, etc...
We pay a premium for these already because they braodcast with few or no channels. This is a non-issue sort of question because the niche for non-commercial TV is already filled and doing fine."
Speaking of paying a premium, how about this strategy: Would you pay one cent to skip a commercial?
Have an account linked to the PVR and subtract 1 cent each time an ad is skipped.
Of course, having an account implies a link to a credit card and a unique identifier. This allows for some detailed profiling.
There should be an option to turn profiling on and off, with various benefits to the user if they turn it on (because the profiling is valuable marketing information.)
When profiling is turned off: Skip an advert: subtract 1 cent from your account
Don't skip an advert: do nothing to your account
When profiling is enabled: Skip an advert: subtract 1 cent from your account
Don't skip an advert: plus 1 cent to your account.
The people with profiling turned on would have some interesting powers too. For example, if the profiling revealed that 90% of people are willing to pay 1c to skip the Mazda Zoom-Zoom kid ad, that #%)*&#% 'Buck-a-day' or similar computer sale ads, the Dell Kid ads, etc, you would essentially be telling the advertisers to change their tune.
WOW! In my area, all the schools are burgeoning at the seams, and have been for as long as I can remember. Lots of companies are moving their operations from Toronto and Mississauga to where the cost of living (and therefore the cost of salaries) is lower. Thousands and thousands of new homes have gone up in the last 2 years.
I have switched schools twice because of it. Half of my sister's friends are now going to a new school that is unrelated to my school-hopping.
I find the concept of an under-filled school to be amazing!
I've never had to put a deposit on a textbook and we were always allowed to take them home and there were always enough except for those english reading books. With the new curriculum, though, the teachers know they're not gonna get new books anytime soon so you get a heavy fine for damaging one. My friend's sister put a piece of paper on the book and wrote on the piece of paper. There was a $5 fine for that because of the imprint from the pen on the book.
Wow man, I did not know how precarious the situation was at underpopulated schools!
The schools with small numbers of students always get short-changed for funding. Sad but true. My friend's high school was very small and had similar problems... like having no calculus textbooks at all!
"(B) There was a long line of people returning bottles and cans, when it's my turn I get a certificate for 90 cents, which I then have to take to the grocery store next door and stand in line to claim."
I hear you... you'd probably nullify that 90 cents in the gas useage and damage to the environment from the pollution from your car's internal combustion engine.
"Same deal with monitors. They really ought to be recycled. So it'd be nice if it weren't such a pain in the ass to do so."
This is actually done competently by the high school I went to... they do plenty of advertising. Basically you have to fill out a single 1-page form that can be downloaded from the web, give the school a call and they send a specially designated crew of students to come with a truck and pick the units up and get the form from you. 'Easy - The way it should be.' Btw, that paperwork form is used for the tax rebate. (Did I just come up with AOL or apple's new slogan?)
"Usually, you can take your monitor to an appropriate dealer or electronics shop, where trained & certified technicians can safely deactivate, disassemble & dispose of the monitor for you. This is what I'm looking for right now."
I'm sure there are public schools in your area that would be ABSOLUTELY THRILLED to take it off your hands, and possibly issue a tax credit in the process.
One time I was working as a co-op student technician at a university and there were a whole pile of really old non-working monitors and other boxen. I was given the task one day of disposing all of these in the dumpster, so I took them down on a cart and had a fun time dropkicking and lobbing them without fear of damanging something important. I actually grabbed one of the boxes out and tossed it in again just for fun.
This was a fun change from imaging hard drives, building machines, software development, etc.
"I always thought old monitors were supposed to sit around in your attic."
1. If you can't use the monitor, then first look into local schools. I know that in Ontario, Canada, you can get a tax credit for donating used computer equipment to schools. My high school (according to my brother who still goes there) has about 4 computer labs for ~P100-266 machines from this program which still word process and surf fairly nicely.
2. If the monitor is broken and the cost of repair is more than a comprable new monitor, then there will be specialised safe disposal facilities at must garbage dumps. Chances are you have to drive there and drop it off yourself, but it's worth it in preventing the Lead, Arsenic, etc from getting into the water.
3. When getting a new CRT montior, make sure it conforms to at least TCO99 (there is a sticker) because these have environmentally conscious amounts of harmful chemicals in them, but should still be disposed of safely in the end.
Re:Get some PRIORITIES!
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 1
This device could help in countries where electrical power in unreliable and highly expensive, especially in war zones where nothing is reliable.
"Not only does buying CDs directly from the artist provide them better compensation, but since you've already heard his/her music you know you'll enjoy much of what's on the CD. And to top it off the music cartels don't get a dime of your money. SCORE!"
You said it. Now if only more bands would come to my town...
I think the statistic is that at their live performances, the artist gets ~$5 per disc sold while with store-bought discs, it's usually a few cents per track.
At this rate, I would prefer to wait several months for my favourite artists to perform near my location so I can buy their CDs at the concert instead of getting the CD in the store immediately after it's released.
"Napster popularized P2P, and really brought about the try-before-you-buy mindset that alot of people have developped since in buying..."
Napster did not popularise P2P. It popularised filesharing and was based on a centralised server and did not use a peer to peer model. It was Morpheus/Kzaaza that popularised P2P.
But I agree with your comments about Napster popularising the try before buy attitude.
"I think a lot of the decline is sales is the price of albums nowadays. It's ludicrous to pay $20 for something that costs less than $1 to produce. THAT'S probably what's killing consumer interest, but digital piracy makes a handy scapegoat. If piracy ended tomorrow, the sales would barely move I think."
I do agree that the price of CDs is outrageous and that they are charging way too much, but I think it costs more than $1.00 to produce a good CD.
The materials (plastic holder, punching the disc, printing the inserts) probably cost less than $1.00 but there are other costs. You have to pay a typesetter to put together the inserts. A photographer is paid to take those shots of the band. A sound engineer has to mix the tracks and produce them for CD format. Oh yeah, and I suspect that even today, the artists get a few cents in royalties.
Still, I expect that the price charged is ludicrous.
Hypothetically, if the royalty portion of the price was doubled, but the profit margin was reduced to, say, 100% (which is still outrageous) I bet the labels would make MORE money because more people could afford to buy the CDs.
"Other people download to find new music, which they then purchase. Personally I have bought a lot of CDs because I downloaded music from a band I read about first."
I think that this is part of the whole point. The RIAA does not like it because they don't control the distribution, and it's one brick in the wall between them and control of their profits.
I also have a whole bunch of CDs that I bought because of hearing the artists when I downloaded their tunes. Populations now are so diverse that most people simply can't find anything worth listening to on mainstream TV or HITMIX 99 radio. This is why I find online samlers from unknown artists and listen to community radio stations. Occasionally, I hear something I like and take note, then look the CD up at Sam's because HMV never seems to have what I want. (For radio, I record the time it played and then look at the station's web site and find what was on their playlist at that time.)
"Seems rather silly since you can't opt not to read the message as you can not to take a call."
Yes, it does seem silly. And on the carriers where you have to pay for receiving SMS (*cough* Fido *cough*) I could just sent 1000 e-mails to my enemy's number and cost him $100 on the spot.
"This is a problem that is exacerbated by the receiving party pays for calls and text messages trap that, as I understand it, only the US has fallen into."
It's because they want to advertise that "sending text messages is free" so people will buy into it. I find it very deceptive and annoying. When you find out the real cost, you don't want to use it because you will cost the other person money, probably without their permission.
My carrier in Canada (Telus Mobility) used to have it that way, but it recently changes to the you only pay to receive if the sender was using a computer and not a phone. Otherwise the sender always page CAD$0.10. (This is about US$0.065).
"lets examine this question here. If I give you the number's 1-10, minus a SINGLE number, then how difficult is it to FIND THE MISSING NUMBER? maybe thats why you get burned, you're asking silly questions."
No, it is not silly. It is a simple question where there are multiple solutions, some of which are more elegant than others. The ability of a person to find the elegant solution for an easy problem speaks volumes about how their brain works.
My first response to this question would be a process of elimination where you use some sort of binary decision tree (or a case statement in java) to eliminate the other possibilities. This is non-elegant and downright ugly. Too many ASM instructions. Hard to implement on embedded systems.
Now a few minutes later I believe I have found a more elegant solution:
Missing number = 55 - sumof(9 numbers)
Assuming the 9 numbers are in an array or linked list, a simple loop or recursive function traverses it, adds the numbers, and then one lines subtracts the sum from 55 to get the answer. I think that that is more elegant.
Can any *real* programmers come up with a better (more elegant, faster) answer?
"Unfortunately, we've been burned a couple of times by people whose performance didn't measure up to what we expected from the interviews. So I'm wondering if other people wanted to share their interviewing tricks - how do you find out if someone is a good programmer?"
By 'performance not measuring up,' do you mean that they simply did not know how to build what you wanted to build? Were they not fast enough? Did they not build stuff according to your specifications?
Please explain how you determined that they were not 'measuring up to standards' !
Were they reading slashdot at work when they should have been programming? I think that this could have been a drain on productivity and perhaps justification for you to discipline them because [...] uh, wait a sec a minute...
/me closes the browser window
Re:this is very limited in usability
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 2
"3. PR releases tend to hype (and even lie) about how many companies are "interested" in an attempt to lure the others in. We need to shine more light on this subject fast."
I think one missing link in the article is the concept of how the 'released' key is read by your computer. The 'smart card' in the protected CD will receive impulses from the CD drive's laser and then will 'release' the decryption key.
How, exactly?
The standard cd-rom drive can only get data from the CD by using its laser to read the pits and bumps. Does this 'smart card' change the laser's impression of the CD? And what prevents us from reading the 'released' code once it is 'released?' I think you are right and that there are serious holes in marketing's description of this product, and I believe that not all of the claims will hold up if this even gets mass produced.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclosure: I am a student, not a contractor or consultant. I have worked closely with Professional Engineers and managers who have worked with as and with a variety of consultants and contractors so I have picked up a few tidbits of knowledge.
I think that expensive consultants and contractors with fancy contracts, names, etc give a sense of implied value. The businesspeople who hire them do know a lot about business but not software development, and thus cannot gauge the real value of a project in terms of a software developer's time until they either do some development themselves or get screwed over enough times by consultants.
The story below has been modified slightly to protect the innocent, but the meanings/morals in it are unchanged.
Now a certain very large company I worked for recently had hired, before I had come on board, a well known worldwide consulting firm to develop some software for them. And the end of this and with ~$20k paid to the consultants (which was at about the time I was hired,) the company I worked for was quite unhappy with the work the consultants had done. They already knew they would be unhappy about half way through the project. Although (according to my sources) the consultants had built what was asked, it was at first insanely buggy, and even after the bugs were fixed, the entire design behind it was flawed.
That is one reason why I was hired. The company had learned its lesson and redefined its criteria and constraints. Then, working as a ~$20/h university student, I built something much closer to what the company wanted and they seem to be quite pleased.
So here is the moral of the story as I see it: One main reason (but not the only reason) why companies will pay too much for software is because the don't understand software development values and what makes something easy or hard to develop. Only by getting screwed over a few times (i.e. by trial and error) will businesspeople and managers really learn how to gauge the value of software development. Until that time, they will believe that high cost == high value.
Yeah but there are always web bugs. You'd better get yourself a hosts blocking list.
Personally, I swear by /etc/hosts or /winnt/system32/drivers/etc/hosts, wherever the circumstances apply.
Thank you kindly for your comments! I am also a media critic (mostly an armchair media critic, mind you) and have been thinking about setting up some sort of ad-critiquing site for use as my personal soapbox for some time.
The comment above mostly was just made up as I read the article and wrote the comment. The actual number '1 cent' came loosely from an article (I forget where exactly) I read in the late 90s that proposed a charge of 1 cent for viewing a web page so that the creator could be compensated.
But applying it to ads and the system of addition and subtraction based upon the value of profiling was my idea. I don't actually know if there's more extensive research documented about a system where ads are 'traded' for money and vice versa based on value.
Speaking of paying a premium, how about this strategy: Would you pay one cent to skip a commercial?
Have an account linked to the PVR and subtract 1 cent each time an ad is skipped.
Of course, having an account implies a link to a credit card and a unique identifier. This allows for some detailed profiling.
There should be an option to turn profiling on and off, with various benefits to the user if they turn it on (because the profiling is valuable marketing information.)
When profiling is turned off:
Skip an advert: subtract 1 cent from your account
Don't skip an advert: do nothing to your account
When profiling is enabled:
Skip an advert: subtract 1 cent from your account
Don't skip an advert: plus 1 cent to your account.
The people with profiling turned on would have some interesting powers too. For example, if the profiling revealed that 90% of people are willing to pay 1c to skip the Mazda Zoom-Zoom kid ad, that #%)*&#% 'Buck-a-day' or similar computer sale ads, the Dell Kid ads, etc, you would essentially be telling the advertisers to change their tune.
I have switched schools twice because of it. Half of my sister's friends are now going to a new school that is unrelated to my school-hopping.
I find the concept of an under-filled school to be amazing!
I've never had to put a deposit on a textbook and we were always allowed to take them home and there were always enough except for those english reading books. With the new curriculum, though, the teachers know they're not gonna get new books anytime soon so you get a heavy fine for damaging one. My friend's sister put a piece of paper on the book and wrote on the piece of paper. There was a $5 fine for that because of the imprint from the pen on the book.
Wow man, I did not know how precarious the situation was at underpopulated schools!
The schools with small numbers of students always get short-changed for funding. Sad but true. My friend's high school was very small and had similar problems ... like having no calculus textbooks at all!
I hear you ... you'd probably nullify that 90 cents in the gas useage and damage to the environment from the pollution from your car's internal combustion engine.
"Same deal with monitors. They really ought to be recycled. So it'd be nice if it weren't such a pain in the ass to do so."
This is actually done competently by the high school I went to ... they do plenty of advertising. Basically you have to fill out a single 1-page form that can be downloaded from the web, give the school a call and they send a specially designated crew of students to come with a truck and pick the units up and get the form from you. 'Easy - The way it should be.' Btw, that paperwork form is used for the tax rebate. (Did I just come up with AOL or apple's new slogan?)
I'm sure there are public schools in your area that would be ABSOLUTELY THRILLED to take it off your hands, and possibly issue a tax credit in the process.
I actually did this once.
One time I was working as a co-op student technician at a university and there were a whole pile of really old non-working monitors and other boxen. I was given the task one day of disposing all of these in the dumpster, so I took them down on a cart and had a fun time dropkicking and lobbing them without fear of damanging something important. I actually grabbed one of the boxes out and tossed it in again just for fun.
This was a fun change from imaging hard drives, building machines, software development, etc.
1. If you can't use the monitor, then first look into local schools. I know that in Ontario, Canada, you can get a tax credit for donating used computer equipment to schools. My high school (according to my brother who still goes there) has about 4 computer labs for ~P100-266 machines from this program which still word process and surf fairly nicely.
2. If the monitor is broken and the cost of repair is more than a comprable new monitor, then there will be specialised safe disposal facilities at must garbage dumps. Chances are you have to drive there and drop it off yourself, but it's worth it in preventing the Lead, Arsenic, etc from getting into the water.
3. When getting a new CRT montior, make sure it conforms to at least TCO99 (there is a sticker) because these have environmentally conscious amounts of harmful chemicals in them, but should still be disposed of safely in the end.
This device could help in countries where electrical power in unreliable and highly expensive, especially in war zones where nothing is reliable.
Please mod parent up as insightful.
You said it. Now if only more bands would come to my town ...
I think the statistic is that at their live performances, the artist gets ~$5 per disc sold while with store-bought discs, it's usually a few cents per track.
At this rate, I would prefer to wait several months for my favourite artists to perform near my location so I can buy their CDs at the concert instead of getting the CD in the store immediately after it's released.
I can one-up you on that one: "
CowboyNeal stole my virginity."
Napster did not popularise P2P. It popularised filesharing and was based on a centralised server and did not use a peer to peer model. It was Morpheus/Kzaaza that popularised P2P.
But I agree with your comments about Napster popularising the try before buy attitude.
I do agree that the price of CDs is outrageous and that they are charging way too much, but I think it costs more than $1.00 to produce a good CD.
The materials (plastic holder, punching the disc, printing the inserts) probably cost less than $1.00 but there are other costs. You have to pay a typesetter to put together the inserts. A photographer is paid to take those shots of the band. A sound engineer has to mix the tracks and produce them for CD format. Oh yeah, and I suspect that even today, the artists get a few cents in royalties.
Still, I expect that the price charged is ludicrous.
Hypothetically, if the royalty portion of the price was doubled, but the profit margin was reduced to, say, 100% (which is still outrageous) I bet the labels would make MORE money because more people could afford to buy the CDs.
I think that this is part of the whole point. The RIAA does not like it because they don't control the distribution, and it's one brick in the wall between them and control of their profits.
I also have a whole bunch of CDs that I bought because of hearing the artists when I downloaded their tunes. Populations now are so diverse that most people simply can't find anything worth listening to on mainstream TV or HITMIX 99 radio. This is why I find online samlers from unknown artists and listen to community radio stations. Occasionally, I hear something I like and take note, then look the CD up at Sam's because HMV never seems to have what I want. (For radio, I record the time it played and then look at the station's web site and find what was on their playlist at that time.)
This exposes what we knew all along about Dubyah and Ashcroft.
Yes, it does seem silly. And on the carriers where you have to pay for receiving SMS (*cough* Fido *cough*) I could just sent 1000 e-mails to my enemy's number and cost him $100 on the spot.
It's because they want to advertise that "sending text messages is free" so people will buy into it. I find it very deceptive and annoying. When you find out the real cost, you don't want to use it because you will cost the other person money, probably without their permission.
My carrier in Canada (Telus Mobility) used to have it that way, but it recently changes to the you only pay to receive if the sender was using a computer and not a phone. Otherwise the sender always page CAD$0.10. (This is about US$0.065).
No, it is not silly. It is a simple question where there are multiple solutions, some of which are more elegant than others. The ability of a person to find the elegant solution for an easy problem speaks volumes about how their brain works.
My first response to this question would be a process of elimination where you use some sort of binary decision tree (or a case statement in java) to eliminate the other possibilities. This is non-elegant and downright ugly. Too many ASM instructions. Hard to implement on embedded systems.
Now a few minutes later I believe I have found a more elegant solution:
Missing number = 55 - sumof(9 numbers)
Assuming the 9 numbers are in an array or linked list, a simple loop or recursive function traverses it, adds the numbers, and then one lines subtracts the sum from 55 to get the answer. I think that that is more elegant.
Can any *real* programmers come up with a better (more elegant, faster) answer?
And most importantly:
Spell <random word picked from thesaurus>
By 'performance not measuring up,' do you mean that they simply did not know how to build what you wanted to build? Were they not fast enough? Did they not build stuff according to your specifications?
Please explain how you determined that they were not 'measuring up to standards' !
/me closes the browser window
I think one missing link in the article is the concept of how the 'released' key is read by your computer. The 'smart card' in the protected CD will receive impulses from the CD drive's laser and then will 'release' the decryption key.
How, exactly?
The standard cd-rom drive can only get data from the CD by using its laser to read the pits and bumps. Does this 'smart card' change the laser's impression of the CD? And what prevents us from reading the 'released' code once it is 'released?' I think you are right and that there are serious holes in marketing's description of this product, and I believe that not all of the claims will hold up if this even gets mass produced.
That's it, I'm gonna start spamming business, sending out unsolicited messages asking everyone to help Dubyah get re-elected.