As a guess, I'd have to say the reason is the myth of "lower production cost". Theoretically, if BMW had a embedded system of this nature, built around a somewhat common and industry supported architecture, then after this system stabilizes, it should be fairly cheap for them to add new features in later versions and to generalize the controller across all their car models.
It's a tradeoff between a fairly specific, dedicated system designed for the "2003 745 Sedan" and a generic "BMW Car Control System". My money is they are shooting for the latter. Of course, the myth part comes in when they realize they are spending just as much, if not more, money in support, recalls, and god forbid, liability.
Also, from what I can tell, this car has a reasonably sophisticated GUI, which probably also made it seem that something like Windows CE would be a natural choice. Too bad, as another poster pointed out, that they didn't try something industrial strength like QNX (or if they did, I'd love to know why CE won the prize).
I couldn't agree more. It might be a little bit out of the way (although the Metro-North commuter railroad will get you pretty close), but I teach the Microsoft (boo, hiss, yeah, yeah, I know) Certification courses at SUNY Ulster, which is a community college just a bit upstate from you. Although I try to prep for the exams, I also have a lot of real-world experience (I'm an adjunct) and do my best to integrate that into the classroom. The other instructors that I've talked to that handle the other tracks seem to take very much the same approach.
We do a lot of hands on, practical stuff, and so far, the cirriculum has been well recieved by the students. Don't overlook SUNYs / Community Colleges. It can be a really good deal. Oh yeah.. classes start next week, better hurry up and enrolll...
About two years ago, I sat down with three of the key players in our public school district's "technology infusion" project (read: get as many computers into classrooms as possible). I was there as a consultant to help them try and find a way to integrate technology into their music education program.
I asked the question - "what do you plan on using all these machines for in each classroom throughout the school, besides in the music department?". The answer - basically, a buzzword laden answer that meant little more than "every other school is getting computers, we have to compete".
And that, friends, is the heart of this, and I would wager a lot of similar "infusion" programs - this need to get the computers into classrooms, but no plan whatsoever on what the actual educational purpose is. How can we expect teachers to effectively do anything with technology when the only thing addressed with many of these programs is the "how" to get computers, but not the "why"? Not one single person I could talk to at the school actually knew what the educational benefit was supposed to be - just get 'em and use 'em and the kids will somehow get smarter.
I think the problem is that there really is not much of a justifiable reason to include computers in general classrooms - at least, not a reason anyone has really come up with and proven to be succesful. "Computerizing" classrooms is a knee-jerk reaction to trying to repair what are fundamental flaws in the education system.
And after two years? Well, it turns out that the "infusion" project did little more than bring Instant Messanging and Email to the masses at school. The school ran out of money to spend on the music department's needs, so the bank of computers they got sit unplugged in the back of the room. Lots of money wasted, lots of talk... no result.
It's a good point, and no, I really don't want to land the plan for nuisance emergencies - and I would also not be suprised at all to hear that most of the cases are nuisance issues.
I guess my big concern with this whole thing the expectation an airline passenger has. Right now, I have the expectation that if I were to fly and to get seriously ill (or to really, really appear to be seriously ill), that I will be taken to seek proper medical attention - they key word, of course, being proper, which I'm not sure this actually is.
That is apparently going to change. The focus is shifting from personal safety to business economics. Just as long as everyone getting on the plan knows where they stand, it's all good... kind of.
Nowhere in the article is there any mention of how this benefits the potentially about-to-die passenger, and probably with good reason - there is no benefit to the potentially about-to-die passenger. Seriously - the article mentions the inconvenienced "other passengers"!
Has our lifestyle actually come to the point where getting to the meeting on time is more important than getting medical attention to another human? This tool is nothing more than a way to play the odds and increase profitibility.
Actually, I thought the comment about MacOS being "lickable" was great. Never thought about licking my os... but yes, now that I've tried it, and found it to be oddly peppermintish, he's right.
... are the two things I've personally found most reasonable when trying to guage developer effectiveness. Having regular code reviews, in addition to a lot of other tangible benefits, exposes the quality of a developer's work to the rest of the team. Over time, the team will generate their own evaluation of each member.
Using peer reviews and feedback, therefore, allows a manager to qualify a particular developer's "productivity" by asking the only metric worth anything - the opinion of other knowledgeable developers. Trying to equate any of this to any metric so far uncovered is truly pointless.
Not that there may not be a real metric (or, more likely, a complex set of metrics) out there that someone will discover to adequately measure this stuff; in the meantime, though, I'll continue to let the team examine, develop, grow, and rate itself. In the end, I know I'll have a strong group of developers who respect each other, work well together, can understand each other's code and approach, and who are...productive.
First, I think any company that makes their employees bind themselves contractually to pay for their own training should they decide to leave is exhibiting bad faith; if you need this type of leverage over your workers, then you must realize you have other problems in the employee-employer relationship that need to be addressed.
That being said... when I consider the issue of training the developers that work for me, I take a long, hard look at this issue. If I decide that someone needs a certain skill, I try to determine not only what the cost of learning that skill will be, but also what the salary range for a person with that skill should be in my general geographic area.
This gives me both up front, and long term costs. The issue then becomes not how much underpaid someone will be that works for me, but rather, is there a business justification to pay them as much as they will then be worth?
What is not said, but is overtly implied, is that the company in question can't afford to pay 3x current salaries, although that's what the employees will be worth in the job market. Well, if a product, such as OS X, requires that much overhead in terms of labor to support, but won't generate enough revenue to pay for it, perhaps the real issue is that there is no business case to support the product.
In the manufacturing world, if you want to build a new product, but you have no hope of ever making enough off the product to pay for the equipment, raw materials, and labor required to manufacture the product, guess what - you don't make the product. Unless there is some overriding business reason to do so, the cost justification isn't there.
The same should be true in the high-tech world - if your companies sales and support fees of OS X are enough to pay the 3x salaries, then you should pay the 3x salaries. If not, you should not do the training, and not support the product. I would bet if you came up with what it would cost you to support this, and pay the employee what they deserve, and compare that number to the number of copies of OS X you will sell and support, you'd realize that, at the prices you'd have to charge your clients, few would deem OS X worth it.
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As a guess, I'd have to say the reason is the myth of "lower production cost". Theoretically, if BMW had a embedded system of this nature, built around a somewhat common and industry supported architecture, then after this system stabilizes, it should be fairly cheap for them to add new features in later versions and to generalize the controller across all their car models.
It's a tradeoff between a fairly specific, dedicated system designed for the "2003 745 Sedan" and a generic "BMW Car Control System". My money is they are shooting for the latter. Of course, the myth part comes in when they realize they are spending just as much, if not more, money in support, recalls, and god forbid, liability.
Also, from what I can tell, this car has a reasonably sophisticated GUI, which probably also made it seem that something like Windows CE would be a natural choice. Too bad, as another poster pointed out, that they didn't try something industrial strength like QNX (or if they did, I'd love to know why CE won the prize).
I couldn't agree more. It might be a little bit out of the way (although the Metro-North commuter railroad will get you pretty close), but I teach the Microsoft (boo, hiss, yeah, yeah, I know) Certification courses at SUNY Ulster, which is a community college just a bit upstate from you. Although I try to prep for the exams, I also have a lot of real-world experience (I'm an adjunct) and do my best to integrate that into the classroom. The other instructors that I've talked to that handle the other tracks seem to take very much the same approach.
We do a lot of hands on, practical stuff, and so far, the cirriculum has been well recieved by the students. Don't overlook SUNYs / Community Colleges. It can be a really good deal. Oh yeah.. classes start next week, better hurry up and enrolll...
About two years ago, I sat down with three of the key players in our public school district's "technology infusion" project (read: get as many computers into classrooms as possible). I was there as a consultant to help them try and find a way to integrate technology into their music education program.
I asked the question - "what do you plan on using all these machines for in each classroom throughout the school, besides in the music department?". The answer - basically, a buzzword laden answer that meant little more than "every other school is getting computers, we have to compete".
And that, friends, is the heart of this, and I would wager a lot of similar "infusion" programs - this need to get the computers into classrooms, but no plan whatsoever on what the actual educational purpose is. How can we expect teachers to effectively do anything with technology when the only thing addressed with many of these programs is the "how" to get computers, but not the "why"? Not one single person I could talk to at the school actually knew what the educational benefit was supposed to be - just get 'em and use 'em and the kids will somehow get smarter.
I think the problem is that there really is not much of a justifiable reason to include computers in general classrooms - at least, not a reason anyone has really come up with and proven to be succesful. "Computerizing" classrooms is a knee-jerk reaction to trying to repair what are fundamental flaws in the education system.
And after two years? Well, it turns out that the "infusion" project did little more than bring Instant Messanging and Email to the masses at school. The school ran out of money to spend on the music department's needs, so the bank of computers they got sit unplugged in the back of the room. Lots of money wasted, lots of talk... no result.
It's a good point, and no, I really don't want to land the plan for nuisance emergencies - and I would also not be suprised at all to hear that most of the cases are nuisance issues. I guess my big concern with this whole thing the expectation an airline passenger has. Right now, I have the expectation that if I were to fly and to get seriously ill (or to really, really appear to be seriously ill), that I will be taken to seek proper medical attention - they key word, of course, being proper, which I'm not sure this actually is. That is apparently going to change. The focus is shifting from personal safety to business economics. Just as long as everyone getting on the plan knows where they stand, it's all good... kind of.
Nowhere in the article is there any mention of how this benefits the potentially about-to-die passenger, and probably with good reason - there is no benefit to the potentially about-to-die passenger. Seriously - the article mentions the inconvenienced "other passengers"!
Has our lifestyle actually come to the point where getting to the meeting on time is more important than getting medical attention to another human? This tool is nothing more than a way to play the odds and increase profitibility.
Actually, I thought the comment about MacOS being "lickable" was great. Never thought about licking my os... but yes, now that I've tried it, and found it to be oddly peppermintish, he's right.
Using peer reviews and feedback, therefore, allows a manager to qualify a particular developer's "productivity" by asking the only metric worth anything - the opinion of other knowledgeable developers. Trying to equate any of this to any metric so far uncovered is truly pointless.
Not that there may not be a real metric (or, more likely, a complex set of metrics) out there that someone will discover to adequately measure this stuff; in the meantime, though, I'll continue to let the team examine, develop, grow, and rate itself. In the end, I know I'll have a strong group of developers who respect each other, work well together, can understand each other's code and approach, and who are...productive.
Testify. Those VIA pieces of rubbish have cost me more headaches that any AMD processor will ever be worth.
That being said... when I consider the issue of training the developers that work for me, I take a long, hard look at this issue. If I decide that someone needs a certain skill, I try to determine not only what the cost of learning that skill will be, but also what the salary range for a person with that skill should be in my general geographic area.
This gives me both up front, and long term costs. The issue then becomes not how much underpaid someone will be that works for me, but rather, is there a business justification to pay them as much as they will then be worth?
What is not said, but is overtly implied, is that the company in question can't afford to pay 3x current salaries, although that's what the employees will be worth in the job market. Well, if a product, such as OS X, requires that much overhead in terms of labor to support, but won't generate enough revenue to pay for it, perhaps the real issue is that there is no business case to support the product.
In the manufacturing world, if you want to build a new product, but you have no hope of ever making enough off the product to pay for the equipment, raw materials, and labor required to manufacture the product, guess what - you don't make the product. Unless there is some overriding business reason to do so, the cost justification isn't there.
The same should be true in the high-tech world - if your companies sales and support fees of OS X are enough to pay the 3x salaries, then you should pay the 3x salaries. If not, you should not do the training, and not support the product. I would bet if you came up with what it would cost you to support this, and pay the employee what they deserve, and compare that number to the number of copies of OS X you will sell and support, you'd realize that, at the prices you'd have to charge your clients, few would deem OS X worth it.