Go read "Debugging the Development Process" by Maguire.
The book is basically for the audience of "Technical Manager."
They might be called App Architect, Tech Lead, Technical Project Lead, Senior Engineer, whatever.
The role exists, and has existed for years, as the author of this essay points out... Brooks talked about it in the 70's.
Now one thing in a corporate environment, you have all the HR crap.
I think many technical people do not mind falling into the tech lead role. But most technical people don't want to deal with HR crap.
Divide that off onto another person, and you start to achieve success. Your tech leads provide their feedback into the reviews, but this team manager actually handles all the hiring, firing, training, salary, budget, whatever crap.
Many successful companies divide these duties up. Let a technical person manage the software development, and some other non-tech person handle the other crap.
Ahh it appears you are trolling, or trying to justify the purchase of your Palm.
Why would I possibly want a laptop?
Seriously, why? I've had 2-3 laptops over the years and I absolutely HATE them. I was offered one at work, and refused to take it.
Considering with the laptop I'd still need to purchase a monitor, keyboard and mouse to make it useful as a desk machine.
Even with the monitor, keyboard and such I'm still suffering because of much slower hardware, not to mention less expandable.
The PocketPC does have many of the disadvantages of a laptop, smaller screen, slower, less memory, etc. But it is a *MUCH* better traveling companion than a Laptop anyway... longer battery life, *INSTANT* access to email, schedule, documents, etc.
I find your arguments to be weak.
You go ahead and carry your PDA and laptop around all day... I'll just carry my PocketPC.
I have a Compaq Aero 2130 which I upgraded to PocketPC. It's not quite as nice as the new ipaq but it's infinitely easier to use and more versatile than the Palm.
The argument that if the Palm user wanted more power they'd buy a laptop doesn't sit well with me. I don't get it, why would you buy both a Palm and a laptop when you can just buy a PocketPC and have all your needs covered?
Besides it's so much easier to lug a PocketPC through the airport than it is a laptop bag. And people don't know you have it so they don't try to steal it.
Actually it was just last week, and I actually thought it sounded much worse than MP3.
I will make the point that I'm listening with Sony MDR-V6 studio headphones, not tinny little speakers.
Perhaps it was just the implementation, like I said. But I want something good today, not in 3 years.
WMA takes about twice as long to encode as MP3 does, but one receives a benefit... it sounds much much better at lower bit rate. i.e. in my experience WMA at 160kbps is equivalant to MP3 at around 256kbps.
The inconvenience of spending $30 on a MP3 encoder is far less of a cost than spending 10 times the computing cycles trying to encode your CD's on a format which is free. I'd rather spend the money and get something that's quality and easy to use than frustrate myself with a freebie.
The inconvenience of a license is far less painful than poor quality software.
Now maybe I was using an older implementation, but...
I tried to encode something using the.ogg format as presented in Media Jukebox or some such app.
What I found was:
- It took an incredibly long time.
- It sounded incredibly bad, even worse than MP3
Granted, it'll probably improve. But I'm a big fan of using stuff that works well today. The inconvenience to me of using a licensed format like MP3 or WMA is incredibly small. When compared to the inconvenience of using a pre-alpha poorly implemented format like OGG, what's the point?
Take your analogy... Now imagine a world in which 3com published the schematics for their devices with instructions on how to build your own.
Ok, that's not hard to believe. A lot of electrical devices have readily available schematics for use by repair technicians.
Now imagine the 3Com Public License which states that not only are they giving away the schematic, but you don't owe them anything... Make as many of these devices as you want, give them to friends and neighbors. No licensing fees, no royalties, etc.
Do you think ethernet would have evolved to 1Gbps if that had been the case?
Do you think 3Com would have survived 5 years in business?
That's all he's saying. Without income there is no incentive to improve the product.
The first part of your article rather ignores the fact that the development of X at MIT was funded by commercial entities such as DEC, etc.
This happens with a lot of work done at Universities. The corporate companies give them a bunch of money to do some research, and in return they benefit by utilizing the research in their commercial products.
RMS just thinks that he is entitled to handouts and freebies for eternity without giving anything back to those who support him financially.
Having worked in a University environment for 4 years, I understand the issues of funding, research and distributing the results. It's a complicated issue, but unfortunately RMS's attitude is pretty much that of the Ivory Tower academic.
The GPL is most certainly *NOT* a necessary evil. It was spawned by jealousy and bitterness.
Hmm, maybe because PCAnywhere isn't a simple app?
It does a lot of low level stuff to take over your machine.
It might seem backwards to have more than one server, but most corporations do just that. Whether it be routers, Unix, NT, whatever... we always test a configuration change before making it in production.
I wouldn't say that is true at all. I along with those I work with are very harsh critics of Microsoft.
It's just that we see the real problems, not the FUD that is spread by the Linux zealots.
Just because we don't agree with the FUD doesn't mean we don't have issues.
Although to be honest, Windows 2000 has addressed nearly every major issue I had with NT 4.0, including some really annoying UI problems. Proof that Microsoft is listening.
We've always had this idea of distributed sharing on the internet for as long as I've been connected... since the late 1980's anyway.
They were called FTP sites. Later we had fsp, and then after that came the Web.
These technologies worked great except that nobody knew you existed unless you advertised. From that concept came the directory services... WAIS and then later yahoo, lycos, altavista, etc.
Napster came out and provided a directory service which catered solely to the purpose of finding pirated music. So yes, they were an easy target to shut down, a directory service that all connected to.
But the idea that you will do peer to peer networking on a grand scale is technically flawed. Anybody who has ever tried to manage a large network of Win95 machines running NetBEUI would understand this.
As the network grows larger, the percentage of network bandwidth which is required to maintain the connections between the nodes, passing queries for services, etc. grows at an almost exponential pace... until at some point you are using more bandwidth handling the overhead than actually sharing data.
Nobody will need to shut down freenet, it will collapse under it's own weight, or it will remain niche and isolated and a bother to nobody.
Napster was a technically sound solution, it was unfortunately ethically and legally flawed.
I have a feeling that we as a society have been down this path before, and we fail to learn from our history.
Prior to the invention of the movable type printing press, in order to copy a book or other paper it required someone sitting down with a pen and paper and doing it by hand.
Prior to this technology it was very difficult to mass produce literature, and as such books were incredibly rare and expensive.
I guess the point is, the copyright laws were pretty much created to combat the problems the new technology generated. Do you think now that there is new technology that makes it even easier to copy books or music the laws will not be strengthened rather than removed?
It is not unthinkable as we start to flesh out the problems of the Internet that we will see more police involvement. There have been reports of huge problems with pedophilia, identity theft, fraud, breaking into systems, etc. over the years. The Internet is drawing attention to itself, and many people are outraged by the stories they hear.
Your claim that it can't be stopped is rather naive. As our country grew westward in the 19th century we had bad people doing bad things and getting away with it, also thinking that they could not be stopped because the land was so wide and they could hide easily.
That obviously changed as the land became more populated, and tax dollars were spent hiring law enforcement officers.
The Internet will most likely evolve in a similar fashion.
As far as the issue there are with crossing nation borders, those can be dealt with as well by cooperation between police agencies. The same technology that connects citizens can also be used to connect police agencies. Perhaps the need for such enforcement will result in cooperation and a world government.
It's hard to say... There's a whole future ahead of us. There aren't very many people who want to live in a lawless anarchy, and as such our society will adapt to bring order to the chaos, or at least try to.
The cost of software has *NOT* gone down in the past 10 years. Just go out and look at pricing on any of a variety of products.
The only markets in which software prices have gone down are those which were influenced by competition from Microsoft. NOS, OS, Office productivity, development tools, etc. in other words, the prices went down because Microsoft provided lower cost alternatives!
The price of Windows 9x has remained consistent with the direction of the market.
You want to compare apples to apples... Go look at the prices for an upgrade to MacOS. $99... boom, same price, same market, same league.
Your example is called Vaporware, not FUD. It is when a company announces a product long before it's released or perhaps even developed in the hopes of pulling mindshare aware from the competition.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is when you say things about some other product not because they are factual but because you hope to spread well FUD about their product.
FUD is and can be used by everyone, considering the amount of FUD spread on slashdot I think it's pretty apparent that it is not isolated to large companies.
From what I can tell, I'm supposed to send an email to some person at some ISP and then hopefully get a response.
But I want to be able to control my thing.city.state.us name just like I can my other domain names at register.com, etc. I don't want to have to rely on sending an email and hopefully getting what I want.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read "Debugging the Development Process" by Maguire.
The book is basically for the audience of "Technical Manager."
They might be called App Architect, Tech Lead, Technical Project Lead, Senior Engineer, whatever.
The role exists, and has existed for years, as the author of this essay points out... Brooks talked about it in the 70's.
Now one thing in a corporate environment, you have all the HR crap.
I think many technical people do not mind falling into the tech lead role. But most technical people don't want to deal with HR crap.
Divide that off onto another person, and you start to achieve success. Your tech leads provide their feedback into the reviews, but this team manager actually handles all the hiring, firing, training, salary, budget, whatever crap.
Many successful companies divide these duties up. Let a technical person manage the software development, and some other non-tech person handle the other crap.
Why not withhold the last chapter to those who buy the book.
:)
If it's a good book, you'll want to find out what happens!
Why not?
Ahh it appears you are trolling, or trying to justify the purchase of your Palm.
Why would I possibly want a laptop?
Seriously, why? I've had 2-3 laptops over the years and I absolutely HATE them. I was offered one at work, and refused to take it.
Considering with the laptop I'd still need to purchase a monitor, keyboard and mouse to make it useful as a desk machine.
Even with the monitor, keyboard and such I'm still suffering because of much slower hardware, not to mention less expandable.
The PocketPC does have many of the disadvantages of a laptop, smaller screen, slower, less memory, etc. But it is a *MUCH* better traveling companion than a Laptop anyway... longer battery life, *INSTANT* access to email, schedule, documents, etc.
I find your arguments to be weak.
You go ahead and carry your PDA and laptop around all day... I'll just carry my PocketPC.
Agreed.
I have a Compaq Aero 2130 which I upgraded to PocketPC. It's not quite as nice as the new ipaq but it's infinitely easier to use and more versatile than the Palm.
The argument that if the Palm user wanted more power they'd buy a laptop doesn't sit well with me. I don't get it, why would you buy both a Palm and a laptop when you can just buy a PocketPC and have all your needs covered?
Besides it's so much easier to lug a PocketPC through the airport than it is a laptop bag. And people don't know you have it so they don't try to steal it.
Oh, that's simple. People were downloading music.
Someone said "Hey, this is wrong"
People suddenly came up with a lame excuse, "Uhh, yeah.... well we're doing it because you ain't giving enough profits to the artists!"
Some other dude said "Yeah! Yeah! What he said."
Actually it was just last week, and I actually thought it sounded much worse than MP3.
I will make the point that I'm listening with Sony MDR-V6 studio headphones, not tinny little speakers.
Perhaps it was just the implementation, like I said. But I want something good today, not in 3 years.
WMA takes about twice as long to encode as MP3 does, but one receives a benefit... it sounds much much better at lower bit rate. i.e. in my experience WMA at 160kbps is equivalant to MP3 at around 256kbps.
The inconvenience of spending $30 on a MP3 encoder is far less of a cost than spending 10 times the computing cycles trying to encode your CD's on a format which is free. I'd rather spend the money and get something that's quality and easy to use than frustrate myself with a freebie.
The inconvenience of a license is far less painful than poor quality software.
Now maybe I was using an older implementation, but...
.ogg format as presented in Media Jukebox or some such app.
I tried to encode something using the
What I found was:
- It took an incredibly long time.
- It sounded incredibly bad, even worse than MP3
Granted, it'll probably improve. But I'm a big fan of using stuff that works well today. The inconvenience to me of using a licensed format like MP3 or WMA is incredibly small. When compared to the inconvenience of using a pre-alpha poorly implemented format like OGG, what's the point?
Open Standard is not the same as Open Source.
Take your analogy... Now imagine a world in which 3com published the schematics for their devices with instructions on how to build your own.
Ok, that's not hard to believe. A lot of electrical devices have readily available schematics for use by repair technicians.
Now imagine the 3Com Public License which states that not only are they giving away the schematic, but you don't owe them anything... Make as many of these devices as you want, give them to friends and neighbors. No licensing fees, no royalties, etc.
Do you think ethernet would have evolved to 1Gbps if that had been the case?
Do you think 3Com would have survived 5 years in business?
That's all he's saying. Without income there is no incentive to improve the product.
The first part of your article rather ignores the fact that the development of X at MIT was funded by commercial entities such as DEC, etc.
This happens with a lot of work done at Universities. The corporate companies give them a bunch of money to do some research, and in return they benefit by utilizing the research in their commercial products.
RMS just thinks that he is entitled to handouts and freebies for eternity without giving anything back to those who support him financially.
Having worked in a University environment for 4 years, I understand the issues of funding, research and distributing the results. It's a complicated issue, but unfortunately RMS's attitude is pretty much that of the Ivory Tower academic.
The GPL is most certainly *NOT* a necessary evil. It was spawned by jealousy and bitterness.
Hmm, maybe because PCAnywhere isn't a simple app?
It does a lot of low level stuff to take over your machine.
It might seem backwards to have more than one server, but most corporations do just that. Whether it be routers, Unix, NT, whatever... we always test a configuration change before making it in production.
I wouldn't say that is true at all. I along with those I work with are very harsh critics of Microsoft.
It's just that we see the real problems, not the FUD that is spread by the Linux zealots.
Just because we don't agree with the FUD doesn't mean we don't have issues.
Although to be honest, Windows 2000 has addressed nearly every major issue I had with NT 4.0, including some really annoying UI problems. Proof that Microsoft is listening.
Because Win32 doesn't have fork(). :)
Do you people even read documentation? Sheesh.
Most of your problems are discussed in great detail from a variety of locations. For BIND integration, check Microsoft. For Samba, check samba.org...
sheesh
Still trying to figure out why someone thought it was a bright idea to put SQL Server and PDC on the same machine.
You can send me my $5 via paypal.com.
Thank you.
We've always had this idea of distributed sharing on the internet for as long as I've been connected... since the late 1980's anyway.
They were called FTP sites. Later we had fsp, and then after that came the Web.
These technologies worked great except that nobody knew you existed unless you advertised. From that concept came the directory services... WAIS and then later yahoo, lycos, altavista, etc.
Napster came out and provided a directory service which catered solely to the purpose of finding pirated music. So yes, they were an easy target to shut down, a directory service that all connected to.
But the idea that you will do peer to peer networking on a grand scale is technically flawed. Anybody who has ever tried to manage a large network of Win95 machines running NetBEUI would understand this.
As the network grows larger, the percentage of network bandwidth which is required to maintain the connections between the nodes, passing queries for services, etc. grows at an almost exponential pace... until at some point you are using more bandwidth handling the overhead than actually sharing data.
Nobody will need to shut down freenet, it will collapse under it's own weight, or it will remain niche and isolated and a bother to nobody.
Napster was a technically sound solution, it was unfortunately ethically and legally flawed.
I have a feeling that we as a society have been down this path before, and we fail to learn from our history.
Prior to the invention of the movable type printing press, in order to copy a book or other paper it required someone sitting down with a pen and paper and doing it by hand.
Prior to this technology it was very difficult to mass produce literature, and as such books were incredibly rare and expensive.
I guess the point is, the copyright laws were pretty much created to combat the problems the new technology generated. Do you think now that there is new technology that makes it even easier to copy books or music the laws will not be strengthened rather than removed?
It is not unthinkable as we start to flesh out the problems of the Internet that we will see more police involvement. There have been reports of huge problems with pedophilia, identity theft, fraud, breaking into systems, etc. over the years. The Internet is drawing attention to itself, and many people are outraged by the stories they hear.
Your claim that it can't be stopped is rather naive. As our country grew westward in the 19th century we had bad people doing bad things and getting away with it, also thinking that they could not be stopped because the land was so wide and they could hide easily.
That obviously changed as the land became more populated, and tax dollars were spent hiring law enforcement officers.
The Internet will most likely evolve in a similar fashion.
As far as the issue there are with crossing nation borders, those can be dealt with as well by cooperation between police agencies. The same technology that connects citizens can also be used to connect police agencies. Perhaps the need for such enforcement will result in cooperation and a world government.
It's hard to say... There's a whole future ahead of us. There aren't very many people who want to live in a lawless anarchy, and as such our society will adapt to bring order to the chaos, or at least try to.
The cost of software has *NOT* gone down in the past 10 years. Just go out and look at pricing on any of a variety of products.
The only markets in which software prices have gone down are those which were influenced by competition from Microsoft. NOS, OS, Office productivity, development tools, etc. in other words, the prices went down because Microsoft provided lower cost alternatives!
The price of Windows 9x has remained consistent with the direction of the market.
You want to compare apples to apples... Go look at the prices for an upgrade to MacOS. $99... boom, same price, same market, same league.
You are seriously confused.
I don't understand why this is news on slashdot. You are disputing the number? Are you seriously that out of touch with the marketplace?
70,000 sounds quite low actually. That must be commercial apps, not all the custom in-house stuff companies write.
When you consider there is something like 5 million registered users of Visual Studio...
Huh!? How could anyone seriously read that article and think the guy was pro-microsoft.
Sheesh!
Just remember, Microsoft recently moved Hotmail's frontend web services off of FreeBSD to Windows 2000.
The "rumor" tries to stir up more controversy then there actually exists in reality.
You don't seem to have a clue what FUD means.
Your example is called Vaporware, not FUD. It is when a company announces a product long before it's released or perhaps even developed in the hopes of pulling mindshare aware from the competition.
FUD is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is when you say things about some other product not because they are factual but because you hope to spread well FUD about their product.
FUD is and can be used by everyone, considering the amount of FUD spread on slashdot I think it's pretty apparent that it is not isolated to large companies.
Huh?
I've had letters published by Infoworld and all they did there was ask if it was ok to publish.
Cringley? He publishes rumors... The juicier the better.
That's exactly the problem.
From what I can tell, I'm supposed to send an email to some person at some ISP and then hopefully get a response.
But I want to be able to control my thing.city.state.us name just like I can my other domain names at register.com, etc. I don't want to have to rely on sending an email and hopefully getting what I want.
Haven't you read the Cathederal and the Bizarre yet?
Ok, if your goal is to take over Microsoft, why is the Linux camp fighting with the Mac camp?
:)
Kind of pathetic, really.
Although the Mac does kind of suck.