The Slashdot FUDmeisters seem to only slam Sony, but consistently praise the XBox 360 and Nintendo.
Maybe because Sony deserves it? Objectivity doesn't mean you lie and say a pile of crap is good. If it's bad, it's OK to say it's bad. If competitors are outmaneuvering Sony, that doesn't obligate us to coddle Sony.
I will give you one concession. I predict that Sony will indeed sell out of consoles in 2006. They've said something like 2 or 3 million will be shipped, and I suspect that there are exactly that many fanboys who absolutely must have a PS3 for Christmas, regardless of price. That will cause some here to rethink their assumptions that Sony is down for the count.
Not me though. I'm buying a Wii and I'm not looking back.
What else is Miyamoto experimenting with? And I don't mean that as a joke. I'd love to see an interview where Miyamoto takes someone though all the things he's got in the hopper. I've seen this with writers before -- one of my favorites walked a reporter through about 30 poems he was working on. In some cases the poems had been in development for years. It was fascinating. Creative people can juggle a dizzying number of ideas, for long periods of time.
The Gamecube has a 485mhz PowerPC. XBox has a 733mhz PIII. Although I'm well aware that the two CPUs don't compare clock-to-clock, it's pretty obvious here that in terms of raw processing power, the XBox wins hands down.
Actually, considering that the PowerPC can do a lot more with lower mhz, I'd say they're pretty close. I don't disagree that the XBox is faster. I'm just disagreeing that it's "obvious" and that the XBox "wins hands down." How are the pipelines? How is the memory? It's possible that in terms of getting raw polygons onto the screen, the GameCube is better. I don't know that as a fact, I'm just suggesting that it's not clear cut based upon the info I've seen.
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
Wow. Pre-emptively demonizing those who might dare disagree with the great RMS. I'm sure all those people won't post now!
I think you've illustrated the RMS cult of personality far better than you realize. Keep that mind closed! It's much safer that way!
Being a Christian, one of the things that saddened me greatly about my religion was how many believers were so unwilling to delve into religion. They didn't want to hear about any other religions, to be sure. But often they didn't even know their own, either. They'd make broad proclaimations about how their Jesus did X, Y, or Z -- even if it wasn't based on anything Biblical. They just knew Jesus didn't smoke, didn't dance, and was just like them. To quote Mandy Moore, "Jesus was white!" Probably spoke English too, I suppose.
My point is this: an unexplored faith is no faith at all. An untested faith is not much better. A faith that survives only in the absence of competing theories isn't faith, it's a security blanket, a crutch for the weak. I've seen those Christians fall apart at the first frat party they experience. I've seen them compromise themselves the first time they fell in love with someone who didn't respect their beliefs.
The strongest Christians are those who are able to hear what others believe, accept what those people feel without belittling them, and somehow manage to still find their faith to be a rock-solid foundation.
Of course, anyone could respond with snarky comments about religion, but that would miss the point. The parallel is what is important here. Mr. Coward is promoting the same sort of head-in-the-sand thinking that so many of my fellow Christians unknowingly endorse -- "a contrary opinion must be stupid, don't even entertain the thought!" And just as that kind of thinking makes for weak Christians, it makes for weak RMS fanboys. And that makes me very skeptical about the merits of their opinions.
So how long will it be before someone cries foul, waves a 'playlist' patent and tries to make a dishonest buck out of this?
Good question. Here's another one: how long until the corporations have fully astroturfed the playlists? They co-opt everything else. What's stopping them in this case?
I can't get the release notes. The page keeps coming up blank. So I have to ask, does this version do anything for stability and memory usage? 0.43 is a beautiful, beautiful piece of Open Source software, but I can make that poor application slow to a crawl by playing with the font size & fill for a large chunk of text. I can send my whole computer into full-on swap frenzy by having Inkscape color-trace a bitmap & then playing with the points of one of the resulting layers.
I love Inkscape. It finally did what Sodipodi couldn't or wouldn't do. But right now it's this pretty, crashy thing-with-lots-of-potential. I'd consider stability, speed, and memory management to be huge potential features at this point. What's happening on that front?
Well, that's fun. Tarus basically gets on a soapbox and starts lecturing about how he & his company have been doing Open Source for, like, years. That young rascal Doug better listen to Tarus!
Tarus is arguing from authority, if you know what that old debate tactic is. And to be honest, I give him some credence.
But then Doug posts right in the comments, and basically explains that he's been doing Open Source for at least a decade -- before the term existed. And he explains that they're going to follow a GPL model, but they're going to do it on their own timetable, not Tarus's.
Fun.
Having said that, they're both getting things wrong, IMHO. Tarus is ascribing way more to Open Source than he should. For example, he says that a community must exist, contributing actively to the code. This is a fallacy on two points. First, that would immediately disqualify 90% of the projects on SourceForge, which are maintained by a lone hacker. But second, that's more of a Free Software, you-must-develop-software-the-RIGHT-way line of thinking. Open Source does not have these burdens -- it's just a flag people raise to say "you can get this source code." No more.
And Doug clearly jumped the gun. If they're going slow & sure toward the goal of GPL, that's great -- just don't say you have something that you don't yet offer.
I was offended by Sony's horrible DRM/rootkit situation, not because they tried to install rootkits (although that was bad enough) but because of their response when caught: "So what? Consumers won't even comprehend your techno-babble complaints."
I was offended by Sony's horrible pricing for the PS3, not because the pricing was so high (although that was bad enough) but because of their response when people took issue: "So what? Sony fanboys are going to pay no matter what the price."
I was offended by Sony's blatant plagarism of the Wii controller, not because of the 2nd-rate implementation (although... you get the idea), but because of their flat-out lying about it: "We didn't copy Nintendo. We're the real innovators."
All of these situations have a common thread: arrogance. A cavalier disrespect for the customer. A lack of ethics. There are no laws that say companies must be ethical, or must respect the customer. So I guess we can write off Sony's behavior as "it's just business." But there are also no laws which say I have to buy into it. So I hope that what goes around, comes around.
Music? Well, you're a prime candidate for programming. Music & math go hand in hand. So you already have a good start.
For me it was fairly natural. The Web had just started. I was one of the much lamented AOL crowd that came online when AOL brought in Usenet news feeds. I was publishing a small press journal, and I wanted more exposure. I learned about the Web, and found I could understand HTML enough to create something similar to my journal, online. So I put out a few issues.
I think in February/March/April/May 1995, I got featured in a few magazines, and was AOL's "site of the day." I had started putting up tutorials for all the things I was learning. I heard that Borland (close to where I was living) was looking for Webmasters. I sent them my URL, along with press clippings. They called, I was hired, and then I parlayed that into more & more.
If I could give a person any single bit of advice, it would be to be curious. Not black-hat curious. But "hey, interesting technology, wonder if I can pick it up" curious. I hired a guy a while back, Jeremy Meigs, and he was REALLY green. But the thing was, he stayed late learning, he read books, if he didn't know how to do something he figured it out -- even if it meant a little extra effort on his part. He didn't farm the hard stuff out to others. He didn't beg for favors. He didn't say things couldn't be done. Sometimes he would ask me for some pseudocode or something to get him started. Sometimes I'd see him searching Google really hard, looking for a long time for tutorials or discussion forums or any helpful data he could find. But in the end, he'd have a finished project, and he'd be able to speak eloquently on why he built it the way he did. He took the time to really absorb stuff, he drank up knowledge like a sponge.
Because of that, the fact that he had zero background in programming mattered little to me. To go back to what I said in my original post, I know his skillset. "He's the guy who is good at learning anything technical." So if I ever need someone to pick up a new technology, he's the guy I'd contact.
So that's my help for you, for what it's worth. Be interested in learning. Be willing to accumulate a body of knowledge, so that after a time, you have a great foundation. Don't rely on consultants, procedures, diagrams, and other meta-chatter. Get into the actual creation of something. Become great at Photoshop, or become great at PHP. Whatever you pick, understand it deeply, and then branch out and apply that deep understanding to new skills. If you do, people will see that, and they will find you valuable.
I have been a web developer for seven years now. I have had some moments of success, but mostly down moments with low pay, less than stable work, and unemployment.
Does that sound odd to anyone else, or am I just disconnected from some greater reality?
Frank, I've been doing Web stuff since 1994. I started with very little know-how -- I went to college to study English, not programming. Over the years I spent time as an artistic Web Designer & Photoshop monkey, then usability expert, then a JavaScript & Perl CGI developer, then PHP, MySQL, and eventually I just decided to say yes to everything. I'll try anything. And what is important to note is that my salary has steadily gone upward -- huge leaps upward during the boom, and then it was flat for a while, and then I started working for myself, and gave myself a pay raise.;)
I have more work than I can accept. In fact, I've probably disappointed a few business people lately because not only was I too overloaded to take their work, but my subcontractor was too. How does this sync up with "low pay and unemployment" problems?
I have to wonder. What is your skill set? In seven years, you could and should have learned quite a lot. You should be much more competent, and thus much more in demand, than any young bloods coming onto the scene. Your skills should be apparent to those working with you -- "oh, he's the guy who does _____." For me, it's "he's the guy who fixes the Web site when our employees break it." There should be certain things you have zero doubts about as far as your skills are concerned. For me, it's PHP and MySQL, with all the ancillary buzzwords as a given (XHTML, CSS, Ajax). Can you easily and readily point to your strengths, and can your peers?
Lastly, what are you doing to market yourself? You don't provide links to your sites or portfolio in your story submission. With your mention of low pay & unemployment, I wonder about your networking too. Have you mass-mailed every friend & relative in your address book, asking for work? Have you kept relationships with the people who have hired you in the past?
I ask because it seems odd that after 7 years, this is the story you have to tell. And that makes me worry about the next thing you jump into. How many of the issues you have right now are due to the job itself, and how many are due to your own networking/skillset/learning/marketing deficiencies? If you find that a lot of it is of your own making, then changing jobs is NOT going to help. It will just be a year of euphoria followed by several more years of being brought back down to harsh reality. Think hard before you jump to the next thing. I'm worried it may be more of the same, unless you do some hard self-analysis first.
I agree. When are we going to be able to filter on tags, like we can filter out authors? I'm dying to filter out all the stories tagged as "stupid," "slownewsday," and "dupe."
I'm curious to know -- will Gamecube games be playable by the Wii? If so, do I have to download them from this "classics" service, or can I use my pre-existing discs?
On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then," said another fired employee.
Because employees would react. If they said "we're thinking about closing" or "things aren't working out as expected" then at least a few employees would just bail, or worse. No company wants that -- if there is a chance to salvage the situation, then they would prefer the employees never even knew how close they came to being laid off. Especially if a few employees leaving could damage the potential turnaround. And if there is no chance to salvage the situation, then they want those employees to still be around long enough to finish whatever needs finishing.
I'm not suggesting that how corporations treat employees is good. I'm just telling you what the thinking is. In fact, I hated that thinking so much that I quit my first high-level job. I'd been a manager of Web teams for most of my career. I got a job with Sabeer Bhatia (the Hotmail guy), and he brought me on as a Director. I sat in all/most of the upper-management meetings. I heard all sorts of private discussions, not meant for the rest of the employees. I knew when the product had serious issues that would hurt our funding. I knew when there was trouble with an investor. I knew when the management team was in conflict. It was never a good idea to let employees in on the issues. I learned that quickly. The first few times there were issues, I took my team to lunch and let them know. You cannot believe the fallout, swift and sure. I grew to hate it. I had to lie to employees when they would ask about rumors. I was supposed to have been doing that all along, anyway (well, maybe "lying" is too harsh because I'm bitter about it, I'm sure a more seasoned person would have simply said "none of your business" to every single rumor or TMI kind of question -- but for me, that just gets uncomfortable when you know the person has a family and will be out of work in a month). Eventually I quit. At my next job, the hiring manager was curious why I was going for a job as a manager of a small team when I was clearly moving up into Director & VP level work. I realized I'd rather be with the rest of the employees, not knowing about the sheer volumes of crap that hit the fan daily.
As I get older, I get better at things, of course. I'm self-employed now, and I have a subcontractor for the times when the work is too plentiful. If I don't have work for the subcontractor, I just say so. If he ends his business relationship with me due to it, I'll deal with that. I try not to make too big a deal out of anything. But I'm also not running a company with 10,000 employees. If things go bad for me, the impact is tiny.
You need a culture where experimentation is rewarded and failure is treated as a normal cost of experiments. Compare bankruptcy in the US (oops, try again) to bankruptcy in Japan (your children hounded at school, people looking at you strangely for not committing suicide).
That's a good point. I would build upon it to add one other ingredient that we have here in SV that others lack: encouraging entrepreneurship not just in words, but with law. Most of us have read the stories on Slashdot over the years about contract employees who had great ideas and worked on them on their own time only to have the employer sue to take the idea & whatever practical implementation had been created.
But in California, there is a law that makes it very clear that in an employee's free time (contract, full-time, whatever), they are free to come up with ideas and launch their own companies. In fact, one of my employers had a clause in their hiring contract which stated they owned everything I would ever do. I struck the clause before signing (just crossed it out) and wrote in the margin "this is not legal in California." The HR person read it, shrugged, and said "yeah, OK." Even if I had not struck the clause, it still wouldn't have applied, because the contract cannot override law (they cannot hire me to kill people, they cannot mandate 20 hour workdays, and so on).
To wrap up, the point is this: I have created many small money-making Web sites for myself while employed with others because I can. My ideas are safe. They cannot be stolen, even when companies want to claim them for their own. This is important enough that I have chosen to NOT move to other states that do not have similar laws. I will not move to technology centers in other states (or countries) unless I feel the small guy with the good idea has solid protection.
For me, I try to look at it from a practical perspective. I don't separate code & content because of some idealogical reason (well, OK, I do... but I use the following thinking to help me determine how to implement it). Instead, I separate code & content because I know that inevitably, some non-geek is going to need to change the look & feel. And I want to expose the least amount of code possible, so that they can do the least amount of damage.
Therefore, here is how that plays out. First, I create everything procedurally, one huge page, HTML & PHP & CSS & JavaScript all mixed in together. Then, once I am no longer iterating through revisions frequently, I start to pull out the non-HTML bits. The CSS & JavaScipt are usually the first to go, with HTML tags to pull that code back in. The PHP gets two run-throughs. First, I move repetitive code into functions (I don't do a lot of OOP). Second, I break the PHP code into logical include files. So for example, I typically have a handful of libraries that set up the page. Those go into setup.php (database connections, handling the on/off issue with addslashes, and so on). Anything that is page-specific goes into another include file. What I'm left with is HTML with a few short PHP echo statements. For example, something like this might appear right after the BODY tag:
<?php echo implode("\n", $messages); ?>
...just to output any status messages that my code generated. And then something like this might appear anywhere I had a PHP variable to drop into the page:
Welcome back, <?php echo $username; ?>.
...and so on. The basic gist is that I offload the code into include files, and those files generate variables that contain whatever content is needed for display. The HTML page itself merely has some PHP include statements and a few PHP variables sprinkled throughout the page. By doing this, some random artsy-type or client who noodles with the HTML can usually still revise things without damage. They usually understand what they're seeing. And that's all I'm aiming for. I don't try to go any more hardcore than that -- no abstraction layers, etc. Oh, also, I try to avoid having more than 1 level of included files. In other words, my included PHP code does not use include() to pull in even more files. The nesting on some projects just drove me a bit nutty, so I try to only go 1 level deep. I rarely keep to it, but it's an ideal.:)
There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.
My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too.:)
I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.
I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.
I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release themtothecommunity. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still:)
Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.
My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.
You can always do a donation system instead of ads. Now that you don't need to be a member of Paypal to make payments with Paypal, pretty much anyone with a credit card can use the Paypal system. Also, Amazon still offers their donation system.
I've tried ads, Paypal donations, and Amazon donations. Amazon only gets people who object to Paypal. And Amazon isn't very reliable -- they're always up & running, but they don't have much of a system for passing data back and forth, or for confirming who paid what (well, you can confirm manually, but if you want to do something programmatically, such as reward donators with a free upgrade of some type, you can't reliably do it in code).
Paypal is OK. They upgraded their system at some point in the last 6 or 7 months, so that programmatic confirmation of a donation could be achieved. So now when my landing page sees "someone just donated" I can confirm the donation is real automatically, and give that person extra features, without worrying that someone just hit my landing page without paying up first. That's nice.
But here's the rub. Donation systems don't work unless you make it very prevalent but not very in-your-face. And that's a hard line to balance on. Essentially, a donation button will need to be in your masthead or sidebar, on every page, above the fold. It shouldn't flash or blink or animate, but it shouldn't be tiny or a plain link either. And, your site needs to be a true resource for people. It can't just be something people do once or twice and think, "that was nice, hmm, what site should I go to now?" Instead, they have to come back daily, have to love the features, have to become emotionally invested in your site somehow. Only then will you see the donations start to come in reliably.
In my own personal case, my site did not reach that level until just recently. For over a year, I had to rely on ads (which do work) because I didn't have the donation icon prevalent, and I didn't offer a strong enough community for anyone to care. Getting everything just right is difficult. And that's why ads might be the best bang for you buck.
Owners will have the option of equipping a small, self-contained attachment to play movies and other DVD content.
That's so stupid. It sounds like they're giving us crippleware. Why make it difficult for your customers to use it in a way that you know they're going to use it?
Thinking of the general populace, I can imagine many potential customers seeing that and heading straight to the PS3 or 360. I could be elitist and say "who needs 'em?" but the problem is that the Wii needs people buying the games, or there won't be much of a future for it. And this is just another deterrent.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe because Sony deserves it? Objectivity doesn't mean you lie and say a pile of crap is good. If it's bad, it's OK to say it's bad. If competitors are outmaneuvering Sony, that doesn't obligate us to coddle Sony.
I will give you one concession. I predict that Sony will indeed sell out of consoles in 2006. They've said something like 2 or 3 million will be shipped, and I suspect that there are exactly that many fanboys who absolutely must have a PS3 for Christmas, regardless of price. That will cause some here to rethink their assumptions that Sony is down for the count.
Not me though. I'm buying a Wii and I'm not looking back.
What else is Miyamoto experimenting with? And I don't mean that as a joke. I'd love to see an interview where Miyamoto takes someone though all the things he's got in the hopper. I've seen this with writers before -- one of my favorites walked a reporter through about 30 poems he was working on. In some cases the poems had been in development for years. It was fascinating. Creative people can juggle a dizzying number of ideas, for long periods of time.
-Tony
Actually, considering that the PowerPC can do a lot more with lower mhz, I'd say they're pretty close. I don't disagree that the XBox is faster. I'm just disagreeing that it's "obvious" and that the XBox "wins hands down." How are the pipelines? How is the memory? It's possible that in terms of getting raw polygons onto the screen, the GameCube is better. I don't know that as a fact, I'm just suggesting that it's not clear cut based upon the info I've seen.
You left out mention of the rootkit. Probably should have been worth at least one mention in your post. -Tony
You'd think they'd be related, or something. :(
Wow. Pre-emptively demonizing those who might dare disagree with the great RMS. I'm sure all those people won't post now!
I think you've illustrated the RMS cult of personality far better than you realize. Keep that mind closed! It's much safer that way!
Being a Christian, one of the things that saddened me greatly about my religion was how many believers were so unwilling to delve into religion. They didn't want to hear about any other religions, to be sure. But often they didn't even know their own, either. They'd make broad proclaimations about how their Jesus did X, Y, or Z -- even if it wasn't based on anything Biblical. They just knew Jesus didn't smoke, didn't dance, and was just like them. To quote Mandy Moore, "Jesus was white!" Probably spoke English too, I suppose.
My point is this: an unexplored faith is no faith at all. An untested faith is not much better. A faith that survives only in the absence of competing theories isn't faith, it's a security blanket, a crutch for the weak. I've seen those Christians fall apart at the first frat party they experience. I've seen them compromise themselves the first time they fell in love with someone who didn't respect their beliefs.
The strongest Christians are those who are able to hear what others believe, accept what those people feel without belittling them, and somehow manage to still find their faith to be a rock-solid foundation.
Of course, anyone could respond with snarky comments about religion, but that would miss the point. The parallel is what is important here. Mr. Coward is promoting the same sort of head-in-the-sand thinking that so many of my fellow Christians unknowingly endorse -- "a contrary opinion must be stupid, don't even entertain the thought!" And just as that kind of thinking makes for weak Christians, it makes for weak RMS fanboys. And that makes me very skeptical about the merits of their opinions.
Good question. Here's another one: how long until the corporations have fully astroturfed the playlists? They co-opt everything else. What's stopping them in this case?
I can't get the release notes. The page keeps coming up blank. So I have to ask, does this version do anything for stability and memory usage? 0.43 is a beautiful, beautiful piece of Open Source software, but I can make that poor application slow to a crawl by playing with the font size & fill for a large chunk of text. I can send my whole computer into full-on swap frenzy by having Inkscape color-trace a bitmap & then playing with the points of one of the resulting layers.
I love Inkscape. It finally did what Sodipodi couldn't or wouldn't do. But right now it's this pretty, crashy thing-with-lots-of-potential. I'd consider stability, speed, and memory management to be huge potential features at this point. What's happening on that front?
Well, that's fun. Tarus basically gets on a soapbox and starts lecturing about how he & his company have been doing Open Source for, like, years. That young rascal Doug better listen to Tarus!
Tarus is arguing from authority, if you know what that old debate tactic is. And to be honest, I give him some credence.
But then Doug posts right in the comments, and basically explains that he's been doing Open Source for at least a decade -- before the term existed. And he explains that they're going to follow a GPL model, but they're going to do it on their own timetable, not Tarus's.
Fun.
Having said that, they're both getting things wrong, IMHO. Tarus is ascribing way more to Open Source than he should. For example, he says that a community must exist, contributing actively to the code. This is a fallacy on two points. First, that would immediately disqualify 90% of the projects on SourceForge, which are maintained by a lone hacker. But second, that's more of a Free Software, you-must-develop-software-the-RIGHT-way line of thinking. Open Source does not have these burdens -- it's just a flag people raise to say "you can get this source code." No more.
And Doug clearly jumped the gun. If they're going slow & sure toward the goal of GPL, that's great -- just don't say you have something that you don't yet offer.
I was offended by Sony's horrible DRM/rootkit situation, not because they tried to install rootkits (although that was bad enough) but because of their response when caught: "So what? Consumers won't even comprehend your techno-babble complaints."
I was offended by Sony's horrible pricing for the PS3, not because the pricing was so high (although that was bad enough) but because of their response when people took issue: "So what? Sony fanboys are going to pay no matter what the price."
I was offended by Sony's blatant plagarism of the Wii controller, not because of the 2nd-rate implementation (although... you get the idea), but because of their flat-out lying about it: "We didn't copy Nintendo. We're the real innovators."
All of these situations have a common thread: arrogance. A cavalier disrespect for the customer. A lack of ethics. There are no laws that say companies must be ethical, or must respect the customer. So I guess we can write off Sony's behavior as "it's just business." But there are also no laws which say I have to buy into it. So I hope that what goes around, comes around.
-Tony
Yeah, OK. Contact me at webmaster at outshine.com. Send me a resume or CV, and point me to some sample code or demo projects.
-Tony
Music? Well, you're a prime candidate for programming. Music & math go hand in hand. So you already have a good start.
For me it was fairly natural. The Web had just started. I was one of the much lamented AOL crowd that came online when AOL brought in Usenet news feeds. I was publishing a small press journal, and I wanted more exposure. I learned about the Web, and found I could understand HTML enough to create something similar to my journal, online. So I put out a few issues.
I think in February/March/April/May 1995, I got featured in a few magazines, and was AOL's "site of the day." I had started putting up tutorials for all the things I was learning. I heard that Borland (close to where I was living) was looking for Webmasters. I sent them my URL, along with press clippings. They called, I was hired, and then I parlayed that into more & more.
If I could give a person any single bit of advice, it would be to be curious. Not black-hat curious. But "hey, interesting technology, wonder if I can pick it up" curious. I hired a guy a while back, Jeremy Meigs, and he was REALLY green. But the thing was, he stayed late learning, he read books, if he didn't know how to do something he figured it out -- even if it meant a little extra effort on his part. He didn't farm the hard stuff out to others. He didn't beg for favors. He didn't say things couldn't be done. Sometimes he would ask me for some pseudocode or something to get him started. Sometimes I'd see him searching Google really hard, looking for a long time for tutorials or discussion forums or any helpful data he could find. But in the end, he'd have a finished project, and he'd be able to speak eloquently on why he built it the way he did. He took the time to really absorb stuff, he drank up knowledge like a sponge.
Because of that, the fact that he had zero background in programming mattered little to me. To go back to what I said in my original post, I know his skillset. "He's the guy who is good at learning anything technical." So if I ever need someone to pick up a new technology, he's the guy I'd contact.
So that's my help for you, for what it's worth. Be interested in learning. Be willing to accumulate a body of knowledge, so that after a time, you have a great foundation. Don't rely on consultants, procedures, diagrams, and other meta-chatter. Get into the actual creation of something. Become great at Photoshop, or become great at PHP. Whatever you pick, understand it deeply, and then branch out and apply that deep understanding to new skills. If you do, people will see that, and they will find you valuable.
-Tony
Does that sound odd to anyone else, or am I just disconnected from some greater reality?
Frank, I've been doing Web stuff since 1994. I started with very little know-how -- I went to college to study English, not programming. Over the years I spent time as an artistic Web Designer & Photoshop monkey, then usability expert, then a JavaScript & Perl CGI developer, then PHP, MySQL, and eventually I just decided to say yes to everything. I'll try anything. And what is important to note is that my salary has steadily gone upward -- huge leaps upward during the boom, and then it was flat for a while, and then I started working for myself, and gave myself a pay raise. ;)
I have more work than I can accept. In fact, I've probably disappointed a few business people lately because not only was I too overloaded to take their work, but my subcontractor was too. How does this sync up with "low pay and unemployment" problems?
I have to wonder. What is your skill set? In seven years, you could and should have learned quite a lot. You should be much more competent, and thus much more in demand, than any young bloods coming onto the scene. Your skills should be apparent to those working with you -- "oh, he's the guy who does _____." For me, it's "he's the guy who fixes the Web site when our employees break it." There should be certain things you have zero doubts about as far as your skills are concerned. For me, it's PHP and MySQL, with all the ancillary buzzwords as a given (XHTML, CSS, Ajax). Can you easily and readily point to your strengths, and can your peers?
Lastly, what are you doing to market yourself? You don't provide links to your sites or portfolio in your story submission. With your mention of low pay & unemployment, I wonder about your networking too. Have you mass-mailed every friend & relative in your address book, asking for work? Have you kept relationships with the people who have hired you in the past?
I ask because it seems odd that after 7 years, this is the story you have to tell. And that makes me worry about the next thing you jump into. How many of the issues you have right now are due to the job itself, and how many are due to your own networking/skillset/learning/marketing deficiencies? If you find that a lot of it is of your own making, then changing jobs is NOT going to help. It will just be a year of euphoria followed by several more years of being brought back down to harsh reality. Think hard before you jump to the next thing. I'm worried it may be more of the same, unless you do some hard self-analysis first.
I agree. When are we going to be able to filter on tags, like we can filter out authors? I'm dying to filter out all the stories tagged as "stupid," "slownewsday," and "dupe."
-T
I'm curious to know -- will Gamecube games be playable by the Wii? If so, do I have to download them from this "classics" service, or can I use my pre-existing discs?
Because employees would react. If they said "we're thinking about closing" or "things aren't working out as expected" then at least a few employees would just bail, or worse. No company wants that -- if there is a chance to salvage the situation, then they would prefer the employees never even knew how close they came to being laid off. Especially if a few employees leaving could damage the potential turnaround. And if there is no chance to salvage the situation, then they want those employees to still be around long enough to finish whatever needs finishing.
I'm not suggesting that how corporations treat employees is good. I'm just telling you what the thinking is. In fact, I hated that thinking so much that I quit my first high-level job. I'd been a manager of Web teams for most of my career. I got a job with Sabeer Bhatia (the Hotmail guy), and he brought me on as a Director. I sat in all/most of the upper-management meetings. I heard all sorts of private discussions, not meant for the rest of the employees. I knew when the product had serious issues that would hurt our funding. I knew when there was trouble with an investor. I knew when the management team was in conflict. It was never a good idea to let employees in on the issues. I learned that quickly. The first few times there were issues, I took my team to lunch and let them know. You cannot believe the fallout, swift and sure. I grew to hate it. I had to lie to employees when they would ask about rumors. I was supposed to have been doing that all along, anyway (well, maybe "lying" is too harsh because I'm bitter about it, I'm sure a more seasoned person would have simply said "none of your business" to every single rumor or TMI kind of question -- but for me, that just gets uncomfortable when you know the person has a family and will be out of work in a month). Eventually I quit. At my next job, the hiring manager was curious why I was going for a job as a manager of a small team when I was clearly moving up into Director & VP level work. I realized I'd rather be with the rest of the employees, not knowing about the sheer volumes of crap that hit the fan daily.
As I get older, I get better at things, of course. I'm self-employed now, and I have a subcontractor for the times when the work is too plentiful. If I don't have work for the subcontractor, I just say so. If he ends his business relationship with me due to it, I'll deal with that. I try not to make too big a deal out of anything. But I'm also not running a company with 10,000 employees. If things go bad for me, the impact is tiny.
You got what you voted for. Thanks.
That's a good point. I would build upon it to add one other ingredient that we have here in SV that others lack: encouraging entrepreneurship not just in words, but with law. Most of us have read the stories on Slashdot over the years about contract employees who had great ideas and worked on them on their own time only to have the employer sue to take the idea & whatever practical implementation had been created.
But in California, there is a law that makes it very clear that in an employee's free time (contract, full-time, whatever), they are free to come up with ideas and launch their own companies. In fact, one of my employers had a clause in their hiring contract which stated they owned everything I would ever do. I struck the clause before signing (just crossed it out) and wrote in the margin "this is not legal in California." The HR person read it, shrugged, and said "yeah, OK." Even if I had not struck the clause, it still wouldn't have applied, because the contract cannot override law (they cannot hire me to kill people, they cannot mandate 20 hour workdays, and so on).
To wrap up, the point is this: I have created many small money-making Web sites for myself while employed with others because I can. My ideas are safe. They cannot be stolen, even when companies want to claim them for their own. This is important enough that I have chosen to NOT move to other states that do not have similar laws. I will not move to technology centers in other states (or countries) unless I feel the small guy with the good idea has solid protection.
For me, I try to look at it from a practical perspective. I don't separate code & content because of some idealogical reason (well, OK, I do... but I use the following thinking to help me determine how to implement it). Instead, I separate code & content because I know that inevitably, some non-geek is going to need to change the look & feel. And I want to expose the least amount of code possible, so that they can do the least amount of damage.
Therefore, here is how that plays out. First, I create everything procedurally, one huge page, HTML & PHP & CSS & JavaScript all mixed in together. Then, once I am no longer iterating through revisions frequently, I start to pull out the non-HTML bits. The CSS & JavaScipt are usually the first to go, with HTML tags to pull that code back in. The PHP gets two run-throughs. First, I move repetitive code into functions (I don't do a lot of OOP). Second, I break the PHP code into logical include files. So for example, I typically have a handful of libraries that set up the page. Those go into setup.php (database connections, handling the on/off issue with addslashes, and so on). Anything that is page-specific goes into another include file. What I'm left with is HTML with a few short PHP echo statements. For example, something like this might appear right after the BODY tag:
...just to output any status messages that my code generated. And then something like this might appear anywhere I had a PHP variable to drop into the page:
...and so on. The basic gist is that I offload the code into include files, and those files generate variables that contain whatever content is needed for display. The HTML page itself merely has some PHP include statements and a few PHP variables sprinkled throughout the page. By doing this, some random artsy-type or client who noodles with the HTML can usually still revise things without damage. They usually understand what they're seeing. And that's all I'm aiming for. I don't try to go any more hardcore than that -- no abstraction layers, etc. Oh, also, I try to avoid having more than 1 level of included files. In other words, my included PHP code does not use include() to pull in even more files. The nesting on some projects just drove me a bit nutty, so I try to only go 1 level deep. I rarely keep to it, but it's an ideal. :)
Would other kinds of strokes be effective?
My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)
I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.
I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.
I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)
Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.
My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.
-Tony
You can always do a donation system instead of ads. Now that you don't need to be a member of Paypal to make payments with Paypal, pretty much anyone with a credit card can use the Paypal system. Also, Amazon still offers their donation system.
I've tried ads, Paypal donations, and Amazon donations. Amazon only gets people who object to Paypal. And Amazon isn't very reliable -- they're always up & running, but they don't have much of a system for passing data back and forth, or for confirming who paid what (well, you can confirm manually, but if you want to do something programmatically, such as reward donators with a free upgrade of some type, you can't reliably do it in code).
Paypal is OK. They upgraded their system at some point in the last 6 or 7 months, so that programmatic confirmation of a donation could be achieved. So now when my landing page sees "someone just donated" I can confirm the donation is real automatically, and give that person extra features, without worrying that someone just hit my landing page without paying up first. That's nice.
But here's the rub. Donation systems don't work unless you make it very prevalent but not very in-your-face. And that's a hard line to balance on. Essentially, a donation button will need to be in your masthead or sidebar, on every page, above the fold. It shouldn't flash or blink or animate, but it shouldn't be tiny or a plain link either. And, your site needs to be a true resource for people. It can't just be something people do once or twice and think, "that was nice, hmm, what site should I go to now?" Instead, they have to come back daily, have to love the features, have to become emotionally invested in your site somehow. Only then will you see the donations start to come in reliably.
In my own personal case, my site did not reach that level until just recently. For over a year, I had to rely on ads (which do work) because I didn't have the donation icon prevalent, and I didn't offer a strong enough community for anyone to care. Getting everything just right is difficult. And that's why ads might be the best bang for you buck.
Perhaps you mean, "Because Nintendo doesn't want them to buy it." Because that's what it amounts to. Customers will walk.
That's so stupid. It sounds like they're giving us crippleware. Why make it difficult for your customers to use it in a way that you know they're going to use it?
Thinking of the general populace, I can imagine many potential customers seeing that and heading straight to the PS3 or 360. I could be elitist and say "who needs 'em?" but the problem is that the Wii needs people buying the games, or there won't be much of a future for it. And this is just another deterrent.
Jigga, please!