"... your best choice is to use our products," Kay said...
..."The buddyscript suite of tools is the best that's available. We're confident they are the best choice (for users) who are building interactive agents. The subject of enforcing the patent shouldn't even come up. Anyone wanting to build a very good interactive agent will find that our tools are the very best," Kay added...
...Kay said ActiveBuddy was not worried about competing firms offering bot-making tools. "Our primary level of comfort comes from the fact that we have the best choice for developers and others. When given the choice, we're confident people will choose ours," he said...
...However, back in August 1999, programmer Aryeh Goldsmith wrote the Net::AIM module, which is timestamped at CPAN...
Talk about flaming contradictions and a huge ego! He knows everything, his is the best and he's never heard of widely-used code that predates his by over a year, or of similar enough IRC-bot code to scare the hell out of *any* patent lawyer.
While we're on the subject, I think Mikey needs a new career, too, if this is how well he understands stuff he's paid to be an expert on:
Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg isn't surprised by the brouhaha surrounding the patent win. "This is just the latest example of a company that has picked up a key patent on critical technology and is going to use it to exploit the market. It's not surprising that the smaller developers are crying foul," he said.
Gartenberg, who covers emerging platforms from the research firm, described the news as a "big win for the ActiveBuddy folks," especially if it holds up to scrutiny.
"This underscores the notion of how powerful the ownership of key patents are in the technology landscape. We saw it in the Amazon.com "one-click" case and the recent controversy over the JPEG patent. This is just the latest example of it," Gartenberg added.
Then again... the NET::Bot code is perl. You really can't expect Windoze people to pay any attention to the rest of the world. As for Mikey, it's pretty damn funny hearing him describing ActiveBuddy's competition as "Smaller developers"... I'll take my next Jupiter Report with an order of fries so you can practice those food service skills, dude.
First you complain that Subscription Games are like drugs (a terrible analogy, since I have yet to hear of people DYING from Everquest overdoses, of children being born deformed or addicted due to a parent being a 3-hour-a-nite junkie, etc). Then you say:
Now if the game was a free downloadable, I might consider it.
Um... so if they make it more like drug dealing (hook you for *free*), you'd prefer it.
I really am betting you just spoke too quickly, because I see a glimmer of a point, but that analogy is from hell. I strongly doubt you're a hypocrite or a moron, but I've got a handful of strong moron votes for the people that modded you up.
Man, I'm readin' slashdot less and less these days, and now I realize why: in fifteen minutes, I've lost a decade's worth of earned respect for Declan McCullagh and been reminded just how idiotic things can get even at the mod-5 level.
The only good part is, you've shown me a 3rd kind of free. Free Beer, Free Speech, and Free Drugs. MSIE belongs in category 3, of course. Free... but yooouuulll beeeee soorrrrrryyyyyy!
If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it.
I'm very sorry to hear he's died, even though I never met the good Doctor. In fact, each time I'm led off into the weeds by some dumbass project manager who misinterprets XP or RAD or ??? into contradicting this law, I quote Dijkstra's Law to anyone nearby. Along with quoting from Yourdon's "Death March", it's my favorite self-help therapy method.
You make a remarkably ill-informed post for someone with the arrogance to give themselves a nick like PhysicsGenius....
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Why would a "PhysicsGenius" make up slanderous statements about one of the greatest scientific instruments ever constructed? The mind boggles...
Um, maybe PhysicsGenius is Stephen Wolfram's nick. Then again, PhysicsGenius *didn't* ask for us to replace HST with a copy of mathematica and rule 42 when we decommission it.
1 - Microsoft's code cannot be revealed without compromising security completely, says microsoft. 2 - Open source code can and is revealed, yet OSS is not completely compromised. 3 - With these 2 HUGELY IMBALANCED stances, both have a steady, uniform streams of bugs.
Since bugs are more easily found WITH source code, there must be a category of bugs/vulnerabilities being overlooked in MS code, so it is less secure.
I've noticed a subtle character trait that is important here. Some leaders/teachers don't mind being corrected. Let's call them wise. Other people feel it undermines their authority if you prove them wrong or ask them a question they can't answer. Many will punish you politically for showing them up, even if that wasn't your intent. Yup... not wise at all.
This knack/flaw alone doesn't make someone a good PM, but it sure does make for a crappy one, if the PM isn't a genius at both PM and any tech roles they fill.
Why wisdom? Well, I was told once that wisdom was learning that you can't know everything.
Just because it was an anomaly of epic proportions, here's my favorite PM's background:
She was nearing 50, had a degree in Sociology, and had been managing I/T projects for a decade or more. A lot of her projects were cobol and RPG for banks, and we were a Java house. She was remarkably good at PM. She was also seriously not technical.
Her best moments: -- She once doubled a bid to a client based on his being unprepared and an a$$. Her explanation was life was too short and she'd rather not have to deal with him, but if he paid a vicious premium, we were there for him... -- She liked to keep status meetings short, group-wide, and effective. Gant charts or checklists of milestone items would get a quick review, we'd respond on change in status since the previous meeting, and we were gone. -- She knew she didn't know code. She didn't revel in it, but she would look for an effective analogy on critical issues so she could understand them well enough to do initial communications with clients (to shelter us). If it exceeded her ability, she'd arrange a call/meeting with all three of us, and she'd quietly listen and learn while we worked with the client to find a workable solution. She was willing to learn, in other words, and wasn't intimidated or put off when we would contradict or correct her on technical items. -- She *did* know people, project management issues and methodologies, political tricks, and everything else, thanks to her adapting her sociology training over to the topic. -- She'd rarely play us politically. If something was hot, we'd get a warning. If it was a lame issue, she'd say it was likely to fade away if ignored.
Going the other direction, I've seen technical types that were the epitome of the Peter Principle... great techies that had been handed a budget and a project without a lick of training or ability to handle the project. This scares me *more* than a non-tech PM, because they often suck at delegating, politics, shielding the techies from distractions, etc.
Having started as a design-build engineer on Semiconductor Fabs, I've got to say the software field is pretty full of rank amateurs in Project Management, in general. The people I worked with in construction PM were trained experts and had field experience and an awareness that careful design, scheduling and bidding/estimating were necessary specialties, not off-the-cuff afterthoughts, and that these were necessary costs in any large project. Anything less is like building a house without a blueprint!
I'd also argue that poor I/T Project Management training is reflected in the poor overall quality of software compared to any other engineering discipline. But that's a whole other can of worms.
I hardly think we can blame Apple for this. Sure they don't have a Linux version of Quicktime yet. But think about it. Does anyone else have a Linux version of *their* media player?
Real and Flash play on linux, too. Hell, there's software for Linux for CREATING Real audio files and streams. And it's also command-line driven, which was seriously cool when I needed Linux scripting power. And there are lots of compatible players for many other multimedia formats... but QT for Linux is a no-go, as far as I've been able to find.
"Yet"? "Apple doesn't have a quicktime player YET"?! That's rich. What are they, um... SIX versions behind now?! Jeez, a roomful of monkeys and an infinite supply of cheesie-poofs would have generated a semiworking first version by now if Apple wanted it to. Occam's razor says they're not trying.
Why's it matter? Well, a port would:
possibly help in market share (taken from microsoft *OR* Unix/Linux),
reinforce an Apple protocol, and in turn weaken further growth of WMP,
be similar enough to osX to not be THAT hard to port,
increase adoption of a standard that has the best development tools available on Macintoshes (thus selling developer hardware),
avoid marginalization when websites pick 'universal' codexes for deploying trailers and ads and other multimedia files.
In this same vein, I'm personally a bit relieved that Microsoft has chosen to avoid supporting Linux for their WMP/wimpy format. Between that and XP's anti-piracy mechanism, MS is only hurting themselves in the long run, which is good for the competition.
BTW, I love Apple. But I'm not delusional about their methodology. They're like Brain, trying to take over the world, but lacking the grasp of one fundamental detail: Apple can't conquer anything with just 5-7% market penetration.
I love this comment, because it hints at my stance on Windoze XP:
I hear it won't run once the system's modded, but since I've never used it or installed it, let alone tried to mod an XP box, how would I know for sure.
...links are distributed according to a "power law" which leads to "rich get richer" or "winner's take all" behaviour where a small number of sites get the vast majority of links and traffic....
It's never winner take all! I have yet to find anyone who can't use the internet to boost their revenues, despite Amazon and the others. The rich get richer, but to say 'winner's (sic) take all' is misapplying a cliche.
And how is this different from the RealWorld(tm)? Franchises do better than mom-n-pop both because of efficiencies of scale AND because national ad campaigns give them an edge. Trust of a new location is immediate, too. After a few years, being established gives one an additional edge. The only one of these that mom-n-pop can hope to win on is the last one.
If Barnes and Noble were to offer a better associate program, Amazon would lose associates. If someone cleverly merges the ideas of Napster and Ebay, or otherwise improves on Ebay's business model, the vocal segment of frustrated ebay vendors would leave, too.
... see how much tougher competition is among booksellers compared to photographers."
This last part even makes sense. When I wander into a 'net community of experts on an unfamiliar topic (like when I decided to buy a film/slide scanner last month), they often suggest three or four vendors for specialty material. Why? Because Amazon doesn't carry the stuff, and neither will 2 of the 3 mentioned vendors. Experience simply tells them that when they get ready to buy, they call those numbers first.
I know way too many niche vendors that have doubled their revenue by wisely using the internet. It isn't winner take everything, it's a matter of earning attention in a MUCH bigger market.
In related news, the internet is more than AOL and spam is bad. Our human interest story tonight is on how gullible people become when surfing the net and reading email.
Why is it everyone calls us for technical questions but nobody has sense enough to trust us when we hit transitional topics like these. It's like the AMA being ignored on addiction and unsafe sex issues.
Oh, yeah, I remember: because we don't spend any money lobbying, we're inscrutible and we have some rather extreme views.
The proposed punishment, failing him in the class for cheating on one assignment that constituted 2% of his final grade, sounds excessive to me, but there does need to be some punishment for cheating.
I'd say an occasional cheater getting booted out of college would do more to improve ethics than a thousand feel-good 1-credit ethics courses. Punishments need to be harsh. And what is this 2% stuff? How can it matter?! If the punishment is milder, one turns ethics into value-tradeoff or cost/benefit decisions.
Put it another way: a crime is committed. However, the crime only (you pick):
robbed the liquor store of 2% of his annual revenue.
deprives that old man of the last 2% of his life.
used the insider information to exploit a 2% increase in share price.
impaired his driving ability 2%.
affected 2% of the votes cast.
This is the crap that got us Enron (not to mention the last generation: Milken, Boesky, etc.). "Well, we'll be billionaires, and if I get jailed, it'll only be for a few years, and I'll still be pretty damn rich. I can live with that."
Punishments by nature should seem harsh. It probably is easy to get away with crime most of the time, or so it seems each time I've had stuff stolen. The severity of a punishment becomes a factor in "keeping honest people honest". Imagine how much more ethical captains of industry would be if they risked a future in a tenement, with one P.O.S. car, and their kids would be forced to go to BoFunk Community College.
Last of all, we need to publicize that CS and Engineering are TOUGH, unflinching professions. This is a message that is especially not getting out about CS. I'm sick and tired of cleaning up after self-trained HTML-jockey- turned-code-wannabe's spaghetti, insecure code, and every other learning-on-the-job blunder.
Um, I respect the hell out of Bruce Perens, but calling this anything but an editorial is one helluva stretch. It is not a news article. It's a counter-salvo to the microsoft marketing machine.
Mislabelling like this is exactly the sort of thing that makes people discount slashdot as a biased source. And before people insist 'cnet news' is a proper noun, it's a highschool mistake to not clarify double-meanings like this. "In an editorial in CNET news", for example.
Man, I am so-oo sorry for ripping off the cliche'd Mastercard commercial, but it so fits my 'second childhood' story:
Same model as my first computer: Down from $2500 to a mere $20 or less.
Book: Hardware interfacing for the (Apple, 8080, Z80, 6502, 6809, 8088, 8086, etc...): $2 on ebay or a computer show.
Chips, resistors, led's, relays and everything else your heart desires: About ten seconds of salary apiece for salvage, $5 for the ones I can't live without.
D.I.Y. is dead!? Horsehockey! Nothing could be further from the truth. I've been a personal computer 'hobbyist' for over 20 years and a quick guess is that the list of what I'd do if I just had time is quadrupling each year. Ditto every other techno-geek I know.
We're not all building Ham radios and grinding our own telescope lenses, but that's because we're so busy building our own aparatus for whatever interests us using the building blocks of the digital generation. 90% of my projects have nearly nothing to do with pre-1970's devices.
And when something DOES?-- well, ten seconds after I got my first Dobsonian 'scope, I began thinking how cool it'd be to rig it up with photocells, servos, a database and a real-time webserver so I could stargaze last night's sky any time I wanted (like at lunch!?). And two-thirds of how I'd do that isn't available from Edmunds. What's more, ten more seconds of searching on google (webcam astronomer) got me two such devices already implemented.
So, instead of Microsoft wanting to have all my personal information, it'll be lots of companies sharing it.
Man, I need advice here: Do I crack jokes about how much safer I feel now that Microsoft is planning to share it's hoard of all my info? Or do I ask how is this an improvement on everyone sharing my info now?
Between this and the WinXE-Tivo story (a few hundred bucks worth of buggy software and a $1000 computer to replace a $300 appliance in a still-tepid market), I can't decide which is more of a product without a need. Ah, well, lets all sit back and enjoy the warm glow as Microsoft burns another billion of that massive war chest. Microsoft cell phones, XBox blues, a legal case based on "Security By Obscurity"... and now these techno-misfires.
Um, I'll admit that Cisco sells you better drivers, better utilities, etc., and I'll even bend anyone's ear about my own Linksys problems, but it still has to be said really loud, if you got modded up for that remark:
'Better (802.11b) security' is an oxymoron.
Hell, I had to make a 4-homed firewall at my home just to give me peace of mind while running wireless: Ext/Int/DMZ/WLAN. All because of design-by-committee screwups on the security. Bruce Schneier says "Good encryption isn't easy" and recommends LOTS of public scrutiny on any encryption algorithms. As happens way too often, the protocol's designer's wrongly chose otherwise.
I realize I'm preachin' to the choir here, but doing something could include:
Cutting jobs, cutting costs. Anyone know how many nonmusicians are employed by these fat-ass royalty-thieving behemoths? I bet there's some room there for reductions...
Dropping prices. I mean, WTF!? Compare price of materials to price of retail goods on CD's. It's ridiculously above inflationary rates.
That's the message that needs to be gotten out. Let shareholders hear a few reports on unfettered waste in the industry and see if the RIAA members still have time to waste on us...
I came in here planning to crack some joke about how I object to the word 'Feature' to describe something by JonKatz. You know, "it's not a bug, it's a FEATURE" sort of lameness.
As I scanned down to see what others had written, I had an epiphany:
There are 3 parts to every JonKatz story:
There's Jon. Personally, I'd rather get stuck next to RMS on a transpacific flight while wearing clothes with about sixteen different Microsoft logos than read the predictable pretensious neauveau intellectualisms of this guy. JonKatz can actually talk me out of my own beliefs just by standing up for them!!!
So, we skip that part. Bada-bing, bada-boom, twenty-percent time savings.
Next, comes a (predictable) wave of anti-Jon rants. Sometimes there's a funny one, so scan or not depending on how nauseated you were by the teaser for JonKatz's article. You know, as a sanity check...
Anyway, after the rants, the postings pick up a few dozen IQ points, and the strong thoughts start to feed on any weakling remarks and wrong cliche's. Smart people who happen to specialize in an area speak up. Trite answers are given a good "straw-man flambe" treatment, and quotes or sources that have sabotaged their own reputations are outed. If you love hating JonKatz, there's even a side game possible: watch how often these discussions never even mention JonKatz! It's like a waiter stepped up to the round table, said something trite, then wandered away to let The Grownups take the discussion to a higher level.
So, just skip a few screenfuls. You won't lose much, context cues can get you a bit further, and if you like to think the issues through and discover complications you'd never considered... the last half are where you'll find the meat of the discussion.
"n% of the people think. m% of the people think they think. The other j% of the people would rather die than think. " -- Edison, Shaw, Coller, or ???
At the end of a harrowing day, I go out for a pint to *FORGET ABOUT WORK*. Who the heck sits there staring at a pint and says 'hmm, I wonder how I can get even more network support requests during happy hour'.
If Scifi wants to throw money at a made-for-SciFi project, why don't they make 'All your Base are belong to us'. Steal the campy style of 'Mars Attacks', throw in some 'Killer Tomatoes' and 'Body Snatchers', and add cameo scenes by Klaatu and the boys for nostalgia's sake...
I mean, at least this way you start from scratch. There's *NOTHING* distracting a scriptwriter here, and no expectation of greatness. Besides, I'm dying to know the real story-behind-the-story here.
Myst suffers the usual game-to-movie lack of plot and dies an ugly hard-to-watch death. Sort of like that nasty jack-n-the-beanstalk miniseries from last year. The good money's on this prospect.
Myst hires good writers. They convert a few dozen hours of gameplay and several novels into something that vaguely resembles watching a movie on fast-forward, trying to cram in a jillion details. Even if this runs a dozen hours in miniseries mode, there's so much material that something has to give.
I conceed, there were stories that accompanied Myst. Granted. But anyone that thinks for one moment that they were *exceptional* must like the suspense in reading a good cheerios box. Ugh! What's more, the mere existence of all this background is a serious strait-jacket to anyone developing a movie script. They must tell a compelling story while not clashing with all that stuff!!!
Heck, it can be done. But expectations are high, and there are jillions more ways to fail than to succeed. I haven't touched on lots of other risks: 'artistic' conflicts with Myst's original creators on what *must* happen, attempts to avoid revealing info that spoils the game, attempts to cling too tenaciously to the gameline, attempts to stray too far from the gameline, production weaknesses, poor acting, or any of the six million other ways a movie can suck without this added baggage.
How bad is it? Remember the rants about LoTR, and remember that it at least had a great novel as a basis. These guys start without a proven storyline but *with* all sorts of baggage.
Perhaps Microsoft should start a consulting arm. Whatever they might have currently doesn't count. I mean significant effort, strong marketing of it, and generating substantial percentages of overall revenue. IBM does, Sun does, Oracle does. And so on, ad nauseum.
Then again, there'd be a few gajillion certified partners that'd scream bloody murder if they did. So step two is to hire the good ones. After all, having a phone list of candidates worldwide can't hurt when trying to come up to speed as a consultancy. The rest will calm down when they see their own rates ligitimized and increased because Microsoft charges 3x or 4x what many mom-n-pop consultancies are currently stuck charging.
Once the consulting arm is alive, start tiering software. Open source and give away the limited/educational level software, and charge for the standard and enterprise grade stuff. Exchange server: costs. Enterprise-grade exchange server: costs lots. Wait, don't set that checkbook down. You'll need help setting things up correctly. And MS will do it for just $300 per hour. Support contract? Another kilobuck per year per dozen employees. Etc.
Hmm, that sounds a lot like Oracle, IBM and Sun. Why is it I read daily that the future is in service, yet Microsoft doesn't have a significant service or consulting branch? It chills me to guess that Microsoft doesn't because they're too happy making 96% markup on their software-only business to waste time picking up the pennies left over on consultancy margins.
OK, so maybe somebody has already thrown this question back to the questioner, but if so, they're buried somewhere below mod-3 level (not that my comments ever escape there with my newbie-ized lack of karma.)
--If early cars were like software, we'd all have gone back to horses.
I'm diving into the pool early here, but the first two mod-3+ comments are up, and they both need a nice, sensible rebuttal:
First: there is no grand conspiracy in science. Fox and Mulder are as nonexistant as Santa Claus. Likewise for cold fusion's early claims. How do I know this? Because I was in a tiny little physics department 150 miles due north of Pons & Fleischman (sp?) when they released their results. No big science. No big budgets. No reason to fudge results wrong and lots of reasons to verify a nearby peer's claim. Just a dozen PhD's, a very minimalist beam lab, some grad students pursuing Master's Degrees, and a whole boatload of freshman Astronomy courses.
Our department faculty jumped on it, because it was nearby, it was novel, and the experiment was easily reproduced. The math even somewhat works. Papers written all over the world came to the same conclusion ours did: close... but no cigar.
So... ditch the conspiracy theories. Rather than ask a physicist about cold fusion (a wild-card answer is all you'll get, 'cuz they're all tired of the subject like I'm tired of Roswell and any other tabloid topic), ask any physicist more carefully phrased questions:
1 - was the cold fusion experiment mentioned above a bust: yep. 2 - is there a conspiracy to bury cold fusion: nope. 3 - would it surprise you if cold fusion became a reality (in *any* form) someday: nope. 4 - what do you watch for as you snore your way through new papers or claims: breakthroughs, significant exothermy, or mention of something useful and unexpected, together something different about aparatus or method that explains the cause.
As for conspiracies, the closest to truth there is that top scientists do have monumental ego's. Perhaps even too big, if you ask me. Does it impede (as in SLOW DOWN) progress? At times. Does it ever prevent the truth getting out? Hell, no. It can slow release of information down, but nothing stops curiosity. More importantly, nothing ever stops all the rest of us from wanting to help discovery along, get famous (perhaps) or even for a brief time be 'Smarter than a Nobel Laureate'. And regardless of how shouted-down someone might be for an iconoclastic view *this year*, the truth gets out. Even a bad idea gets attention (I was once asked to build a prototype to help a professor convince a politician that some rube-goldberg gravity-defying device wasn't a perpetual-motion device capable of launching anything into space).
So, stop with crying 'conspiracy'. Yes, there might be papers being written. Are they making advances? Probably. But enough reputable papers have been written and enough effort has been put into this that it isn't conspiracy that makes physicists all shrug when people talk small, incremental cold fusion advances. The problem's just unsolved and we're all busy elsewhere on our own unsolved problems. The collective non-shrug will come when a respected peer calls one of us up and say "Hey, this one's *INTERESTING*".
-- The most powerful declaration in the scientific method isn't "Eureka!", but "That's funny..."
Slashdot Mirror
While we're on the subject, I think Mikey needs a new career, too, if this is how well he understands stuff he's paid to be an expert on:
Then again... the NET::Bot code is perl. You really can't expect Windoze people to pay any attention to the rest of the world. As for Mikey, it's pretty damn funny hearing him describing ActiveBuddy's competition as "Smaller developers"... I'll take my next Jupiter Report with an order of fries so you can practice those food service skills, dude.I really am betting you just spoke too quickly, because I see a glimmer of a point, but that analogy is from hell. I strongly doubt you're a hypocrite or a moron, but I've got a handful of strong moron votes for the people that modded you up.
Man, I'm readin' slashdot less and less these days, and now I realize why: in fifteen minutes, I've lost a decade's worth of earned respect for Declan McCullagh and been reminded just how idiotic things can get even at the mod-5 level.
The only good part is, you've shown me a 3rd kind of free. Free Beer, Free Speech, and Free Drugs. MSIE belongs in category 3, of course. Free... but yooouuulll beeeee soorrrrrryyyyyy!
Dijkstra's Law (of Programming Inertia):
If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it.
I'm very sorry to hear he's died, even though I never met the good Doctor. In fact, each time I'm led off into the weeds by some dumbass project manager who misinterprets XP or RAD or ??? into contradicting this law, I quote Dijkstra's Law to anyone nearby. Along with quoting from Yourdon's "Death March", it's my favorite self-help therapy method.
1 - Microsoft's code cannot be revealed without compromising security completely, says microsoft.
2 - Open source code can and is revealed, yet OSS is not completely compromised.
3 - With these 2 HUGELY IMBALANCED stances, both have a steady, uniform streams of bugs.
Since bugs are more easily found WITH source code, there must be a category of bugs/vulnerabilities being overlooked in MS code, so it is less secure.
Dear Cambridge... print THAT!
I've noticed a subtle character trait that is important here. Some leaders/teachers don't mind being corrected. Let's call them wise. Other people feel it undermines their authority if you prove them wrong or ask them a question they can't answer. Many will punish you politically for showing them up, even if that wasn't your intent. Yup... not wise at all.
This knack/flaw alone doesn't make someone a good PM, but it sure does make for a crappy one, if the PM isn't a genius at both PM and any tech roles they fill.
Why wisdom? Well, I was told once that wisdom was learning that you can't know everything.
Just because it was an anomaly of epic proportions, here's my favorite PM's background:
She was nearing 50, had a degree in Sociology, and had been managing I/T projects for a decade or more. A lot of her projects were cobol and RPG for banks, and we were a Java house. She was remarkably good at PM. She was also seriously not technical.
Her best moments:
-- She once doubled a bid to a client based on his being unprepared and an a$$. Her explanation was life was too short and she'd rather not have to deal with him, but if he paid a vicious premium, we were there for him...
-- She liked to keep status meetings short, group-wide, and effective. Gant charts or checklists of milestone items would get a quick review, we'd respond on change in status since the previous meeting, and we were gone.
-- She knew she didn't know code. She didn't revel in it, but she would look for an effective analogy on critical issues so she could understand them well enough to do initial communications with clients (to shelter us). If it exceeded her ability, she'd arrange a call/meeting with all three of us, and she'd quietly listen and learn while we worked with the client to find a workable solution. She was willing to learn, in other words, and wasn't intimidated or put off when we would contradict or correct her on technical items.
-- She *did* know people, project management issues and methodologies, political tricks, and everything else, thanks to her adapting her sociology training over to the topic.
-- She'd rarely play us politically. If something was hot, we'd get a warning. If it was a lame issue, she'd say it was likely to fade away if ignored.
Going the other direction, I've seen technical types that were the epitome of the Peter Principle... great techies that had been handed a budget and a project without a lick of training or ability to handle the project. This scares me *more* than a non-tech PM, because they often suck at delegating, politics, shielding the techies from distractions, etc.
Having started as a design-build engineer on Semiconductor Fabs, I've got to say the software field is pretty full of rank amateurs in Project Management, in general. The people I worked with in construction PM were trained experts and had field experience and an awareness that careful design, scheduling and bidding/estimating were necessary specialties, not off-the-cuff afterthoughts, and that these were necessary costs in any large project. Anything less is like building a house without a blueprint!
I'd also argue that poor I/T Project Management training is reflected in the poor overall quality of software compared to any other engineering discipline. But that's a whole other can of worms.
And, you can have your stem cells banked for later disasters after your liposuction."
Disaster? Lipo's gross as hell, but most times I wouldn't call it a disaster.
Real and Flash play on linux, too. Hell, there's software for Linux for CREATING Real audio files and streams. And it's also command-line driven, which was seriously cool when I needed Linux scripting power. And there are lots of compatible players for many other multimedia formats... but QT for Linux is a no-go, as far as I've been able to find.
"Yet"? "Apple doesn't have a quicktime player YET"?! That's rich. What are they, um... SIX versions behind now?! Jeez, a roomful of monkeys and an infinite supply of cheesie-poofs would have generated a semiworking first version by now if Apple wanted it to. Occam's razor says they're not trying.
Why's it matter? Well, a port would:
In this same vein, I'm personally a bit relieved that Microsoft has chosen to avoid supporting Linux for their WMP/wimpy format. Between that and XP's anti-piracy mechanism, MS is only hurting themselves in the long run, which is good for the competition.
BTW, I love Apple. But I'm not delusional about their methodology. They're like Brain, trying to take over the world, but lacking the grasp of one fundamental detail: Apple can't conquer anything with just 5-7% market penetration.
I love this comment, because it hints at my stance on Windoze XP:
I hear it won't run once the system's modded, but since I've never used it or installed it, let alone tried to mod an XP box, how would I know for sure.
xyzzy-plugh
And how is this different from the RealWorld(tm)? Franchises do better than mom-n-pop both because of efficiencies of scale AND because national ad campaigns give them an edge. Trust of a new location is immediate, too. After a few years, being established gives one an additional edge. The only one of these that mom-n-pop can hope to win on is the last one.
If Barnes and Noble were to offer a better associate program, Amazon would lose associates. If someone cleverly merges the ideas of Napster and Ebay, or otherwise improves on Ebay's business model, the vocal segment of frustrated ebay vendors would leave, too.
This last part even makes sense. When I wander into a 'net community of experts on an unfamiliar topic (like when I decided to buy a film/slide scanner last month), they often suggest three or four vendors for specialty material. Why? Because Amazon doesn't carry the stuff, and neither will 2 of the 3 mentioned vendors. Experience simply tells them that when they get ready to buy, they call those numbers first.I know way too many niche vendors that have doubled their revenue by wisely using the internet. It isn't winner take everything, it's a matter of earning attention in a MUCH bigger market.
In related news, the internet is more than AOL and spam is bad. Our human interest story tonight is on how gullible people become when surfing the net and reading email.
Why is it everyone calls us for technical questions but nobody has sense enough to trust us when we hit transitional topics like these. It's like the AMA being ignored on addiction and unsafe sex issues.
Oh, yeah, I remember: because we don't spend any money lobbying, we're inscrutible and we have some rather extreme views.
I'd say an occasional cheater getting booted out of college would do more to improve ethics than a thousand feel-good 1-credit ethics courses. Punishments need to be harsh. And what is this 2% stuff? How can it matter?! If the punishment is milder, one turns ethics into value-tradeoff or cost/benefit decisions.
Put it another way: a crime is committed. However, the crime only (you pick):
- robbed the liquor store of 2% of his annual revenue.
- deprives that old man of the last 2% of his life.
- used the insider information to exploit a 2% increase in share price.
- impaired his driving ability 2%.
- affected 2% of the votes cast.
This is the crap that got us Enron (not to mention the last generation: Milken, Boesky, etc.). "Well, we'll be billionaires, and if I get jailed, it'll only be for a few years, and I'll still be pretty damn rich. I can live with that."Punishments by nature should seem harsh. It probably is easy to get away with crime most of the time, or so it seems each time I've had stuff stolen. The severity of a punishment becomes a factor in "keeping honest people honest". Imagine how much more ethical captains of industry would be if they risked a future in a tenement, with one P.O.S. car, and their kids would be forced to go to BoFunk Community College.
Last of all, we need to publicize that CS and Engineering are TOUGH, unflinching professions. This is a message that is especially not getting out about CS. I'm sick and tired of cleaning up after self-trained HTML-jockey- turned-code-wannabe's spaghetti, insecure code, and every other learning-on-the-job blunder.
Mislabelling like this is exactly the sort of thing that makes people discount slashdot as a biased source. And before people insist 'cnet news' is a proper noun, it's a highschool mistake to not clarify double-meanings like this. "In an editorial in CNET news", for example.
We're not all building Ham radios and grinding our own telescope lenses, but that's because we're so busy building our own aparatus for whatever interests us using the building blocks of the digital generation. 90% of my projects have nearly nothing to do with pre-1970's devices.
And when something DOES?-- well, ten seconds after I got my first Dobsonian 'scope, I began thinking how cool it'd be to rig it up with photocells, servos, a database and a real-time webserver so I could stargaze last night's sky any time I wanted (like at lunch!?). And two-thirds of how I'd do that isn't available from Edmunds. What's more, ten more seconds of searching on google (webcam astronomer) got me two such devices already implemented.
Folks are building their own fuel cells and hooking 'em to bikes, making wireless network antennas, turbocharged generators, stereo-to-PC integration devices, in-car-computers, personal VTOL aircraft, and more!
We're all still experimenting. That's what hacking is, in my book. We're just caught up in 'new' areas of discovery.
Oh, and Open Source has little to do with the urge to experiment. They may coincide, but either can live just fine exclusively of one another.
So, instead of Microsoft wanting to have all my personal information, it'll be lots of companies sharing it.
Man, I need advice here: Do I crack jokes about how much safer I feel now that Microsoft is planning to share it's hoard of all my info? Or do I ask how is this an improvement on everyone sharing my info now?
Between this and the WinXE-Tivo story (a few hundred bucks worth of buggy software and a $1000 computer to replace a $300 appliance in a still-tepid market), I can't decide which is more of a product without a need. Ah, well, lets all sit back and enjoy the warm glow as Microsoft burns another billion of that massive war chest. Microsoft cell phones, XBox blues, a legal case based on "Security By Obscurity"... and now these techno-misfires.
'Better (802.11b) security' is an oxymoron.
Hell, I had to make a 4-homed firewall at my home just to give me peace of mind while running wireless: Ext/Int/DMZ/WLAN. All because of design-by-committee screwups on the security. Bruce Schneier says "Good encryption isn't easy" and recommends LOTS of public scrutiny on any encryption algorithms. As happens way too often, the protocol's designer's wrongly chose otherwise.
I realize I'm preachin' to the choir here, but doing something could include:
Cutting jobs, cutting costs. Anyone know how many nonmusicians are employed by these fat-ass royalty-thieving behemoths? I bet there's some room there for reductions...
Dropping prices. I mean, WTF!? Compare price of materials to price of retail goods on CD's. It's ridiculously above inflationary rates.
That's the message that needs to be gotten out. Let shareholders hear a few reports on unfettered waste in the industry and see if the RIAA members still have time to waste on us...
There are 3 parts to every JonKatz story:
There's Jon. Personally, I'd rather get stuck next to RMS on a transpacific flight while wearing clothes with about sixteen different Microsoft logos than read the predictable pretensious neauveau intellectualisms of this guy. JonKatz can actually talk me out of my own beliefs just by standing up for them!!!
So, we skip that part. Bada-bing, bada-boom, twenty-percent time savings.
Next, comes a (predictable) wave of anti-Jon rants. Sometimes there's a funny one, so scan or not depending on how nauseated you were by the teaser for JonKatz's article. You know, as a sanity check...
Anyway, after the rants, the postings pick up a few dozen IQ points, and the strong thoughts start to feed on any weakling remarks and wrong cliche's. Smart people who happen to specialize in an area speak up. Trite answers are given a good "straw-man flambe" treatment, and quotes or sources that have sabotaged their own reputations are outed. If you love hating JonKatz, there's even a side game possible: watch how often these discussions never even mention JonKatz! It's like a waiter stepped up to the round table, said something trite, then wandered away to let The Grownups take the discussion to a higher level.
So, just skip a few screenfuls. You won't lose much, context cues can get you a bit further, and if you like to think the issues through and discover complications you'd never considered... the last half are where you'll find the meat of the discussion.
"n% of the people think. m% of the people think they think. The other j% of the people would rather die than think. " -- Edison, Shaw, Coller, or ???
Whoa... talk about uber-geek...
At the end of a harrowing day, I go out for a pint to *FORGET ABOUT WORK*. Who the heck sits there staring at a pint and says 'hmm, I wonder how I can get even more network support requests during happy hour'.
If they're whipping spammers, I want video of it!!!
If Scifi wants to throw money at a made-for-SciFi project, why don't they make 'All your Base are belong to us'. Steal the campy style of 'Mars Attacks', throw in some 'Killer Tomatoes' and 'Body Snatchers', and add cameo scenes by Klaatu and the boys for nostalgia's sake...
I mean, at least this way you start from scratch. There's *NOTHING* distracting a scriptwriter here, and no expectation of greatness. Besides, I'm dying to know the real story-behind-the-story here.
Myst suffers the usual game-to-movie lack of plot and dies an ugly hard-to-watch death. Sort of like that nasty jack-n-the-beanstalk miniseries from last year. The good money's on this prospect.
Myst hires good writers. They convert a few dozen hours of gameplay and several novels into something that vaguely resembles watching a movie on fast-forward, trying to cram in a jillion details. Even if this runs a dozen hours in miniseries mode, there's so much material that something has to give.
I conceed, there were stories that accompanied Myst. Granted. But anyone that thinks for one moment that they were *exceptional* must like the suspense in reading a good cheerios box. Ugh! What's more, the mere existence of all this background is a serious strait-jacket to anyone developing a movie script. They must tell a compelling story while not clashing with all that stuff!!!
Heck, it can be done. But expectations are high, and there are jillions more ways to fail than to succeed. I haven't touched on lots of other risks: 'artistic' conflicts with Myst's original creators on what *must* happen, attempts to avoid revealing info that spoils the game, attempts to cling too tenaciously to the gameline, attempts to stray too far from the gameline, production weaknesses, poor acting, or any of the six million other ways a movie can suck without this added baggage.
How bad is it? Remember the rants about LoTR, and remember that it at least had a great novel as a basis. These guys start without a proven storyline but *with* all sorts of baggage.
Perhaps Microsoft should start a consulting arm. Whatever they might have currently doesn't count. I mean significant effort, strong marketing of it, and generating substantial percentages of overall revenue. IBM does, Sun does, Oracle does. And so on, ad nauseum.
Then again, there'd be a few gajillion certified partners that'd scream bloody murder if they did. So step two is to hire the good ones. After all, having a phone list of candidates worldwide can't hurt when trying to come up to speed as a consultancy. The rest will calm down when they see their own rates ligitimized and increased because Microsoft charges 3x or 4x what many mom-n-pop consultancies are currently stuck charging.
Once the consulting arm is alive, start tiering software. Open source and give away the limited/educational level software, and charge for the standard and enterprise grade stuff. Exchange server: costs. Enterprise-grade exchange server: costs lots. Wait, don't set that checkbook down. You'll need help setting things up correctly. And MS will do it for just $300 per hour. Support contract? Another kilobuck per year per dozen employees. Etc.
Hmm, that sounds a lot like Oracle, IBM and Sun. Why is it I read daily that the future is in service, yet Microsoft doesn't have a significant service or consulting branch? It chills me to guess that Microsoft doesn't because they're too happy making 96% markup on their software-only business to waste time picking up the pennies left over on consultancy margins.
OK, so maybe somebody has already thrown this question back to the questioner, but if so, they're buried somewhere below mod-3 level (not that my comments ever escape there with my newbie-ized lack of karma.)
--If early cars were like software, we'd all have gone back to horses.
I'm diving into the pool early here, but the first two mod-3+ comments are up, and they both need a nice, sensible rebuttal:
First: there is no grand conspiracy in science. Fox and Mulder are as nonexistant as Santa Claus. Likewise for cold fusion's early claims. How do I know this? Because I was in a tiny little physics department 150 miles due north of Pons & Fleischman (sp?) when they released their results. No big science. No big budgets. No reason to fudge results wrong and lots of reasons to verify a nearby peer's claim. Just a dozen PhD's, a very minimalist beam lab, some grad students pursuing Master's Degrees, and a whole boatload of freshman Astronomy courses.
Our department faculty jumped on it, because it was nearby, it was novel, and the experiment was easily reproduced. The math even somewhat works. Papers written all over the world came to the same conclusion ours did: close... but no cigar.
So... ditch the conspiracy theories. Rather than ask a physicist about cold fusion (a wild-card answer is all you'll get, 'cuz they're all tired of the subject like I'm tired of Roswell and any other tabloid topic), ask any physicist more carefully phrased questions:
1 - was the cold fusion experiment mentioned above a bust: yep.
2 - is there a conspiracy to bury cold fusion: nope.
3 - would it surprise you if cold fusion became a reality (in *any* form) someday: nope.
4 - what do you watch for as you snore your way through new papers or claims: breakthroughs, significant exothermy, or mention of something useful and unexpected, together something different about aparatus or method that explains the cause.
As for conspiracies, the closest to truth there is that top scientists do have monumental ego's. Perhaps even too big, if you ask me. Does it impede (as in SLOW DOWN) progress? At times. Does it ever prevent the truth getting out? Hell, no. It can slow release of information down, but nothing stops curiosity. More importantly, nothing ever stops all the rest of us from wanting to help discovery along, get famous (perhaps) or even for a brief time be 'Smarter than a Nobel Laureate'. And regardless of how shouted-down someone might be for an iconoclastic view *this year*, the truth gets out. Even a bad idea gets attention (I was once asked to build a prototype to help a professor convince a politician that some rube-goldberg gravity-defying device wasn't a perpetual-motion device capable of launching anything into space).
So, stop with crying 'conspiracy'. Yes, there might be papers being written. Are they making advances? Probably. But enough reputable papers have been written and enough effort has been put into this that it isn't conspiracy that makes physicists all shrug when people talk small, incremental cold fusion advances. The problem's just unsolved and we're all busy elsewhere on our own unsolved problems. The collective non-shrug will come when a respected peer calls one of us up and say "Hey, this one's *INTERESTING*".
-- The most powerful declaration in the scientific method isn't "Eureka!", but "That's funny..."