This question is sort fo a variant fo what I was thinking about. I was thinking that it might actually make more send and be more economical to buy the new headless mac, and carry that around, rather then an iBook. Lot's of places I go to teach or make presentations have monitor, keyboard and mouse, so all I really need is the itty bitty mini Mac.
But there are occassions I want to take the Mini Mac with me and bring along a monitor as well. So I was thinking about some of those portable LCDs targeting the car market. Something like this:
There has to be a cheaper, better solution. I think there will be many more options coming out in the near future, precisely because of the ehadless Mac. And this will help those who need, on occassion, to plug a monitor into a headless box acting up (where precisely because it is acting up, VNC is not an option).
Not too long ago I wrote an article about software development methods which heavily focused on Brooks as a precurser of Agile methods. Those who are interested can read it here.
Insightful? Hardly. Windows has all the bugs, bloatware etc. because Microsoft is focused on making a profit of its monopoly position, not providing a valuable product to its customers. In fact, if Linux does reach 50% of the desktop:
1. Windows will become a far better product because Microsoft will finally have real competition and need to worry about keeping its customers 2. Linux would still have the modularity and diversity it has now, ensuring that at least those who use the Debian distro (for example) will continue to have a fine, reliable product.
I just upgraded from 2.4 to 2.6 on my IBM Thinkpad notebook. I did a quick browse of a "how to" someone wrote before I did it. Did apt-get just to the kernel (I'm up to date in everything else) rebooted and everything but sound worked. Did another google search, did apt-get for alsa-utils and libesd, ran alsaconf, and voila. Working system. Entire process from beginning to end: 15 minutes. So I would say even a major kernel upgrade is pretty painless.
Sure in a large IT environment, you'ld be wise to do far more testing, and wait a bit till 2.6 is further down the line. But I am truly astounded by both the quality and ease of use of Linux qua Linux.
On the other hand, as for upgrading to the latest Windows to solve your problems. I recently left the same notebook booted in Windows XP (which I keep patched and up to date) and did nothing unusual - just started up Yahoo messenger (I only use it for Messenger voice and syncing my Palm with Vindigo, which still doesnt seem to work in Linux). The next morning I woke up and the boot block was trashed. Why? I haven't a clue. I use an anti-virus and spyware killer, so it was none of the above. I had to reinstall Windows XP from the hidden backup partition, Several hours wasted.
Windows is becoming more and more of a joke, and not suitable for serious computer usage.
Why was this listed as informative? Yahoo voice does NOT work on Mac or Linux so is just plain wrong. The voice chat uses some proprietary codec that is Windoze only. Was it modded up because of the cutsie comment about seducing your gf(s)?
I wish people would read before commenting. I said that there has to be equal *access* and equal *information*. I didn't say that a free market requires equal distribution of wealth.
What I said is exactly what Adam Smith said, and has nothing to do with Marx.
Whenever an issue like this comes up the inevitable/. knee-jerk libetarians come out of the wood-work: "capitalism good protection bad" Well maybe some of these libetarians should find out what Adam Smith was really about. His model of capitalism is based in an agrarian society with independent artisans and traders. His idea of a free market is exactly that - where everyone has equal access to market and equal information.
Corporate America has as much to do with the Adam Smith model as the Bolshevist U.S.S.R. It's not even related to Marx' model of capitalism, for in Corporate America, capital is as alientated from controlling the means of production as labor is. Instead, what you have is a management class which calls the shots and enriches itself at the expense of both workers and owners - can you say Enron, Adelphi, Worldcom etc etc.
Sure a worker has the "freedom" to say "fuck you" to his boss and look for another job. In theory. In practice, as the job market shrinks despite the "improving" economy (i.e. the management class being further enriched) those jobs are very hard to come by. So the worker has to bite his tongue as his workload is doubled, as her boss wittles away more and more of her "perks," as the threat of outsourcing is used to bludgeon him into obedience.
Saying to someone "go out and upgrade your skills" is also BS. A friend of mine is in his mid-40s, extremely talented, engineer/MBA out of work for a year and a half. Who's going to hire people in their 40s and 50s, no matter how much talent and experience they have, no matter how upgraded their skills are? And you young 'uns are going to get there faster than you think.
Corporate America demands obedience, makes people work like slaves, uses them, chews them up and throws them out when they no longer are useful. Maybe we should just kill off laid of workers so we don't have to worry about unemployment insurance and welfare?
And no I am not speaking out of personal bitterness. I have a successful consultancy business and work for myself. But even if you believe in ultra-selfishness, a society with many poor, disaffected people is a very scary and dangerous place to live in. This is an issue that effects all of us, not just the laid off.
Nearly all of the article's "myths" are relevant for all software development, not just FOSS. As for the first myth, and the one cited in the posting, that's just a troll. I don't think anyone believes that just releasing code makes it useful or desirable. In other words, this article should have titled: 7 Myths about Software Development. As such, it's not bad, although I didn't find any deep insights in it.
---------------- Mythical Man Month Methodology http://fourm.info/
The details of the story don't matter and boil down to he said-she said. However, these facts are on the public record:
1. Marc Andreesen did not invent either the Web or the browser. Mosaic was based on the idea and codes of others. Nor was he a programmer. Nor did he have a significant management role at Netscape. 2. Despite Andreesen's admiration of the Google founders creating something of value and long-lasting, he and Jim Clark did not do the same. Netscape was one big air-bubble, the beginning of the madness which left a few people very rich and many others quite poor. Nothing of Netscape remains, and if it is remembered at all, it will be as an icon of greed, stupidity and arrogance (the three main characteristics of the dot-com entrepeneurs). 3. Ironically, and most gratifyingly, Mozilla, which arose from the ashes of Netscape was a project that returned to the original roots of the Web - the idea of sharing as a mechanism to expand human knowledge. Precisely because it is based on these positive values, Mozilla will be around for a long, long time and create long term value and real innovation.
So I agree with the poster. Why should we care about Andreesen's opinions? He was at the right place at the right time - but that doesn't make him wise, not has he learned from his experiences. Read what he has to say about browsersand innovation:
"There's nothing emerging right now. Creativity stopped in 1997. Before that, there were huge numbers of changes: dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java mail, plug-ins for security and other functions. And these were created by Netscape and many others."
Just because he's rich doesn't make him any less of a pompous fool. Jim Clark was the business brains of Netscape, by the way, so don't give Andreesen any credit for that.
Others responses have addressed this issue, but for a more detailed response check out my article Software Methodologies: Battle of the Gurus. The idea that software development is an engineering practice, that detailed and accurate specifications are both feasible and practical, are hogwash. Software development is a human centric process. Communication and prototyping are the keys to success. Outsourcing works against both of these. Outsourcing is build on 19th century ideas of industrializing human activity. It may get the job done, but it is neither efficient nor effective.
That is not to say teams can't co-operate over long distances. FOSS projects do that all the time. But there is a reason so many of these projects organize programming sprints when they can. The team that works together in the same room is the most effective and efficient team.
You don't have to go that far. When I lived in Israel i went to the bank one day to open an acccount. I was about to give the clerk my address and phone number, and she said "that won't be necessary." Israelis have a national ID and there is a Ministry of Interior database with all your information. Apparently the banks have free access to it. Once she had my ID number, she could pull all the rest. Getting someone's id of course trivial. When I complained she said "don't worry, I only have read access."
It get's worse? You know the electronic portpass you can get in the U.S. to use instead of yuor passport? Well in Israel you can get one too - they don't issue a separate card but turn one of your existing credit cards issued by a commercial bankd into a portpass equivalent.
What bothers me most about this story is some of the reactions here, which reflect the worst sort of corporate thinking: "Someone makes a mistake - can him." Even if one concedes that Microsoft is within its legal rights, it was a senseless act on their part to fire him. Being right is no excuse for being stupid.
If the concern was really about looking bad for using Macs, they would have insisted he remove the post. I take it at face value that they saw this as a security breach. However, their approach to solving the problem shows how inflexible and rigid they have become, a bad sign for an organization competing in a highly dynamic industry.
On the self-interest level, they just generated for themselves more bad publicity, something Microsoft can ill afford. Microsoft management should be trained to take public opinion into consideration in every act they do, and to think carefully about the PR implications of their public actions.
On a more fundamental level, a corporation has no real existence. It is a group of people working towards some goal. Proper motivation of employees is a key to success.
If fear is the greatest motivating tool that corporate management chooses to make use of, that corporation is doomed to oblivion. Firing someone should be a last resort action taken only after other options have been exhausted. If management is seen as cruel and capricious, then the best employees who have a choice of where to work, will go find a more congenial working environment.
The proper way to have handled this was to ask the employee to immediately remove the offending post from his blog, and point out to him the corporate policies he violated and let him go with a warning. That way they would have avoided bad PR, limited the security breach and would have been viewed as an understanding employer. Microsoft lost on every level by taking this foolish action, whatever the initial motivation might have been.
Unfortunately, as a FOSS vendor I am not a convicted monopolist who can take the billions I stole from innocent consumers and put it into a foundation to promote FOSS and then say what a wonderful person I am. Of course, Gates learned this technique from the Robber Barons of 'yore. Today, for example, everyone in America associates Carnegie with good deeds - not the thieving son-of-a-bitch he really was.
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
Ahem. How can any individual who has even opened a newspaper in the past two years make such a ridiculous statement? Efficiency? What about Enron, Worldcom, Dot.com etc. etc.
And have you ever worked in a modern corporation? Efficiency? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
One tiny little anecdote: I had a meeting recently with this high-powered executive in this huge investment bank in New York. A few years ago, this company decided to consolidate into one building so they spent tens of millions constructing a downtown headquarters. For two years this woman's job was to develop the "content" for the large electronic signs that engirth the building. The "content" was essentially projections all kinds of marketing images. She ran a 10 person team on this project and spend several millions of dollars. After 9/11 the President of the bank decided he liked his workers dispersed, so he sold the headquarters building at a loss to another investment bank. Those huge signs now project only one thing - the name of the company who owns the building
First a bit of history. When I started an interactive agency in 1984, we were a Mac shop. But a year after Apple made the move to the Power Macs, I forced my graphic designers to move to Windows. Apple's platform was so unreliable and so slow that the price premium was absurd.
Very early on we used Linux as our file server platform, since we could serve both Windows and Mac files. Over time the advantages of open source became more apparent to me, and about 4 years ago I switched to a Linux desktop. I started with Gnome before it hit 1.0, but I have been using KDE now for about 2 years.
I'm a marketing/manager type. My key tools are these: word processing, browsing, addressbook, email and IM. One thing I have learned to love about the open source world is that it allows me to own my own information. Proprietary formats mean I have no control and I will be forced to pay ransom in the future just to keep accessing my own files!
So now my key working application set includes: Lyx, Abiword, OpenOffice (for those pesky word files I have to open and edit on occassion that Abiword still barfs on), Jpilot, Mozilla, GAIM and Acrobat Reader. Sometimes I also use Quanta for fixing up our website or Gimp for touching up a graphics file. I also use Konqueror as an ftp client for our Zope backend. All these applications give me everything I need, work quite well, and store my files in formats which are open standards which I know will be around for as long as I need to access them. Windows is not an option, and never again be for me.
In fact, the Linux desktop has reached a stage where I would recommend any business user like myself to use it. Certainly, I would strongly urge businesses to use the applications listed, instead of their proprietary equivalents. Most of these apps are available on Windows as well. And I haven't even begun to talk about the thousands of dollars saved in licensing fees and the superior feature set and useability of these apps over the proprietary equivalents.
Recently I had to decide about a new computer for a web designer. The software set this person uses - Photoshop, Freehand, Dreamweaver - just isn't available for Linux and may never be. So looking at Windows XP versus Apple, guess what: I chose the eMac. Despite the small premium in price, the stability of Mac OS X made the switch seem worthwhile. It had been a number of years since I had played around with an Apple machine, and I was extremely impressed by the speed and the ease of use of the OS X platform., and how great these apps ran on the Mac.
But there is also me as the home user. Yes, I also like to listen to music and rip cds. My son likes to do that too, and he also wants a P2P client and he just got a video camera and he would like to do some editing, and play around with midi and his piano keyboard. Here's where things get fuzzy. Sure you can do all this stuff on Linux, but it's such a pain to set up, and if you upgrade something, something else breaks.
Now in the past I would say, the Apple premium isn't worth it. But having played with that eMac I'm starting to think differently. For the home user who wants multimedia capabilities, Linux is just too big a pain. Apple just works out of the box (except I would add the Ogg Vorbis plugin to iTunes since I don't want to use proprietary MP3s). So probably the next home computer I get will be a Mac (and that's certainly what I'm going to get for my son going to college).
So the key in choosing a platform is your application set. For designers Apple (once again) rules and the price premium is worth it. For business people, Linux is the way to go. For home users with a rock bottom budget or who aren't multimedia fanatics, Linux is a great entry system. If you have some extra cash, the Mac is worth it.
And here's another thought: maybe down the line if business is good I might get a Mac as my business machine as well. With Fink and other projects bringing my favorite Linux open source applications to the Mac, I can hav
On principle, I wont ever use my moderation points to mod things down.. But the fact that this infantile and moronic joke got moderated to a 5 is truly pathetic.
I wrote about this in an internal reply but apparently people didn't seeit and are continuing to make some very ignorant statements about Statecharts.
Statecharts are not a fancy way to do state machines. They are an extremely sophisticated graphics based notation with a formal mathematical semantics for modelling reactive systems. The ideas behind statecharts were developed by David Harel and Amir Pnueli (a winner of the prestigious Touring award and a world expert in Temporal Logic which heavily influenced the semantics of Statecharts).
I was one of the early programmers (later manager) in the company that Harel and Pnueli founded in the early 80s. Because of its mathematical basis, we were able to build a tool that "executed" the statechart designs - not a probabilistic execution, but more akin to a mathematical proof done via a computer program.
This isn't just a nice toy. It was used by companies like Alsthom-Alcatel to build the high-speed TGF train. The reactive model of the train was designed in Statecharts and the model executed. In this way they were able to discover serious flaws in the design (e.g. situations where the doors would open while travelling at high speeds). The only alternative to doing this is to build prototypes and do real world testing. By finding flaws in the very earliest design stage, the company was able to save millions of dollars and perhaps some lives.
For more online information see:
http://ilogix.com/quick_links/white_papers/index .c fm
There is also a paper about Statechart semantics which I am listed as an author out there, but I have only found citations online. UML adopted Harel's Statecharts with some minor modifications, as part of the standard. They never claimed to invent it.
Disclaimer: I still have some stock options in i-Logix which was founded in 1984 but never did go public.
As one of the original developers of Statemate, a tool for modelling with Statecharts, I have to step in here. Statecharts are not flow charts nor are they state diagrams. They are an extension of the latter, but they are actually a mathematical language based on temporal logic. As such, Statecharts can be processed to prove or disprove assertions about your design.
Alsthom Alcatel, for example, used our tool to discover flaws in the high-speed TGF before they started actually building it. They thereby saved millions of dollars in construction retooling costs and probably some lives as well.
You can find a whole bunch of whitepapers here:
http://ilogix.com/quick_links/white_papers/index .c fm
Full disclosure: I still have in a drawer somewhere some stock options in i_logix, which was founded in 1984 but never did go public:)
"NASDAQ trading, at the top of the active list, Microsoft (MSFT), moving up $1.37. That`s a 5.6 percent gain. The company says it`s eyeing the search engine company Google as a possible acquisition. Google private."
Every few weeks someone posts a book here about some new "methodology" that will save the world of Software Engineering. Please write this down and stick this on your forehead. Then have your pair programmer read it to you once in a while:
1. Programmers are not engineers 2. Programming is a human-centric activity 3. There are no "silver bullets" 4. Agile methods are useful only to the extent that they remind us of everything Fred Brooks already said.
We are a company which is almost totally based on open-source software solutions. We are currently doing a nice size project for a government agency (who currently must remain nameless - no this is not defense related) which is all being done in Python and the Twisted Framework.
One issue we confront is that you have to have software tools that play nicely with all the legacy and Microsoft systems out there. Customers aren't going to throw out their existing investment in infrastructure. The open source model almost by definition guarantees that it is actually great for integration with the proprietary world. In fact, Python is especially so.
The other issue is convincing our customers to "give back to the community." At first they almost always say we have to own the IP. Then we explain to them that they aren't software companies so there is no value to them in that ownership. Then they worry about their competitors getting their hands on it (this isn't an issue obviously with government clients, but they still have hesitations.). In the end of the day, we always manage to educate them on the benefits they will derive in releasing as much as possible back to the open source community. We usually add a clause in the contract which gives them the right to exclude code from being open sourced, but they rarely invoke it. In more commercial environments, there may be proprietary ways of doing things embedded in the software, but that kind of stuff isn't usually amenable to opens sourcing in any case.
Bottom line: open source development is a business both in commercial and government sectors.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it only me, or do other people find it ironic that an $800+ portable computer is reviewed on BARGAINPDA?
This question is sort fo a variant fo what I was thinking about. I was thinking that it might actually make more send and be more economical to buy the new headless mac, and carry that around, rather then an iBook. Lot's of places I go to teach or make presentations have monitor, keyboard and mouse, so all I really need is the itty bitty mini Mac.
m v? Screen=PROD&Store_Code=GE&Product_Code=XN+700YV&Ca tegory_Code=LCD
But there are occassions I want to take the Mini Mac with me and bring along a monitor as well. So I was thinking about some of those portable LCDs targeting the car market. Something like this:
http://www.goelectronic.com/Merchant2/merchant.
There has to be a cheaper, better solution. I think there will be many more options coming out in the near future, precisely because of the ehadless Mac. And this will help those who need, on occassion, to plug a monitor into a headless box acting up (where precisely because it is acting up, VNC is not an option).
It also doesnt do OGG streaming. So if you have your music collection on a server, you can't listen to it in iTunes.
Not too long ago I wrote an article about software development methods which heavily focused on Brooks as a precurser of Agile methods. Those who are interested can read it here.
Insightful? Hardly. Windows has all the bugs, bloatware etc. because Microsoft is focused on making a profit of its monopoly position, not providing a valuable product to its customers. In fact, if Linux does reach 50% of the desktop:
1. Windows will become a far better product because Microsoft will finally have real competition and need to worry about keeping its customers
2. Linux would still have the modularity and diversity it has now, ensuring that at least those who use the Debian distro (for example) will continue to have a fine, reliable product.
I just upgraded from 2.4 to 2.6 on my IBM Thinkpad notebook. I did a quick browse of a "how to" someone wrote before I did it. Did apt-get just to the kernel (I'm up to date in everything else) rebooted and everything but sound worked. Did another google search, did apt-get for alsa-utils and libesd, ran alsaconf, and voila. Working system. Entire process from beginning to end: 15 minutes. So I would say even a major kernel upgrade is pretty painless.
Sure in a large IT environment, you'ld be wise to do far more testing, and wait a bit till 2.6 is further down the line. But I am truly astounded by both the quality and ease of use of Linux qua Linux.
On the other hand, as for upgrading to the latest Windows to solve your problems. I recently left the same notebook booted in Windows XP (which I keep patched and up to date) and did nothing unusual - just started up Yahoo messenger (I only use it for Messenger voice and syncing my Palm with Vindigo, which still doesnt seem to work in Linux). The next morning I woke up and the boot block was trashed. Why? I haven't a clue. I use an anti-virus and spyware killer, so it was none of the above. I had to reinstall Windows XP from the hidden backup partition, Several hours wasted.
Windows is becoming more and more of a joke, and not suitable for serious computer usage.
Funny, Java seems to be working both in Mozilla 1.6 and Firebird .7. Maybe you need to upgrade your version of Java?
Why was this listed as informative? Yahoo voice does NOT work on Mac or Linux so is just plain wrong. The voice chat uses some proprietary codec that is Windoze only. Was it modded up because of the cutsie comment about seducing your gf(s)?
I wish people would read before commenting. I said that there has to be equal *access* and equal *information*. I didn't say that a free market requires equal distribution of wealth.
What I said is exactly what Adam Smith said, and has nothing to do with Marx.
Whenever an issue like this comes up the inevitable /. knee-jerk libetarians come out of the wood-work: "capitalism good protection bad" Well maybe some of these libetarians should find out what Adam Smith was really about. His model of capitalism is based in an agrarian society with independent artisans and traders. His idea of a free market is exactly that - where everyone has equal access to market and equal information.
Corporate America has as much to do with the Adam Smith model as the Bolshevist U.S.S.R. It's not even related to Marx' model of capitalism, for in Corporate America, capital is as alientated from controlling the means of production as labor is. Instead, what you have is a management class which calls the shots and enriches itself at the expense of both workers and owners - can you say Enron, Adelphi, Worldcom etc etc.
Sure a worker has the "freedom" to say "fuck you" to his boss and look for another job. In theory. In practice, as the job market shrinks despite the "improving" economy (i.e. the management class being further enriched) those jobs are very hard to come by. So the worker has to bite his tongue as his workload is doubled, as her boss wittles away more and more of her "perks," as the threat of outsourcing is used to bludgeon him into obedience.
Saying to someone "go out and upgrade your skills" is also BS. A friend of mine is in his mid-40s, extremely talented, engineer/MBA out of work for a year and a half. Who's going to hire people in their 40s and 50s, no matter how much talent and experience they have, no matter how upgraded their skills are? And you young 'uns are going to get there faster than you think.
Corporate America demands obedience, makes people work like slaves, uses them, chews them up and throws them out when they no longer are useful. Maybe we should just kill off laid of workers so we don't have to worry about unemployment insurance and welfare?
And no I am not speaking out of personal bitterness. I have a successful consultancy business and work for myself. But even if you believe in ultra-selfishness, a society with many poor, disaffected people is a very scary and dangerous place to live in. This is an issue that effects all of us, not just the laid off.
Nearly all of the article's "myths" are relevant for all software development, not just FOSS. As for the first myth, and the one cited in the posting, that's just a troll. I don't think anyone believes that just releasing code makes it useful or desirable. In other words, this article should have titled: 7 Myths about Software Development. As such, it's not bad, although I didn't find any deep insights in it.
----------------
Mythical Man Month Methodology
http://fourm.info/
The details of the story don't matter and boil down to he said-she said. However, these facts are on the public record:
1. Marc Andreesen did not invent either the Web or the browser. Mosaic was based on the idea and codes of others. Nor was he a programmer. Nor did he have a significant management role at Netscape.
2. Despite Andreesen's admiration of the Google founders creating something of value and long-lasting, he and Jim Clark did not do the same. Netscape was one big air-bubble, the beginning of the madness which left a few people very rich and many others quite poor. Nothing of Netscape remains, and if it is remembered at all, it will be as an icon of greed, stupidity and arrogance (the three main characteristics of the dot-com entrepeneurs).
3. Ironically, and most gratifyingly, Mozilla, which arose from the ashes of Netscape was a project that returned to the original roots of the Web - the idea of sharing as a mechanism to expand human knowledge. Precisely because it is based on these positive values, Mozilla will be around for a long, long time and create long term value and real innovation.
So I agree with the poster. Why should we care about Andreesen's opinions? He was at the right place at the right time - but that doesn't make him wise, not has he learned from his experiences. Read what he has to say about browsersand innovation:
"There's nothing emerging right now. Creativity stopped in 1997. Before that, there were huge numbers of changes: dynamic HTML, JavaScript, Java mail, plug-ins for security and other functions. And these were created by Netscape and many others."
Just because he's rich doesn't make him any less of a pompous fool. Jim Clark was the business brains of Netscape, by the way, so don't give Andreesen any credit for that.
Others responses have addressed this issue, but for a more detailed response check out my article Software Methodologies: Battle of the Gurus. The idea that software development is an engineering practice, that detailed and accurate specifications are both feasible and practical, are hogwash. Software development is a human centric process. Communication and prototyping are the keys to success. Outsourcing works against both of these. Outsourcing is build on 19th century ideas of industrializing human activity. It may get the job done, but it is neither efficient nor effective. That is not to say teams can't co-operate over long distances. FOSS projects do that all the time. But there is a reason so many of these projects organize programming sprints when they can. The team that works together in the same room is the most effective and efficient team.
You don't have to go that far. When I lived in Israel i went to the bank one day to open an acccount. I was about to give the clerk my address and phone number, and she said "that won't be necessary." Israelis have a national ID and there is a Ministry of Interior database with all your information. Apparently the banks have free access to it. Once she had my ID number, she could pull all the rest. Getting someone's id of course trivial. When I complained she said "don't worry, I only have read access."
It get's worse? You know the electronic portpass you can get in the U.S. to use instead of yuor passport? Well in Israel you can get one too - they don't issue a separate card but turn one of your existing credit cards issued by a commercial bankd into a portpass equivalent.
There's more but I'll stop here.
What bothers me most about this story is some of the reactions here, which reflect the worst sort of corporate thinking: "Someone makes a mistake - can him." Even if one concedes that Microsoft is within its legal rights, it was a senseless act on their part to fire him. Being right is no excuse for being stupid.
If the concern was really about looking bad for using Macs, they would have insisted he remove the post. I take it at face value that they saw this as a security breach. However, their approach to solving the problem shows how inflexible and rigid they have become, a bad sign for an organization competing in a highly dynamic industry.
On the self-interest level, they just generated for themselves more bad publicity, something Microsoft can ill afford. Microsoft management should be trained to take public opinion into consideration in every act they do, and to think carefully about the PR implications of their public actions.
On a more fundamental level, a corporation has no real existence. It is a group of people working towards some goal. Proper motivation of employees is a key to success.
If fear is the greatest motivating tool that corporate management chooses to make use of, that corporation is doomed to oblivion. Firing someone should be a last resort action taken only after other options have been exhausted. If management is seen as cruel and capricious, then the best employees who have a choice of where to work, will go find a more congenial working environment.
The proper way to have handled this was to ask the employee to immediately remove the offending post from his blog, and point out to him the corporate policies he violated and let him go with a warning. That way they would have avoided bad PR, limited the security breach and would have been viewed as an understanding employer. Microsoft lost on every level by taking this foolish action, whatever the initial motivation might have been.
Unfortunately, as a FOSS vendor I am not a convicted monopolist who can take the billions I stole from innocent consumers and put it into a foundation to promote FOSS and then say what a wonderful person I am. Of course, Gates learned this technique from the Robber Barons of 'yore. Today, for example, everyone in America associates Carnegie with good deeds - not the thieving son-of-a-bitch he really was.
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
Ahem. How can any individual who has even opened a newspaper in the past two years make such a ridiculous statement? Efficiency? What about Enron, Worldcom, Dot.com etc. etc.
And have you ever worked in a modern corporation? Efficiency? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
One tiny little anecdote: I had a meeting recently with this high-powered executive in this huge investment bank in New York. A few years ago, this company decided to consolidate into one building so they spent tens of millions constructing a downtown headquarters. For two years this woman's job was to develop the "content" for the large electronic signs that engirth the building. The "content" was essentially projections all kinds of marketing images. She ran a 10 person team on this project and spend several millions of dollars. After 9/11 the President of the bank decided he liked his workers dispersed, so he sold the headquarters building at a loss to another investment bank. Those huge signs now project only one thing - the name of the company who owns the building
Efficiency? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
First a bit of history. When I started an interactive agency in 1984, we were a Mac shop. But a year after Apple made the move to the Power Macs, I forced my graphic designers to move to Windows. Apple's platform was so unreliable and so slow that the price premium was absurd.
Very early on we used Linux as our file server platform, since we could serve both Windows and Mac files. Over time the advantages of open source became more apparent to me, and about 4 years ago I switched to a Linux desktop. I started with Gnome before it hit 1.0, but I have been using KDE now for about 2 years.
I'm a marketing/manager type. My key tools are these: word processing, browsing, addressbook, email and IM. One thing I have learned to love about the open source world is that it allows me to own my own information. Proprietary formats mean I have no control and I will be forced to pay ransom in the future just to keep accessing my own files!
So now my key working application set includes: Lyx, Abiword, OpenOffice (for those pesky word files I have to open and edit on occassion that Abiword still barfs on), Jpilot, Mozilla, GAIM and Acrobat Reader. Sometimes I also use Quanta for fixing up our website or Gimp for touching up a graphics file. I also use Konqueror as an ftp client for our Zope backend. All these applications give me everything I need, work quite well, and store my files in formats which are open standards which I know will be around for as long as I need to access them. Windows is not an option, and never again be for me.
In fact, the Linux desktop has reached a stage where I would recommend any business user like myself to use it. Certainly, I would strongly urge businesses to use the applications listed, instead of their proprietary equivalents. Most of these apps are available on Windows as well. And I haven't even begun to talk about the thousands of dollars saved in licensing fees and the superior feature set and useability of these apps over the proprietary equivalents.
Recently I had to decide about a new computer for a web designer. The software set this person uses - Photoshop, Freehand, Dreamweaver - just isn't available for Linux and may never be. So looking at Windows XP versus Apple, guess what: I chose the eMac. Despite the small premium in price, the stability of Mac OS X made the switch seem worthwhile. It had been a number of years since I had played around with an Apple machine, and I was extremely impressed by the speed and the ease of use of the OS X platform., and how great these apps ran on the Mac.
But there is also me as the home user. Yes, I also like to listen to music and rip cds. My son likes to do that too, and he also wants a P2P client and he just got a video camera and he would like to do some editing, and play around with midi and his piano keyboard. Here's where things get fuzzy. Sure you can do all this stuff on Linux, but it's such a pain to set up, and if you upgrade something, something else breaks.
Now in the past I would say, the Apple premium isn't worth it. But having played with that eMac I'm starting to think differently. For the home user who wants multimedia capabilities, Linux is just too big a pain. Apple just works out of the box (except I would add the Ogg Vorbis plugin to iTunes since I don't want to use proprietary MP3s). So probably the next home computer I get will be a Mac (and that's certainly what I'm going to get for my son going to college).
So the key in choosing a platform is your application set. For designers Apple (once again) rules and the price premium is worth it. For business people, Linux is the way to go. For home users with a rock bottom budget or who aren't multimedia fanatics, Linux is a great entry system. If you have some extra cash, the Mac is worth it.
And here's another thought: maybe down the line if business is good I might get a Mac as my business machine as well. With Fink and other projects bringing my favorite Linux open source applications to the Mac, I can hav
On principle, I wont ever use my moderation points to mod things down.. But the fact that this infantile and moronic joke got moderated to a 5 is truly pathetic.
I wrote about this in an internal reply but apparently people didn't seeit and are continuing to make some very ignorant statements about Statecharts.
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Statecharts are not a fancy way to do state machines. They are an extremely sophisticated graphics based notation with a formal mathematical semantics for modelling reactive systems. The ideas behind statecharts were developed by David Harel and Amir Pnueli (a winner of the prestigious Touring award and a world expert in Temporal Logic which heavily influenced the semantics of Statecharts).
I was one of the early programmers (later manager) in the company that Harel and Pnueli founded in the early 80s. Because of its mathematical basis, we were able to build a tool that "executed" the statechart designs - not a probabilistic execution, but more akin to a mathematical proof done via a computer program.
This isn't just a nice toy. It was used by companies like Alsthom-Alcatel to build the high-speed TGF train. The reactive model of the train was designed in Statecharts and the model executed. In this way they were able to discover serious flaws in the design (e.g. situations where the doors would open while travelling at high speeds). The only alternative to doing this is to build prototypes and do real world testing. By finding flaws in the very earliest design stage, the company was able to save millions of dollars and perhaps some lives.
For more online information see:
http://ilogix.com/quick_links/white_papers/inde
There is also a paper about Statechart semantics which I am listed as an author out there, but I have only found citations online. UML adopted Harel's Statecharts with some minor modifications, as part of the standard. They never claimed to invent it.
Disclaimer: I still have some stock options in i-Logix which was founded in 1984 but never did go public.
As one of the original developers of Statemate, a tool for modelling with Statecharts, I have to step in here. Statecharts are not flow charts nor are they state diagrams. They are an extension of the latter, but they are actually a mathematical language based on temporal logic. As such, Statecharts can be processed to prove or disprove assertions about your design.
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:)
Alsthom Alcatel, for example, used our tool to discover flaws in the high-speed TGF before they started actually building it. They thereby saved millions of dollars in construction retooling costs and probably some lives as well.
You can find a whole bunch of whitepapers here:
http://ilogix.com/quick_links/white_papers/inde
Full disclosure: I still have in a drawer somewhere some stock options in i_logix, which was founded in 1984 but never did go public
http://www.nightlybusiness.org/transcript.html#sto cks
"NASDAQ trading, at the top of the active list, Microsoft (MSFT), moving up $1.37. That`s a 5.6 percent gain. The company says it`s eyeing the search engine company Google as a possible acquisition. Google private."
On PBS' Nightly Business Report this story was reported as Microsoft is looking into *buying* Google. Now that's a scary thought.
Every few weeks someone posts a book here about some new "methodology" that will save the world of Software Engineering. Please write this down and stick this on your forehead. Then have your pair programmer read it to you once in a while:
1. Programmers are not engineers
2. Programming is a human-centric activity
3. There are no "silver bullets"
4. Agile methods are useful only to the extent that they remind us of everything Fred Brooks already said.
Read here.
We are a company which is almost totally based on open-source software solutions. We are currently doing a nice size project for a government agency (who currently must remain nameless - no this is not defense related) which is all being done in Python and the Twisted Framework.
One issue we confront is that you have to have software tools that play nicely with all the legacy and Microsoft systems out there. Customers aren't going to throw out their existing investment in infrastructure. The open source model almost by definition guarantees that it is actually great for integration with the proprietary world. In fact, Python is especially so.
The other issue is convincing our customers to "give back to the community." At first they almost always say we have to own the IP. Then we explain to them that they aren't software companies so there is no value to them in that ownership. Then they worry about their competitors getting their hands on it (this isn't an issue obviously with government clients, but they still have hesitations.). In the end of the day, we always manage to educate them on the benefits they will derive in releasing as much as possible back to the open source community. We usually add a clause in the contract which gives them the right to exclude code from being open sourced, but they rarely invoke it. In more commercial environments, there may be proprietary ways of doing things embedded in the software, but that kind of stuff isn't usually amenable to opens sourcing in any case.
Bottom line: open source development is a business both in commercial and government sectors.