And, you know, five years or so as project lead for Excel, designer of Excel Basic, champion of VBA, five-time published author on the subject of software development, graduate summa cum laude from Yale, StackExchange, running a profitable business in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and surviving that whole IT sector bust in 2000 despite being founded that year.
I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's pretty qualified to speak on the subject of managing teams of developers. It's what he does, and his company is doing better than many. Maybe he's not always right, and maybe he's opinionated. He's qualified to be brashly and authoritatively wrong once in a while, though, because he's doing something right most of the time.
Size of company is only a measure of success if you choose to make it so, by the way. Many people prefer to be the alpha male in a pack than the lead sheep in a flock, beholden to Wall Street mutual fund managers or grow-quick-and-sell VCs. Fog Creek was bootstrapped and is growing on its own funds in a custom-designed office in Manhattan with what many would call extravagant furnishings, equipment, and benefits. I'd say that's pretty successful after just 10 years of cash-flow growth.
Maybe you should just read A Brief History of the Internet which lists FTP, email, telnet, NCP, TCP, UUCP, and BITNET gateways as being developed and in production before MS-DOS was released in 1982.
CBBS was a dial-in BBS (think web forum without the WWW, HTTP, browser, or pretense) in 1978 on CP/M.
IBM had terminals connecting to remote servers -- a serious precursor to proper client/server -- in 1964. The first ATM -- clearly a client-server technology -- was installed in 1970. Usenet was invented in 1979. Essex MUD was in 1979. Ask the Computer History Museum about networking.
Creeper traversed networks in 1971. Wikipedia calls it a virus, but the description they give is more of a worm. It ran on TENEX and infected systems over ARPANET.
In 1971, RFC 189 described a method and system for submitting jobs to a mainframe from remote systems over ARAPANET and to receive the results. It includes the connections, protocols, the mapping of ASCII to EBCDIC for systems that used ASCII to not need to translate on their end, a name for the whole thing (NETRJS), and several details of implementation.
Need any more examples?
Why yes, yes, computer history is a hobby of mine.
If your old code is so convoluted you can't possibly refactor it, then you've already made major strategic mistakes, and a lot of tactical ones, too. Being backed into a corner by one strategic mistake and throwing your hands up to let the superior tactics of your troops bail you out is not a new strategy. It's a prayer.
The best know which rules to break when, and why. Not all of us are the best. I'm not. I know which few rules I can break some of the time by trial and error. I'm not about to break all of them. Reinventing wheels is one you can get away with fairly often if you actually need a different wheel from the start. Rewriting from scratch is one you can get away with sometimes, but not nearly as often.
Don't forget that although they started consulting with it (meaning their people implemented it for the customers), they weren't ready to sell copies of it until 2010. That's three additional years for documentation and testing, as admitted in this post earlier this thread. So it's really a five-year rewrite of something they'd been using only 5 years, if you consider documentation/testing/making it ready to actually sell to your customers part of the process of replacing the old product.
There is no disconnect between something being a strategically poor choice and having to do it anyway due to unforeseen technical or architectural issues. Sometimes when backed into a corner deeply enough, strategy devolves into tactics and hope.
This is exactly why only my play machines went to 4.x before 4.3 and my work machines stayed with the 3 series. I'm not sure why some many people think that newer is always better. I love new things, but in the end better is better.
Adding a language is a problem? It used to be that people said to use the best tool for the job at hand. That often included writing parts of a system with different needs in different languages.
C and assembly is one example. Regular expressions, EBNF, and C is another. Perl and regexes is a third (although in Perl regexes are basically a sub-language, like printf in C but on a bigger scale). PHP, SQL, and JavaScript seem pretty popular together. What exactly do you use for a database, and is it accessible with SQL? Are your applications written in SQL?
If you're intrigued by that, stop by Perl.org and PerlMonks. It's a much-maligned language, and for really superficial reasons. The modern best practices for the language answer most of the problems people ever had with it. The rest of the problems are personal preferences stated as fact, PR failures, and hyperbole.
So the project wasn't really complete in 2007? I mean, I've always considered testing and documentation part of a software project. Don't you? So your rewrite of the code was done in a couple of years, but the complete project, I'd say, took closer to five.
I've always liked the compromise of something fairly long, like 50 years, so long as it continues to be made available. If a work is no longer produced for sale, that exclusive right should be forfeit in a much shorter time like, say, 10 years. There's no reason to protect the income of someone who's making none by choice. Orphaned works should go into the public domain sooner than actively marketed works because the balance of public good versus the rights of the copyright holder change when the holder is just burying the work.
That's exactly the point of the quote. People claim patriotism as a reason when it's just a ruse for terrible behavior. See also: "It's for the children" and "Drugs are bad".
He had offspring, and presumably he expected some of them to have offspring. 100 years is a long time for one man, but not so much for three or four generations of separation from him. He also had siblings who may have had kids (I don't recall). He was probably being considerate.
He also invented that little tie on the back of a men's dress vest that brings it in around the waist and was awarded a patent for it, but to no monetary gain. It originally had uses on other garments as patented and was sometimes detachable, but it's still there on many suit vests.
He also patented a self-pasting scrapbook which did sell really well and a trivia game.
"Not arms a militia would keep" and "not arms" are still two distinct sets with differing membership.
Glass flasks, BTW, can be useful for making your own ammunition. There's nothing in the Commerce Clause which prevents a reloader from mixing his own smokeless in his own state with his own materials and equipment, and banning ammo is just like banning the gun.
Is it a "reasonable regulation" to say a guy can buy commercial ammo but not make his own?
Re:Speaking from my Personal Interests...
on
Scientific R&D At Home?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A wonderful way to be a real hero in aquaculture right now would be to figure out how to discourage overrunning of popular native game and commercial fish by less desirable invasive species in the wild.
Snakehead are a real problem in the Southeastern US and silver carp are having a terrible effect in the Midwest. Snakehead are aggressive towards other fish, towards frogs, turtles, and all sorts of other creatures, and both parents protect the brood, too. They also have crude air-breathing capabilities so they can live in oxygen-poor water and move easily through shallows. Silver carp are better filter-feeders than native species, mass in huge numbers, and are actually a bit dangerous to small boats. They grow to about 40 pounds and all tend to jump out of the water as boats approach. Boats get damaged, and people in small boats have been knocked overboard.
9th Amendment, and reinforced by the 14th. Possibly also reinforced by the 18th and the 21st, as there was no enumerated right to liquor yet it took an amendment to take that right away. IANAL and that's just a rough guess.
"Firearms" are not. "Arms" are. Bombs, combustible liquids, tear-inducing gases, and vomit-inducing gases are "arms", too. Good luck with that home lab and the second amendment, though.
IANAL, but when they distribute the binaries to you, you get a license to the source just like they had when they got the source or binaries. Someone who's taking a GPLed work and sending it on to someone else would seem to be obliged to both the copyright holder and the recipient of the binaries. One couldn't get monetary damages as the new licensee probably, but there's always specific performance. I'd be interested to see how that suit would play out, but not interested enough to buy an embedded product I know is in violation and sue the seller just to find out.
Define the "standard" compiler that Company A has to use to compile the code for their Platform B, for which they only use one compiler. That compiler would be the "standard" compiler for that platform, wouldn't it? So if the "standard" compiler is closed-source and owned by someone else, just because it's the standard doesn't mean much. The work's system libraries are probably part of what's closed source here -- drivers for some chipset they bought from Conexant, Broadcom, or someone.
IANAL either, but... actually he is granted a license to the source when they distribute the binary to him, and so are any of us he sends the binary or the source on to later. He has as much license to it under the GPL as the hardware vendor using the GPLed code does, in fact. ITYM he's not the holder of the copyrights upon which the license is (allegedly) being broken. It's a nit, but an important nit. Law is like that.
Since he does have a license and they are allegedly not fulfilling their end of it, he could sue for specific performance. If he's right about it being a violation, he may even win given enough money to pay the lawyers. However, as in many lawsuits, winning may not bring the result he really wants. If the company just loses all rights to sell the product, then he's not going to get much use out of that.
Actually, "telephone" has a literal meaning : "far sound", and television is "far seeing", literally. It's called Latin. Lots of English words have Latin, Greek, or German roots. In fact, most do. Calling a television a "far seeing thing" in Chinese is not just as clear as calling it a television. It's pretty much the same thing.
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And, you know, five years or so as project lead for Excel, designer of Excel Basic, champion of VBA, five-time published author on the subject of software development, graduate summa cum laude from Yale, StackExchange, running a profitable business in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and surviving that whole IT sector bust in 2000 despite being founded that year.
I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's pretty qualified to speak on the subject of managing teams of developers. It's what he does, and his company is doing better than many. Maybe he's not always right, and maybe he's opinionated. He's qualified to be brashly and authoritatively wrong once in a while, though, because he's doing something right most of the time.
Size of company is only a measure of success if you choose to make it so, by the way. Many people prefer to be the alpha male in a pack than the lead sheep in a flock, beholden to Wall Street mutual fund managers or grow-quick-and-sell VCs. Fog Creek was bootstrapped and is growing on its own funds in a custom-designed office in Manhattan with what many would call extravagant furnishings, equipment, and benefits. I'd say that's pretty successful after just 10 years of cash-flow growth.
Maybe you should just read A Brief History of the Internet which lists FTP, email, telnet, NCP, TCP, UUCP, and BITNET gateways as being developed and in production before MS-DOS was released in 1982.
CBBS was a dial-in BBS (think web forum without the WWW, HTTP, browser, or pretense) in 1978 on CP/M.
IBM had terminals connecting to remote servers -- a serious precursor to proper client/server -- in 1964. The first ATM -- clearly a client-server technology -- was installed in 1970. Usenet was invented in 1979. Essex MUD was in 1979. Ask the Computer History Museum about networking.
Creeper traversed networks in 1971. Wikipedia calls it a virus, but the description they give is more of a worm. It ran on TENEX and infected systems over ARPANET.
In 1971, RFC 189 described a method and system for submitting jobs to a mainframe from remote systems over ARAPANET and to receive the results. It includes the connections, protocols, the mapping of ASCII to EBCDIC for systems that used ASCII to not need to translate on their end, a name for the whole thing (NETRJS), and several details of implementation.
Need any more examples?
Why yes, yes, computer history is a hobby of mine.
If your old code is so convoluted you can't possibly refactor it, then you've already made major strategic mistakes, and a lot of tactical ones, too. Being backed into a corner by one strategic mistake and throwing your hands up to let the superior tactics of your troops bail you out is not a new strategy. It's a prayer.
The best know which rules to break when, and why. Not all of us are the best. I'm not. I know which few rules I can break some of the time by trial and error. I'm not about to break all of them. Reinventing wheels is one you can get away with fairly often if you actually need a different wheel from the start. Rewriting from scratch is one you can get away with sometimes, but not nearly as often.
Don't forget that although they started consulting with it (meaning their people implemented it for the customers), they weren't ready to sell copies of it until 2010. That's three additional years for documentation and testing, as admitted in this post earlier this thread. So it's really a five-year rewrite of something they'd been using only 5 years, if you consider documentation/testing/making it ready to actually sell to your customers part of the process of replacing the old product.
Apple didn't rewrite OS X from scratch. They bought NeXT and made their OS look vaguely OS 9ish.
There is no disconnect between something being a strategically poor choice and having to do it anyway due to unforeseen technical or architectural issues. Sometimes when backed into a corner deeply enough, strategy devolves into tactics and hope.
This is exactly why only my play machines went to 4.x before 4.3 and my work machines stayed with the 3 series. I'm not sure why some many people think that newer is always better. I love new things, but in the end better is better.
Adding a language is a problem? It used to be that people said to use the best tool for the job at hand. That often included writing parts of a system with different needs in different languages.
C and assembly is one example. Regular expressions, EBNF, and C is another. Perl and regexes is a third (although in Perl regexes are basically a sub-language, like printf in C but on a bigger scale). PHP, SQL, and JavaScript seem pretty popular together. What exactly do you use for a database, and is it accessible with SQL? Are your applications written in SQL?
Perl's regex engine, at least, supports Unicode. I'm sure other languages's regex systems will soon if they don't already.
You can do that with most regex systems. With Perl's you can do even so much more. If you have perl installed, try 'perldoc perlre', or you can readthe perldoc for perl regular expressions on perldoc.perl.org instead.
If you're intrigued by that, stop by Perl.org and PerlMonks. It's a much-maligned language, and for really superficial reasons. The modern best practices for the language answer most of the problems people ever had with it. The rest of the problems are personal preferences stated as fact, PR failures, and hyperbole.
So the project wasn't really complete in 2007? I mean, I've always considered testing and documentation part of a software project. Don't you? So your rewrite of the code was done in a couple of years, but the complete project, I'd say, took closer to five.
I've always liked the compromise of something fairly long, like 50 years, so long as it continues to be made available. If a work is no longer produced for sale, that exclusive right should be forfeit in a much shorter time like, say, 10 years. There's no reason to protect the income of someone who's making none by choice. Orphaned works should go into the public domain sooner than actively marketed works because the balance of public good versus the rights of the copyright holder change when the holder is just burying the work.
That's exactly the point of the quote. People claim patriotism as a reason when it's just a ruse for terrible behavior. See also: "It's for the children" and "Drugs are bad".
He had offspring, and presumably he expected some of them to have offspring. 100 years is a long time for one man, but not so much for three or four generations of separation from him. He also had siblings who may have had kids (I don't recall). He was probably being considerate.
He also invented that little tie on the back of a men's dress vest that brings it in around the waist and was awarded a patent for it, but to no monetary gain. It originally had uses on other garments as patented and was sometimes detachable, but it's still there on many suit vests.
He also patented a self-pasting scrapbook which did sell really well and a trivia game.
"Not arms a militia would keep" and "not arms" are still two distinct sets with differing membership.
Glass flasks, BTW, can be useful for making your own ammunition. There's nothing in the Commerce Clause which prevents a reloader from mixing his own smokeless in his own state with his own materials and equipment, and banning ammo is just like banning the gun.
Is it a "reasonable regulation" to say a guy can buy commercial ammo but not make his own?
A wonderful way to be a real hero in aquaculture right now would be to figure out how to discourage overrunning of popular native game and commercial fish by less desirable invasive species in the wild.
Snakehead are a real problem in the Southeastern US and silver carp are having a terrible effect in the Midwest. Snakehead are aggressive towards other fish, towards frogs, turtles, and all sorts of other creatures, and both parents protect the brood, too. They also have crude air-breathing capabilities so they can live in oxygen-poor water and move easily through shallows. Silver carp are better filter-feeders than native species, mass in huge numbers, and are actually a bit dangerous to small boats. They grow to about 40 pounds and all tend to jump out of the water as boats approach. Boats get damaged, and people in small boats have been knocked overboard.
9th Amendment, and reinforced by the 14th. Possibly also reinforced by the 18th and the 21st, as there was no enumerated right to liquor yet it took an amendment to take that right away. IANAL and that's just a rough guess.
"Firearms" are not. "Arms" are. Bombs, combustible liquids, tear-inducing gases, and vomit-inducing gases are "arms", too. Good luck with that home lab and the second amendment, though.
IANAL, but when they distribute the binaries to you, you get a license to the source just like they had when they got the source or binaries. Someone who's taking a GPLed work and sending it on to someone else would seem to be obliged to both the copyright holder and the recipient of the binaries. One couldn't get monetary damages as the new licensee probably, but there's always specific performance. I'd be interested to see how that suit would play out, but not interested enough to buy an embedded product I know is in violation and sue the seller just to find out.
Define the "standard" compiler that Company A has to use to compile the code for their Platform B, for which they only use one compiler. That compiler would be the "standard" compiler for that platform, wouldn't it? So if the "standard" compiler is closed-source and owned by someone else, just because it's the standard doesn't mean much. The work's system libraries are probably part of what's closed source here -- drivers for some chipset they bought from Conexant, Broadcom, or someone.
IANAL either, but... actually he is granted a license to the source when they distribute the binary to him, and so are any of us he sends the binary or the source on to later. He has as much license to it under the GPL as the hardware vendor using the GPLed code does, in fact. ITYM he's not the holder of the copyrights upon which the license is (allegedly) being broken. It's a nit, but an important nit. Law is like that.
Since he does have a license and they are allegedly not fulfilling their end of it, he could sue for specific performance. If he's right about it being a violation, he may even win given enough money to pay the lawyers. However, as in many lawsuits, winning may not bring the result he really wants. If the company just loses all rights to sell the product, then he's not going to get much use out of that.
Actually, "telephone" has a literal meaning : "far sound", and television is "far seeing", literally. It's called Latin. Lots of English words have Latin, Greek, or German roots. In fact, most do. Calling a television a "far seeing thing" in Chinese is not just as clear as calling it a television. It's pretty much the same thing.
Most poetry sucks because most people aren't very good at writing it. It's not a fault of the form. Most of everything sucks, BTW. Just ask Sturgeon.