I agree with the parent; if you can take some time to put together a business plan, you are more than halfway there. Some suggestions to help you along the way:
* Identify a "champion" in upper management and work together to get approval for the plan. If you don't have a higher-up who thinks what you are doing is worthwhile, you will continue to be a voice in the wilderness.
* Tie your project to a pain point. You and your champion need to identify something that's bothering the CEO and CFO, and figure out how to fix it. Most CxOs don't care if the receptionist's PC is running Windows 95 and takes more time for you to fix it. They will care if you can accelerate revenue (ship product faster) or reduce expenses (reduce time inventory sits in the warehouse).
* An alternative is to improve the decision-making ability: deliver more accurate information or deliver information faster. This gives a business the basis for a competitive advantage.
* Start small. Keep your project's scope simple and discrete. Grand plans to integrate systems don't fly; things to eliminate redundancy or repetitive data entry work better (wireless inventory updates from the warehouse, for example).
It's tough to see this situation when you are a person who cares about the job they do, can see how to improve the network, and yet can't get the initiatives approved. As others have pointed out, you may be working for a company that is a late traditionalist / very late adopter. If they think things are running "good enough" they will resist change in spite of evidence to the contrary.
In that case, go to where your years of experience are appreciated. Get your resume together and get another job.
Sending it back with a link to http://www.cluetrain.org/ would be a great first step. Then if the same mess comes back, post the correspondence between parties, allowing the world to see that Blizzard doesn't speak to people, it speaks to "markets." With enough negative word-of-mouth like this, revenue decreases, and marketroids get fired.
As a side note, marketroids *must* be hit directly in the face with negative publicity, otherwise they won't learn. I speak from experience in a dev organization; developers, product managers, et al. were never allowed to talk to "press," customers, etc. without a marketroid present (and after being heavily coached). Net result was that the press and customers never trusted a word we said.
And no, I didn't work for a certain Redmond software company. But when marketing controls a company, this behavior is commonplace.
News flacks always are howling after the next big headline, regardless of what the data suggests. Blame News.com, who want lots of hits to help drive revenues that are charged to advertisers.
In any event, as anyone who has taken math courses more complicated than arithmetic, a properly selected sample size will return whatever result you want. If the number of vulnerabilities is considered over a span of time longer than the one in the article, IE is far less secure than Mozilla et al.
Microsoft skipped "patch Tuesday" this last month; that doesn't mean that IE is finally secure. It only means that, in Microsoft's opinion, the various bugs and flaws don't rise to the level of patchworthiness. I'd rather make the determination of what needs fixing than rely on Microsoft for that assessment. A decent reporter should also present a similar analysis, rather than leaping for the extremes.
No, I don't think you're griping. I used to work for two different companies, each of which trumpeted its ability to build "connectors" for Siebel. But Siebel's server-side and desktop components were so big, the APIs so convoluted, and the performance so bad, that both companies (rather than being "Siebel Consultants") always brought in Siebel wonks to develop the interfaces. We knew it was so bad, that we -- for once -- made a smart decision and kept away from the integration aspect.
I also got tired of Siebel's attitude (courtesy of HRH Tom) that nobody else either "got it" or "understood customers" according to the Siebel Way(tm) of doing things. I had yet to find a customer whose requirements weren't thoroughly bollixed up after an encounter with Siebel.
Oracle is going to have its hands full phasing out Siebel in favor of its own dog food.
The gaming industry will continue to exist. What won't exist are the current software houses, not because of WoW but because it's the nature of the beast. Ten years ago Sierra, Dynamix, Interplay, and others were the kings of the gaming hill. Now, they're just fond memories.
In the online community Everquest is fading, DAoC is fading, even City of Heroes is fading. All the supposed "hot! hot!" games enjoy popularity for a while then fade away. WoW will do this too.
As for the original question, WoW has little or nothing to do with the revenue streams flowing into other game developers. The purported "fear" of WoW cutting into game-buying is the sound of marketers quaking (pun not intended) because they promised management and shareholders 15-20% revenue increases based on publication of such scintillating games as "50 Cent: Bulletproof", and the revenue flow is just not happening. WoW is a convenient scapegoat.
As others have said, good games, not good marketing, draws the dollars. The recording industry is learning a similar lesson, as is Hollywood. It just happens to be gaming's turn.
I really tried to get more than halfway through the article. But after phrases like " a belly-barn shackle in the reunion of unjustified friends", I couldn't continue. He bemoans the lack of clarity in HCI, yet his writing is a stream-of-consciousness mess.
If he can't communicate his ideas better, maybe he's not the best person to describe what's wrong with HCI. I'm not the brightest bulb on the billboard, but come on -- this guy needs an editor.
Regardless of those who mock, nitpick, strain at gnats and swallow camels here on/., it's still *cool*. Hearing the "voice" made by a distant planet is thrilling. Sure some nerd can make a similar recording in the basement but this is the real thing.
Learning by rote doesn't work. Taking tests that encourage information regurgitation doesn't help.
What helps is giving students the training they need to tap into the brain's potential. For the left brain, this means teaching the ability to reason, to use both inductive and deductive logic, and to learn about the doctrine of natural consequence; for the right brain, the freedom to engage in creative bursts of joy without insisting everyone color in between the lines, or always make the grass green and the sky blue.
Education today is all about moving the mobs through, teaching low-expectation behavior. However, there is no "right" to graduate, or "right" to an A. Grades and graduation should be a measure of earned merit, not classroom attendance.
We need to expect more from kids in school. Soft-pedaling education doesn't do anyone any favors.
* People expect that taking night school courses at a community college entitle them to high-five-figure salaries out of the box.
* People expect that playing Halo makes you a game designer / developer.
* People expect that they can misspell words in your resume and simultaneously assert they are a highly talented programmer.
I agree with the majority of posters who state that many companies have unreasonable expectations of skill level, job requirements, and salary levels. Those bean-counter-run businesses have little grip on business reality.
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of skr1pt kidd33z with mad h4X0rz skillz toss (misspelled) resumes over the transom expecting to start at the top. That may get you a job at Burger Wang but not in a core development role.
You are right in several respects: non-development management has screwed over more projects than it's ever helped. I've seen it and had my projects fscked many a time. One classic was the VP who wanted the acronym "API" removed from the help files for a developer kit. Reason? "We make solutions, not programming software."
But I *will* point fingers at developers for bad design, too. In the same company I have worked with developers who code up something that neither does what it should, is usable by anyone but them, or can be gracefully fit into the existing programming model. Too often they were called a "temporary fix" for the current release, to be fixed in a future release. It never was, it just became more encrusted with shims, helper libraries, and other complexification / bogger-downers.
Same goes for UI designed by developers. *UNLESS* you have spent time with the end users seeing what it is they are trying to do, you are not going to hit the mark by coding UI in your cubicle on the mistaken assumption that you know the best way to do something.
I have seen this happen so many times. I take a developer to a customer site to help diagnose a problem. After only ten minutes, the light comes on in the developer's head and a new solution is created that works, works well, and does what the customer wants and expects. Yet most development happens in reverse: cook up an idea, code it, then see if anyone likes it.
There's a lot of bad software project management out there, and there is enough blame to go around.
No mention is made of Gagne's "French chef" schtick that clogs his Linux Journal column. I'm hoping against hope that Gagne decided to ditch the schtick in favor of delivering clean, clear prose.
Anyone else seen the book and confirm or deny the presence of schtick?
Cheesy? Of *course* it's cheesy! It's for every kid who sat in a theatre with a big bucket of popcorn, grinning like a madman at every swoop and explosion that graced the screen.
I wasn't part of the pulp era, but I enjoyed reading pulp and Golden Age sf works. There's just something free-wheeling, childlike, and wondrous about the visions of tomorrow that those stories embodied. I still like space opera, with vast galactic fleets spinning out of a nebular cluster to go into battle with the dreaded Zorkanoids -- or whatever the evil space being of the moment was.
The trailers for this reminded me of another "guilty pleasure" film, "The Rocketeer." I suspect "Sky Captain" will join "Rocketeer" in my movie collection as something that is aimless, harmless exciting fun.
Centrally managed, downloadable applets and applications have been built and sold for years. I used to work for two different 3270 companies, and they both had systems that did this, as Web applets, as standalone apps, and as hybrid (split-stack) systems that used a gateway and a somewhat-thin client on the desktop.
Yes, there are a bunch of technological hurdles, none of which are easy to solve. And believe it or not, deploying and running a single version is not always possible. Custom macros, feature / function differences, desktop / color schemes, etc. all end up version-dependent, and sometimes you *can't* roll out a new version even when it's centrally managed.
In any event, what made these systems difficult to accept, customer-wise, was not the technology but the licensing.
How do you license it: by the computer, by the user, by the download? What about the server end -- by the processor, by the server? What about hot-failover clusters? What about the Internet -- do you really want to give access to anyone?
There was no simple way to license it, because no matter what you could think of, the customer had a different scheme they wanted to use. The sales force had no consistent pricing method, and since customers talk to one another, the pricing ended up all over the map.
We tried everything, including three "standard" pricing models that we thought would cover everything including a razor blade / handle model, and we still couldn't reach agreement with the customers on pricing.
Microsoft has these headaches all the time, just ask anyone who has dealt with desktop licenses, server licenses, CALs, and Terminal Server licenses for even a medium-smallish business. It will make your head spin. I doubt MS will come up with an equitable subscription service, especially for larger customers, because there are too many other licensing variables in there.
Once you decide on licensing, how do you regulate or enforce it? Tokens, passwords, thresholds, group memberships? Most customers resist active enforcement, preferring word-of-honor agreements and true-ups when necessary (such as with threat of audit).
The technology is solvable. The licensing is a muddle and is the biggest hurdle to overcome for these service-based proposals.
Re:For Those That Don't Know
on
Moving To Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh, thank god. I thought I was the only one who found that "French chef" schtick utterly obnoxious! It may be funny in a Muppet, but it's moronic in a columnist.
My neighbor has a mid-Eighties Isuzu pickup truck, so I guess it falls into the category of needing fuel lines etc. replaced. I believe he has a heater for the fuel installed, as the cord runs from his house to somewhere under the hood when the car is not in use.
Another person down the street also has a biodiesel conversion project going, and I believe they exchange notes regularly. Still haven't smelled any French fries, donuts, or hemp oil burning next door yet.
A neighbor of mine has been working on his biodiesel conversion project for quite a while. According to him, here in the US it's fairly difficult to find a consumer diesel vehicle that's (a) in good operational shape (never mind appearance) and (b) converts easily to using biodiesel. So while conversion projects sound cool, and I'm sure Mother Jones magazine proclaims they're the Second Coming, it may be better to get an auto manufacturer to build a vehicle specifically designed to consume biodiesel.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, reported without actual knowledge or research on my part, and (wait for it!) YMMV.
That's too bad about the developers recreating only ten favorite scenes. The existing screenshots are fantastic, and I for one would pay full price for a recreation of CT3D. It's one of the best RPGs out there, along with Xenogears.
The article spends most of its time on Nautilus, and I'm not going to rehash the debates here. But he makes a valid point, one that I've wrestled with since Day One of Linux:
Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I've seen this time and again during my work as a software product manager. Everything from base functionality to key UI choices are made by the development team based on what they find useful, or what they think will be useful. It is a very, very rare team that actually conducts any workflow analysis or UI usability studies during the design phase. And, once it's coded, it will cling like a limpet to a rock, difficult if not impossible to change.
I know enough about my own predispositions and biases to know that my judgment about what's best for me isn't always what's best for everyone. While both Microsoft and Apple make poor function / UI choices, with Linux the problem is magnified because each piece is built by a different design team using a different methodology.
Server-side and admin people aren't bothered by this, but your average end user is easily frustrated by applications that don't behave in an expected way, or don't have settings that can be easily changed to adapt to the user. If you give your software to a reasonably knowledgable end user, watch the interaction with your product. Don't argue, or explain why the actions aren't correct. Take notes, and figure out a way to accommodate the user. Don't use the mantra of "Read the man pages, foo!" That only leads to reviews like Petreley's, and the ensuing does not / does too debates on/.
"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
I've changed careers five times now in my 40+ years on the planet. By "career change" I mean a completely different line of work than what your experience or education trained you for, not a "job change" where you are working in the same employment sector.
[As much as some might protest, there's not a lot of *job* difference between a QA tester and a software jock. OTOH there is a *career* difference between a software jock and a flight attendant. If you're only moving across the street to a competitor with a slightly better view from your cube, you're not changing careers.]
I highly recommend changing careers several times throughout your life. You get the chance to follow different paths to see where they lead, discover new talents or reacquaint yourself with old talents, and in general prevent hardening of the thought arteries from setting in. Besides, it's much more exciting to say, "I quit my programming job to count migrating birds in Argentina!" than to say "I programmed at the same company for twenty years!"
As far as I know, you only get one life. Might as well make an adventure out of it.
I'm all in favor of women playing online games, I don't harsh on them or harass them, and I find they're just as interested in the same things as I am while gaming. I've had my head handed to me many times by women gamers, and it was a blast. No need to debate differences between men and women gamers, any more than there's a need to debate nuances of philosophy. Just play games, and let others sort out the stacks of bodies afterward!
[Subject heading is a quote from Robert Heinlein, I think as a proposed article title from Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land."]
IANAS, but if I recall correctly, the problem with biological agents like virii are that it's very difficult to create a highly contagious, high-mortality virus. Virii need a living host to reproduce, mutate, and pass on their modified genes to the descendants. Airborne virii need to be extremely hardy to survive outside their ideal breeding conditions (read: human host). And a virus that is so virulent it kills its host almost immediately won't live for very many more generations -- it's an unsuccessful mutation.
That being said, it's still possible to balance all the factors so you have a fairly lethal virus, relatively contagious, that mutates quickly and successfully. It's just not as likely to end up as a Captain Tripps, or even an Ebola.
Toxins, on the other hand, are better for short-term, near-instantaneous death, and are more likely to be "controllable" through judicious application. Again, there are contraindications such as method of application, weather, &tc. that would warrant not using them.
The various death merchants will keep experimenting anyway, but it's nice to know that we're far more likely to be wiped out as a species by a giant asteroid than from a little critter built in a lab.
Idiots and time constraints
on
Digital Fortress
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Digital Fortress suffered from, as others noted, "idiot plots" in which the main characters have to think and act like idiots in order to propel the book along in order to create suspense. I find idiot plots highly annoying, because anyone with the purported intelligence of the main characters does the *stupidest* things or misses the *blatantly obvious* solutions to the problem. And I don't exactly consider myself genius material; we're talking on the order of "not interviewing primary witnesses to an event" level of stupidity.
Also, Brown now has three books that use time constraints to provide the major tension in the plot. The characters have only nnnn amount of time to figure things out or something truly bad will happen. (nnnn is usually an arbitrarily small number, like 24 hours.) Since the characters are acting like idiots, the time constraints only allow Brown to pull quickie and highly improbable solutions out of a hat -- "My god! You mean the Pope was really a female impersonator?" This isn't innovative, it's trite.
As cheapie reads from a used bookstore, Brown's books could be worse, but they're not worth paying full price at a bookstore. They're not high art or truly innovative, and I really don't understand why "DaVinci Code" has been on the bestseller list for so long.
(Slightly off topic: I think the Templar sigils in "Angels and Demons" are truly creative -- and they were created by an artist friend of Brown's. Best thing about the book.)
There are a lot of smart, dedicated, and *unsung* heroes at JPL. NASA tends to get all the celebrity, but JPL deserves it just as much. Thanks to all who are working on our Mars missions and the various other missions that are increasing our knowledge of our universe and ourselves.
I'm there, too. This same question came up a few years ago, and I said I'd go in a heartbeat. My wife was horrified; you mean I'd leave her, Earth, and all this behind? Yep -- for the opportunity to be the first, to explore, to find out huge quantities of information and report back. I'd go.
(As a side note, the answer is not even within the realm of possibility: I'm not a scientist, I'm over 40, in so-so health, and lack any qualifications that would make me a candidate for a mission. Despite all this, my wife is still horrified at the answer.:) )
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the parent; if you can take some time to put together a business plan, you are more than halfway there. Some suggestions to help you along the way:
* Identify a "champion" in upper management and work together to get approval for the plan. If you don't have a higher-up who thinks what you are doing is worthwhile, you will continue to be a voice in the wilderness.
* Tie your project to a pain point. You and your champion need to identify something that's bothering the CEO and CFO, and figure out how to fix it. Most CxOs don't care if the receptionist's PC is running Windows 95 and takes more time for you to fix it. They will care if you can accelerate revenue (ship product faster) or reduce expenses (reduce time inventory sits in the warehouse).
* An alternative is to improve the decision-making ability: deliver more accurate information or deliver information faster. This gives a business the basis for a competitive advantage.
* Start small. Keep your project's scope simple and discrete. Grand plans to integrate systems don't fly; things to eliminate redundancy or repetitive data entry work better (wireless inventory updates from the warehouse, for example).
It's tough to see this situation when you are a person who cares about the job they do, can see how to improve the network, and yet can't get the initiatives approved. As others have pointed out, you may be working for a company that is a late traditionalist / very late adopter. If they think things are running "good enough" they will resist change in spite of evidence to the contrary.
In that case, go to where your years of experience are appreciated. Get your resume together and get another job.
Sending it back with a link to http://www.cluetrain.org/ would be a great first step. Then if the same mess comes back, post the correspondence between parties, allowing the world to see that Blizzard doesn't speak to people, it speaks to "markets." With enough negative word-of-mouth like this, revenue decreases, and marketroids get fired.
As a side note, marketroids *must* be hit directly in the face with negative publicity, otherwise they won't learn. I speak from experience in a dev organization; developers, product managers, et al. were never allowed to talk to "press," customers, etc. without a marketroid present (and after being heavily coached). Net result was that the press and customers never trusted a word we said.
And no, I didn't work for a certain Redmond software company. But when marketing controls a company, this behavior is commonplace.
News flacks always are howling after the next big headline, regardless of what the data suggests. Blame News.com, who want lots of hits to help drive revenues that are charged to advertisers.
In any event, as anyone who has taken math courses more complicated than arithmetic, a properly selected sample size will return whatever result you want. If the number of vulnerabilities is considered over a span of time longer than the one in the article, IE is far less secure than Mozilla et al.
Microsoft skipped "patch Tuesday" this last month; that doesn't mean that IE is finally secure. It only means that, in Microsoft's opinion, the various bugs and flaws don't rise to the level of patchworthiness. I'd rather make the determination of what needs fixing than rely on Microsoft for that assessment. A decent reporter should also present a similar analysis, rather than leaping for the extremes.
No, I don't think you're griping. I used to work for two different companies, each of which trumpeted its ability to build "connectors" for Siebel. But Siebel's server-side and desktop components were so big, the APIs so convoluted, and the performance so bad, that both companies (rather than being "Siebel Consultants") always brought in Siebel wonks to develop the interfaces. We knew it was so bad, that we -- for once -- made a smart decision and kept away from the integration aspect.
I also got tired of Siebel's attitude (courtesy of HRH Tom) that nobody else either "got it" or "understood customers" according to the Siebel Way(tm) of doing things. I had yet to find a customer whose requirements weren't thoroughly bollixed up after an encounter with Siebel.
Oracle is going to have its hands full phasing out Siebel in favor of its own dog food.
The gaming industry will continue to exist. What won't exist are the current software houses, not because of WoW but because it's the nature of the beast. Ten years ago Sierra, Dynamix, Interplay, and others were the kings of the gaming hill. Now, they're just fond memories.
In the online community Everquest is fading, DAoC is fading, even City of Heroes is fading. All the supposed "hot! hot!" games enjoy popularity for a while then fade away. WoW will do this too.
As for the original question, WoW has little or nothing to do with the revenue streams flowing into other game developers. The purported "fear" of WoW cutting into game-buying is the sound of marketers quaking (pun not intended) because they promised management and shareholders 15-20% revenue increases based on publication of such scintillating games as "50 Cent: Bulletproof", and the revenue flow is just not happening. WoW is a convenient scapegoat.
As others have said, good games, not good marketing, draws the dollars. The recording industry is learning a similar lesson, as is Hollywood. It just happens to be gaming's turn.
I really tried to get more than halfway through the article. But after phrases like " a belly-barn shackle in the reunion of unjustified friends", I couldn't continue. He bemoans the lack of clarity in HCI, yet his writing is a stream-of-consciousness mess.
If he can't communicate his ideas better, maybe he's not the best person to describe what's wrong with HCI. I'm not the brightest bulb on the billboard, but come on -- this guy needs an editor.
Regardless of those who mock, nitpick, strain at gnats and swallow camels here on /., it's still *cool*. Hearing the "voice" made by a distant planet is thrilling. Sure some nerd can make a similar recording in the basement but this is the real thing.
Fun stuff!
Learning by rote doesn't work. Taking tests that encourage information regurgitation doesn't help.
What helps is giving students the training they need to tap into the brain's potential. For the left brain, this means teaching the ability to reason, to use both inductive and deductive logic, and to learn about the doctrine of natural consequence; for the right brain, the freedom to engage in creative bursts of joy without insisting everyone color in between the lines, or always make the grass green and the sky blue.
Education today is all about moving the mobs through, teaching low-expectation behavior. However, there is no "right" to graduate, or "right" to an A. Grades and graduation should be a measure of earned merit, not classroom attendance.
We need to expect more from kids in school. Soft-pedaling education doesn't do anyone any favors.
From what I've seen in the US programmer's pool:
* People expect that taking night school courses at a community college entitle them to high-five-figure salaries out of the box.
* People expect that playing Halo makes you a game designer / developer.
* People expect that they can misspell words in your resume and simultaneously assert they are a highly talented programmer.
I agree with the majority of posters who state that many companies have unreasonable expectations of skill level, job requirements, and salary levels. Those bean-counter-run businesses have little grip on business reality.
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of skr1pt kidd33z with mad h4X0rz skillz toss (misspelled) resumes over the transom expecting to start at the top. That may get you a job at Burger Wang but not in a core development role.
You are right in several respects: non-development management has screwed over more projects than it's ever helped. I've seen it and had my projects fscked many a time. One classic was the VP who wanted the acronym "API" removed from the help files for a developer kit. Reason? "We make solutions, not programming software."
But I *will* point fingers at developers for bad design, too. In the same company I have worked with developers who code up something that neither does what it should, is usable by anyone but them, or can be gracefully fit into the existing programming model. Too often they were called a "temporary fix" for the current release, to be fixed in a future release. It never was, it just became more encrusted with shims, helper libraries, and other complexification / bogger-downers.
Same goes for UI designed by developers. *UNLESS* you have spent time with the end users seeing what it is they are trying to do, you are not going to hit the mark by coding UI in your cubicle on the mistaken assumption that you know the best way to do something.
I have seen this happen so many times. I take a developer to a customer site to help diagnose a problem. After only ten minutes, the light comes on in the developer's head and a new solution is created that works, works well, and does what the customer wants and expects. Yet most development happens in reverse: cook up an idea, code it, then see if anyone likes it.
There's a lot of bad software project management out there, and there is enough blame to go around.
No mention is made of Gagne's "French chef" schtick that clogs his Linux Journal column. I'm hoping against hope that Gagne decided to ditch the schtick in favor of delivering clean, clear prose.
Anyone else seen the book and confirm or deny the presence of schtick?
Cheesy? Of *course* it's cheesy! It's for every kid who sat in a theatre with a big bucket of popcorn, grinning like a madman at every swoop and explosion that graced the screen.
I wasn't part of the pulp era, but I enjoyed reading pulp and Golden Age sf works. There's just something free-wheeling, childlike, and wondrous about the visions of tomorrow that those stories embodied. I still like space opera, with vast galactic fleets spinning out of a nebular cluster to go into battle with the dreaded Zorkanoids -- or whatever the evil space being of the moment was.
The trailers for this reminded me of another "guilty pleasure" film, "The Rocketeer." I suspect "Sky Captain" will join "Rocketeer" in my movie collection as something that is aimless, harmless exciting fun.
Centrally managed, downloadable applets and applications have been built and sold for years. I used to work for two different 3270 companies, and they both had systems that did this, as Web applets, as standalone apps, and as hybrid (split-stack) systems that used a gateway and a somewhat-thin client on the desktop.
Yes, there are a bunch of technological hurdles, none of which are easy to solve. And believe it or not, deploying and running a single version is not always possible. Custom macros, feature / function differences, desktop / color schemes, etc. all end up version-dependent, and sometimes you *can't* roll out a new version even when it's centrally managed.
In any event, what made these systems difficult to accept, customer-wise, was not the technology but the licensing.
How do you license it: by the computer, by the user, by the download? What about the server end -- by the processor, by the server? What about hot-failover clusters? What about the Internet -- do you really want to give access to anyone?
There was no simple way to license it, because no matter what you could think of, the customer had a different scheme they wanted to use. The sales force had no consistent pricing method, and since customers talk to one another, the pricing ended up all over the map.
We tried everything, including three "standard" pricing models that we thought would cover everything including a razor blade / handle model, and we still couldn't reach agreement with the customers on pricing.
Microsoft has these headaches all the time, just ask anyone who has dealt with desktop licenses, server licenses, CALs, and Terminal Server licenses for even a medium-smallish business. It will make your head spin. I doubt MS will come up with an equitable subscription service, especially for larger customers, because there are too many other licensing variables in there.
Once you decide on licensing, how do you regulate or enforce it? Tokens, passwords, thresholds, group memberships? Most customers resist active enforcement, preferring word-of-honor agreements and true-ups when necessary (such as with threat of audit).
The technology is solvable. The licensing is a muddle and is the biggest hurdle to overcome for these service-based proposals.
Oh, thank god. I thought I was the only one who found that "French chef" schtick utterly obnoxious! It may be funny in a Muppet, but it's moronic in a columnist.
My neighbor has a mid-Eighties Isuzu pickup truck, so I guess it falls into the category of needing fuel lines etc. replaced. I believe he has a heater for the fuel installed, as the cord runs from his house to somewhere under the hood when the car is not in use.
Another person down the street also has a biodiesel conversion project going, and I believe they exchange notes regularly. Still haven't smelled any French fries, donuts, or hemp oil burning next door yet.
A neighbor of mine has been working on his biodiesel conversion project for quite a while. According to him, here in the US it's fairly difficult to find a consumer diesel vehicle that's (a) in good operational shape (never mind appearance) and (b) converts easily to using biodiesel. So while conversion projects sound cool, and I'm sure Mother Jones magazine proclaims they're the Second Coming, it may be better to get an auto manufacturer to build a vehicle specifically designed to consume biodiesel.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, reported without actual knowledge or research on my part, and (wait for it!) YMMV.
...say to the other stress fracture during an earthquake?
"Hey, it's not my fault!"
That's too bad about the developers recreating only ten favorite scenes. The existing screenshots are fantastic, and I for one would pay full price for a recreation of CT3D. It's one of the best RPGs out there, along with Xenogears.
"Stand tall and shake the heavens!" --Xenogears
The article spends most of its time on Nautilus, and I'm not going to rehash the debates here. But he makes a valid point, one that I've wrestled with since Day One of Linux:
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Engineers design programs that work for them, not for end users.
I've seen this time and again during my work as a software product manager. Everything from base functionality to key UI choices are made by the development team based on what they find useful, or what they think will be useful. It is a very, very rare team that actually conducts any workflow analysis or UI usability studies during the design phase. And, once it's coded, it will cling like a limpet to a rock, difficult if not impossible to change.
I know enough about my own predispositions and biases to know that my judgment about what's best for me isn't always what's best for everyone. While both Microsoft and Apple make poor function / UI choices, with Linux the problem is magnified because each piece is built by a different design team using a different methodology.
Server-side and admin people aren't bothered by this, but your average end user is easily frustrated by applications that don't behave in an expected way, or don't have settings that can be easily changed to adapt to the user. If you give your software to a reasonably knowledgable end user, watch the interaction with your product. Don't argue, or explain why the actions aren't correct. Take notes, and figure out a way to accommodate the user. Don't use the mantra of "Read the man pages, foo!" That only leads to reviews like Petreley's, and the ensuing does not / does too debates on
"There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."
--Mike
I've changed careers five times now in my 40+ years on the planet. By "career change" I mean a completely different line of work than what your experience or education trained you for, not a "job change" where you are working in the same employment sector.
[As much as some might protest, there's not a lot of *job* difference between a QA tester and a software jock. OTOH there is a *career* difference between a software jock and a flight attendant. If you're only moving across the street to a competitor with a slightly better view from your cube, you're not changing careers.]
I highly recommend changing careers several times throughout your life. You get the chance to follow different paths to see where they lead, discover new talents or reacquaint yourself with old talents, and in general prevent hardening of the thought arteries from setting in. Besides, it's much more exciting to say, "I quit my programming job to count migrating birds in Argentina!" than to say "I programmed at the same company for twenty years!"
As far as I know, you only get one life. Might as well make an adventure out of it.
I'm all in favor of women playing online games, I don't harsh on them or harass them, and I find they're just as interested in the same things as I am while gaming. I've had my head handed to me many times by women gamers, and it was a blast. No need to debate differences between men and women gamers, any more than there's a need to debate nuances of philosophy. Just play games, and let others sort out the stacks of bodies afterward!
[Subject heading is a quote from Robert Heinlein, I think as a proposed article title from Jubal Harshaw in "Stranger in a Strange Land."]
IANAS, but if I recall correctly, the problem with biological agents like virii are that it's very difficult to create a highly contagious, high-mortality virus. Virii need a living host to reproduce, mutate, and pass on their modified genes to the descendants. Airborne virii need to be extremely hardy to survive outside their ideal breeding conditions (read: human host). And a virus that is so virulent it kills its host almost immediately won't live for very many more generations -- it's an unsuccessful mutation.
That being said, it's still possible to balance all the factors so you have a fairly lethal virus, relatively contagious, that mutates quickly and successfully. It's just not as likely to end up as a Captain Tripps, or even an Ebola.
Toxins, on the other hand, are better for short-term, near-instantaneous death, and are more likely to be "controllable" through judicious application. Again, there are contraindications such as method of application, weather, &tc. that would warrant not using them.
The various death merchants will keep experimenting anyway, but it's nice to know that we're far more likely to be wiped out as a species by a giant asteroid than from a little critter built in a lab.
Digital Fortress suffered from, as others noted, "idiot plots" in which the main characters have to think and act like idiots in order to propel the book along in order to create suspense. I find idiot plots highly annoying, because anyone with the purported intelligence of the main characters does the *stupidest* things or misses the *blatantly obvious* solutions to the problem. And I don't exactly consider myself genius material; we're talking on the order of "not interviewing primary witnesses to an event" level of stupidity.
Also, Brown now has three books that use time constraints to provide the major tension in the plot. The characters have only nnnn amount of time to figure things out or something truly bad will happen. (nnnn is usually an arbitrarily small number, like 24 hours.) Since the characters are acting like idiots, the time constraints only allow Brown to pull quickie and highly improbable solutions out of a hat -- "My god! You mean the Pope was really a female impersonator?" This isn't innovative, it's trite.
As cheapie reads from a used bookstore, Brown's books could be worse, but they're not worth paying full price at a bookstore. They're not high art or truly innovative, and I really don't understand why "DaVinci Code" has been on the bestseller list for so long.
(Slightly off topic: I think the Templar sigils in "Angels and Demons" are truly creative -- and they were created by an artist friend of Brown's. Best thing about the book.)
There are a lot of smart, dedicated, and *unsung* heroes at JPL. NASA tends to get all the celebrity, but JPL deserves it just as much. Thanks to all who are working on our Mars missions and the various other missions that are increasing our knowledge of our universe and ourselves.
I'm there, too. This same question came up a few years ago, and I said I'd go in a heartbeat. My wife was horrified; you mean I'd leave her, Earth, and all this behind? Yep -- for the opportunity to be the first, to explore, to find out huge quantities of information and report back. I'd go.
:) )
(As a side note, the answer is not even within the realm of possibility: I'm not a scientist, I'm over 40, in so-so health, and lack any qualifications that would make me a candidate for a mission. Despite all this, my wife is still horrified at the answer.