The people defending the new ribbons came up with a lot of good points about things the ribbons make easier -- that's quite interesting. The people attacking ribbons gave me an insight into the instinct to resist change -- that's less interesting because I see it all the time elsewhere but it's an important aspect of UI design and always worth considering.
Sure, I agree that there's a body of legacy x-windows apps (usually with windows clients) that's chugging away pretty effectively. In fact, many of them have reached a considerable level of stability, and they're more responsive than web apps while still being quite scalable. I don't think I'd go from that to calling X11 'the way normal people would do it', though, at least not these days.
I think the path of least controversy these days is a web app. Of course that just raises the question of what you'll have on the server side --.NET, 'simple' Java, custom code, or J2EE...
Ha! Witness the failure of American-style capitalism to produce REAL waste! Why, here in the UK our glorious NHS have just recently thrown away 12bn of public money on a computer system that has ZERO percent uptime -- because nobody could decide what it was for and nobody wanted it! Compare that to the paltry few billions your private enterprise was able to throw away!
And that's not all! The graft, corruption, bribery and crime surrounding the NHS system was such that Accenture *refused to work on it* -- that's right, Accenture turned down a paycheck because they didn't want to be associated with the way the project was being conducted! Let's see some privately-owned HMO reach that kind of level -- THEN maybe I'll admit that your 'Capitalism' has some advantages!
And you know what else you get wrong? Kaiser's failure, like that of Enron and WorldCom, is big news! In the glorious United Kingdom, this kind of thing barely makes it to the fringes of public awareness! Why, the NHS project actually KILLED a few struggling UK startup companies just to distract attention from the activities of the bigger contractors (i.e. iSOFT). Let's see Kaiser do that. Can it do that? THOUGHT NOT! Because that kind of thing requires a GOVERNMENT that can tax and borrow!
(sound of 'Rule Britannia' gradually swells in the background)
And THAT, my American chums, is why the NHS is the envy of the world, and why I am proud to pay 10% of my income toward it.
Although obviously I have private health cover as well in case I get sick. Which all comes in kind of expensive.
"We're the largest Citrix deployment in the world," Deal said. "We're using it in a way that's quite different from the way most organizations are using it.
Considering the performance and flexibility problems observed even on small, normal Citrix installations, I'd have to say the above sounds like a bad move -- probably one among many in this project.
Heck, what could be sillier than basing a critical system on a Citrix deployment of untested scale and unconventional topology?
The way normal people would do it is use an X11 graphic application
Ah, it appears that a Slashdot-crazed unix fanatic could be sillier!
Having watched rooms full of English people feeling *so happy* and *so righteous* to be giving another 1% of their income per year to the NHS, I have to say if ever there was a national decline that was the fault of the individual people of the nation, this is it. The UK has got *exactly* what it demanded.
Seriously, I will never forget that budget with the giant tax hike for the NHS. The public really were literally *happy*. They don't pause and think whether giant IT projects with no defined results, buildings endlessly built and rebuilt, and vast dividends for contractors benefit them. They think "OUR FREE HEALTH CARE IS THE ENVY OF THE WORLD!!"
Which brings us to the issue in question -- the culture of ASBO and surveillance. It's closely analogous.
People were happy to give money to the NHS without reflecting on where the money really goes. Health care became scarce (except in politically powerful areas like Scotland) and the NHS became a huge powerful entity. The question became not 'how can we obtain healthcare' but 'how can we manipulate / moderate / survive the NHS which has grown up in the absence of proper health care?' Now people are dependent on the NHS for healthcare building contracts, support contracts, and above all employment.
Similarly with the ASBO/surveillance culture. People were happy to constantly rein in the power of police and courts without thinking of how order would actually be maintained. Convictions became near-impossible -- try getting a conviction for assault or rape without eyewitnesses or camera footage in the UK. Getting bad people out of the way once their badness had been established also became near-impossible. So the question became not 'how can we restore order' but 'how can we leverage the ersatz structure of surveillance and pseudo-legal sanctions that has grown up in the absence of order?' Now people are dependent on cameras and ASBOs and each new problem is solved by adding further layers of special powers, special institutions, and surveillance.
The original post is being just a little specious on generics -- the reason Java generics are backwards compatible is that they aren't generics, they're just automatic type conversions when accessing collections. Whee. C# generics may not be up to the level of true generic programming (e.g. C++) but they are at least 'templates' in the sense that ArrayList is a different type from ArrayList.
Java has come a long way but there's still a reason Java programmers cost about 60% of the cost of actual C++ programmers (curse them).
The idea of an omnipotent God who creates a creature capable of reason, then throws an eternal hissy fit when that creature doesn't spend all his time telling God how wonderful He is... Well it seems like rather insecure behavior for an all powerful, all loving being.
And when you're done beating up that straw man, you can just grab a fresh bundle of straw and build another! Hooray for straw, now at only $5 per cubic bushel-meter. Or however you measure out straw.
Nobody intervenes to help the Ingush, nobody intervenes to help the Ossetes, nobody intervenes to help the Karens. Look them up.
Nobody intervened to help the Tibetans, nobody intervened to help the Karelians, nobody intervened to help the Andamanese. Look them up too, the Andamanese are fascinating.
Nobody intervened to help the entire population of North America when they were overrun by Europeans and nobody intervened to help the entire population of north-east Asia when they were overrun by Han and Russians and nobody intervened to help the entire pre-Islamic world from Spain to India when it was overrun by Arabs.
Nobody intervened to help the Beaker Folk, the Picts, the Achaean as opposed to Dorian Greeks, the Helots, or the pre-Cro Magnon subspecies of humans.
BUT YES LET'S ALL INTERVENE IN DARFUR. That'll make it all OK.
Re:I disagree with Smart Appliances being listed
on
The Top 21 Tech Flops
·
· Score: 1
Imagine pulling recipes just for the foods you currently have, printing out a shopping list straight from your fridge
Oh, yeah, that's worth filling my house and my life with dozens of computers, having my every purchase trackable by means of an RFID tag, consuming the energy to construct and power these millions of worthless circuits and their transmitters and recievers. Boy oh boy. A fridge that can print.
A fridge that can print.
Here's the thing, right? Companies make money by selling stuff so naturally they want you to have reasons to buy stuff. Sometimes that's good -- for instance an industrial freezer that can issue SNMP alerts for ice buildup has uses, and such freezers are indeed available. But take a long hard look at your life. Is a fridge that can print *really* going to make it better?
If the answer is yes there is something so, so wrong with you:)
That's breathtakingly evil. But like a lot of breathtakingly evil things, especially the smaller-scale ones, it first requires breathtaking stupidity on the part of the victim.
The government has been encroaching on our personal liberties one piece at a time for a century.
Ever since 1861, really. That's when they first elected a guy who represented specific, well-defined commercial powers and was willing to start wars and gag the press to fund them.
Those vultures at Viacom have a full-fledged plan to feather their nests by hatching lawsuits -- and it looks like some people are getting soar about it. Hiring those legal eagles to flip them the bird won't come cheep, though.
Bah, the RIAA probably egged them on in the first place.
Multithreaded development is commonplace in applications that need it. The places it's not common in are:
-- old-style Unix development, because of the 'lightweight process model'. It's a unix-ism that's on the way out but until it disappears we will have some things like Ruby that don't 'get it'.
-- places that have absolutely no need for it, which certainly includes the chicken demo. One core per chicken?? Seems more like the guy just discovered threads but hasn't quite grasped what they're for.
Nobody is trying to end fossil-fuel dependence here. Nobody is subsidising ethanol production, except in a rather technical sense. If people wanted to end fossil-fuel dependenence and make ethanol production easier, they could fund, subsidize, and promote any number of solutions.
What IS going on here is another huge subsidy for the very powerful corn industry. This particular subsidy is wearing a paper hat that says 'ethanol', which is enough to fool:
0% of people who know anything about energy markets. 25% of lawmakers 95% of the public 100% of all the libertarian slashdotters who have already jumped in and gone 'OMG teh socialism sux lol!!'
Now, repeat after me: ETHANOL is one thing, ETHANOL FROM NORTH AMERICAN CORN is another thing. You want energy, subsidize the former. You want money for corn growers, subsidize the latter.
*hilariously, goes and plays a pinball machine called 'Devil's Advocate'*
Ah, those Simpsons. Anyway, problem:
Those patents gathering dust are DEFENSIVE patents. That's why they're gathering dust; they're the deterrent your company has just in case anyone starts violating the patent sharing agreements that prevail between the big players in many markets.
If you donate them to other institutions, they 1) are no longer a deterrent and 2) may no longer be covered by patent sharing agreements. Congratulations! You have plunged the world into an era of 0 technological progress, as companies find the existing patent detente is no longer enforceable.
It would be better to simply grant every company ever a patent on everything possi -- oh, wait, that is the USPTO's actual strategy.
I appreciate that exact communication is neither possible nor desirable on Slashdot but I do feel that if you are going to be pedantic you should pretty much be able to spell 'pedantry' correctly.
'Pendantry' could mean any of the following:
"The art of creating things to hang on necklaces" "Like infantry, only with pends instead of infs" "The act of writing 'Patent Pending' on every silly darn product your company makes"
I bet I have the perfect meaning for it, though:
Pendantry: The the act of publically correcting others without being either accurate or informed. Pendantic: Having a tendency toward, or resembling, pendantry.
Example 1:
"Yeah, so, we just got back from la belle ville de Marseilles..." "Hello?? McFly?? MarsielleS has an S on the end, it doesn't rhyme with 'say'. Did you even actually go there?" "Er, could you possibly be a little less pendantic?"
Example 2:
"People think America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, but it was actually Lief Ericsson in spring 1002." "What, exactly 1002? Unless you give me a citation, I'm going to have to call that pure pendantry!"
Once again, committees lag behind actual problems and actual solutions.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to browsing.jp.
(I seem to recall that/. has issues of its own, so the ascii encoding of that would be http://xn--cckev5k8eta5k.jp/. Anyway, the point is that characters beyond ASCII have been used for ages. Mostly by people who don't mind it when users from other countries can't access their site.)
I work in-or-near the bespoke software business in finance, and certainly the increasingly powerful off-the-peg solutions that have emerged in the last 5-10 years do compete with bespoke development. It's also generally fairly true that it takes fewer developers to give 10 banks the _same_ software package than to give them each a bespoke package, making off-the-peg generally cheaper. But there are other differences.
Projects go on forever either way so multiply by the number of years required:)
Bespoke app: 10 devs, 1 pm, 1 ba, 2 it people * 20 banks. Total man years: 200 dev, 20 pm, 20 ba, 40 it
Off-the-peg app: 10 devs, 1 pm, 5 bas (minimum, because the software house has to talk to lots of clients), 2 sales. 1 pm, 1 dev & 2 it ppl per bank to do rollout & integration work. Total man years: 30 dev, 21 pm, 5 ba, 2 sales, 40 it.
Now sure, the total spend has decreased. But what's more important is that developers, as a fraction of the spend, are no longer the big slice. Project management, business analysis -- these are BIGGER when development and rollout are spread across companies. The IT burden is roughly the same (IT people, meaning people installing software, plugging things in etc. are cheap anyway).
What this means is that as the market matures, the actual work of development becomes less and less important and the work of managing, selling and integrating what has been developed gets more and more important.
Note that this applies to software development that can be expressed in terms of product, i.e. software which is delivered, installed and supported in a product-like way. There's also a wide world of 'service-like' software development which is subject to very different trends -- e.g. to outsourcing. But that's a story for another post.
It's Masonic, or maybe Theosophist if you prefer. As long as it's in the Capstone, I don't think the actual look of the eye matters much. An Eye of Horus or 'udjat' looks much more gothicky. You can google it easily enough.
Verbs and their subjects have to agree in number in this language. If you left 'such' out of your last sentence, it would be correct because 'were' would be the subjunctive mood. But you didn't, and it isn't, and you don't come across as sounding nearly as grown-up as you hoped.
You don't know what I mean by 'agree in number' and 'subjunctive mood'? I think it's time for some *quiet study time* on the subject of grammar -- to prevent future embarrassment.
I hate to join the chorus of people complaining about the 'editors', but... unfortunately, it is getting pretty silly, isn't it? Would it be that hard to just get some reasonably literate person with a bit of spare time and have them edit stuff?
You too, huh? I feel the same. It's one of the most surprising things I know. It's just baffling. I'm not even sure I believe it -- it just seems so far-fetched.
Yet amazingly -- it's true! They don't have horns! Unless you glue one or more horns on! Which is very dangerous to you *and* the whale, trust me on that.
And then users say, and they're right to say this:
"Okay, can we have a basic real-time price chart on that?" "Can you pick up the settings for my main thick-client work application and use those?" "This is OK for offline work but now that we're using it seriously it has to respond to clicks right away." "Ok, when we enter the currency pair, the visual display of the curves should update immediately before we enter the price, just as a sanity check."
Of course you can always reply:
"Well, I decided to do this as a CGI script. That meant a bit of a tradeoff whereby it was easy to develop at the time, but we can't really extend it with rich client-side functionality like that."
To which the correct answer is:
"Looks like YOU have a problem!"
Okay, that doesn't ALWAYS happen. But it certainly happens a lot -- if there's any chance that that the solution will be compared to thick-client apps, it's really not a good idea to start with the web. When everyone's lucky, the result is that work starts on a proper client application. When everyone's NOT lucky, the Java applets and DHTML wizardry come out, and you're left supporting and justifying an increasingly complicated solution that's heavy on scripting and net traffic and that's competing with solid (usually C#) client/server apps. Which is a pain.
I agree with your above post except that I would insert 'not' before 'doomed' in the last line.
If we were incapable of finding channels for commerce and amusement in new environments, then yeah, we'd be doomed.
Having said that, if people really buy sex on 2nd life, that's kind of sad. Not because buying sex is sad but because it suggests it's a less positive environment than, say, FurryMUCK was in the last decade.
The word 'innovation' has a funny meaning in OS, doesn't it? Zenoss is a Tivoli clone that now "claims it provides 80% of the functionality of the big offerings". rPath is another virtualizer. Sugar CRM is another CFM system. Linux is a copy of Unix. Even Frozen Bubble is a copy of Puzzle Bobble! They couldn't come up with their own puzzle game??
COM, Java, Civilization -- those were innovative..NET, Emacs, Populous -- those I'd call incrementally innovative, not big paradigm shifts but definitely 'new content'. The OSS clone that currently seems to have to exist behind (usually about 2-3 versions behind) every successful piece of large scale commercial software -- not innovative. Useful, sure. Worth working on, sure. But innovation is where you do something _new_.
Yeah, blah blah blah, linux has more innovation in its little finger that Microsoft has in its whole bloated body, I'm a troll, etc etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I found the thread quite useful.
The people defending the new ribbons came up with a lot of good points about things the ribbons make easier -- that's quite interesting. The people attacking ribbons gave me an insight into the instinct to resist change -- that's less interesting because I see it all the time elsewhere but it's an important aspect of UI design and always worth considering.
Sure, I agree that there's a body of legacy x-windows apps (usually with windows clients) that's chugging away pretty effectively. In fact, many of them have reached a considerable level of stability, and they're more responsive than web apps while still being quite scalable. I don't think I'd go from that to calling X11 'the way normal people would do it', though, at least not these days.
I think the path of least controversy these days is a web app. Of course that just raises the question of what you'll have on the server side --
Ha! Witness the failure of American-style capitalism to produce REAL waste! Why, here in the UK our glorious NHS have just recently thrown away 12bn of public money on a computer system that has ZERO percent uptime -- because nobody could decide what it was for and nobody wanted it! Compare that to the paltry few billions your private enterprise was able to throw away!
And that's not all! The graft, corruption, bribery and crime surrounding the NHS system was such that Accenture *refused to work on it* -- that's right, Accenture turned down a paycheck because they didn't want to be associated with the way the project was being conducted! Let's see some privately-owned HMO reach that kind of level -- THEN maybe I'll admit that your 'Capitalism' has some advantages!
And you know what else you get wrong? Kaiser's failure, like that of Enron and WorldCom, is big news! In the glorious United Kingdom, this kind of thing barely makes it to the fringes of public awareness! Why, the NHS project actually KILLED a few struggling UK startup companies just to distract attention from the activities of the bigger contractors (i.e. iSOFT). Let's see Kaiser do that. Can it do that? THOUGHT NOT! Because that kind of thing requires a GOVERNMENT that can tax and borrow!
(sound of 'Rule Britannia' gradually swells in the background)
And THAT, my American chums, is why the NHS is the envy of the world, and why I am proud to pay 10% of my income toward it.
Although obviously I have private health cover as well in case I get sick. Which all comes in kind of expensive.
"We're the largest Citrix deployment in the world," Deal said. "We're using it in a way that's quite different from the way most organizations are using it.
Considering the performance and flexibility problems observed even on small, normal Citrix installations, I'd have to say the above sounds like a bad move -- probably one among many in this project.
Heck, what could be sillier than basing a critical system on a Citrix deployment of untested scale and unconventional topology?
The way normal people would do it is use an X11 graphic application
Ah, it appears that a Slashdot-crazed unix fanatic could be sillier!
Having watched rooms full of English people feeling *so happy* and *so righteous* to be giving another 1% of their income per year to the NHS, I have to say if ever there was a national decline that was the fault of the individual people of the nation, this is it. The UK has got *exactly* what it demanded.
Seriously, I will never forget that budget with the giant tax hike for the NHS. The public really were literally *happy*. They don't pause and think whether giant IT projects with no defined results, buildings endlessly built and rebuilt, and vast dividends for contractors benefit them. They think "OUR FREE HEALTH CARE IS THE ENVY OF THE WORLD!!"
Which brings us to the issue in question -- the culture of ASBO and surveillance. It's closely analogous.
People were happy to give money to the NHS without reflecting on where the money really goes. Health care became scarce (except in politically powerful areas like Scotland) and the NHS became a huge powerful entity. The question became not 'how can we obtain healthcare' but 'how can we manipulate / moderate / survive the NHS which has grown up in the absence of proper health care?' Now people are dependent on the NHS for healthcare building contracts, support contracts, and above all employment.
Similarly with the ASBO/surveillance culture. People were happy to constantly rein in the power of police and courts without thinking of how order would actually be maintained. Convictions became near-impossible -- try getting a conviction for assault or rape without eyewitnesses or camera footage in the UK. Getting bad people out of the way once their badness had been established also became near-impossible. So the question became not 'how can we restore order' but 'how can we leverage the ersatz structure of surveillance and pseudo-legal sanctions that has grown up in the absence of order?' Now people are dependent on cameras and ASBOs and each new problem is solved by adding further layers of special powers, special institutions, and surveillance.
Moral? Meh, I don't know. Mod me off-topic.
The original post is being just a little specious on generics -- the reason Java generics are backwards compatible is that they aren't generics, they're just automatic type conversions when accessing collections. Whee. C# generics may not be up to the level of true generic programming (e.g. C++) but they are at least 'templates' in the sense that ArrayList is a different type from ArrayList.
Java has come a long way but there's still a reason Java programmers cost about 60% of the cost of actual C++ programmers (curse them).
The idea of an omnipotent God who creates a creature capable of reason, then throws an eternal hissy fit when that creature doesn't spend all his time telling God how wonderful He is... Well it seems like rather insecure behavior for an all powerful, all loving being.
And when you're done beating up that straw man, you can just grab a fresh bundle of straw and build another! Hooray for straw, now at only $5 per cubic bushel-meter. Or however you measure out straw.
Nobody intervenes to help the Ingush, nobody intervenes to help the Ossetes, nobody intervenes to help the Karens. Look them up.
Nobody intervened to help the Tibetans, nobody intervened to help the Karelians, nobody intervened to help the Andamanese. Look them up too, the Andamanese are fascinating.
Nobody intervened to help the entire population of North America when they were overrun by Europeans and nobody intervened to help the entire population of north-east Asia when they were overrun by Han and Russians and nobody intervened to help the entire pre-Islamic world from Spain to India when it was overrun by Arabs.
Nobody intervened to help the Beaker Folk, the Picts, the Achaean as opposed to Dorian Greeks, the Helots, or the pre-Cro Magnon subspecies of humans.
BUT YES LET'S ALL INTERVENE IN DARFUR. That'll make it all OK.
Imagine pulling recipes just for the foods you currently have, printing out a shopping list straight from your fridge
:)
Oh, yeah, that's worth filling my house and my life with dozens of computers, having my every purchase trackable by means of an RFID tag, consuming the energy to construct and power these millions of worthless circuits and their transmitters and recievers. Boy oh boy. A fridge that can print.
A fridge that can print.
Here's the thing, right? Companies make money by selling stuff so naturally they want you to have reasons to buy stuff. Sometimes that's good -- for instance an industrial freezer that can issue SNMP alerts for ice buildup has uses, and such freezers are indeed available. But take a long hard look at your life. Is a fridge that can print *really* going to make it better?
If the answer is yes there is something so, so wrong with you
That's breathtakingly evil. But like a lot of breathtakingly evil things, especially the smaller-scale ones, it first requires breathtaking stupidity on the part of the victim.
So in a sense it balances out.
The government has been encroaching on our personal liberties one piece at a time for a century.
Ever since 1861, really. That's when they first elected a guy who represented specific, well-defined commercial powers and was willing to start wars and gag the press to fund them.
Those vultures at Viacom have a full-fledged plan to feather their nests by hatching lawsuits -- and it looks like some people are getting soar about it. Hiring those legal eagles to flip them the bird won't come cheep, though.
Bah, the RIAA probably egged them on in the first place.
Multithreaded development is commonplace in applications that need it. The places it's not common in are:
-- old-style Unix development, because of the 'lightweight process model'. It's a unix-ism that's on the way out but until it disappears we will have some things like Ruby that don't 'get it'.
-- places that have absolutely no need for it, which certainly includes the chicken demo. One core per chicken?? Seems more like the guy just discovered threads but hasn't quite grasped what they're for.
Nobody is trying to end fossil-fuel dependence here. Nobody is subsidising ethanol production, except in a rather technical sense. If people wanted to end fossil-fuel dependenence and make ethanol production easier, they could fund, subsidize, and promote any number of solutions.
What IS going on here is another huge subsidy for the very powerful corn industry. This particular subsidy is wearing a paper hat that says 'ethanol', which is enough to fool:
0% of people who know anything about energy markets.
25% of lawmakers
95% of the public
100% of all the libertarian slashdotters who have already jumped in and gone 'OMG teh socialism sux lol!!'
Now, repeat after me: ETHANOL is one thing, ETHANOL FROM NORTH AMERICAN CORN is another thing. You want energy, subsidize the former. You want money for corn growers, subsidize the latter.
*hilariously, goes and plays a pinball machine called 'Devil's Advocate'*
Ah, those Simpsons. Anyway, problem:
Those patents gathering dust are DEFENSIVE patents. That's why they're gathering dust; they're the deterrent your company has just in case anyone starts violating the patent sharing agreements that prevail between the big players in many markets.
If you donate them to other institutions, they 1) are no longer a deterrent and 2) may no longer be covered by patent sharing agreements. Congratulations! You have plunged the world into an era of 0 technological progress, as companies find the existing patent detente is no longer enforceable.
It would be better to simply grant every company ever a patent on everything possi -- oh, wait, that is the USPTO's actual strategy.
I appreciate that exact communication is neither possible nor desirable on Slashdot but I do feel that if you are going to be pedantic you should pretty much be able to spell 'pedantry' correctly.
'Pendantry' could mean any of the following:
"The art of creating things to hang on necklaces"
"Like infantry, only with pends instead of infs"
"The act of writing 'Patent Pending' on every silly darn product your company makes"
I bet I have the perfect meaning for it, though:
Pendantry: The the act of publically correcting others without being either accurate or informed.
Pendantic: Having a tendency toward, or resembling, pendantry.
Example 1:
"Yeah, so, we just got back from la belle ville de Marseilles..."
"Hello?? McFly?? MarsielleS has an S on the end, it doesn't rhyme with 'say'. Did you even actually go there?"
"Er, could you possibly be a little less pendantic?"
Example 2:
"People think America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, but it was actually Lief Ericsson in spring 1002."
"What, exactly 1002? Unless you give me a citation, I'm going to have to call that pure pendantry!"
Once again, committees lag behind actual problems and actual solutions.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to browsing
(I seem to recall that
I work in-or-near the bespoke software business in finance, and certainly the increasingly powerful off-the-peg solutions that have emerged in the last 5-10 years do compete with bespoke development. It's also generally fairly true that it takes fewer developers to give 10 banks the _same_ software package than to give them each a bespoke package, making off-the-peg generally cheaper. But there are other differences.
:)
Projects go on forever either way so multiply by the number of years required
Bespoke app: 10 devs, 1 pm, 1 ba, 2 it people * 20 banks. Total man years: 200 dev, 20 pm, 20 ba, 40 it
Off-the-peg app: 10 devs, 1 pm, 5 bas (minimum, because the software house has to talk to lots of clients), 2 sales. 1 pm, 1 dev & 2 it ppl per bank to do rollout & integration work. Total man years: 30 dev, 21 pm, 5 ba, 2 sales, 40 it.
Now sure, the total spend has decreased. But what's more important is that developers, as a fraction of the spend, are no longer the big slice. Project management, business analysis -- these are BIGGER when development and rollout are spread across companies. The IT burden is roughly the same (IT people, meaning people installing software, plugging things in etc. are cheap anyway).
What this means is that as the market matures, the actual work of development becomes less and less important and the work of managing, selling and integrating what has been developed gets more and more important.
Note that this applies to software development that can be expressed in terms of product, i.e. software which is delivered, installed and supported in a product-like way. There's also a wide world of 'service-like' software development which is subject to very different trends -- e.g. to outsourcing. But that's a story for another post.
It's Masonic, or maybe Theosophist if you prefer. As long as it's in the Capstone, I don't think the actual look of the eye matters much. An Eye of Horus or 'udjat' looks much more gothicky. You can google it easily enough.
Verbs and their subjects have to agree in number in this language. If you left 'such' out of your last sentence, it would be correct because 'were' would be the subjunctive mood. But you didn't, and it isn't, and you don't come across as sounding nearly as grown-up as you hoped.
You don't know what I mean by 'agree in number' and 'subjunctive mood'? I think it's time for some *quiet study time* on the subject of grammar -- to prevent future embarrassment.
'such as it were'?
I hate to join the chorus of people complaining about the 'editors', but... unfortunately, it is getting pretty silly, isn't it? Would it be that hard to just get some reasonably literate person with a bit of spare time and have them edit stuff?
I am surprised whales don't have horns.
You too, huh? I feel the same. It's one of the most surprising things I know. It's just baffling. I'm not even sure I believe it -- it just seems so far-fetched.
Yet amazingly -- it's true! They don't have horns! Unless you glue one or more horns on! Which is very dangerous to you *and* the whale, trust me on that.
And then users say, and they're right to say this:
"Okay, can we have a basic real-time price chart on that?"
"Can you pick up the settings for my main thick-client work application and use those?"
"This is OK for offline work but now that we're using it seriously it has to respond to clicks right away."
"Ok, when we enter the currency pair, the visual display of the curves should update immediately before we enter the price, just as a sanity check."
Of course you can always reply:
"Well, I decided to do this as a CGI script. That meant a bit of a tradeoff whereby it was easy to develop at the time, but we can't really extend it with rich client-side functionality like that."
To which the correct answer is:
"Looks like YOU have a problem!"
Okay, that doesn't ALWAYS happen. But it certainly happens a lot -- if there's any chance that that the solution will be compared to thick-client apps, it's really not a good idea to start with the web. When everyone's lucky, the result is that work starts on a proper client application. When everyone's NOT lucky, the Java applets and DHTML wizardry come out, and you're left supporting and justifying an increasingly complicated solution that's heavy on scripting and net traffic and that's competing with solid (usually C#) client/server apps. Which is a pain.
I agree with your above post except that I would insert 'not' before 'doomed' in the last line.
If we were incapable of finding channels for commerce and amusement in new environments, then yeah, we'd be doomed.
Having said that, if people really buy sex on 2nd life, that's kind of sad. Not because buying sex is sad but because it suggests it's a less positive environment than, say, FurryMUCK was in the last decade.
The word 'innovation' has a funny meaning in OS, doesn't it? Zenoss is a Tivoli clone that now "claims it provides 80% of the functionality of the big offerings". rPath is another virtualizer. Sugar CRM is another CFM system. Linux is a copy of Unix. Even Frozen Bubble is a copy of Puzzle Bobble! They couldn't come up with their own puzzle game??
COM, Java, Civilization -- those were innovative.
Yeah, blah blah blah, linux has more innovation in its little finger that Microsoft has in its whole bloated body, I'm a troll, etc etc.