Again, instead of saying "Product" or "Service", which is *exactly* what we're discussing here, you'll use the Web 2.0 version, namely "Deliverable".
As somebody else pointed out, this term is much older. Good managers use this term because they're thinking at an abstract level about how work gets done and how to organize people. When I design a system, I often talk about objects, rather than specific things like invoices or customers. Like "deliverable", "object" is an overgeneralization that makes it easier to think about certain things in abstract terms.
Oh, so they're not laid off, they're realigned. But they're still out of work. That's called a euphamism, useful for propaganda.
It may be propaganda, but it's probably just a different focus. When I eat a hamburger, I am funding the bloody death of innocent animals in their prime and having them ground up into little bits just because they are tasty. However, I'm still going to call it eating a hamburger, because that's what I'm after.
I know in my company I've seen a member of another IT group move up fairly quickly and he speaks corporate lingo pretty well. Not to say he doesn't have talent but I can see where his "speaking the jive" helped him along with upper management.
To be fair, the reverse is also true. I spend part of my time developing, and part consulting on development process. A lot of what I do is talking business to the suits and tech to the techies. Both groups are much more suspicious of people who can't speak their language.
Also, there's a difference between talking in business terms and using bullshit corporate jargon. The second is regrettably popular, but many companies minimize it. The first, though, is necessary to rise through the ranks: corporations are there to accomplish business goals, not technical ones.
Bullshit. Some tech terms are well defined and standardised (just like some business terms). [...] Others are ambiguous, vague, domain/language/product dependent or just "defined" differently depending on who you speak to.
Agreed. When programmers talk about things like code quality, maintainability, clarity, and elegance, there's no RFC for those.
Corporate speak is basically the same type of "Rah-Rah" speech you here at Amway/Mary Kay/etc conventions. It's just for pumping up peoples emotions rather than conveying useful information.
I'm not a big fan of corporatespeak or rah-rah bullshit, but a lot of company problems aren't problems of lack of information. A lot of human communication isn't about facts; it's about moods, motivation, and primate dominance dynamics. The book Chimpanzee Politics is a great way for geeks to understand what managers seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time on.
Did anyone happen to consider that, since there are MORE laptops in the world, there might be more thefts?
Yes, you have it just right. Just like the number of thefts, he number of laptops in San Francisco nearly tripled in the space of a year. We're one of those low-tech areas that has just recently gotten into computers because the price has come down.
That squishing sound? Oh, that's nothing; it's just my eyes rolling. They do that sometimes. Pay it no mind.
I don't have the figures (any economists please? google?) but I am pretty sure that the Euro-zone of countries is now similar to North America in its size as a market for products.
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. [...] The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y.
Fantastic idea. Let's start with school spaces, the right to vote, and public offices. You should also talk to the Red Cross about better ways to manage their disaster relief programs. They could have turned a nice profit on Katrina let me tell you.
Hey, Taco! I bid $20 for this guy's account (and any future ones he registers). Forget paid ads or subscriptions: you guys could make a fortune trading STFU.
Kyoto is unecessary, ineffective, and little more than a thinly veiled wealth redistribution scheme.
Kyoto is also the best global effort so far. If the current solution is flawed, the proper response is to improve it, not stand around ignoring the problem. Of course, given the administration's behavior around government debt, personal savings rate, or balance of trade, it's pretty obvious that ignoring long-term problems is an acceptable Bush strategy.
"There's the oft prediction that once their income level rises to Western standards, they will cease to have so many children." And how exactly does their income rise to western standards? Ill tell you. The over consumption of the earths resources, and the over utlilization of otherwise unspoiled lands. Sweet, I can't wait untill all 10 billion of us consume more than we need!!!
There are other ways. Note that despite the moderate cost of energy, US usage of energy per dollar of GDP has been declining. With a proper carbon tax, you'd see that get even better. Also note that first-world economic growth has much more to do with services and information.
There's no reason that growth has to result in American-style resource use. In the same way that third-world countries are skipping over wired telecoms for wireless, they can skip over our obsession with physical stuff and go right for virtual stuff and goods whose status is enhanced by resource efficiency (e.g., the iPod).
Anyone under the age of 30, intelligent enough to use a computer, who intentionally reproduced despite the COMMONLY UNDERSTOOD STATE OF AFFAIRS, should be very, very ashamed of themselves.
I don't think the people who pay attention to the state of the world are the ones that are the problem. We already don't have enough smart, thoughtful people. If they stop reproducing, our species is well and truly fucked.
Actually, Bush has behaved entirely responsibly with regard to global warming.
If you call what he's doing "entirely responsible", what would you call what European countries are up to? Because they are inarguably way ahead on doing something about the problem.
DO NOT do anything 50-50 in your company. 50-50 is the road to misery.
I disagree strongly.
If at the two-person size your company has a lot of power issues, you're screwed no matter what ownership structure you have. For years I happily had a 50/50 partner. We avoided deadlock by a buyout clause: at any point, a partner could declare a price for the company, and the other partner could buy or sell at that price.
There's a terribly written book with some good advice called "The E Myth". The best thing I took from it was to draw up an org chart for the full business, as if it were a 20-50 person company. Then you make sure somebody's name goes in each spot, whether it's a partner or an outside service. That generally gives each person plenty to do and plenty of feeling of control. The CEO position becomes much more nominal, and the 50/50 split and the buyout option keep it that way.
I agree with other posters when they say that for a high-tech startup, the person with the CEO title should be the best shmoozer. The kind of people who are impressed by titles will want to talk to the CEO anyhow, so the CEO might as well enjoy the talking.
I'd argue that Netflix's method wasn't common sense. It was new, bold, and innovative.
However, I still think business method patents are ridiculous. Did the patent make the difference between Netflix succeeding or failing? Not at all. Would the people behind Netflix not have launched without the patent? No way. And that's the point of patents: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
That is a really smart idea. A sufficiently long random token would mean people couldn't fish for attachments, so security is no worse. The rise of WebDAV makes it easy to set up a relationship between your mail server and your web server.
I think the only drawback is that it shifts storage burden from recipient to sender. You'd probably have to put in an expiration policy notice in with the replacement link. Or perhaps mail servers could implement this for inbound email as well, so that you don't have to wait for everybody else to get a clue about big attachments.
Because email wasn't designed to deal with large binary files. It was meant to send text back of forth between two people. Kind of like paper letters, no pictures allowed.
This was true of email in 1986 or so. When MIME came along, I heard this exact complaint about 500k attachments and how they were going to end email as we knew it. Turns out, email still works. Why? Happily, the people making the decisions realized that computers are here to serve people, not the other way around.
There's only one legitimate reason to object to large binary attachments, and that's if your correspondents can't receive massive emails (e.g., dial-ups, mobile phones). But those are now rare enough that the burden of dealing with low-bandwidth is shifting to the client. My mobile phone mail client skips all attachments until I explicitly ask for them.
Sure, it's good when people are smart and polite enough to ask themselves if they really need to email you a CD's worth of data. But technology that's designed only for smart and polite people to use has a pretty limited market.
That's like saying that floppy disks have unlimited storage.
Now that you mention it, an MP3 player built around a 5.25" floppy drive would get serious geek points. At one over-compressed song per floppy, it would be beautifully ridiculous. I think I still have one of those Apple ][ floppy drive cases around, which probably have enough room for batteries and a speaker. Hmmm....
If you're using J2EE/Java EE for simple data-driven web sites a la RoR, then you're probably not the target developer for the Java EE platform.
What the yutzes at Sun missed is that almost every large app starts life as a small app, and the way you learn to code well is by starting small and work up. This has led to a few obvious problems with the J2EE world:
Because the J2EE stuff is a bitch to get started with, fewer people use it than should.
If you start with the heavyweight J2EE stuff because you hope for high volume but don't get it, you end up paying a lot of money that you never needed to spend.
Competitors who start with something like ROR are more likely to beat you to market, meaning that choosing J2EE makes it less likely you will need J2EE's expandability.
People who start life coding on J2EE can't code worth a damn; they get so used to everything being difficult, slow, and mysterious that they never notice that their own code is difficult, slow, and mysterious.
And that's leaving aside that the most enterprise-ish portion of J2EE, EJB, has never come close to living up to its promise. Sun finally admitted that with EJB3, where they basically replaced it with an open-source package.
There's no reason that Java couldn't have birthed Rails, other than that Sun cares very little about enabling day-to-day development. Want to write a quick command-line Java app? Too bad, because Java takes 100 times as long to do "Hello World" as Ruby or Perl. Want to do multiple inheritance or mix-ins? Sorry, Sun thinks you're not smart enough. You find Java awkward for writing certain kinds of code? Tough. Better use some super-complicated framework with a zillion XML files. Need a quick scripting language or to evaluate a bit of code? Sorry, Charlie.
Java 1.5 was basically C# forcing Sun to briefly pay attention to developers. Perhaps the RoR movement will get Sun to pull their head out of the collective ass of the Fortune 500 and make Java 1.7 another release that tries to catch up with the competition's superior ease of development.
One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love, and if you make a couple extra dollars, that's a bonus.
This is completely true. I wrote a 30-page chapter for a book, and got paid $200 for my hundred hours of work. A friend who wrote a 500+ page book did better: he almost made $4 per hour on his time.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, instead of saying "Product" or "Service", which is *exactly* what we're discussing here, you'll use the Web 2.0 version, namely "Deliverable".
As somebody else pointed out, this term is much older. Good managers use this term because they're thinking at an abstract level about how work gets done and how to organize people. When I design a system, I often talk about objects, rather than specific things like invoices or customers. Like "deliverable", "object" is an overgeneralization that makes it easier to think about certain things in abstract terms.
Oh, so they're not laid off, they're realigned. But they're still out of work. That's called a euphamism, useful for propaganda.
It may be propaganda, but it's probably just a different focus. When I eat a hamburger, I am funding the bloody death of innocent animals in their prime and having them ground up into little bits just because they are tasty. However, I'm still going to call it eating a hamburger, because that's what I'm after.
I know in my company I've seen a member of another IT group move up fairly quickly and he speaks corporate lingo pretty well. Not to say he doesn't have talent but I can see where his "speaking the jive" helped him along with upper management.
To be fair, the reverse is also true. I spend part of my time developing, and part consulting on development process. A lot of what I do is talking business to the suits and tech to the techies. Both groups are much more suspicious of people who can't speak their language.
Also, there's a difference between talking in business terms and using bullshit corporate jargon. The second is regrettably popular, but many companies minimize it. The first, though, is necessary to rise through the ranks: corporations are there to accomplish business goals, not technical ones.
Bullshit. Some tech terms are well defined and standardised (just like some business terms). [...] Others are ambiguous, vague, domain/language/product dependent or just "defined" differently depending on who you speak to.
Agreed. When programmers talk about things like code quality, maintainability, clarity, and elegance, there's no RFC for those.
Corporate speak is basically the same type of "Rah-Rah" speech you here at Amway/Mary Kay/etc conventions. It's just for pumping up peoples emotions rather than conveying useful information.
I'm not a big fan of corporatespeak or rah-rah bullshit, but a lot of company problems aren't problems of lack of information. A lot of human communication isn't about facts; it's about moods, motivation, and primate dominance dynamics. The book Chimpanzee Politics is a great way for geeks to understand what managers seem to spend a disproportionate amount of their time on.
Did anyone happen to consider that, since there are MORE laptops in the world, there might be more thefts?
Yes, you have it just right. Just like the number of thefts, he number of laptops in San Francisco nearly tripled in the space of a year. We're one of those low-tech areas that has just recently gotten into computers because the price has come down.
That squishing sound? Oh, that's nothing; it's just my eyes rolling. They do that sometimes. Pay it no mind.
SF itself houses only 744,230 (give or take).
And only circa 300,000 of them are in coffeeshops working on laptops at any one time.
A quick Google search gets me a bunch of comparisons, including 2003 GDP:
There seems to be a special place in the liberal heart for the notion of queues and everyone lining up for their "fair share" of whatever is being doled out. [...] The point of all this is that the market has demonstrated time and again that queuing and rationing ultimately fail to satisfy anyone as somebody will always get the short end of the stick even though they would have paid more for item x than item y.
Fantastic idea. Let's start with school spaces, the right to vote, and public offices. You should also talk to the Red Cross about better ways to manage their disaster relief programs. They could have turned a nice profit on Katrina let me tell you.
Hey, Taco! I bid $20 for this guy's account (and any future ones he registers). Forget paid ads or subscriptions: you guys could make a fortune trading STFU.
At an auction, or any time multiple parties are competing to buy something. From TFA:
GSM uses TDMA, and has also been noted for interference to hearing aids. The solution is to properly shield the speakers and speaker wire.
Ah, that's why grandpa wears a tinfoil hat.
Kyoto is unecessary, ineffective, and little more than a thinly veiled wealth redistribution scheme.
Kyoto is also the best global effort so far. If the current solution is flawed, the proper response is to improve it, not stand around ignoring the problem. Of course, given the administration's behavior around government debt, personal savings rate, or balance of trade, it's pretty obvious that ignoring long-term problems is an acceptable Bush strategy.
"There's the oft prediction that once their income level rises to Western standards, they will cease to have so many children." And how exactly does their income rise to western standards? Ill tell you. The over consumption of the earths resources, and the over utlilization of otherwise unspoiled lands. Sweet, I can't wait untill all 10 billion of us consume more than we need!!!
There are other ways. Note that despite the moderate cost of energy, US usage of energy per dollar of GDP has been declining. With a proper carbon tax, you'd see that get even better. Also note that first-world economic growth has much more to do with services and information.
There's no reason that growth has to result in American-style resource use. In the same way that third-world countries are skipping over wired telecoms for wireless, they can skip over our obsession with physical stuff and go right for virtual stuff and goods whose status is enhanced by resource efficiency (e.g., the iPod).
Anyone under the age of 30, intelligent enough to use a computer, who intentionally reproduced despite the COMMONLY UNDERSTOOD STATE OF AFFAIRS, should be very, very ashamed of themselves.
I don't think the people who pay attention to the state of the world are the ones that are the problem. We already don't have enough smart, thoughtful people. If they stop reproducing, our species is well and truly fucked.
Actually, Bush has behaved entirely responsibly with regard to global warming.
If you call what he's doing "entirely responsible", what would you call what European countries are up to? Because they are inarguably way ahead on doing something about the problem.
DO NOT do anything 50-50 in your company. 50-50 is the road to misery.
I disagree strongly.
If at the two-person size your company has a lot of power issues, you're screwed no matter what ownership structure you have. For years I happily had a 50/50 partner. We avoided deadlock by a buyout clause: at any point, a partner could declare a price for the company, and the other partner could buy or sell at that price.
There's a terribly written book with some good advice called "The E Myth". The best thing I took from it was to draw up an org chart for the full business, as if it were a 20-50 person company. Then you make sure somebody's name goes in each spot, whether it's a partner or an outside service. That generally gives each person plenty to do and plenty of feeling of control. The CEO position becomes much more nominal, and the 50/50 split and the buyout option keep it that way.
I agree with other posters when they say that for a high-tech startup, the person with the CEO title should be the best shmoozer. The kind of people who are impressed by titles will want to talk to the CEO anyhow, so the CEO might as well enjoy the talking.
So a common-sense business method is patentable?
I'd argue that Netflix's method wasn't common sense. It was new, bold, and innovative.
However, I still think business method patents are ridiculous. Did the patent make the difference between Netflix succeeding or failing? Not at all. Would the people behind Netflix not have launched without the patent? No way. And that's the point of patents: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Personally, I think the best solution is for the outbound email servers (SMTP) to identify and remove large attachments, replacing them with a URL to obtain the file via http(s).
That is a really smart idea. A sufficiently long random token would mean people couldn't fish for attachments, so security is no worse. The rise of WebDAV makes it easy to set up a relationship between your mail server and your web server.
I think the only drawback is that it shifts storage burden from recipient to sender. You'd probably have to put in an expiration policy notice in with the replacement link. Or perhaps mail servers could implement this for inbound email as well, so that you don't have to wait for everybody else to get a clue about big attachments.
Because email wasn't designed to deal with large binary files. It was meant to send text back of forth between two people. Kind of like paper letters, no pictures allowed.
This was true of email in 1986 or so. When MIME came along, I heard this exact complaint about 500k attachments and how they were going to end email as we knew it. Turns out, email still works. Why? Happily, the people making the decisions realized that computers are here to serve people, not the other way around.
There's only one legitimate reason to object to large binary attachments, and that's if your correspondents can't receive massive emails (e.g., dial-ups, mobile phones). But those are now rare enough that the burden of dealing with low-bandwidth is shifting to the client. My mobile phone mail client skips all attachments until I explicitly ask for them.
Sure, it's good when people are smart and polite enough to ask themselves if they really need to email you a CD's worth of data. But technology that's designed only for smart and polite people to use has a pretty limited market.
That's like saying that floppy disks have unlimited storage.
Now that you mention it, an MP3 player built around a 5.25" floppy drive would get serious geek points. At one over-compressed song per floppy, it would be beautifully ridiculous. I think I still have one of those Apple ][ floppy drive cases around, which probably have enough room for batteries and a speaker. Hmmm....
And here I thought capitalism was an economic system. Silly me! It must be the defining term of my society. My bad.
You said it. Fundamentalist capitalists are even more annoying than fundamentalist Christians.
As I've written before, the only way this spam stuff will be sorted out is when they redesign the SMTP protocol.
They? On the internet, it's "we". If you think you know how it should be done, why not hop to it? I'd bet you'll find it's harder than you think.
What the yutzes at Sun missed is that almost every large app starts life as a small app, and the way you learn to code well is by starting small and work up. This has led to a few obvious problems with the J2EE world:
And that's leaving aside that the most enterprise-ish portion of J2EE, EJB, has never come close to living up to its promise. Sun finally admitted that with EJB3, where they basically replaced it with an open-source package.
There's no reason that Java couldn't have birthed Rails, other than that Sun cares very little about enabling day-to-day development. Want to write a quick command-line Java app? Too bad, because Java takes 100 times as long to do "Hello World" as Ruby or Perl. Want to do multiple inheritance or mix-ins? Sorry, Sun thinks you're not smart enough. You find Java awkward for writing certain kinds of code? Tough. Better use some super-complicated framework with a zillion XML files. Need a quick scripting language or to evaluate a bit of code? Sorry, Charlie.
Java 1.5 was basically C# forcing Sun to briefly pay attention to developers. Perhaps the RoR movement will get Sun to pull their head out of the collective ass of the Fortune 500 and make Java 1.7 another release that tries to catch up with the competition's superior ease of development.
People who dress and look freaky do it for a reason -- because they ARE freaky.
And it turns out that creativity and freakiness are related. Read Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament for more information. It's no accident that the SF Bay Area is both known for being accepting of freaks and is the heart of the high-tech industry.
One of the things that he stressed is that there is no money in writing books - you do it essentially for the love, and if you make a couple extra dollars, that's a bonus.
This is completely true. I wrote a 30-page chapter for a book, and got paid $200 for my hundred hours of work. A friend who wrote a 500+ page book did better: he almost made $4 per hour on his time.