There is no way that 4-6 people working in their spare time can complete a project like this.
The article says:
David: People usually assume that writing an office suite is very difficult That's not true. _Some_ part of it are difficult (can I say WYSIWYG ?;), but there are many many missing features that are easy to add.
Thomas: It is not too hard to get in. It is written in a Object Oriented language after all. Most stuff is cleanly isolated from the core and well documented. The hard part is getting to know the structures of the applications, but here, we can help. After that, its just programming, which is fun;)
When you get down to it, an office product is really just a collection of different objects that have defined rules for interacting with eachother. You don't have to read all 350,000 lines of code to find a starting point for a new module.
It takes a very long time just to reverse engineer other file formats and build filters.
The article confirms your point on the filters. They mention the filters as the one area where they need the most help. It would be nice to live in the ideal world where the producers of file formats create cleaner documentation, or provide industry standard filters for their formats that you can integrate in a product. Unfortunately, the temptation is to use poorly documented, proprietary formats to create a monopoly position in the market.
I didn't say small groups can handle all projects, just that they can do some things very well. I would agree with the article that filters are a rough edge.
collaboration also has its cost. To make collaboration work you have to devote more time to the logistics of the collaboration than the current team is spending on coding. I love the idea of a team putting out an office suite with 350,000 or less lines of code. The effort has a good chance of capture the fast, efficient niche of the market. PS: I must admit I am envious of the people on the project.
While I wait for the poor slashdotted server to retreive the article, I should mention that the right 4 to 6 people can outperform the wrong 400 person programming department.
Small teams often can focus on the issues at hand and make a more tightly tuned product than the big teams, and if they fail...not as much is lost. This is especially true when you have a good well established foundation onwhich to build.
The scientific community has been fascinated with the topology of indexes long before Google. I can remember in college (1980s) coming across companies that tallied the journal citations on all academic journals and produced various reports on the influence of various writers, and trends. (of course, I went senile and can't remember the names of the organizations.) In any case, the bibliography of an article is often as interesting as its contents. If I ever had any spare time and cash, my plan was to turn y-intercept.com into a place where people could track the citations in different books. In any case, google didn't come up with a new idea, they are just applying an old idea to the web.
I really like the idea of launching class action law suits against spammers...that way every time I receive a spam, it will be followed immediately by emails from lawyers asking if I want to sue the person who spammed me.
Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died.
Come on, give Microsoft a break. When you think about it, dead people know more about grass roots than any of us; so why shouldn't they be part of a grass roots campaign?
When a Communist nation allows scientists greater freedom than a Democracy?
Well, it says is democracies value the freedom of the individual over the state. Communist nations allowed their scientist to experiment and toy with people's lives. Look at all of horrifying and disgusting experiments done on living people by the USSR and Hitler's Germany.
Western nations say that science is supposed to serve people...not that people are lab equipment for scientists, and stem cell research borders on experimentation on people.
It's amazing that they can find planets that quickly,
It's like everything in science...the first one is the hardest. Once you are happy with your mechanism for determining that a blip is a planet; it is just a matter of brute force to replicate the experiment a few million times.
This probably brings up the big ugly question of intellectual property. Does the person who found a new planet get to claim it, or are all of the planets found by a particular technique the property of the person who designed the technique? I am sure lawyers will spend millions of tax dollars deciding such important questions.
Because it is generally faster, and you can easily define relations between the emails to a customer and the customer. For example, my last billing database would show all correspondences with the customer along with their billing history...it was very convenient to have it all in one place. Queries against an indexed database are generally faster and easier to do than a GREP through a ton of flat files.
I am actually surprised by the number of times people send out email not knowing who will receive it or the number of people in their CC list. Most email clients don't let the end user see how much damage they have done. The goal of a developer is to give the users the power to get their job done, but so often you find people are clueless on what the power is or how to use it.
Personally, I would like to see email merge with databases. With a good relational DB, it is easy to show users what's gone through the pipe and how many emails your company has sent to a client, etc.. You can integrate the email into your CRM, etc. You can also place constraints on the system that can prevent this type of mailing list abuse that generates so much unwanted garbage.
Implicit in spam is the idea that the spammer wants to sell you something. Politicians don't sell you anything, they simply take.
On a serious side. Think of all the crap that politicians receive in the mail. The stuff our representatives and senators get make your 80 pieces of spam a day look like a cake walk. For that matter, Tom Daschel gets Anthrax. I would rather get ten thousand offers for a fake university degree than a single bomb.
Let's face it, the mark up on tech goods, internet, etc can no longer justify even an $8.00 an hour Oklahoma worker. Perhaps it is finally time for the tech industry to complete the move over seas.
I think it depends on where you are with a particular language. I studied several languages, and have found really strange things go on inside my head. There seems to be a hierarchy on how well I know the language. English and French live in separate spaces.
When I speak spanish, I revert to French for unknown words. When I try to speak Portuguese, I revert into Spanish. When learning a new language,
the new language seems to start by sharing the memory space of an existing language. Then grandually the mind separates it into its own space.
I also find it extremely interesting how I learn differt computer languages. I programmed in Basic for years before moving to C++, Java, PHP and other languages. When I first started programming in c, I kept trying to do things the Basic way. It took a long time for c to separate into its own space. Oddly enough, when I wanted to learn Java, I was able to separate the two languages more rapidly, as if my brain remembered the problems I had with c and Basic.
I really don't think this phenomena is exclusive to language. When we launch into a new subject, our minds have to decide if it is something completely new (requiring a new memory space) or just a addition to stuff already on file.
Your problem is with the deep pockets law. First I want to show you how to abuse the law. The taxi business has a high liability risk. A cab company might decide to make all of its drivers "independent contractors." The independent contractors would be responsible for their insurance. The independent contractors would be underinsured, etc..
In this scenerio, the taxi cab companies were trying to avoid risk by pushing the risk onto a smaller business that would simply go bankrupt when an accident occurred.
You can imagine a company giving away the troublesome parts of the program for free (to avoid the liability exposure) while selling the stable pieces for a premium. Should MS have to pay for a bug in a free patch, or a free utility they distribute with XP?
In the taxi case, the courts would found the taxi cab company partially liable for the accident. Since they have deep pockets, they ended up paying the full claim.
This deep pocket legislation is quite popular since it prevents companies with deep pockets from spinning off risk into small entities.
Deep pocket litigation has some really bad side effects. Really, in every accident that occurs, you can say the county or city that built the road was partly to blame. This means that counties and cities become the deep pocket in thousands of lawsuits.
In the software world, we would start seeing the same gamesmanship going around if we started flinging billion dollar suits left and right. We would see big companies spawning little companies whose primary purpose is to control risk exposure. Meanwhile, fearing deep pocket litigation, the big companies would stop funding smaller research projects or stop giving code to GPL efforts in fear of become a deep pocket in a suit they really cannot control.
The litigation would not be pretty. The only certainty is that the lawyers would make out like bandits.
Re:Google doesn't accept money, but accepts cheate
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There seems to be an entire industry dedicated to finding ways to cheat search engines...like making the title of the page a long keyword list. This industry really is annoying.
I have noticed that the quality of Google hits has been dropping dramatically as people study these techniques.
DMOZ is one of my favorite engines because people look at the pages at least. Of course, DMOZ is owned by AOL now, and will be subject to the AOL agendas.
Since Google calculates the number of links to different sites in its weight calculation, I try to make sure all of my sites have a rich index to high quality sites, but it seems that promoting quality is an uphill battle.
Personally, I like the overture concept (they used to be Goto.com). Quite frankly, I believe there needs to be some mechanism to monetize the net, and pay per click search engines seems to be a less intrusive mechanism than banner ads.
The main reason I like it is from a game theory perspective. Self organizing systems tend to optimize themselves. In general, web sites will only bid on keywords that are relevant to their service. As a result, the pay per search engines should end up with more relevant results.
That is in theoary. Of course, only
the sites that sell a product can afford a listing on Goto. That means you will see the same
site over and over again, while purely information
sites cannot compete.
Web sites can make a little bit of money from
Goto. You sign up for their engine, then put a link on your site. Overture will pay you $.02 for each paying search from your site. You would have to have 1000 searches from your site to make $20.
They used to pay $.03.
In theory this could be a nice way for small web sites to off set their costs, but like so much of the web, I believe overture has turned its back on the small sites. I believe they pay the larger sites something like $.10 per click and small sites.02.
I prefer to use Google, but I think it is really worthwhile to have a sites that "monetize" the net. When they first opened, the minimum bid was a penny, and they paid three cents for a click. So I made this page and bid a penny on the term "goto". I paid Goto $35 for hits, and made $50 from clicks back to goto. Okay...so maybe the product wasn't quite sustainable for goto at that point. They raised the bid to a nickel, and dropped the payment to $.02...so the game was no longer any fun.
Place bids on Overture, and this will change. A well designed advertising campaign can work. The only problem is that your web site has to have the ability to return more than your advertising campaign...so if you bid a nickel for a keyword, you have to be able to generate at least a nickel from the viewer to stay solvent.
The end result of the bid for placement is that only cashflow positive ecommerce sites can afford the ads. Sites that just give information can not afford the listings.
I threw this book in my to read list. BTW, I've found that people are probably a more important part of your security strategy than just code. Every program I write begins with a security mechanism that drops any anomolies into a database. Severe problems get emailed to an admin or activates their pager. The program does a great job detecting and reporting security breaches, but means squat if no one ever acts on the problems or turns off their pagers. It generally is an uphill battle to get a company to train resources in monitoring their systems, and to give adequate rewards to the admin who gets woken up at 3AM because some one is trying to hack a password in the system.
I always lose the font wars. On many monitors, sans serif fonts are easier on the eye than the default serifed fonts. Serifed fonts are also difficult to read when made tiny. On project after project I get requests to change the font for the few readers who would prefer helvetica but couldn't figure out how to change their browser defaults. The original idea for the web was for the end user to have as much control over their environment as possible, and the web site would concentrate on content.
I always make help menus, definitions of terms and the like popup in small windows. Help pages really aren't that helpful when they cause you to lose track of where you were.
I was thinking the mod up was because of the ironic twist of the article. One of the themes of the rants was that you increased your self worth by displaying someone elses work and adding to the collective pool...so cutting and pasting the article into the/. pool should earn a big mod up...wish I had thought of it.
The best jacket warmer that I know of is small, blonde...requires extensive maintenance and costs about twenty grand a year. Even so, the unit only gets the jacket up to about 98.6...It's a warm heat...
You have a good point. If you wait a year or so, all of the hardware and software companies will redesign their products around the new version so that you can get a somewhat stable server out of the mess.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says:
When you get down to it, an office product is really just a collection of different objects that have defined rules for interacting with eachother. You don't have to read all 350,000 lines of code to find a starting point for a new module.It takes a very long time just to reverse engineer other file formats and build filters.
The article confirms your point on the filters. They mention the filters as the one area where they need the most help. It would be nice to live in the ideal world where the producers of file formats create cleaner documentation, or provide industry standard filters for their formats that you can integrate in a product. Unfortunately, the temptation is to use poorly documented, proprietary formats to create a monopoly position in the market.
I didn't say small groups can handle all projects, just that they can do some things very well. I would agree with the article that filters are a rough edge.
collaboration also has its cost. To make collaboration work you have to devote more time to the logistics of the collaboration than the current team is spending on coding. I love the idea of a team putting out an office suite with 350,000 or less lines of code. The effort has a good chance of capture the fast, efficient niche of the market. PS: I must admit I am envious of the people on the project.
While I wait for the poor slashdotted server to retreive the article, I should mention that the right 4 to 6 people can outperform the wrong 400 person programming department.
Small teams often can focus on the issues at hand and make a more tightly tuned product than the big teams, and if they fail...not as much is lost. This is especially true when you have a good well established foundation onwhich to build.
The scientific community has been fascinated with the topology of indexes long before Google. I can remember in college (1980s) coming across companies that tallied the journal citations on all academic journals and produced various reports on the influence of various writers, and trends. (of course, I went senile and can't remember the names of the organizations.) In any case, the bibliography of an article is often as interesting as its contents. If I ever had any spare time and cash, my plan was to turn y-intercept.com into a place where people could track the citations in different books. In any case, google didn't come up with a new idea, they are just applying an old idea to the web.
I really like the idea of launching class action law suits against spammers...that way every time I receive a spam, it will be followed immediately by emails from lawyers asking if I want to sue the person who spammed me.
It's like trying to fit a round cat through a square hole
Some of the letters supporting Microsoft are from people who have long since died.
Come on, give Microsoft a break. When you think about it, dead people know more about grass roots than any of us; so why shouldn't they be part of a grass roots campaign?
Colonel Steve Austin jumps over security.
When a Communist nation allows scientists greater freedom than a Democracy?
Well, it says is democracies value the freedom of the individual over the state. Communist nations allowed their scientist to experiment and toy with people's lives. Look at all of horrifying and disgusting experiments done on living people by the USSR and Hitler's Germany.
Western nations say that science is supposed to serve people...not that people are lab equipment for scientists, and stem cell research borders on experimentation on people.
This probably brings up the big ugly question of intellectual property. Does the person who found a new planet get to claim it, or are all of the planets found by a particular technique the property of the person who designed the technique? I am sure lawyers will spend millions of tax dollars deciding such important questions.
Because it is generally faster, and you can easily define relations between the emails to a customer and the customer. For example, my last billing database would show all correspondences with the customer along with their billing history...it was very convenient to have it all in one place. Queries against an indexed database are generally faster and easier to do than a GREP through a ton of flat files.
I am actually surprised by the number of times people send out email not knowing who will receive it or the number of people in their CC list. Most email clients don't let the end user see how much damage they have done. The goal of a developer is to give the users the power to get their job done, but so often you find people are clueless on what the power is or how to use it.
Personally, I would like to see email merge with databases. With a good relational DB, it is easy to show users what's gone through the pipe and how many emails your company has sent to a client, etc.. You can integrate the email into your CRM, etc. You can also place constraints on the system that can prevent this type of mailing list abuse that generates so much unwanted garbage.
Working with pure email clients (sendmail, exchange, whatever) seems to be like trying to fit a round cat through a square hole.
Implicit in spam is the idea that the spammer wants to sell you something. Politicians don't sell you anything, they simply take.
On a serious side. Think of all the crap that politicians receive in the mail. The stuff our representatives and senators get make your 80 pieces of spam a day look like a cake walk. For that matter, Tom Daschel gets Anthrax. I would rather get ten thousand offers for a fake university degree than a single bomb.
Let's face it, the mark up on tech goods, internet, etc can no longer justify even an $8.00 an hour Oklahoma worker. Perhaps it is finally time for the tech industry to complete the move over seas.
I think it depends on where you are with a particular language. I studied several languages, and have found really strange things go on inside my head. There seems to be a hierarchy on how well I know the language. English and French live in separate spaces.
When I speak spanish, I revert to French for unknown words. When I try to speak Portuguese, I revert into Spanish. When learning a new language, the new language seems to start by sharing the memory space of an existing language. Then grandually the mind separates it into its own space.
I also find it extremely interesting how I learn differt computer languages. I programmed in Basic for years before moving to C++, Java, PHP and other languages. When I first started programming in c, I kept trying to do things the Basic way. It took a long time for c to separate into its own space. Oddly enough, when I wanted to learn Java, I was able to separate the two languages more rapidly, as if my brain remembered the problems I had with c and Basic.
I really don't think this phenomena is exclusive to language. When we launch into a new subject, our minds have to decide if it is something completely new (requiring a new memory space) or just a addition to stuff already on file.
Your problem is with the deep pockets law. First I want to show you how to abuse the law. The taxi business has a high liability risk. A cab company might decide to make all of its drivers "independent contractors." The independent contractors would be responsible for their insurance. The independent contractors would be underinsured, etc..
In this scenerio, the taxi cab companies were trying to avoid risk by pushing the risk onto a smaller business that would simply go bankrupt when an accident occurred.
You can imagine a company giving away the troublesome parts of the program for free (to avoid the liability exposure) while selling the stable pieces for a premium. Should MS have to pay for a bug in a free patch, or a free utility they distribute with XP?
In the taxi case, the courts would found the taxi cab company partially liable for the accident. Since they have deep pockets, they ended up paying the full claim.
This deep pocket legislation is quite popular since it prevents companies with deep pockets from spinning off risk into small entities.
Deep pocket litigation has some really bad side effects. Really, in every accident that occurs, you can say the county or city that built the road was partly to blame. This means that counties and cities become the deep pocket in thousands of lawsuits.
In the software world, we would start seeing the same gamesmanship going around if we started flinging billion dollar suits left and right. We would see big companies spawning little companies whose primary purpose is to control risk exposure. Meanwhile, fearing deep pocket litigation, the big companies would stop funding smaller research projects or stop giving code to GPL efforts in fear of become a deep pocket in a suit they really cannot control.
The litigation would not be pretty. The only certainty is that the lawyers would make out like bandits.
I have noticed that the quality of Google hits has been dropping dramatically as people study these techniques.
DMOZ is one of my favorite engines because people look at the pages at least. Of course, DMOZ is owned by AOL now, and will be subject to the AOL agendas.
Since Google calculates the number of links to different sites in its weight calculation, I try to make sure all of my sites have a rich index to high quality sites, but it seems that promoting quality is an uphill battle.
Personally, I like the overture concept (they used to be Goto.com). Quite frankly, I believe there needs to be some mechanism to monetize the net, and pay per click search engines seems to be a less intrusive mechanism than banner ads.
.02.
The main reason I like it is from a game theory perspective. Self organizing systems tend to optimize themselves. In general, web sites will only bid on keywords that are relevant to their service. As a result, the pay per search engines should end up with more relevant results.
That is in theoary. Of course, only the sites that sell a product can afford a listing on Goto. That means you will see the same site over and over again, while purely information sites cannot compete.
Web sites can make a little bit of money from Goto. You sign up for their engine, then put a link on your site. Overture will pay you $.02 for each paying search from your site. You would have to have 1000 searches from your site to make $20. They used to pay $.03.
In theory this could be a nice way for small web sites to off set their costs, but like so much of the web, I believe overture has turned its back on the small sites. I believe they pay the larger sites something like $.10 per click and small sites
I prefer to use Google, but I think it is really worthwhile to have a sites that "monetize" the net. When they first opened, the minimum bid was a penny, and they paid three cents for a click. So I made this page and bid a penny on the term "goto". I paid Goto $35 for hits, and made $50 from clicks back to goto. Okay...so maybe the product wasn't quite sustainable for goto at that point. They raised the bid to a nickel, and dropped the payment to $.02...so the game was no longer any fun.
Place bids on Overture, and this will change. A well designed advertising campaign can work. The only problem is that your web site has to have the ability to return more than your advertising campaign...so if you bid a nickel for a keyword, you have to be able to generate at least a nickel from the viewer to stay solvent.
The end result of the bid for placement is that only cashflow positive ecommerce sites can afford the ads. Sites that just give information can not afford the listings.
I threw this book in my to read list. BTW, I've found that people are probably a more important part of your security strategy than just code. Every program I write begins with a security mechanism that drops any anomolies into a database. Severe problems get emailed to an admin or activates their pager. The program does a great job detecting and reporting security breaches, but means squat if no one ever acts on the problems or turns off their pagers. It generally is an uphill battle to get a company to train resources in monitoring their systems, and to give adequate rewards to the admin who gets woken up at 3AM because some one is trying to hack a password in the system.
I always lose the font wars. On many monitors, sans serif fonts are easier on the eye than the default serifed fonts. Serifed fonts are also difficult to read when made tiny. On project after project I get requests to change the font for the few readers who would prefer helvetica but couldn't figure out how to change their browser defaults. The original idea for the web was for the end user to have as much control over their environment as possible, and the web site would concentrate on content.
I always make help menus, definitions of terms and the like popup in small windows. Help pages really aren't that helpful when they cause you to lose track of where you were.
I was thinking the mod up was because of the ironic twist of the article. One of the themes of the rants was that you increased your self worth by displaying someone elses work and adding to the collective pool...so cutting and pasting the article into the /. pool should earn a big mod up...wish I had thought of it.
The best jacket warmer that I know of is small, blonde...requires extensive maintenance and costs about twenty grand a year. Even so, the unit only gets the jacket up to about 98.6...It's a warm heat...
You have a good point. If you wait a year or so, all of the hardware and software companies will redesign their products around the new version so that you can get a somewhat stable server out of the mess.
Of course, SUVs do their worst damage off roads.