The situation with Zune/iPod is no different than the situation with Office/ODF. *More* real choices = better for the consumer and lower prices by all! We need a serious challenger to Apple for no other reason than to force them to cross that final frontier - playing nicely with everyone else (i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM). Once their current feature-set become commoditized, they'll have no choice but to add interoperability as a feature to differentiate themselves.
I hunt for food and use the blood of my kill to jot down the design of my project on the backs of baby turtle shells, each representing a piece of functionality. Then I let them loose on the ground and follow them for days. Those that live through the ordeal will have a hollowed place in my design.
I think you misunderstood the chapter on "shell programming". See this is what happens when you bring these VB6-ers over to the Linux world.:)
Maybe if they made floors all soft and squishy like our sofas, we'd be happier standing? Or better, make computer interfaces use more body parts - standing forever is a pain, but if were doing little tapdances and knee bends the whole day, I bet you could go for hours (okay...maybe not but...).
I know I'm more comfortable standing while working. I even submitted some articles about it to Slashdot. I just wish my employer was more amenable to this.
..one minor detail about Apple's amazing comeback. In 1997, Microsoft gave Apple 150 million dollars in return for...well, not much. I'm sure that nice hunk of cash helped out Apple quite a bit.
It was so that Microsoft could point at someone and claim that they had "competition" and seem less like a monopoly (since public opinion is that monopolies are Bad).
"Kildall was financially well off, but he never achieved either the fame or the wealth that Gates achieved. If Gates had gotten the billion-dollar wealth but Kildall had gotten the fame (for his work on OSes), then Kildall would probably have accepted the outcome. However, Kildall achieved neither the fame nor the wealth. The bitterness drove Kildall to essentially commit suicide by drinking himself to death. He died in a bar."
Anyone one who kills himself for not being rich or famous enough (especially if he's already rich and very famous in certain circles as was Kildall) probably is a miserable person anyway and in need of psychiatric help.
When the IBM PC was introduced, IBM sold the operating system as an unbundled (but necessary) option. One of the operating system options was PC-DOS, priced at US$60. A new port of CP/M, called CP/M-86, was offered a few months later and priced at $240. Largely due to its early availability and the substantial price difference, PC-DOS became the preferred operating system.
You say Gates "ripped off" Kildall. It sounds to me that Gates sold a compelling alternative that was 4 times cheaper and did the job well enough that users didn't care. Kildall was a rich guy who got beat in business by someone who was smarter in this specific instance. Hardly worth killing yourself over. It's time we stopped feeling so sorry for this guy (outside of his obvious need for psychiatric help).
That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.
Eh, I don't know. A site as big as Amazon probably suffers from DOS almost daily. (In fact, an average day of legit traffic for Amazon.com would probably be indistinguishable from a DOS attack for most sites). And I'm sure Amazon has had past promotions that caused traffic surges too. I'm guessing they(including engineering) underestimated the popularity of THIS particular promotion.
I've seen this on a lot of projects. Very often, I end up just listening quietly in meetings, because it's obvious that people aren't communicating very well. Afterwards, I'll type up my analysis and suggestions, and email them. That's where the actual communication takes place. Then management wants a meeting to discuss things, and we have another meeting where people are talking past each other, and again I mostly sit and listen.
This is a HUGE annoyance for me. Too many meetings are dog and pony shows where people use them as a way to look good for bosses by making various unprovable (true or false) promises and statements that are mostly forgotten by the next day. VERY little real communication that will result in anything having an impact happens here simply because a lot of the people listening have no idea what they're listening to and many people talking have no idea what they're talking about. Steering the conversation to something of any depth often make you look to be the Bad Guy and is thankless. However, at the end of the day, Something Has To Be Done and the best way to make that happen is often to nod your head during the meeting and start real communication for Boots On the Ground stuff afterwards.
Looking at the writeup from Nature. They clearly state that these results point to maybe a 0.5% difference among individuals, or 99.5% identical. That's 20X less variation than this crap article would have you believe.
Well, to be fair, the Reuters article states that "One person's DNA code can be as much as 10 percent different from another's", not IS 10% different. That seems to cast the statement in the light of "theorhetical upper limit", rather than "absolute truth".
Aaah, evolution makes life so simple at times. In my younger days (I'm a ripe old 29 now), if a blood sample would bump me to the front of the line at a hot club in LA, I'd have gladly given it up. Thank goodness, I've matured since then.
.
.
.
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hehe, just kidding. I'd still cough up the blood sample.:)
10 hours work 500 bucks 50 bucks an hour thats not much for consulting work. The prices on RAC in general were less that what you can telecommute a contract on dice for.
Not grand theft true, but it ain't THAT bad. If I had the time to spare, I'd take that in a heartbeat (as a side project). If you're planning to live off this though, the trick becomes lining up enough projects to keep a steady income (that's a LOT of 10 hour projects).
..students who are good with math are less likely to be happy, and are likely to have low confidence. From the article "In essence, happiness is overrated" says study author Tom Loveless.
Really? Didn't anyone stop to think that maybe math is overrated?
From a purely economic standpoint, it definitely is as Philip Greenspun shows. So we should absolutely let these foreign kids move over and take the science and math jobs. The pay (mostly) stinks.
However, as I'm sure many will point out, there are other uses for math too, but unless you had some special teachers or mentors, you won't find out about them in the typical public schoo. Of course with guys like Tom Loveless dictating education policy and believing things like "happiness is overrated" and associating that with math, the negativity surrounding math comes as no suprise.
Eh, there's no real "loser" in either scenario...
on
Friendster's Rise and Fall
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The guy (Abrams, founder of friendster) rolled the dice and tried to hold out for something better and, as far as we know, he missed out. Big deal. The guy is probably still extremely well off (if not an outright multi-millionaire) and it seems more than a little silly for us (read: people who will never be offered 1/1000th this amount for anything we produce) to be telling this guy what to do with his toy.
That's life -- sometimes you need to roll the dice to see what happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I personally believe rolling the dice is more fun than always doing the Smart Thing (note: really should be called doing the Average Thing since the Smart Thing seems to be defined as doing what everyone else would do). Unless you're talking about life and death situations, it's really no Big Deal. Silly online networking sites definitely don't count as Big Deals.:)
(Aside: I personally don't believe in "winning" and "losing" when it comes to stuff like this. There's only learning. Anyway, I'll get off my philosophical high horse.:) )
It uses software to attract viewers in the same way television networks use programming and magazines use articles. Under this model, it makes sense to give developers a large amount of freedom to develop whatever they want.
Perfect analogy. This kind of reminds me of Disney during it's heydey under Eisner (before going off the depend), Katzenberg, and Wells. They were flush with cash, money was rolling in, they were growing every quarter, etc, etc. In their case, the animators were the "technical people" being catered to and they were given similiar perks and freedoms. We all know how that ended. There's probably dozens of other similiar examples.
All that is to say this - when you have tons of cash, then you can afford> to create a fairyland for your workers. Everybody is getting paid, everybody is happy. Most assholes become assholes due to fear, which happens when the money starts going away. There is nothing magical about Google in this regard. I'm not trying to bash Google here, but I'm just saying that there's nothing so special about it that it wouldn't collapse if that oversupply of cash disappered overnight. That is to say, MONEY is what makes life at Google possible, not methodologies, lack of timelines or anything like that. When that money goes away, then say goodbye to the locker room towel service.
it's not telling everyone how everyone should work,
Actually, that's exactly what it's saying. Steve really takes no prisoners when describing Agile's "methodology". The problem with Google's methodology is that it works only in the following environments:
1) Open-source software projects.
2) Grad school projects.
3) Google.
These are environments that essentially have unlimited budgets and no "customers". (Here customers are defined as people who seek you out and explicitly pay you to do something, not people who look over something that's prebuilt and decide whether to buy it or not.)
I think Steve has the right idea, but he bashes Agile methodology too heavily. A lot of places have a Methodology known as No Methodology and believe me, Agile, Waterfall, and everything else is better than No Methodology. A lot of smart programmers who claim to have No Methodology actually do have a methodology - they just don't have a label for it. Heck even Google has some controls on the chaos that allows developers to move around different projects at will.
I think the important thing is to not to drink too deeply of the Kool-Aid, regardless of flavor. Blindly following any process does not guarauntee success and, much like Google, always be thinking of things that can improve the process.
Apples going to have problems with this case. Had they acted quickly they might have a case. But they have let the public go around freely using the term Podcast for almost 2 years now. Its too late your trademark has already been dilluted, atleast insomuch as Podcast goes.
Yes, but they couldn't do that. Apple wants the best of both worlds. They couldn't go arounding threatening lawsuits early in iPod's existence as the tech was just taking off because people would become (understandably) ticked and move to the competition. Now that they are the dominant player, they want to flex their muscle and exert control over anything and everything having to do with.*Pod.* to get more money. (Remind you of anyone?)
The whole basis for this lawsuit is absurd anyway. If someone were selling an MP3 Player called a Podcaster, Apple would have a point. But they're going after people selling (or giving away) content. It's ridiculous. (Of course, Apple will get a free pass here since they are officially the good guys.)
Online gambling might be illegal in u.s. This guy is an u.k. citizen, and set up a site IN u.k.
Are americans SO moron that they can conclude they have the right to arrest someone according to their own laws, WHEREAS ALL they NEED to do and HAD to do is to bar all access from u.s. to that u.k. site ? Huh ?
Well your plan for solving this is almost certainly unworkable in the real world. A US version of The Great Wall of China would immediately turn into a fight between the "We-Should-Have-Complete Access-to-the-Net!" vs the "This-Doesn't-Go-Far-Enough!" camps.
These guys are being arrested because billions of untaxed dollars are flowing out of the US and probably because the casino lobby has paid key people in the government to have their foreign competition arrested.
"It shows that Google is one of the few companies like Apple that are succeeding because of their inherent talent. Google knows this and I would encourage them to resist the pressure to devolve into management structures that are having negative effects on tech companies as diverse as SGI, HP, Dell and Microsoft."
I hate to be the black cloud here, but I bet SGI, HP, Dell, and MS were all like Google is now at one point. All were smart companies with flat structures where smart people were making measurable contributions that directly affect the stock price.
But Wall Street is setup so that you have to keep growing or die. You can have a healthy business in any other sense, but if you're not growing then you may as well be dead as far as The Street is concerned. Exhibit A - Microsoft. They have something like 70% profit margins, earn billions of dollars in pure profit every single quarter...yet they are considered a lackluster company and their reflects this perception.
So in order to satisfy Wall Street's appetite for growth companies keep...growing. Often way too fast. Many times this results in bad products in good potential markets, good products in bad markets, and bad products in bad markets. It takes staff to ramp up to develop all these misses. The money made before supports all these misses. You get a few too many of these misses and not only are you not growing anymore, but your bread and butter that once made you a Wall Street darling is now undercut by cheaper competition.
Exhibits B & C - SGI and Dell.
Anyway, right now Google is obviously in a growth phase. But there is nothing THAT new or innovative about what they're doing. (And many of the products people give them credit for was actually purchased by Google as many in this thread have pointed out for Google Earth.) They're just the most recent cool new company (that everyone's heard of) on the tech block.
I'd love to work with/for Google and I think they're a cool company, but a bit of perspective can be useful too.:)
"We all wanted to invite her out with us after work, not JUST because we were trying to score with her, but because we wanted her to be part of the team."
Fixed that.:)
"We never invited her, because we were all worried about sexual harrassment."
Sounds a lot better than "none of us had any balls".:)
Re:A persistant delusion
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And yet I notice that these experts are, coincidentally, also the same
people who use a spell-checker, who ask what terms mean before trying to
use them, who write down what they're going to do before they do it, who
understand what the business context of the work they're doing is, and
who understand the imperfect realities of the workplace. In other words,
they're not natural computer geniuses; they're people who bother to learn
how to do stuff right.
It takes a certain level of talent to see this. Some people assume that just because you ask questions about something (and thus admitting you don't know "everything"), that disqualies you as an expert. This is VERY prevalent in geek circles. I've been in many meetings where people's opinions were discounted because someone admitted to not having memorized some detailed technical nuance, smart programmers (not me, I swear!) were denied jobs because they didn't know some arcande aspect of SQL, or whole business plans that cost real dollers were made with hardly any technical basis in reality (just high level fluff).
Now that said, someone who understands the low level technical nuances and is able to switch between that and the "high level fluff" I just mentioned has a true advantage in any endeaver they undertake.
I think this is a skill that can be learned assuming a person is confident enough in their intelligence, yet humble enough to admit they don't know everything. Few people have that balance, sadly.
But, do you have to be a master to write a symphony? I think not. Was Mozart's first symphony his best? Was it remarkable, if you ignore the fact that it was written by a child? Surely his musical skills were far beyond a normal child his age, but he studied far more than any normal child his age.
Exactly. My own hypothesis is that the reason Mozart was able to do this was because he knew the individual components to writing a symphony. How many other children at that time had this knowledge? You could probably have counted them on two hands. I'm willing to bet any child with the training Mozart had would be able to wire the individual components together to make something that's technically a symphony. Sure it (probably) wouldn't be brilliant by any stretch, but it'd still be a symphony written by a kid.
Oh yeah, I see you orbiting around the earth 24 hours a day 365 days a year, 366 on leapyears, you have plenty of room to talk.
No one is asking the moon to be a workaholic. I know everyone expects her to be Super Moon, but she needs to say "No" every once in a while and take some "me time". Just look what happened to the moon in the opening sequence of "Thundarr the Barbarian". Take heed, moon, take heed.
You, and no one else, can name a single company that attained any sort of monopoly WITHOUT government allowance. They don't exist naturally, they never will.
MS became a monopoly through a combination of intelligence and bad moves by competitors, not by government allowance. How has government allowance made them a monopoly? Unless you define "monopoly" as owning 100% of market share rather than 90%.
If a company gets to the top of their market and corners a large percentage, they have to compete EVERY DAY to keep themselves at the top. This means better prices, better and safer products, more competitive wages, more competitive benefits, and happier customers and employees. Only government destroys these items by enforcing elite-run monopolies to exist without competition.
There are no natural monopolies, only government has the power to create them.
Well, it's been proven that MS has deliberately crippled competing products. Consumers by and large don't care because these competitors die young and they still get decent products at low prices. However, should MS be allowed to cripple competing products like this?
The best "real" world analogy I can think of is imagining a hypothetical world where GM makes tires in addition to selling cars. Suppose they engineer their tires to fall off the axles of Nissans. Now presumably Nissan could simply buy their tires elsewhere, but should GM be allowed to do something like this with no repurcussions? They are essentially deliberately destroying someone's property.
This is essentially what MS did with DR-DOS. While I agree that MS does often provide a good product at a decent price (flamesuit on), they did come up with some pretty interesting shenanigans to get their current monopoly (however, I consider 90%+ market dominance a monopoly).
Slashdot Mirror
The situation with Zune/iPod is no different than the situation with Office/ODF. *More* real choices = better for the consumer and lower prices by all! We need a serious challenger to Apple for no other reason than to force them to cross that final frontier - playing nicely with everyone else (i.e., not forcing their product chain down our throats with restrictive DRM). Once their current feature-set become commoditized, they'll have no choice but to add interoperability as a feature to differentiate themselves.
Additionally,from your linked Wikipedia entry:
You say Gates "ripped off" Kildall. It sounds to me that Gates sold a compelling alternative that was 4 times cheaper and did the job well enough that users didn't care. Kildall was a rich guy who got beat in business by someone who was smarter in this specific instance. Hardly worth killing yourself over. It's time we stopped feeling so sorry for this guy (outside of his obvious need for psychiatric help).Aaah, evolution makes life so simple at times. In my younger days (I'm a ripe old 29 now), if a blood sample would bump me to the front of the line at a hot club in LA, I'd have gladly given it up. Thank goodness, I've matured since then. . . . . hehe, just kidding. I'd still cough up the blood sample. :)
However, as I'm sure many will point out, there are other uses for math too, but unless you had some special teachers or mentors, you won't find out about them in the typical public schoo. Of course with guys like Tom Loveless dictating education policy and believing things like "happiness is overrated" and associating that with math, the negativity surrounding math comes as no suprise.
That's life -- sometimes you need to roll the dice to see what happens. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I personally believe rolling the dice is more fun than always doing the Smart Thing (note: really should be called doing the Average Thing since the Smart Thing seems to be defined as doing what everyone else would do). Unless you're talking about life and death situations, it's really no Big Deal. Silly online networking sites definitely don't count as Big Deals. :)
(Aside: I personally don't believe in "winning" and "losing" when it comes to stuff like this. There's only learning. Anyway, I'll get off my philosophical high horse. :) )
All that is to say this - when you have tons of cash, then you can afford> to create a fairyland for your workers. Everybody is getting paid, everybody is happy. Most assholes become assholes due to fear, which happens when the money starts going away. There is nothing magical about Google in this regard. I'm not trying to bash Google here, but I'm just saying that there's nothing so special about it that it wouldn't collapse if that oversupply of cash disappered overnight. That is to say, MONEY is what makes life at Google possible, not methodologies, lack of timelines or anything like that. When that money goes away, then say goodbye to the locker room towel service.
1) Open-source software projects.
2) Grad school projects.
3) Google.
These are environments that essentially have unlimited budgets and no "customers". (Here customers are defined as people who seek you out and explicitly pay you to do something, not people who look over something that's prebuilt and decide whether to buy it or not.)
I think Steve has the right idea, but he bashes Agile methodology too heavily. A lot of places have a Methodology known as No Methodology and believe me, Agile, Waterfall, and everything else is better than No Methodology. A lot of smart programmers who claim to have No Methodology actually do have a methodology - they just don't have a label for it. Heck even Google has some controls on the chaos that allows developers to move around different projects at will.
I think the important thing is to not to drink too deeply of the Kool-Aid, regardless of flavor. Blindly following any process does not guarauntee success and, much like Google, always be thinking of things that can improve the process.
And if so, where do I sign up?
The whole basis for this lawsuit is absurd anyway. If someone were selling an MP3 Player called a Podcaster, Apple would have a point. But they're going after people selling (or giving away) content. It's ridiculous. (Of course, Apple will get a free pass here since they are officially the good guys.)
These guys are being arrested because billions of untaxed dollars are flowing out of the US and probably because the casino lobby has paid key people in the government to have their foreign competition arrested.
But Wall Street is setup so that you have to keep growing or die. You can have a healthy business in any other sense, but if you're not growing then you may as well be dead as far as The Street is concerned. Exhibit A - Microsoft. They have something like 70% profit margins, earn billions of dollars in pure profit every single quarter...yet they are considered a lackluster company and their reflects this perception.
So in order to satisfy Wall Street's appetite for growth companies keep...growing. Often way too fast. Many times this results in bad products in good potential markets, good products in bad markets, and bad products in bad markets. It takes staff to ramp up to develop all these misses. The money made before supports all these misses. You get a few too many of these misses and not only are you not growing anymore, but your bread and butter that once made you a Wall Street darling is now undercut by cheaper competition.
Exhibits B & C - SGI and Dell.
Anyway, right now Google is obviously in a growth phase. But there is nothing THAT new or innovative about what they're doing. (And many of the products people give them credit for was actually purchased by Google as many in this thread have pointed out for Google Earth.) They're just the most recent cool new company (that everyone's heard of) on the tech block.
I'd love to work with/for Google and I think they're a cool company, but a bit of perspective can be useful too. :)
It takes a certain level of talent to see this. Some people assume that just because you ask questions about something (and thus admitting you don't know "everything"), that disqualies you as an expert. This is VERY prevalent in geek circles. I've been in many meetings where people's opinions were discounted because someone admitted to not having memorized some detailed technical nuance, smart programmers (not me, I swear!) were denied jobs because they didn't know some arcande aspect of SQL, or whole business plans that cost real dollers were made with hardly any technical basis in reality (just high level fluff).
Now that said, someone who understands the low level technical nuances and is able to switch between that and the "high level fluff" I just mentioned has a true advantage in any endeaver they undertake.
I think this is a skill that can be learned assuming a person is confident enough in their intelligence, yet humble enough to admit they don't know everything. Few people have that balance, sadly.
(Wait, the moon IS a chick, isn't it?)
Everyone knows your metabolism slows down after a certain age. Still though, a half hour a day on the treadmill probably wouldn't hurt either.
Well, it's been proven that MS has deliberately crippled competing products. Consumers by and large don't care because these competitors die young and they still get decent products at low prices. However, should MS be allowed to cripple competing products like this?
The best "real" world analogy I can think of is imagining a hypothetical world where GM makes tires in addition to selling cars. Suppose they engineer their tires to fall off the axles of Nissans. Now presumably Nissan could simply buy their tires elsewhere, but should GM be allowed to do something like this with no repurcussions? They are essentially deliberately destroying someone's property .
This is essentially what MS did with DR-DOS. While I agree that MS does often provide a good product at a decent price (flamesuit on), they did come up with some pretty interesting shenanigans to get their current monopoly (however, I consider 90%+ market dominance a monopoly).