I think the quote from Heisenberg in the article is particularly interesting:
"We definitely did not want to get into this bomb business," said Heisenberg. "I wouldn't like to idealize this; we did this also for our personal safety. We thought that the probability that this would lead to atomic bombs during the War was nearly zero. If we had done otherwise, and if many thousand people had been put to work on it and then if nothing had been developed, this could have had extremely disagreeable consequences for us."
In other words, simple-minded tyrants think that the best way to motivate people is to say, "Make this happen or die." (And less powerful but just as simple-minded people in the workplace use "Make this happen or lose your job.") But one result is that no one is willing to suggest the idea of anything moderately risky, for fear that they'll be put to work on making that happen, and punished when it can't be done.
Well, in my experience what's annoying about closed source software is that you can't solve your own problems. I've reported quite a few defects and gotten quite a few of them fixed, but when you're working with a large vendor just getting through the support organization, down to development and back out through the normal release process means the implementation project is normally over before you get it. There's also a hotfix process but that creates its own headaches both in getting it, running other support cases on the same module and getting rid of it when it's rolled into a normal release.
I think this is where the article misrepresents ESR's statement. If you look at the context, the quote was never meant to imply, "There are more people doing security-focused code review." In context, it meant that there are more people willing and able to look at a bug that's reported. If you have a problem, and post it to the mailing list of an active project in the right way, you're likely to get a dozen or so independent people looking for what the problem is, and getting a fix within a day or two.
The author also unfairly shifts perspective a bit too. He talks about reviewing tons of *old* code; what he doesn't talk about is the potential review of *new* code as it's generated. I think he's probably right that old code isn't going to get reviewed unless someone is paid to do it. But the structure of open-source makes it likely that in a big project, *new* code will at least get glanced at by 2-3 people; and big new features will get the attention of probably a few dozen. Obviously "glanced at by at least 2-3" and "the attention of a few dozen" is a lot less than "millions of eyeballs"; but at least it's structurally more than most closed-source projects.
That said, OSS projects are definitely weak in the area of security code review. Security bugs are generally the kind that never get tripped by normal users.
Plagiarize and copy are obvious, but I never heard of asking for help on homework being cheating. How else does one learn ?
If you didn't get the concept in class, you are out of luck, that's it ?
Yeah, my first 2 years I did a lot of problem sets working with other people. It was really working *with*: we all tried the problem on our own, and then talked about things if/when we got stuck, and compared answers. I was surprised when, in my 3rd year, I suggested getting together and doing the same and the person gave me a funny look and said, "Well, that's cheating isn't it?" We all knew that the problem sets weren't going to be as big in our grade as the exams, where we'd be totally on our own, so everyone was really motivated to actually learn the material.
But some of my friends (in other disciplines) would get together and "share out" problem: I'll do 1-2, you do 3-4, and he'll do 5-6, then we'll copy each other's answers. Obviously not the same thing.
At my school, the statement we signed at each exam was "I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid, nor have I concealed any violations of the honor code." (Emphasis mine.) The "unauthorized" was key: some teachers authorized books, notes, and papers from class; one even authorized "internet connections" (though I assume he meant web pages, not IM).
The nice thing about accepting real computer programs is that it's very easy to 1) change the definition sufficiently year-to-year so that last year's solution won't work out of the box, and 2) it's easy to run analysis on the programs to find similarities between students' submissions.
I think prison is bad enough; and if you make it really terrible, then you get screwed up people coming out the other end.
Also, it may be that you actually get a lot of enjoyment and refreshment out of "educational reading", and don't particularly enjoy football. But not everyone is of that bent: Imagine being sent to a prison where you *weren't* allowed educational reading, but *only* playing football. A little bit of "release" can change an unpleasant situation from unbearable to bearable.
Disclaimer: I'm certainly no expert, but I have visited a prison at least once.:-)
As the article noted, lots of games might come under their "mimics gang structure" argument:
By this “reasoning,” you could ban the “cooperative game” of football because “during football games, one player is denoted the ‘quarterback.’ The quarterback is tasked with giving directions to other players.”
Cost-per-line is a patently bad way to compute the worth of code or value of a coder. Knowing what to code is more important then just writing the code. Features implemented or bugs fixed is probably a better measure.
I think the last several bug-fixes I've checked in have been less than 3 lines. Each time it took me a week or two of tracking things down to find the subtle race that was being triggered, and another day of hard thinking to find the "right" way to fix it, and another day or two of testing to make sure the fix worked right. Given my pay, those changes cost thousands of dollars per line. But given the effect, it's well worth it to my company. I mostly work on a very mature product, so even adding new features is mostly about careful thinking of the "best" way to do it, rather than writing bulk code from scratch.
And if I want to log in from somewhere other than the computer I made the password on? Or if I make the password in Linux, and then want to log in when I'm in Windows? Or if someone manages to get ahold of my laptop / get some malware on it?
This method allows me to have:
Physical security. I'm not a spy, so the set of people who want to steal my password are people much less likely to be able to pick my pocket than break into my computer.
Not tied to a specific computer, so I can type in the password from anywhere.
Physically backed up in a way that won't deteriorate for hundreds of years.
The only disadvantage so far is one site (albeit a very high-level one) that doesn't like the base character set.:-)
On a related note, what pisses me off even more is going to a website and trying to use a strong password and their system doesn't allow it.
Tell me about it. I got a good idea from a slashdot comment about a way to easily have secure, diverse passwords for my websites: use a password generator to make a grid of passwords, and devise a mapping from the website name onto the grid. Print the grid on a business-card size sheet. Put a photocopy in your wallet, and the original somewhere you will absolutely not lose it. (I put mine with my passport folder.) Instant, close-to-unique, strong passwords for each site without memorization, ready on-demand.
But the federal tax payment system, of all people, won't allow some of the characters. Oh, they require some characters, like $ or %. But forbid others, like ) and;. (Afraid of an SQL injection attack, perhaps?) *sigh*
But in theory, raising money for his heirs might have been a motivating factor for him to have written it originally... if the current laws had been in place at the time.:-)
In regions with lots of sunlight, evolution selects against this mutation because it kills more than it saves (you aren't likely to be short of vitamin D in the middle of Africa, but you are likely to develop skin cancer).
Or what's probably more important for selection (since you won't get skin cancer until you've had a chance to procreate): get sun poisoning (vitamin D overdose).
I was raised in the North and spent all summer in the sun, never had a problem. Twice went to the beach in Virginia, got raging mad sick both times due to vitamin D poisoning. Now I'm a lot more careful.
Heh -- don't miss the "bunch of extra money" condition. If you both just lost your jobs because you were bragging too much about winning the lottery, or because the company you started without venture capital was bought out for $10M, and you aren't too busy with travelling the world, looking for second homes in tropical locations, or what-not, then yeah, might be a convenient time to have kids.:-)
Perhaps I should have said, "There's never a convenient time." Friends have said the same regarding children: there's never a time in your life when you say, "Right, we seem to have a bunch of extra money, lots of free time, way too much sleep, and nothing much to do. The perfect time to fill it with children!" Obviously some times are worse than others, but in the end you just have to do it and deal with the inconvenience. (Assuming, of course, that it's something you want to do.)
And like renewable energy / carbon emissions (related but actually separate ideas), there is a time factor: wait too long, and things become much more inconvenient; wait longer, and things become impossible.
Please, I beg you, start reading up on how governments have failed their people (in every country) again and again and again throughout history.
Well obviously governments fail -- just like markets. You seem to be making a false dichotomy here: either trust the government to do everything (Mao cultural-revolution style, where they replaced money with "chits" for individual goods, and regulated the production of everything), or trust the market to do everything (with the backdoor of saying they need to be "regulated" to avoid any criticism). Isn't it possible that both governments, and markets sometimes "work" and sometimes screw things up in a major way? Wouldn't it make sense to look at when they work the way we want, and when they don't, and use them each according to their strengths?
If the market "worked", wouldn't it have compensated for the government intervention with mortgages? On the contrary, the market did what markets do: optimize for whatever inputs are put into them. The government definitely didn't tell the markets to invent complicated derivatives that no one could understand and erroneously value them: the markets (or more accurately, the people in the markets) did that on their own.
In any case, as I said before, the Minnesota tax on carbon emissions (not on energy!) is an attempt to use the market to solve a problem. The fact that they're using a tax to do things economically, rather than simply passing laws about what you must / may not do, means that they do believe in the "free market" to solve problems and come up with the best solution.
Well, free markets do something. But saying they "work" is a bit dodgy. What, exactly is it that they do? Are you trying to say that a free market will always give the greatest amount of happiness, over the course of the rest of our species lifetime, to the greatest number of people? I think that's pretty obviously bullshit.
Morever, markets are well known to fail (meaning, "reach a conclusion we as a society don't like") under certain conditions. Externalities is a classic example, and carbon emissions is an externality. Since carbon-neutral is the only sustainable solution, the actual cost of dumping carbon into the air is either the cost of the damage done to the environment by it for as long as it's in the air (probably several hundred years at least), or the cost of removing it from the atmosphere. Both are pretty darned expensive; I'd be willing to bet it's a lot less than Minnesota's tax is.
So taxing the externality is really a way of making the market come to the truly optimal solution, taking into account true cost of the externality that is now conveniently free.
When we actually are in danger of running out, people will start to change over.
That's awful lot of faith you're having in people making the right prediction. If, as a whole, people are too optimistic about how long the fossil fuels will last, or about how quickly we'll be able to develop new technologies, we're totally screwed. "Market adjustment" here may mean mass starvation, anarchy, and cannibalism, until "the market adjusts" so that the number of mouths to feed is equal to the amount of food available to feed them. Almost this exact situation has already happened several times. Read "Collapse", by Jared Diamond, for a detailed investigation of how it happening to the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi Indians, and the Greenland Norse.
If you want me to believe that the market somehow won't fall into this trap of over-optimism, preventing us from investing in alternate energy sources until it's too late, you're going to have to have a bit more than a simplistic a-priori argument. The only evidence I've seen, including the recent financial crisis, leads me to believe exactly the opposite.
And what would you say when the economy is booming? And risk being accused of stopping a big boom and putting us into a recession?
The fact is there is no good time to switch away from a cheap, well-established source of energy. But if we don't start doing it soon, when that source runs out, we won't have the technology or the infrastructure to replace it. And that would truly be a disaster of epic proportions. So I say kudos to Minnesota for trying. No doubt they'll make some mistakes and learn from them, to the benefit of everyone.
I so badly want to see the FTC slap Apple with fines every day until they open the iPhone up to apps sold outside the app store without Apple vetting. That is the only action that sets a strong enough precedent that consumers are in charge of devices that they paid for and have a right to tinker.
Why don't you just buy a different phone, one that allows you to tinker? They do exist.
I suppose only allowing natural persons to have copyright would be a nice start.
How would that work for things like, say, Microsoft Windows? Photoshop? AutoCAD? Software is covered under copyright; taking away corporate copyright would completely trash the software industry at this point.
I've had a little check-box next to my front page on Slashdot for months that says "Disable Advertising: As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising." I haven't checked it because the ads are in good taste, and some of them are actually interesting. Similarly, I often look at the ads I get in gmail, because the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher than normal advertising; there's probably a 5% chance that any ad will be at least mildly interesting, rather than < 1%.
I don't understand what people who make invasive ads are thinking. Is there anyone who, when reading an article and some random thing blocks out the whole screen and starts giving you ads, doesn't feel annoyed? And once being annoyed, is there anyone who doesn't just click the "close window" button without even looking at the ad? If you need to shout and scream at people to get them to look at you, then you're selling the wrong thing. Find out what people actually need/want, and you won't have any trouble getting people to buy.
Actually, I think the most important thing is to understand what you need from a system. For that, I'd recommend Getting Things Done, by David Allen. Very practical, common-sense way to think about all the things that need to be done in your life, and how to actually make them happen. I wish I'd had it when I was an engineering student; when I went into the workforce, and I started to have more "open loops" than I could keep up with, it was a lifesaver.
The book itself is technology agnostic (he actually uses folders and pieces of paper), but there are a number of software products that use the GTD methodology, including GTD self-editing wikis (free) and Omnifocus (which I haven't used, but have heard good things about). Different workflow tools like bug / issue trackers can be set up in similar ways.
As most technical people are very aware, if I'm selling a product in a marketplace where a virtually identical product is available, I need to add value in order to get people to purchase through me instead of the competition. Adding value for movie studios is easy. They are selling legal copies and supporting the people who made the movies. The added value is already there. However, to add value, they need to provide an equivalent experience.
Imainge if when you bought a DVD, it had no copy restrictions, it contained on it versions formatted for copying to a hard drive and for various smaller players (such as the iPhone), and instead of the "FBI WARNING: IF U STEEL THIS WE'LL COME AND GET YOU" (which only people who have already paid see), you saw one of the main actors saying, "Hi, this is Denzel Washington. I realize that you could have downloaded this illegally, so I just want to express my personal thanks to you for supporting the movie industry by opting to pay for this DVD instead. Please enjoy the show."
Piracy would probably only go down a few percent, but you could probably sell the DVDs, but overall DVD sales would grow, because people would be happy buying a DVD, instead of feeling screwed (as I always do).
I agree. Management or business can actually be very interesting. If you find you like it, you may be good at it; and having been a technical person, you'll bring a different perspective and an analytical method to it. However, it's a totally different job, and just because you're good at what you have been doing doesn't mean you'll be any good at what they're asking you to do.
If you think it's worth giving a try, I really suggest reading First Break All the Rules. It's a book based on 25 years of research correlating what good managers said to actual business outcomes. It may also help you decide whether your new job is something you want to stick with, or whether you want to move back to something technical.
Otherwise, join a company that has a technical track where people can grow in seniority without changing their jobs.
I think the best advice I ever saw on presentations was to start with asking, "What's my goal? What am I trying to accomplish here?" A lot of people's goal is to "talk about [foo]", and that's exactly what they do: they put a bunch of [foo] on slides, and talk about it. The thing is, they could have done that in their basement and been successful. Your goal in giving a talk with other people present should be to change the listener somehow: to inform them of something, to help them understand something, to persuade them of something, to entertain them, to make them think. Otherwise they didn't really need to be there.
The last two conference presentations I've done, after a "hook" intro, I put up a "goals" slide, and said, "At the end of this presentation, I want you to know that..." and I had three or four points. Then I put up my outline; "To do that, I'm going to talk about these subjects." Then, away we go. Cover the material, but only the material that is necessary to reach those goals presented at the beginning. Other material can be found in the paper. Then at the end, put up the outline slide to review, and end with the goals slide to remind them (and myself, as I'm preparing) what my point was.
Explicitly listing the goals isn't suitable for every talk, but having goals (stated or not) is a prerequisite for any effective talk.
Himmelstein said that only a handful of hospitals and clinics realized even modest savings and increased efficiency -- and those hospitals custom-built their systems after computer system architects conducted months of research.
He pointed to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Latter Day Saints Hospital in Salt Lake City and Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis as facilities with some success in deploying efficient e-health systems. That's because they were intuitive and aimed at clinicians, not administrators.
Programmers of the successful systems told Himmelstein that they didn't write manuals or offer training. "If you need a manual, then the system doesn't work. If you need training, the system doesn't work," he said.
In other words, computers are not a magic bullet. They only work well when you actually invest the time to find out what you need them to do, and then make them do that.
But you don't do that in other jobs. At Chrysler I'm sure that the people who design the cars and the people who set up and maintain the machinery aren't both called "mechanics". And I don't think at GE the people who design electrical parts for the company and the people who install them in their building are called "electricians". They're not grouped together at all, because it's understood they're doing completely different things. Why should computers be different?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the quote from Heisenberg in the article is particularly interesting:
In other words, simple-minded tyrants think that the best way to motivate people is to say, "Make this happen or die." (And less powerful but just as simple-minded people in the workplace use "Make this happen or lose your job.") But one result is that no one is willing to suggest the idea of anything moderately risky, for fear that they'll be put to work on making that happen, and punished when it can't be done.
I think this is where the article misrepresents ESR's statement. If you look at the context, the quote was never meant to imply, "There are more people doing security-focused code review." In context, it meant that there are more people willing and able to look at a bug that's reported. If you have a problem, and post it to the mailing list of an active project in the right way, you're likely to get a dozen or so independent people looking for what the problem is, and getting a fix within a day or two.
The author also unfairly shifts perspective a bit too. He talks about reviewing tons of *old* code; what he doesn't talk about is the potential review of *new* code as it's generated. I think he's probably right that old code isn't going to get reviewed unless someone is paid to do it. But the structure of open-source makes it likely that in a big project, *new* code will at least get glanced at by 2-3 people; and big new features will get the attention of probably a few dozen. Obviously "glanced at by at least 2-3" and "the attention of a few dozen" is a lot less than "millions of eyeballs"; but at least it's structurally more than most closed-source projects.
That said, OSS projects are definitely weak in the area of security code review. Security bugs are generally the kind that never get tripped by normal users.
Yeah, my first 2 years I did a lot of problem sets working with other people. It was really working *with*: we all tried the problem on our own, and then talked about things if/when we got stuck, and compared answers. I was surprised when, in my 3rd year, I suggested getting together and doing the same and the person gave me a funny look and said, "Well, that's cheating isn't it?" We all knew that the problem sets weren't going to be as big in our grade as the exams, where we'd be totally on our own, so everyone was really motivated to actually learn the material.
But some of my friends (in other disciplines) would get together and "share out" problem: I'll do 1-2, you do 3-4, and he'll do 5-6, then we'll copy each other's answers. Obviously not the same thing.
At my school, the statement we signed at each exam was "I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid, nor have I concealed any violations of the honor code." (Emphasis mine.) The "unauthorized" was key: some teachers authorized books, notes, and papers from class; one even authorized "internet connections" (though I assume he meant web pages, not IM).
The nice thing about accepting real computer programs is that it's very easy to 1) change the definition sufficiently year-to-year so that last year's solution won't work out of the box, and 2) it's easy to run analysis on the programs to find similarities between students' submissions.
I think prison is bad enough; and if you make it really terrible, then you get screwed up people coming out the other end.
Also, it may be that you actually get a lot of enjoyment and refreshment out of "educational reading", and don't particularly enjoy football. But not everyone is of that bent: Imagine being sent to a prison where you *weren't* allowed educational reading, but *only* playing football. A little bit of "release" can change an unpleasant situation from unbearable to bearable.
Disclaimer: I'm certainly no expert, but I have visited a prison at least once. :-)
As the article noted, lots of games might come under their "mimics gang structure" argument:
I think the last several bug-fixes I've checked in have been less than 3 lines. Each time it took me a week or two of tracking things down to find the subtle race that was being triggered, and another day of hard thinking to find the "right" way to fix it, and another day or two of testing to make sure the fix worked right. Given my pay, those changes cost thousands of dollars per line. But given the effect, it's well worth it to my company. I mostly work on a very mature product, so even adding new features is mostly about careful thinking of the "best" way to do it, rather than writing bulk code from scratch.
And if I want to log in from somewhere other than the computer I made the password on? Or if I make the password in Linux, and then want to log in when I'm in Windows? Or if someone manages to get ahold of my laptop / get some malware on it?
This method allows me to have:
The only disadvantage so far is one site (albeit a very high-level one) that doesn't like the base character set. :-)
Tell me about it. I got a good idea from a slashdot comment about a way to easily have secure, diverse passwords for my websites: use a password generator to make a grid of passwords, and devise a mapping from the website name onto the grid. Print the grid on a business-card size sheet. Put a photocopy in your wallet, and the original somewhere you will absolutely not lose it. (I put mine with my passport folder.) Instant, close-to-unique, strong passwords for each site without memorization, ready on-demand.
But the federal tax payment system, of all people, won't allow some of the characters. Oh, they require some characters, like $ or %. But forbid others, like ) and ;. (Afraid of an SQL injection attack, perhaps?) *sigh*
But in theory, raising money for his heirs might have been a motivating factor for him to have written it originally... if the current laws had been in place at the time. :-)
Or what's probably more important for selection (since you won't get skin cancer until you've had a chance to procreate): get sun poisoning (vitamin D overdose).
I was raised in the North and spent all summer in the sun, never had a problem. Twice went to the beach in Virginia, got raging mad sick both times due to vitamin D poisoning. Now I'm a lot more careful.
Heh -- don't miss the "bunch of extra money" condition. If you both just lost your jobs because you were bragging too much about winning the lottery, or because the company you started without venture capital was bought out for $10M, and you aren't too busy with travelling the world, looking for second homes in tropical locations, or what-not, then yeah, might be a convenient time to have kids. :-)
And like renewable energy / carbon emissions (related but actually separate ideas), there is a time factor: wait too long, and things become much more inconvenient; wait longer, and things become impossible.
Well obviously governments fail -- just like markets. You seem to be making a false dichotomy here: either trust the government to do everything (Mao cultural-revolution style, where they replaced money with "chits" for individual goods, and regulated the production of everything), or trust the market to do everything (with the backdoor of saying they need to be "regulated" to avoid any criticism). Isn't it possible that both governments, and markets sometimes "work" and sometimes screw things up in a major way? Wouldn't it make sense to look at when they work the way we want, and when they don't, and use them each according to their strengths?
If the market "worked", wouldn't it have compensated for the government intervention with mortgages? On the contrary, the market did what markets do: optimize for whatever inputs are put into them. The government definitely didn't tell the markets to invent complicated derivatives that no one could understand and erroneously value them: the markets (or more accurately, the people in the markets) did that on their own.
In any case, as I said before, the Minnesota tax on carbon emissions (not on energy!) is an attempt to use the market to solve a problem. The fact that they're using a tax to do things economically, rather than simply passing laws about what you must / may not do, means that they do believe in the "free market" to solve problems and come up with the best solution.
Well, free markets do something. But saying they "work" is a bit dodgy. What, exactly is it that they do? Are you trying to say that a free market will always give the greatest amount of happiness, over the course of the rest of our species lifetime, to the greatest number of people? I think that's pretty obviously bullshit.
Morever, markets are well known to fail (meaning, "reach a conclusion we as a society don't like") under certain conditions. Externalities is a classic example, and carbon emissions is an externality. Since carbon-neutral is the only sustainable solution, the actual cost of dumping carbon into the air is either the cost of the damage done to the environment by it for as long as it's in the air (probably several hundred years at least), or the cost of removing it from the atmosphere. Both are pretty darned expensive; I'd be willing to bet it's a lot less than Minnesota's tax is.
So taxing the externality is really a way of making the market come to the truly optimal solution, taking into account true cost of the externality that is now conveniently free.
That's awful lot of faith you're having in people making the right prediction. If, as a whole, people are too optimistic about how long the fossil fuels will last, or about how quickly we'll be able to develop new technologies, we're totally screwed. "Market adjustment" here may mean mass starvation, anarchy, and cannibalism, until "the market adjusts" so that the number of mouths to feed is equal to the amount of food available to feed them. Almost this exact situation has already happened several times. Read "Collapse", by Jared Diamond, for a detailed investigation of how it happening to the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi Indians, and the Greenland Norse.
If you want me to believe that the market somehow won't fall into this trap of over-optimism, preventing us from investing in alternate energy sources until it's too late, you're going to have to have a bit more than a simplistic a-priori argument. The only evidence I've seen, including the recent financial crisis, leads me to believe exactly the opposite.
And what would you say when the economy is booming? And risk being accused of stopping a big boom and putting us into a recession?
The fact is there is no good time to switch away from a cheap, well-established source of energy. But if we don't start doing it soon, when that source runs out, we won't have the technology or the infrastructure to replace it. And that would truly be a disaster of epic proportions. So I say kudos to Minnesota for trying. No doubt they'll make some mistakes and learn from them, to the benefit of everyone.
Why don't you just buy a different phone, one that allows you to tinker? They do exist.
How would that work for things like, say, Microsoft Windows? Photoshop? AutoCAD? Software is covered under copyright; taking away corporate copyright would completely trash the software industry at this point.
I've had a little check-box next to my front page on Slashdot for months that says "Disable Advertising: As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising." I haven't checked it because the ads are in good taste, and some of them are actually interesting. Similarly, I often look at the ads I get in gmail, because the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher than normal advertising; there's probably a 5% chance that any ad will be at least mildly interesting, rather than < 1%.
I don't understand what people who make invasive ads are thinking. Is there anyone who, when reading an article and some random thing blocks out the whole screen and starts giving you ads, doesn't feel annoyed? And once being annoyed, is there anyone who doesn't just click the "close window" button without even looking at the ad? If you need to shout and scream at people to get them to look at you, then you're selling the wrong thing. Find out what people actually need/want, and you won't have any trouble getting people to buy.
Actually, I think the most important thing is to understand what you need from a system. For that, I'd recommend Getting Things Done, by David Allen. Very practical, common-sense way to think about all the things that need to be done in your life, and how to actually make them happen. I wish I'd had it when I was an engineering student; when I went into the workforce, and I started to have more "open loops" than I could keep up with, it was a lifesaver.
The book itself is technology agnostic (he actually uses folders and pieces of paper), but there are a number of software products that use the GTD methodology, including GTD self-editing wikis (free) and Omnifocus (which I haven't used, but have heard good things about). Different workflow tools like bug / issue trackers can be set up in similar ways.
Imainge if when you bought a DVD, it had no copy restrictions, it contained on it versions formatted for copying to a hard drive and for various smaller players (such as the iPhone), and instead of the "FBI WARNING: IF U STEEL THIS WE'LL COME AND GET YOU" (which only people who have already paid see), you saw one of the main actors saying, "Hi, this is Denzel Washington. I realize that you could have downloaded this illegally, so I just want to express my personal thanks to you for supporting the movie industry by opting to pay for this DVD instead. Please enjoy the show."
Piracy would probably only go down a few percent, but you could probably sell the DVDs, but overall DVD sales would grow, because people would be happy buying a DVD, instead of feeling screwed (as I always do).
For the one time it's not predictable. You want that to happen in your own organization, before you ship, rather than in the hands of a customer.
I agree. Management or business can actually be very interesting. If you find you like it, you may be good at it; and having been a technical person, you'll bring a different perspective and an analytical method to it. However, it's a totally different job, and just because you're good at what you have been doing doesn't mean you'll be any good at what they're asking you to do.
If you think it's worth giving a try, I really suggest reading First Break All the Rules. It's a book based on 25 years of research correlating what good managers said to actual business outcomes. It may also help you decide whether your new job is something you want to stick with, or whether you want to move back to something technical.
Otherwise, join a company that has a technical track where people can grow in seniority without changing their jobs.
I think the best advice I ever saw on presentations was to start with asking, "What's my goal? What am I trying to accomplish here?" A lot of people's goal is to "talk about [foo]", and that's exactly what they do: they put a bunch of [foo] on slides, and talk about it. The thing is, they could have done that in their basement and been successful. Your goal in giving a talk with other people present should be to change the listener somehow: to inform them of something, to help them understand something, to persuade them of something, to entertain them, to make them think. Otherwise they didn't really need to be there.
The last two conference presentations I've done, after a "hook" intro, I put up a "goals" slide, and said, "At the end of this presentation, I want you to know that..." and I had three or four points. Then I put up my outline; "To do that, I'm going to talk about these subjects." Then, away we go. Cover the material, but only the material that is necessary to reach those goals presented at the beginning. Other material can be found in the paper. Then at the end, put up the outline slide to review, and end with the goals slide to remind them (and myself, as I'm preparing) what my point was.
Explicitly listing the goals isn't suitable for every talk, but having goals (stated or not) is a prerequisite for any effective talk.
In other words, computers are not a magic bullet. They only work well when you actually invest the time to find out what you need them to do, and then make them do that.
But you don't do that in other jobs. At Chrysler I'm sure that the people who design the cars and the people who set up and maintain the machinery aren't both called "mechanics". And I don't think at GE the people who design electrical parts for the company and the people who install them in their building are called "electricians". They're not grouped together at all, because it's understood they're doing completely different things. Why should computers be different?