The Open Source movement would have happened even if we had a kinder gentler Microsoft. It just would have taken a lot longer to catch on.
Development of Proprietary Software is fast but expensive and inefficient. You have to write all the parts from scratch. With open source you can start with modules written by others. You may be able to get your desired functionality by stiching together existing open source parts.
Proprietary software is usually not well partitioned into modules. The large staff with centralized management allows the creation of software that is not modular in design. Because open source software is written by individuals and small groups aound the world, functionality has to be cleanly partioned into small parts. This allows mixing and matching of parts.
After a certain level of functionality is reached, adding features does not add much value and may in fact just make the software harder to use. We have seen this in the desktop. The only notable thing XP does that W2k does not do is better font rendering. If the open source development had been slower, it would have still happened. Antialiased fonts would have appeared in open source project after they showed up in windows instead of showing up in open source first!
In the early days of computing software was more like open source. The economics efficiencies of open source are so compelling that it is inevitable that open source dominates in the end. It is just a matter of time. Are we talking about 1 or 2 decades or a much longer time frame before open source takes over.
I ran the script. It spent a long long time downloading KDE debian packages. I must have reinstalled 2/3rds of KDE in the process. When it was all done my time zone was set to Moscow! That is a long way from California.
In the end it did a good job setting up everything though. It is a painless way to get the missing parts of the(K)ubuntu desktop installed.
I spoke to someone at the help desk/sales department and got nowhere (if the disk is faulty due to a manufacturing defect send it back and we will replace it). Not like I had much of a choice, so I ponied up the money.
Additions to python such as scipy are bring some Matlab like functionality. Defining class objects in Matlab is Ugly Ugly Ugly. In Python creating new classes is so much easier.
The extensions to Python are not as complete as the Matlab toolboxes but python is a far far better programming license. And Python is free.
First we find out there is a rise in the number of brits who believe in "inteligent design" or "creationism" or whatever they call it now. Then we find this drop in intelligence of the eleven year olds. I suspect the populations of both Briton and the USA are too dumb to maintain Democracy in the long run!
On one hand, I'm happy to see that rampant idiocy isn't a uniquely American trait.
On the other hand, however, I'm seriously troubled by this. I guess I was kinda counting on the rest of the world to bitchslap America back to sanity sooner or later, but now it appears that we can't count on the global community saving the day for rationality.
We do not have natural selection like we had in the past. The dumb reproduce more than anyone else. Has the population devolved to the point where that majority is not capable of rational thought?
I could see someone deliberatly doing this, maybe a contractor or a disgruntled employee.
Even if it was put in by a contractor or a disgruntled employee it stayed in there. Does Microsoft have any employees reponsable for this chunk of code. Do they have someone responsible who reads this code figures out how it works and thinks WTF!
Does Microsoft lack mastery over their code set? Or does this stay in the code set by design?
When Maxtor bought Quantum HDD, Maxtor was somewhat profitable. Both Maxtor and Quantum brought good balance sheets to the deal with a few hundred million in cash each. Quantum sold because they could not see a path to profitability. Maxtor bought because the executives had a hard on to do an aquisition.
The end result of this first merger was a disaster. The combined company has been limping along and losing market share. The biggest plus on the balance sheet is "goodwill". This "goodwill" is the amount Maxtor paid for Quantum over the value of the tangible assets. This "goodwill" at this point in time is just accounting bullshit. Without the goodwill, Maxtor may have negative value for the tangible assets.
I have been wondering if Maxtor would get purchased soon. I think Seagate is just paying to have one less competitor.
We know they developed the software on different hardware. When they tested the hardware, did they use the power supplies that were going to ship with the units? When they did the tests in the oven ( I will assume they did testing at ambient temperature corners ) did they put the brick in the oven too?
I suspect a disconnect in the testing process. It looks like the developers were not eating their own dog food.
Usually companies such as Microsoft promote people to "Fellow" positions after they get credibility and a large informal "sphere of influence" within the company.
It is interesting that Microsoft will bring in someone from the outside here. They must realise they need some thinking that is outside the Microsoft box.
I read the blog of DVD Jon. He lost out on getting a job because of similar numbers on his resume. If the potential employer had been reading the news, they would have had no doubt that he is qualified!
Maybe it is about accounting rules. It could be that the software can only go on the books as an asset if it can be resold.
Companies need to rediscover their inner geek
on
Best Way to Manage Geeks?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I work for a company that used to be at the top of it's game. It used to create the best products in it's market segment. It still has the largest market segment share, but this is because of it's lingering control of the distribution channels.
Now most of it's products are inferior to those of the competition. The competition is gaining market segment share and the distribution channels are getting uppity.
What has happend to this former giant of technical excellence? The short answer is this company thinks it does not need geeks. This company gives pay cuts instead of pay raises. The company no longer values it's engineers. Part of this is that they are drooling over the lower paid talent in India. Do not get me wrong. I think the company should hire some of this lower cost talent in other parts of the world. This is good for the world even though it is not good for me.
Beyond this though the company thinks it can substitute "management process" for engineering. There are many many meetings where managers talk about procedures for engineering products. They have meetings to discuss procedures to talk about how to talk about procedures for engineering products. The ratio of talking about doing to doing is extraordinarily high. Most of the product developement decisions are made by what they called "product development teams". This is a group of people where product design engineers are a very small minority, and where engineers of any sort are a minority.
Beyond this, we have an annual review process that is a cross between a high school popularity contest and a bad episode of Survivor. In this review process people who do not know or have any understanding of what we do determing the outcome. One thing that comes out of this is that we do not know what we are accountable for.
If this company does not relearn to love geeks soon it will see a big decline in profitability and market segment share.
If we had a populous that was capable of critical thinking it would be the end of commerce as we know it.
If we had a population capable of critical thinking then 90% of all advertising would not be effective. A lot of companies on top right now would not be on top. I am sure there are powerfull business interests that do not want a population capable fo critical thinking.
People would not buy a brand of toothpaste thinking it will help them get laid.
People would not buy humongous automobiles styled to look like war equipment just to feel more secure.
Political ads would no longer work. People would see them and just wonder where the money came from to pay for them.
But as this all plays out and the country becomes anti-science we will lose our competative edge in the world marketplace. Those business interests who wanted a population incapable of critical thinking will lose out.
It's funny how corporations love economics right up until the point where it involves paying intelligent people higher wages.
I have noticed this. They especially do not want to pay intelligent honest people! They will bribe congressmen to bring in more people from overseas. They will "outsource".
Where I work they are trying to create bureaucratic process as substitute for Engineering knowledge and experience. This is not working but the main players do not have the experience or knowledge to know it is not working.
The article was more of a diatribe promoting "free market" religion than a serious presentation of the science and economics of this extraction technique. There was no mention of the energy costs of heating or cooling the rocks in the ground compared to the amount of energy extracted.
I have a distrust of anything that is presented as part of a polemic.
Slashdot Mirror
The Open Source movement would have happened even if we had a kinder gentler Microsoft. It just would have taken a lot longer to catch on.
Development of Proprietary Software is fast but expensive and inefficient. You have to write all the parts from scratch. With open source you can start with modules written by others. You may be able to get your desired functionality by stiching together existing open source parts.
Proprietary software is usually not well partitioned into modules. The large staff with centralized management allows the creation of software that is not modular in design. Because open source software is written by individuals and small groups aound the world, functionality has to be cleanly partioned into small parts. This allows mixing and matching of parts.
After a certain level of functionality is reached, adding features does not add much value and may in fact just make the software harder to use. We have seen this in the desktop. The only notable thing XP does that W2k does not do is better font rendering. If the open source development had been slower, it would have still happened. Antialiased fonts would have appeared in open source project after they showed up in windows instead of showing up in open source first!
In the early days of computing software was more like open source. The economics efficiencies of open source are so compelling that it is inevitable that open source dominates in the end. It is just a matter of time. Are we talking about 1 or 2 decades or a much longer time frame before open source takes over.
After reading that Tuttle times article I start to feel some sympathy for the guy. Maybe he was just having a bad day or a bad week.
I suppose Michael Crichton knows about as much about patent law as he does about global warming. He should go back to bending spoons!
I ran the script. It spent a long long time downloading KDE debian packages. I must have reinstalled 2/3rds of KDE in the process. When it was all done my time zone was set to Moscow! That is a long way from California.
In the end it did a good job setting up everything though. It is a painless way to get the missing parts of the(K)ubuntu desktop installed.What does Ubuntu offer that Debian doesn't?
Repositories that are both up to date and coherent. A distro is only as good as it's repositories.
I spoke to someone at the help desk/sales department and got nowhere (if the disk is faulty due to a manufacturing defect send it back and we will replace it). Not like I had much of a choice, so I ponied up the money.
Additions to python such as scipy are bring some Matlab like functionality. Defining class objects in Matlab is Ugly Ugly Ugly. In Python creating new classes is so much easier.
The extensions to Python are not as complete as the Matlab toolboxes but python is a far far better programming license. And Python is free.
They now give us cheap usb=serial adapters with the things. They have crappy drivers that always change the port#, but they work.
The latest drivers let you change the port number with Device Manager.
This would have to be the north Antarctic ice sheet. From the south pole every direction is north.
First we find out there is a rise in the number of brits who believe in "inteligent design" or "creationism" or whatever they call it now. Then we find this drop in intelligence of the eleven year olds. I suspect the populations of both Briton and the USA are too dumb to maintain Democracy in the long run!
Could you repeat the expiriment running Knoppix and report back to us.
More seriously though, Tom's Hardware should repeat the experiment with a Linux distro that is notebook friendly and has a SMP kernal.
But it's nice to see that yet another company is telling off the RIAA.
I thought Nettwerk was a member of the RIAA. Check it out on RIAA Radar .
But this action raises their Karma to where I will not rule out CDs from Nettwerk. This is just in time for the next CD from Delerium!
On one hand, I'm happy to see that rampant idiocy isn't a uniquely American trait.
On the other hand, however, I'm seriously troubled by this. I guess I was kinda counting on the rest of the world to bitchslap America back to sanity sooner or later, but now it appears that we can't count on the global community saving the day for rationality.
We do not have natural selection like we had in the past. The dumb reproduce more than anyone else. Has the population devolved to the point where that majority is not capable of rational thought?
I could see someone deliberatly doing this, maybe a contractor or a disgruntled employee.
Even if it was put in by a contractor or a disgruntled employee it stayed in there. Does Microsoft have any employees reponsable for this chunk of code. Do they have someone responsible who reads this code figures out how it works and thinks WTF!
Does Microsoft lack mastery over their code set? Or does this stay in the code set by design?
I do not know of any Indie labels that sell CDs infected with DRM or any other crap. Only the big labels have the arrogance to do that type of stuff.
When Maxtor bought Quantum HDD, Maxtor was somewhat profitable. Both Maxtor and Quantum brought good balance sheets to the deal with a few hundred million in cash each. Quantum sold because they could not see a path to profitability. Maxtor bought because the executives had a hard on to do an aquisition.
The end result of this first merger was a disaster. The combined company has been limping along and losing market share. The biggest plus on the balance sheet is "goodwill". This "goodwill" is the amount Maxtor paid for Quantum over the value of the tangible assets. This "goodwill" at this point in time is just accounting bullshit. Without the goodwill, Maxtor may have negative value for the tangible assets.
I have been wondering if Maxtor would get purchased soon. I think Seagate is just paying to have one less competitor.
We know they developed the software on different hardware. When they tested the hardware, did they use the power supplies that were going to ship with the units? When they did the tests in the oven ( I will assume they did testing at ambient temperature corners ) did they put the brick in the oven too?
I suspect a disconnect in the testing process. It looks like the developers were not eating their own dog food.
Usually companies such as Microsoft promote people to "Fellow" positions after they get credibility and a large informal "sphere of influence" within the company.
It is interesting that Microsoft will bring in someone from the outside here. They must realise they need some thinking that is outside the Microsoft box.
I read the blog of DVD Jon. He lost out on getting a job because of similar numbers on his resume. If the potential employer had been reading the news, they would have had no doubt that he is qualified!
Is Cisco paying too much?
Maybe it is about accounting rules. It could be that the software can only go on the books as an asset if it can be resold.
I work for a company that used to be at the top of it's game. It used to create the best products in it's market segment. It still has the largest market segment share, but this is because of it's lingering control of the distribution channels.
Now most of it's products are inferior to those of the competition. The competition is gaining market segment share and the distribution channels are getting uppity.
What has happend to this former giant of technical excellence? The short answer is this company thinks it does not need geeks. This company gives pay cuts instead of pay raises. The company no longer values it's engineers. Part of this is that they are drooling over the lower paid talent in India. Do not get me wrong. I think the company should hire some of this lower cost talent in other parts of the world. This is good for the world even though it is not good for me.
Beyond this though the company thinks it can substitute "management process" for engineering. There are many many meetings where managers talk about procedures for engineering products. They have meetings to discuss procedures to talk about how to talk about procedures for engineering products. The ratio of talking about doing to doing is extraordinarily high. Most of the product developement decisions are made by what they called "product development teams". This is a group of people where product design engineers are a very small minority, and where engineers of any sort are a minority.
Beyond this, we have an annual review process that is a cross between a high school popularity contest and a bad episode of Survivor. In this review process people who do not know or have any understanding of what we do determing the outcome. One thing that comes out of this is that we do not know what we are accountable for.
If this company does not relearn to love geeks soon it will see a big decline in profitability and market segment share.
Now that I got the sound to work on Gnome I am using it too! I am warming up to Gnome.
critical thinking
If we had a populous that was capable of critical thinking it would be the end of commerce as we know it.
If we had a population capable of critical thinking then 90% of all advertising would not be effective. A lot of companies on top right now would not be on top. I am sure there are powerfull business interests that do not want a population capable fo critical thinking.
People would not buy a brand of toothpaste thinking it will help them get laid.
People would not buy humongous automobiles styled to look like war equipment just to feel more secure.
Political ads would no longer work. People would see them and just wonder where the money came from to pay for them.
But as this all plays out and the country becomes anti-science we will lose our competative edge in the world marketplace. Those business interests who wanted a population incapable of critical thinking will lose out.
It's funny how corporations love economics right up until the point where it involves paying intelligent people higher wages.
I have noticed this. They especially do not want to pay intelligent honest people! They will bribe congressmen to bring in more people from overseas. They will "outsource".
Where I work they are trying to create bureaucratic process as substitute for Engineering knowledge and experience. This is not working but the main players do not have the experience or knowledge to know it is not working.
The article was more of a diatribe promoting "free market" religion than a serious presentation of the science and economics of this extraction technique. There was no mention of the energy costs of heating or cooling the rocks in the ground compared to the amount of energy extracted.
I have a distrust of anything that is presented as part of a polemic.