Others have posted practical advice about budgets, hiring, etc.
All the advice I can offer is to spend some time studying the "culture" of your new company & try to fit yourself into it (or create a niche for your style). If that means things as trivial as dress standards & water cooler slang, do it.
Of course, if conforming means outright prostitution of your principles, I'd say "freshen up the resumé." Either way, make sure you are adequately protected by your contract.
It doesn't sound like your new "parent" is really all that big, so it shouldn't be hard to assimilate into it. And assimilation isn't bad if you become part of something larger & stronger:-)
Heck, I figured they'd need a team of at least a dozen just to wait for it to load & review it.
And I still can't comment on the artwork -- after a 5 minute wait for the "50K skinny site" to download, my browser locked up. OK, I'm probably not running the latest-and-greatest: this is "only" a 1.8 GHz Wintel PC with 255 MB RAM & a T1 connection with Netscape 7.02... I'm sure the site looks fine on a 3.0 GHz Linux box with a gig of RAM & a T3...
The point of this rant is that it's a damned shame that excellent artwork gets flushed down the tube of Flash.
I don't believe for a minute that the code base is so bloated that they can't change it. In the late 1990's, when they weren't dominant, new features and versions were released all the time.
Could it be that the code base isn't so bloated that they can't change it, but that it's now so "spaghettied" that they can't figure out how to change it? Is it just possible that MSIE is hooked into the OS in such a torturous manner that even Microsoft can't decipher it?
Re:self-preservation
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"There are three kinds of men - the ones that learn by reading - the
few who learn by observation, and the rest of them have to pee on the
electric fence for themselves."
--Will Rogers
We do hope that our offspring don't have to pee on the fence, don't we? Well, dunno about the rest of the/. world, but I am usually unable to realize all my geek fantasies without ready access to a good machine shop!
Which would be worse...
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... kids building mock UFOs from dry cleaner bags & candles or kids standing on the railroad tracks trying to stop the "Hogwarts Express" with a small stick, er, "wand."
It took Rowling a whole lot more than 200 pages to tell the latest Potter story & she already had the characters & setting in place.
Methinks I need to revisit the Mad Scientists Club of my youth...
I don't think that "Kerplop" will have the latest batch of 8-12 yr old boys out doing "science" instead of trying to be wizards, but that's probably because our "post-post-modern" culture is more attuned to angels & witches than it is to the scientific method. <sigh> I don't blame it on Bhopal, Three Mile Island, or Agent Orange, though. I blame it on LSD, fake mysticism & "I'm OK, You're OK."
RIAA, Grayzone & those other outfits like to blur the distinction between a true pirate operation & simple bootlegging. Surely most of/. will recognize that there's a big difference in a commercial operation in, say, Singapore pressing thousands of counterfeit copies of a hot CD & enthusiasts swapping concert recordings of their favorite performer. One is like a criminal cooking thousands of gallons of moonshine & sticking it in empty Jack Daniels bottles & the other is like a fellow making a few gallons of homebrew for himself & his friends. RIAA does not understand that distinction or does not want to make that distinction.
It is always easier to go after the little guy than to try to track down organized criminals.
Speaking of organized criminals, how about the recording industry itself? Many moons ago, they excused selling CDs for 3x the price of vinyl because the compact disc was "new technology." Today, CDs are no longer new technology, but we're still paying the ramped-up price. And the "industry" wonders why kids share files... heck, they can't afford to buy the CDs!
My point? Browsers don't matter. Office suites don't matter. OS doesn't matter. What matters is that the user can sit down and do their shit (whatever particular shit that happens to be), and not think about how they do their shit. Once that happens, businesses can just change out the parts that the users need to get the cheapest/most efficient/most effective shit making stuff.
When that day is truly, completly realized - then it will be Microsoft who is in the shit, because they'll have to truly, honestly compete. Not just put up whatever shit they want and expect me to swallow it.
Shit, there's some profound shit in that shit, man! Good shit. Buenos guano. Like the t-shi(r)t said, "I don't want any shit. I don't give any shit. I ain't in the shit business."
But see-riously, your point is spot-on: Good software, in this case browsers, ought to be transparent & just get the user on with the job at hand. And the user (or the user's tech staff) should be able to make basic modifications to the software to improve the end-user's ability to do his/her shit transparently.
Incidentally, Microsoft have a frankly amazing record on backwards compatibility.
Um... I think you focus too much on operating systems, which are just one factor in the big picture. Microsoft's track record for programming languages & related tools is much less "amazing." Or maybe it's just "amazing" in a different way altogether.
Perhaps the easiest example is when Microsoft switched to the Visual Basic language for programming macros in Excel. This happened even though Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?) had already set up a de facto standard macro language that was easy to learn, easy to read & easy to debug. I believe that Microsoft made this switch for no other reasons than to ensure that its products were incompatible with those made by other vendors ("Microsoft or nothing") & to introduce a level of complexity that guaranteed sales of additional development tools & costly training.
I won't go into J-script, MS's attempts to twist Java into a MS-proprietary format, or Visual "BASIC" (which was no more BASIC than I am an ashtray).
A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.
As someone who observed the sharecropper society/economy a little bit -- it died out here while I was still very young -- I think there's a bit missing. Typically, the farmer also provided housing for the sharecroppers, with the rent taken out of the profits. Seed would be sold at a ramped-up price, because the farmer & not the sharecropper could get into town to buy it from the seed'n'feed store. And some farmers paid the sharecroppers in script that could only be redeemed at the company store. Plus, a good many farmers would change the rules constantly, so the illiterate farmers (read that in this context as "developers without a legal department") usually had no idea what they were likely to earn at harvest anyway. So in the end, the sharecropper wound up with very little legal tender as most of his earnings were either plowed back into paying off supplies and rent or paid in proprietary paper.
I think this addition to the definition of terms just reinforces Bray's thesis. Using the "detested" Microsoft as the "farmer," we find that the free tools & stuff usually come with high-priced training attached. None of the Microsoft "standards" remain unmolested very long. Of course, the next version of the tools (which can handle the ever-evolving "standards") is often not free. And oh yeah, forget backwards compatibility -- just go look at the history of WinCE, PPC, whatever-they-call-the-Microsoft-handheld-OS-du-jo ur...
In the final analysis, I agree with Bray about the web platform... to an extent. But go out & view source on websites & you're going to find that a distressing number are written with proprietary tags for MSIE. Those of us who care about web "standards" should be evangelizing for Mozilla or just for "validatable code" in general instead of spending so many hours b*tching about it on/.
As far as *nix or OSS, I'll have to defer to those more experienced with those thank I. My employer chose many moons ago to become a Microsoft shop, because the IT director loves getting paid in proprietary paper:-(
Everyone seems to be focusing on Estonia & overlooking the big question raised by this article: Is Internet access a basic right?
How much different would the discussions below look if it had been German, England, Brazil, or the U.S.?
Perhaps/. has become too Estonia-centric?;-)
Oh yeah, IMO, it is preposterous to propose Internet access as a basic right when literacy, healthcare, housing & even potable water aren't universally accepted as basic rights, regardless of the country. No slam against Estonia intended, of course.
The American legal system is not inadequate per se. What's inadequate is the rigor of law school curricula. OK, the teaching of ethics in law schools is also pretty inadequate. That's the only way I can explain the idiots traipsing around with "Juris Doctor" after their name.
And if the lawyer is very good at cocktail party schmoozing & politics, s/he may well get appointed to the bench. And in law, "the bench" is not where science is performed.
Best to stay far away from that advertisement & spyware-ridden beast.
I whole-heartedly agree. But the FACT that Kazaa has already mastered the advertising/spyware aspect of marketing probably makes it more attractive to the music industry that any of us care to admit. The music industry serves a lot of tripe & Kazaa knows how to do tripe right.
Many many years ago, I had a beagle dog that got herself impregnated through a chicken-wire fence. We advertised the puppies as "mother is purebred beagle, father is very determined." When it comes to determination, Kazaa's spyware installations are on par with Doggie Daddy. Resistance is futile.
On a weekly basis, I have to do a general search'n'destroy mission to clean up the detritus from my 17 yr old daughter's latest Kazaa all-nighter. I uninstall; she reinstalls. Yin and yang.
Thank God for Ad-aware & Search-and-Destroy is all I can say.
Until I read that the umpires association was complaining about it, I was thinking, "Now that's a neat tool for the umps to hone their skills." In short, I thought the machine was validating the umpires rather than the umpires calibrating the machine.
Anyway, fear not for umps falling victim to automation. Without them, who would the fans have to cuss? Managers would look pretty stupid yelling & kicking dirt at R2D2. Umps are as much a part of the game as any player.
Perhaps, though, what the umpires association opposes is that kind of "performance assessment" of it members. Maybe that's the real reason...
This is why the old term for the trucker's log book is a "swindle sheet."
But hey, they're using laptops, folks -- there ought to be a market out there for self-cooking swindle sheet software for truckers. Just remember, you read it on/. first!
The fundamental difference between computing in biology and computing with man-made computers is that biological systems were not designed.
What's that I hear? The hoofbeats of the/. creationist legion coming in for the kill?
Hold your hosses! fasta makes a good point. Because they weren't "designed," biological systems are generally inefficient & rarely optimal. But taking it a step farther, because they are inefficient & suboptimal, biological systems are adaptable. The very mechanisms that prevent biological systems from becoming optimized are the ones that ensure their survival.
Now they need to figure out the data segments and maybe in time they can figure out how datasegments in DNA manage to make their way into a creatures memory.
Assuming you mean "memory" in the conventional sense, I'd say you have little understanding of the relationship between DNA & memory. Aside from instinctual "species memory," I'm pretty sure memory has more to do with cells' membrane potentials than it does with modifying individual cells' DNA.
Further assuming that by "DNA decoding" you are referring to human beings decoding DNA in a lab, I'd have to agree. But if you mean biological DNA decoding, I'd have to say that biology has a few million years' jump on computer science;-)
... will computing stimulate a revolution in biology, or will biology stimulate a revolution in computer science?
Computing has accelerated biological research, but I'm unconvinced that it will fundamentally alter the prevalent paradigm in the biological sciences. OTOH, biology may provide the concepts that will push a change in computer science.
Not being a computer scientist, I can't say this for sure, but I think one of the places to look would be in membrane potentials & how that might be applied to fundamental computer architecture. For the totally baffled here, a nerve cell membrane may be polarized (off), depolarized (on), hyperpolarized (extremely off), or anywhere in between (sorta off/almost on). This isn't binary any more, Toto.
Whatever, let's remember what the scripture (Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions) tells us: Change will happen when practitioners of the old paradigm die. Don't look for anything other than incremental change in the meantime...
Read Ernst Mayr's The Growth of Biological Thought. The reason that physics was viewed as the "queen of science" in the first part of the 20th Century is that it is the science to which reductionism is most easily applied. Biology, according to Mayr, is characterized by "emergent properties," that is, higher levels of organization (systems, organisms, populations, etc) may exhibit properties that would not be evident by following the reductionist approach & studying only biochemistry. Yes, biochemistry can explain some emergent properties. But without study of the higher levels of organization, biochemists simply don't know there are emergent properties that need to be explained.
IMO, the view that good science must be "reducible" to a set of simple mathematical equations is the biggest fallacy in the philosophy of science.
Unfortunately, a lot of biologists are operating today under some form of "physics envy." What we need is another revolution to break the shackles of rampant reductionism!
In 1950, physics reigned as the "queen of science" because the math was do-able. Only in the 2nd half of the 20th century did we devise the computing machinery needed to do the math for biology. Will this enable biology to undergo a real scientific revolution, or will we continue down the road of "physics envy?"
Slashdot Mirror
All the advice I can offer is to spend some time studying the "culture" of your new company & try to fit yourself into it (or create a niche for your style). If that means things as trivial as dress standards & water cooler slang, do it.
Of course, if conforming means outright prostitution of your principles, I'd say "freshen up the resumé." Either way, make sure you are adequately protected by your contract.
It doesn't sound like your new "parent" is really all that big, so it shouldn't be hard to assimilate into it. And assimilation isn't bad if you become part of something larger & stronger :-)
I did. I said it was a Wintel box & that it would probably work better on Linux. Gotta stick to the /. code, y'know? ;-)
But you're correct -- my usual reaction to an overly-Flashed site is to "stop" & "back"...
And I still can't comment on the artwork -- after a 5 minute wait for the "50K skinny site" to download, my browser locked up. OK, I'm probably not running the latest-and-greatest: this is "only" a 1.8 GHz Wintel PC with 255 MB RAM & a T1 connection with Netscape 7.02... I'm sure the site looks fine on a 3.0 GHz Linux box with a gig of RAM & a T3...
The point of this rant is that it's a damned shame that excellent artwork gets flushed down the tube of Flash.
Could it be that the code base isn't so bloated that they can't change it, but that it's now so "spaghettied" that they can't figure out how to change it? Is it just possible that MSIE is hooked into the OS in such a torturous manner that even Microsoft can't decipher it?
It took Rowling a whole lot more than 200 pages to tell the latest Potter story & she already had the characters & setting in place.
Methinks I need to revisit the Mad Scientists Club of my youth...
I don't think that "Kerplop" will have the latest batch of 8-12 yr old boys out doing "science" instead of trying to be wizards, but that's probably because our "post-post-modern" culture is more attuned to angels & witches than it is to the scientific method. <sigh> I don't blame it on Bhopal, Three Mile Island, or Agent Orange, though. I blame it on LSD, fake mysticism & "I'm OK, You're OK."
RIAA, Grayzone & those other outfits like to blur the distinction between a true pirate operation & simple bootlegging. Surely most of /. will recognize that there's a big difference in a commercial operation in, say, Singapore pressing thousands of counterfeit copies of a hot CD & enthusiasts swapping concert recordings of their favorite performer. One is like a criminal cooking thousands of gallons of moonshine & sticking it in empty Jack Daniels bottles & the other is like a fellow making a few gallons of homebrew for himself & his friends. RIAA does not understand that distinction or does not want to make that distinction.
It is always easier to go after the little guy than to try to track down organized criminals.
Speaking of organized criminals, how about the recording industry itself? Many moons ago, they excused selling CDs for 3x the price of vinyl because the compact disc was "new technology." Today, CDs are no longer new technology, but we're still paying the ramped-up price. And the "industry" wonders why kids share files ... heck, they can't afford to buy the CDs!
Um... I think you focus too much on operating systems, which are just one factor in the big picture. Microsoft's track record for programming languages & related tools is much less "amazing." Or maybe it's just "amazing" in a different way altogether.
Perhaps the easiest example is when Microsoft switched to the Visual Basic language for programming macros in Excel. This happened even though Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?) had already set up a de facto standard macro language that was easy to learn, easy to read & easy to debug. I believe that Microsoft made this switch for no other reasons than to ensure that its products were incompatible with those made by other vendors ("Microsoft or nothing") & to introduce a level of complexity that guaranteed sales of additional development tools & costly training.
I won't go into J-script, MS's attempts to twist Java into a MS-proprietary format, or Visual "BASIC" (which was no more BASIC than I am an ashtray).
This reinforces the sharecropper metaphor, IMO.
I think this addition to the definition of terms just reinforces Bray's thesis. Using the "detested" Microsoft as the "farmer," we find that the free tools & stuff usually come with high-priced training attached. None of the Microsoft "standards" remain unmolested very long. Of course, the next version of the tools (which can handle the ever-evolving "standards") is often not free. And oh yeah, forget backwards compatibility -- just go look at the history of WinCE, PPC, whatever-they-call-the-Microsoft-handheld-OS-du-jo ur...
In the final analysis, I agree with Bray about the web platform ... to an extent. But go out & view source on websites & you're going to find that a distressing number are written with proprietary tags for MSIE. Those of us who care about web "standards" should be evangelizing for Mozilla or just for "validatable code" in general instead of spending so many hours b*tching about it on /.
As far as *nix or OSS, I'll have to defer to those more experienced with those thank I. My employer chose many moons ago to become a Microsoft shop, because the IT director loves getting paid in proprietary paper :-(
How much different would the discussions below look if it had been German, England, Brazil, or the U.S.?
Perhaps /. has become too Estonia-centric? ;-)
Oh yeah, IMO, it is preposterous to propose Internet access as a basic right when literacy, healthcare, housing & even potable water aren't universally accepted as basic rights, regardless of the country. No slam against Estonia intended, of course.
And if the lawyer is very good at cocktail party schmoozing & politics, s/he may well get appointed to the bench. And in law, "the bench" is not where science is performed.
It would've been even better had the original development group code-named their computer "Ralph Nader"...
I whole-heartedly agree. But the FACT that Kazaa has already mastered the advertising/spyware aspect of marketing probably makes it more attractive to the music industry that any of us care to admit. The music industry serves a lot of tripe & Kazaa knows how to do tripe right.
Many many years ago, I had a beagle dog that got herself impregnated through a chicken-wire fence. We advertised the puppies as "mother is purebred beagle, father is very determined." When it comes to determination, Kazaa's spyware installations are on par with Doggie Daddy. Resistance is futile.
On a weekly basis, I have to do a general search'n'destroy mission to clean up the detritus from my 17 yr old daughter's latest Kazaa all-nighter. I uninstall; she reinstalls. Yin and yang.
Thank God for Ad-aware & Search-and-Destroy is all I can say.
Why would anybody want to emulate a politician?
No wonder she had trouble hitting those little buttons on the keyboard...
Anyway, fear not for umps falling victim to automation. Without them, who would the fans have to cuss? Managers would look pretty stupid yelling & kicking dirt at R2D2. Umps are as much a part of the game as any player.
Perhaps, though, what the umpires association opposes is that kind of "performance assessment" of it members. Maybe that's the real reason...
Not if you're suggesting that Microsoft should nuke itself ;-)
I think the pr0nographers have already significantly merged biology & computers. Or maybe that's just gynecology & computers...
But hey, they're using laptops, folks -- there ought to be a market out there for self-cooking swindle sheet software for truckers. Just remember, you read it on /. first!
... to your new career
What's that I hear? The hoofbeats of the /. creationist legion coming in for the kill?
Hold your hosses! fasta makes a good point. Because they weren't "designed," biological systems are generally inefficient & rarely optimal. But taking it a step farther, because they are inefficient & suboptimal, biological systems are adaptable. The very mechanisms that prevent biological systems from becoming optimized are the ones that ensure their survival.
Assuming you mean "memory" in the conventional sense, I'd say you have little understanding of the relationship between DNA & memory. Aside from instinctual "species memory," I'm pretty sure memory has more to do with cells' membrane potentials than it does with modifying individual cells' DNA.
Further assuming that by "DNA decoding" you are referring to human beings decoding DNA in a lab, I'd have to agree. But if you mean biological DNA decoding, I'd have to say that biology has a few million years' jump on computer science ;-)
Computing has accelerated biological research, but I'm unconvinced that it will fundamentally alter the prevalent paradigm in the biological sciences. OTOH, biology may provide the concepts that will push a change in computer science.
Not being a computer scientist, I can't say this for sure, but I think one of the places to look would be in membrane potentials & how that might be applied to fundamental computer architecture. For the totally baffled here, a nerve cell membrane may be polarized (off), depolarized (on), hyperpolarized (extremely off), or anywhere in between (sorta off/almost on). This isn't binary any more, Toto.
Whatever, let's remember what the scripture (Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions) tells us: Change will happen when practitioners of the old paradigm die. Don't look for anything other than incremental change in the meantime...
IMO, the view that good science must be "reducible" to a set of simple mathematical equations is the biggest fallacy in the philosophy of science.
Unfortunately, a lot of biologists are operating today under some form of "physics envy." What we need is another revolution to break the shackles of rampant reductionism!
In 1950, physics reigned as the "queen of science" because the math was do-able. Only in the 2nd half of the 20th century did we devise the computing machinery needed to do the math for biology. Will this enable biology to undergo a real scientific revolution, or will we continue down the road of "physics envy?"