The findings of fact went unchallenged, and stand as a legal finding by a competent court that what was reported in them actually happened. Conclusions on the laws broken differed, but the fundamental antitrust convictions based on those findings remained.
The point is that a court has found that Sun was directly harmed, and not, say, IBM; so IBM can't go to a court and demand that Lotus Notes be included.
Besides, Sun really doesn't benefit from this at all. So what if Java's included? Sun has no large Java software packages it's trying to sell; it's almost nowhere in the web applications sphere; Java itself isn't sold, it's downloaded. Pretty much all Sun gets is bragging rights.
A lot of posters have gone on about the pros and cons of this as a victory for sun. But remember, Sun will benefit very little from this. In the Java software space, they're nowhere. They don't sell the language. They have next to nothing to offer for development tools at a price. About all they get is bragging rights.
It's IBM who's probably tipping the bubbly right now. And, a lot of Java developers.
Did you miss the whole antitrust trial where Microsoft was found to be, not just a monopolist, but an abusive, predatory monopolist (and then upheld on appeal)? That's why they're being forced to include java: it's called punishment for past wrongs that are about to be repeated.
Not really, since Sun/Java was directly named in the findings of fact. The only other entity that might seek similar relief is Netscape. I wouldn't cry over the forced inclusion of that, either.
The judge isn't forcing Microsoft open to competition generally, he's remedying a situation in which a company was wronged in the past, and (successfully) claimed they were about to be wronged again. This pretty significantly limits the number of companies with a claim.
Re:Mod parent down for the love of pete
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2
It's not kissing ass, it's self-preservation. You're a more valuable employee to the company if you understand more about the company. It's also about being better at proposing things, arguing for or against them, and communicating with people outside your department.
If you don't want to be a manager, then don't accept the promotion when it's offered. Though with your attitude, I doubt it will.
Re:The problem with the hacker ethos
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 2
I think you've overstated my position.
I'm not suggesting that a programmer also be responsible for the cost analysis/business analysis/whatever. You're right in that it's generally the manager's job to do those things.
However, when you go to your manager and say "we should do this", and he asks "why?", do you offer any reasons besides technical ones? What if he says "that'll cost too much money." How do you argue against that if you don't understand what the costs are? On the other hand, if the manager says "we'll have a tough time justifying that on a financial basis," and you can help him out, then your idea has a greater chance of acceptance, and you'll have a better relationship with your manager if he sees that you understand his concerns in the same way you want him to understand yours.
Yes, a manager of technical people, if he's not a technical person himself (as I am: I'm currently in my MSCS, and have been coding for years) needs to learn as much as possible about the technology side. If you, as a geek, learn the financial side, then the two of you can communicate well across the whole spectrum of concerns and are more likely to be successful. You can also show your boss's boss that your boss is running a solid *business* department, and you'll have more independence because of it. You'll have the ammunition to fight back against accusations of being an unjustifiable expense.
You don't have to do a cost analysis every time; you're just miles ahead if you can, and if you understand them.
Ask your non-geek boss how to make a business presentation on the business merits of a technology initiative. Ask her about cost analysis. Ask her about justifying new software to her bosses (what they're looking for).
Pick up a textbook on managerial accounting (which is different than what accoutants do): it'll go into great detail on how businesses analyse costs and plan with them.
Look at your company's profit and loss statement and figure it out. I started at the company as a cost analyst, and now I know exactly how the business is financially structured.
Try doing it yourself: start a spreadsheet. List all the costs of something, say, upgrading to the latest version of Office. Include every cost you can think of: retraining, troubleshooting, labor spent installing, licence fees, costs to convert all the documents on the server. Don't just list dollar figures, list your calculation: 30 hours at $20.00/hr (but don't forget to include the cost of benefits and other expenses: an employee paid $10/hr costs the business $12-14/hr). Then list all the monetary benefits: time saved with zippity feature X, etc. Compare the bottom line: will the business benefit financially from the upgrade?
At it's heart, understanding the internals of a business means understanding it's programming language: finance. You don't understand how a business works until you understand the flow of money through it. Figure that out, and you'll be a respected geek who can talk to managers on their own terms.
The problem with the hacker ethos
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In the 90s, I saw endless screeds about how technology professionals were a different breed, and how the best thing you could do was get a hacker and leave him alone. Things like The Hacker FAQ fed the self-image of geeks as lone gunman who were above petty business concerns.
This is what feeds Andreeson's IT crisis today: the fact that technology professionals took their apparent suffering and feelings of being not understood, and used it to isolate themselves. They refused to act like businesspeople in an organization that lives and dies by its profit and loss statement. They complain about how management doesn't appreciate them, but how many learn to do a cost analysis that will show the business reasons for buying software X or hardware Y? In other words, the glorification of the geek in the 90s gave a lot of geeks the idea that they didn't have to learn the language of business to survive there. That's why they're underfunded, underappreciated, and harassed.
I've had the benefit of a boss who demanded a business analysis for any significant technology initiative at the company. He doesn't get computers, but he understands ROI. He understands a well-presented business case for anti-virus software. We have a wireless network in our new facility in Texas for a real-time inventory management system for one reason: my cost analysis showed that the implementation costs would be recovered within a year because of labor saved from eliminating batch-mode downloading, and that the cost over five years of our wireless system was ~15% of the batch-mode system.
When geeks figure out that they have to speak the language of the business, then the IT department gets properly funded, properly respected, and properly treated.
I've never been into MMORPG, but I have had some marathon sessions with Sim City and Civilization and any good FPS. My trick to setting an alarm for myself is to ignore my bladder for as long as I can. Having created a competing need that escalates in realtime, I have an unavoidable time limit: going to the bathroom == turn the game off. At some point "just one more turn" no longer outweighs "I'm about to piss myself".
The second example was coded for a flaw in the implementation of the standard in VC6: variable declaration in for loops was not limited to the scope of the for block (as the standard specifies). If you tried to compile the first example in VC6, you got a compile error claiming i was declared twice.
Christ, what a couple of hacks. I swear, any significant author should kill his own son before he dies, just to preclude any possibility of what might be done in their names.
Perhaps it's simply acknowledgement that the markets will react to the verdict, no matter what it is, combined with a desire to avoid secondary effects.
Standalone LCDs have low res
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a Dell Latitude with a 15" LCD screen running natively at 1600x1200, and it looks fantastic. Why the hell can't I get a standalone LCD with that high a resolution? 15" LCDs max out at 1024x768; 17" at 1280x1024. Half the reason that text is so clear on my laptop screen is the high resolution, and that advantage disappears for a standalone.
...is why they didn't do this three years ago, before their market share was in the basement? This could have held onto a reasonable share of the browser market, and would have boosted the credibility of the whole project immensely.
It's fraud if they think they're agreeing to one thing and you mislead them to believe they're agreeing to another.
It's not fraud if they sign the contract without checking it, which is their responsibility. You can't "maneuver" someone into signing a contract without external influences (i.e., duress, threats, extortion, etc.)--if he makes a change to the paper, and they agree to it, then they're bound by it.
If the costs were equal, then the vendor would have to sell twenty-five times as many copies, proportional to the linux user base, than he would have to sell Windows copies. I agree that the Linux costs should be lower, but unless the Linux costs are one-twenty fifth or less the windows costs, then the vendor still has to sell more copies, proportionally, to justify the port.
Personally, I doubt that Linux users would buy even half (proportionally) what Windows users would.
...with his comments on why software vendors don't port to Mac: they can't expect to sell enough on such a minority platform to cover porting costs.
The author of the rant seems to assume that if he pays the same price for the linux version, and if linux users purchase it in the same proportion as Windows users, then the development costs of the Linux version will be covered. They won't be. Linux has less than 4% of the market share that Windows does for desktops. A company has to sell several times as many Linux copies, proportionally, the recoup its investment in the port; that's extremely doubtful, even if Linux users could be counted on to purchase it at all, which is doubtful to begin with.
One of my employees is Japanese, from the parent company. Most of the Japanese at our company worked twelve or fourteen hours days habitually; it's just what's done at the parent company. I told Yuichi to start leaving an hour earlier, until he'd worked himself down to a roughly normal workday. The first thing he told me once he was doing it was that he had more energy, and seemed to be getting more done. He was less scatterbrained from tiredness, he could concentrate more, and he looks forward to coming to work now because it isn't a grind.
Here's another thing: he works harder now. People who work fifteen hour days get less done because there's actually less time pressure. It's easier to procrastinate when you know, at four in the afternoon, that you've got six hours left in the office. When you're leaving at five or six, there's a more immediate motivation to wrap something up. Generally, when you feel time is limited, you're more careful about scheduling.
When they do stay late, they're rewarded with flex-time off, and they can buy flex-time by staying late. All of them make use of it for doctor's appointments and such, or to leave early for the weekend. My systems administrator decides to come in at one a.m. to upgrade a server, and tells me about it the next day. More responsibility for their own schedules has made them more willing to contribute beyond the minimum 40 hour week.
Thus, something like DeCSS which does not violate copywrite law on its own but can be made to, would not be in violation.
This is the essence of the "Betamax Defence": when the movie industry went after VCRs as copyright infringement devices, the judge found that they had "substantial non-infringing uses", meaning that while they could be used to violate copyright, that wasn't their sole or even intended purpose, and so VCRs were not essentially illegal tools.
Let's hope this holds up in a Norwegian court, since it's the exact defence Jon Johansen will be using--that DeCSS has a substantial non-infringing use (playing DVDs on Linux in an exercise of fair use rights), even if it can be used to decrypt DVDs for piracy.
This is also the defence that Napster tried, and failed.
But O'Reilly isn't arguing against the virtues of Open Source, he's arguing that the mandatory use of it is both contrary to Open Source/Free Software principles, and bad strategy to boot. He decries the "radicalization" of Open Source because he thinks it will hurt the movement in the long run.
O'Reilly's argument isn't "the right tool for the right job". His argument is that requiring the use of Open Source in government is a losing strategy for Open Source because it polarizes the software community and encourages vendors of proprietary software to fight back harder with legal weapons.
There's nothing wrong with pushing Open Source use in government. But accomplishing by law what can't accomplished in a fair procurement market (which should be mandated by law) is a recipe for Open Source to become the affirmative action software--unable to compete on its merits, it succeeds by political hackery
I work for a sub $100 million dollar a year manufacturer, and our IT department is just warming up.
Any IT project I or anyone else has proposed has had to have a rock solid cost analysis with it, and it's that analysis that makes or breaks the project. Good projects can always be justified on a spreadsheet.
For example, we're implementing a wireless network in Operations for use with hand held terminals, for doing location management (mainly a lot of barcode scanning). Our current system works in batch mode, with hourly downloads. The cost analysis pointed out that the labor alone from downloading was costing the company $150,000 per year that could be directly saved, and more than recovered the investment in a wireless network and new PDTs.
A new computer for someone is also easily justified. We had people running Windows 98 on Pentium 133s. Assume they waste ten minutes (in increments of 15 to 120 seconds) a day waiting unnecessarily (compared to a new computer) for files to open or close, operations to complete, and to reboot from the occasional crash. I think you'll agree that's conservative. That's 45 hours a year. A clerk costs at least $15 an hour ($12/hour + benefits), usually more. That's $675/year wasted. A new Optiplex GX50 from Dell is around $900, and has a lifespan of at least three years. The computer pays for itself within 15 months, providing a net savings of over $1,000 over the life of the computer.
The president is definitely not a gearhead. But taking the time to justify the costs has always paid off for me, and now he trusts me with more speculative projects, like an in-house TV network, and control units for injection molding machines that are just Win2000 workstations running a VB app with a touchscreen.
So, no, IT is not undervalued in companies that are generally well-run, and have a very rational approach to the profit and loss statement. I suspect that the same companies that now denigrate IT are the one's that jumped hardest on the bandwagon when it was hot.
Re:Deep Blue = Unfair
on
Men vs. Machines
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Prior to Kasparov's match, Deep Blue hadn't played any significant chess players in matches (though I believe there was a consulting grandmaster).
At any rate, they could have provided Kasparov with a history of Deep Blue's games against other computers; they could also have provided Kasparov with Deep Blue's analyses of other match games. Either would have been easy to produce, and given Kasparov ample material to study.
I suspect Kasparov's arrogance led him not even to ask for such. He certainly didn't seem to take the match itself seriously (a mistake Kramnik is not repeating), and I don't recall hearing that Kasparov was explicitly denied those materials.
Slashdot Mirror
Which still doesn't benefit them directly. The only sales that will be affected for Sun are Java books and training courses.
The findings of fact went unchallenged, and stand as a legal finding by a competent court that what was reported in them actually happened. Conclusions on the laws broken differed, but the fundamental antitrust convictions based on those findings remained.
The point is that a court has found that Sun was directly harmed, and not, say, IBM; so IBM can't go to a court and demand that Lotus Notes be included.
Besides, Sun really doesn't benefit from this at all. So what if Java's included? Sun has no large Java software packages it's trying to sell; it's almost nowhere in the web applications sphere; Java itself isn't sold, it's downloaded. Pretty much all Sun gets is bragging rights.
A lot of posters have gone on about the pros and cons of this as a victory for sun. But remember, Sun will benefit very little from this. In the Java software space, they're nowhere. They don't sell the language. They have next to nothing to offer for development tools at a price. About all they get is bragging rights.
It's IBM who's probably tipping the bubbly right now. And, a lot of Java developers.
Did you miss the whole antitrust trial where Microsoft was found to be, not just a monopolist, but an abusive, predatory monopolist (and then upheld on appeal)? That's why they're being forced to include java: it's called punishment for past wrongs that are about to be repeated.
Not really, since Sun/Java was directly named in the findings of fact. The only other entity that might seek similar relief is Netscape. I wouldn't cry over the forced inclusion of that, either.
The judge isn't forcing Microsoft open to competition generally, he's remedying a situation in which a company was wronged in the past, and (successfully) claimed they were about to be wronged again. This pretty significantly limits the number of companies with a claim.
It's not kissing ass, it's self-preservation. You're a more valuable employee to the company if you understand more about the company. It's also about being better at proposing things, arguing for or against them, and communicating with people outside your department.
If you don't want to be a manager, then don't accept the promotion when it's offered. Though with your attitude, I doubt it will.
I think you've overstated my position.
I'm not suggesting that a programmer also be responsible for the cost analysis/business analysis/whatever. You're right in that it's generally the manager's job to do those things.
However, when you go to your manager and say "we should do this", and he asks "why?", do you offer any reasons besides technical ones? What if he says "that'll cost too much money." How do you argue against that if you don't understand what the costs are? On the other hand, if the manager says "we'll have a tough time justifying that on a financial basis," and you can help him out, then your idea has a greater chance of acceptance, and you'll have a better relationship with your manager if he sees that you understand his concerns in the same way you want him to understand yours.
Yes, a manager of technical people, if he's not a technical person himself (as I am: I'm currently in my MSCS, and have been coding for years) needs to learn as much as possible about the technology side. If you, as a geek, learn the financial side, then the two of you can communicate well across the whole spectrum of concerns and are more likely to be successful. You can also show your boss's boss that your boss is running a solid *business* department, and you'll have more independence because of it. You'll have the ammunition to fight back against accusations of being an unjustifiable expense.
You don't have to do a cost analysis every time; you're just miles ahead if you can, and if you understand them.
- Ask your non-geek boss how to make a business presentation on the business merits of a technology initiative. Ask her about cost analysis. Ask her about justifying new software to her bosses (what they're looking for).
- Pick up a textbook on managerial accounting (which is different than what accoutants do): it'll go into great detail on how businesses analyse costs and plan with them.
- Look at your company's profit and loss statement and figure it out. I started at the company as a cost analyst, and now I know exactly how the business is financially structured.
- Try doing it yourself: start a spreadsheet. List all the costs of something, say, upgrading to the latest version of Office. Include every cost you can think of: retraining, troubleshooting, labor spent installing, licence fees, costs to convert all the documents on the server. Don't just list dollar figures, list your calculation: 30 hours at $20.00/hr (but don't forget to include the cost of benefits and other expenses: an employee paid $10/hr costs the business $12-14/hr). Then list all the monetary benefits: time saved with zippity feature X, etc. Compare the bottom line: will the business benefit financially from the upgrade?
At it's heart, understanding the internals of a business means understanding it's programming language: finance. You don't understand how a business works until you understand the flow of money through it. Figure that out, and you'll be a respected geek who can talk to managers on their own terms.This is what feeds Andreeson's IT crisis today: the fact that technology professionals took their apparent suffering and feelings of being not understood, and used it to isolate themselves. They refused to act like businesspeople in an organization that lives and dies by its profit and loss statement. They complain about how management doesn't appreciate them, but how many learn to do a cost analysis that will show the business reasons for buying software X or hardware Y? In other words, the glorification of the geek in the 90s gave a lot of geeks the idea that they didn't have to learn the language of business to survive there. That's why they're underfunded, underappreciated, and harassed.
I've had the benefit of a boss who demanded a business analysis for any significant technology initiative at the company. He doesn't get computers, but he understands ROI. He understands a well-presented business case for anti-virus software. We have a wireless network in our new facility in Texas for a real-time inventory management system for one reason: my cost analysis showed that the implementation costs would be recovered within a year because of labor saved from eliminating batch-mode downloading, and that the cost over five years of our wireless system was ~15% of the batch-mode system.
When geeks figure out that they have to speak the language of the business, then the IT department gets properly funded, properly respected, and properly treated.
I've never been into MMORPG, but I have had some marathon sessions with Sim City and Civilization and any good FPS. My trick to setting an alarm for myself is to ignore my bladder for as long as I can. Having created a competing need that escalates in realtime, I have an unavoidable time limit: going to the bathroom == turn the game off. At some point "just one more turn" no longer outweighs "I'm about to piss myself".
The second example was coded for a flaw in the implementation of the standard in VC6: variable declaration in for loops was not limited to the scope of the for block (as the standard specifies). If you tried to compile the first example in VC6, you got a compile error claiming i was declared twice.
VC.NET implements the standard correctly.
In the review above, it's "Ominus". Is that wrong?
Either way, it's a painfully heavy-handed association that any grade-schooler should deride.
Christ, what a couple of hacks. I swear, any significant author should kill his own son before he dies, just to preclude any possibility of what might be done in their names.
Perhaps it's simply acknowledgement that the markets will react to the verdict, no matter what it is, combined with a desire to avoid secondary effects.
I have a Dell Latitude with a 15" LCD screen running natively at 1600x1200, and it looks fantastic. Why the hell can't I get a standalone LCD with that high a resolution? 15" LCDs max out at 1024x768; 17" at 1280x1024. Half the reason that text is so clear on my laptop screen is the high resolution, and that advantage disappears for a standalone.
...is why they didn't do this three years ago, before their market share was in the basement? This could have held onto a reasonable share of the browser market, and would have boosted the credibility of the whole project immensely.
It's fraud if they think they're agreeing to one thing and you mislead them to believe they're agreeing to another.
It's not fraud if they sign the contract without checking it, which is their responsibility. You can't "maneuver" someone into signing a contract without external influences (i.e., duress, threats, extortion, etc.)--if he makes a change to the paper, and they agree to it, then they're bound by it.
If the costs were equal, then the vendor would have to sell twenty-five times as many copies, proportional to the linux user base, than he would have to sell Windows copies. I agree that the Linux costs should be lower, but unless the Linux costs are one-twenty fifth or less the windows costs, then the vendor still has to sell more copies, proportionally, to justify the port.
Personally, I doubt that Linux users would buy even half (proportionally) what Windows users would.
...with his comments on why software vendors don't port to Mac: they can't expect to sell enough on such a minority platform to cover porting costs.
The author of the rant seems to assume that if he pays the same price for the linux version, and if linux users purchase it in the same proportion as Windows users, then the development costs of the Linux version will be covered. They won't be. Linux has less than 4% of the market share that Windows does for desktops. A company has to sell several times as many Linux copies, proportionally, the recoup its investment in the port; that's extremely doubtful, even if Linux users could be counted on to purchase it at all, which is doubtful to begin with.
And they're more productive for it.
One of my employees is Japanese, from the parent company. Most of the Japanese at our company worked twelve or fourteen hours days habitually; it's just what's done at the parent company. I told Yuichi to start leaving an hour earlier, until he'd worked himself down to a roughly normal workday. The first thing he told me once he was doing it was that he had more energy, and seemed to be getting more done. He was less scatterbrained from tiredness, he could concentrate more, and he looks forward to coming to work now because it isn't a grind.
Here's another thing: he works harder now. People who work fifteen hour days get less done because there's actually less time pressure. It's easier to procrastinate when you know, at four in the afternoon, that you've got six hours left in the office. When you're leaving at five or six, there's a more immediate motivation to wrap something up. Generally, when you feel time is limited, you're more careful about scheduling.
When they do stay late, they're rewarded with flex-time off, and they can buy flex-time by staying late. All of them make use of it for doctor's appointments and such, or to leave early for the weekend. My systems administrator decides to come in at one a.m. to upgrade a server, and tells me about it the next day. More responsibility for their own schedules has made them more willing to contribute beyond the minimum 40 hour week.
Thus, something like DeCSS which does not violate copywrite law on its own but can be made to, would not be in violation.
This is the essence of the "Betamax Defence": when the movie industry went after VCRs as copyright infringement devices, the judge found that they had "substantial non-infringing uses", meaning that while they could be used to violate copyright, that wasn't their sole or even intended purpose, and so VCRs were not essentially illegal tools.
Let's hope this holds up in a Norwegian court, since it's the exact defence Jon Johansen will be using--that DeCSS has a substantial non-infringing use (playing DVDs on Linux in an exercise of fair use rights), even if it can be used to decrypt DVDs for piracy.
This is also the defence that Napster tried, and failed.
But O'Reilly isn't arguing against the virtues of Open Source, he's arguing that the mandatory use of it is both contrary to Open Source/Free Software principles, and bad strategy to boot. He decries the "radicalization" of Open Source because he thinks it will hurt the movement in the long run.
That's the OP in a nutshell.
O'Reilly's argument isn't "the right tool for the right job". His argument is that requiring the use of Open Source in government is a losing strategy for Open Source because it polarizes the software community and encourages vendors of proprietary software to fight back harder with legal weapons.
There's nothing wrong with pushing Open Source use in government. But accomplishing by law what can't accomplished in a fair procurement market (which should be mandated by law) is a recipe for Open Source to become the affirmative action software--unable to compete on its merits, it succeeds by political hackery
I work for a sub $100 million dollar a year manufacturer, and our IT department is just warming up.
Any IT project I or anyone else has proposed has had to have a rock solid cost analysis with it, and it's that analysis that makes or breaks the project. Good projects can always be justified on a spreadsheet.
For example, we're implementing a wireless network in Operations for use with hand held terminals, for doing location management (mainly a lot of barcode scanning). Our current system works in batch mode, with hourly downloads. The cost analysis pointed out that the labor alone from downloading was costing the company $150,000 per year that could be directly saved, and more than recovered the investment in a wireless network and new PDTs.
A new computer for someone is also easily justified. We had people running Windows 98 on Pentium 133s. Assume they waste ten minutes (in increments of 15 to 120 seconds) a day waiting unnecessarily (compared to a new computer) for files to open or close, operations to complete, and to reboot from the occasional crash. I think you'll agree that's conservative. That's 45 hours a year. A clerk costs at least $15 an hour ($12/hour + benefits), usually more. That's $675/year wasted. A new Optiplex GX50 from Dell is around $900, and has a lifespan of at least three years. The computer pays for itself within 15 months, providing a net savings of over $1,000 over the life of the computer.
The president is definitely not a gearhead. But taking the time to justify the costs has always paid off for me, and now he trusts me with more speculative projects, like an in-house TV network, and control units for injection molding machines that are just Win2000 workstations running a VB app with a touchscreen.
So, no, IT is not undervalued in companies that are generally well-run, and have a very rational approach to the profit and loss statement. I suspect that the same companies that now denigrate IT are the one's that jumped hardest on the bandwagon when it was hot.
Prior to Kasparov's match, Deep Blue hadn't played any significant chess players in matches (though I believe there was a consulting grandmaster).
At any rate, they could have provided Kasparov with a history of Deep Blue's games against other computers; they could also have provided Kasparov with Deep Blue's analyses of other match games. Either would have been easy to produce, and given Kasparov ample material to study.
I suspect Kasparov's arrogance led him not even to ask for such. He certainly didn't seem to take the match itself seriously (a mistake Kramnik is not repeating), and I don't recall hearing that Kasparov was explicitly denied those materials.