The problem with your analogy is that IBM was (relatively) restrained by antitrust proceedings from using the mainframe club to protect its PC line and vice-versa. Although the case never completed, internal documents inside IBM show that the company was completely hamstrung by efforts to either comply with antitrust law (if you're feeling charitable) or not give the Feds any more ammunition (if you're not).
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been given a slap on the wrist, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did. No new competitor will be able to survive the onslaught of the Microsoft alternative, funded as a loss-leader by monopolist billions and tied to the must-have Windows OS.
The premise of the article is flawed - there is no competitor capable of defeating Microsoft even if Microsoft continues to do shoddy work.
No major computer maker preloads linux on the desktop for more than a tiny niche market. No major computer maker preloads a competing office suite for more than a tiny niche market. Nobody's making money on browsers, directly or indirectly. Etc.
People who keep thinking that the IBM model can occur here are fooling themselves - IBM voluntarily restrained from anticompetitive behavior because they were scared to death of the antitrust proceedings. Microsoft (for good reason) has no fear of the government here, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did.
That's ridiculous. He said he was comparing on the desktop; and the distro(s) he used were clearly packaged for desktop use.
It's like saying that I shouldn't think an SUV's gas mileage is too low for commuting to and from work, since it could also go off-road. Problem is - I wasn't rating it on off-road capabilities; I was evaluating it for use as a commuter vehicle.
Prius is mid-size; not sure about the Golf. The '04 Prius is completely different from the small, chintzy-looking compact Prius from '03 and earlier.
I fit comfortably in the back seat of our '04 Prius (average-sized male) which I can't say about any compact car. It is a bit smaller than a Camry, though.
The original Workplace Shell developers are all over the country, most not at IBM. Even the Warp 4 team is all over the place now (including me).
A few people in Austin still work on it, including a good friend of mine who actually still works on the OS/2 browser from time to time. Some support is done in India. That's all, though.
I was talking about OS/2 v3, which had networking. I worked at IBM at the time, and had sufficient contacts in the IBM PC Company to know what their customers were asking for. (They, by the way, were not happy about having to turn away those customers either).
Primarily, preloading OS/2 was a cost-saving measure for those companies - didn't have to pay for a Windows license which was superfluous (since OS/2 at that time included a copy of Windows 3 itself). But a lot of the bigger, dumber, customers (banks, mostly) would in fact run with the preload indefinitely despite the fact that it stunk.
Plenty of buyers (20-30% according to internal rumors) wanted OS/2 preloaded. Problem was that Microsoft told IBM's PC arm that if they did so, they'd pay full retail for Windows for the other 70-80%.
That's a load of crap. A bunch of bicycles going 3 mph (even if we accepted that ludicrous contention) take up much less space than the same number of cars going 60. (The same is true for cars, after all; you need much less space between vehicles when travelling slowly).
Bicycles take up about 1/20 as much space on the roadway as a car does. People using transit take up about 1/100 as much space as they would one-to-a-car.
exactly. The libertarian answer to this just simply DOESN'T WORK due to network effects.
There's no non-trivial number of jobs out there offering anything different than 50-hours-a-week with 2-shitty-weeks-off-per-year.
When asked to explain this, the typical libertarian falls back on "well, OBVIOUSLY people don't WANT more vacation", which is a load of crap; but is just simple enough for them to wrap their brains around. Never mind that we never had anything like a 40-hour work-week until labor unions fought (and some members died) for that privilege to be written into law.
Fabulous. So now our profession is nothing more than short-order fry cook. No possibility of turning on the headphones and going into the zone. No chance of browsing the web for new and interesting por^H^H^Hstuff.
libertarians just don't get any smarter with time, do they?
Spam is the best example these days of the tragedy of the commons. Perhaps they should have read that chapter of their economics book instead of reading Ayn Rand in the bathroom for the 46th time.
Re:Getting ready to move my company
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm at a company that thinks like that when it comes to furniture; and yet we (like most other companies) have no problem wasting ten times as much on perks for useless executives like our VP of sales (gets a plane ticket back/forth from his home city every weekend) or last-second travel to companies to make deals that an idiot can tell you are never going to pan out (and never do).
Thinking it's worthwhile to save a one-time 50 bucks per-employee on cheap chairs or a monthly 100 bucks per-employee on rent is very telling in our industry, where the average employee is supposed to be generating several times that revenue for your business every single day.
Bankers don't put up with cubicles. Lawyers and doctors don't. Neither do architects (at least the ones I've seen). Why do programmers? Because too many of us buy into this shit that we're going to benefit later on by squeezing a few pennies now.
No reputable scientists ever predicted a short-term anthropogenic ice age in a peer-reviewed journal; and the repetition of this claim is straight out of Rush Limbaugh's Guide To Shouting Down Science.
http://www.wmc.care4free.net/sci/iceage/
The things they theorized about were long-term natural climate cycles; NOT short-term human-forced changes in climate; and in fact, they are not even contradictory.
The right-wingers of the world would have me believe that if I stop my car on an uphill, start rolling backwards (downhill), and then hit the gas and start going uphill, that I've just disproved gravity.
Oh, come on; how many of us had some classes in real physical college where we rarely showed up for class, and yet did the work and got an A? Well, how many of us here on Slashdot, anyways?
In fact, I was pretty clear that the problem we've had with many of our developer PhD's was not that they SOMETIMES prefer the elegant solution; but that they ALWAYS push for the elegant solution, even when it is in a search routine that will never have more than 4 components in it; or it's just wiring code; or when you're running late and the business is at stake. That's clearly different from your allegation.
we generally avoid PhD's for the (admittedly prejudiced) reasons below:
1. More likely to leave for reasons beyond our control (even if we do our best to make work happy, they may decide to go off and do research or go teach)
2. Less likely to work well in the compromise-heavy environment required in commercial development (prefer an elegant solution; sometimes to the point of a huge productivity loss for everybody else, when all that was needed was a select-sort or some other quick get-it-done-because-it's-late solution)
I've worked with a lot of PhD's despite the two caveats above, and have generally observed that if you can get the right PhD in the right position, you can play to their strengths. This usually means hiring them for an architecture position where they can interact with professional organizations; do long-range planning; write neat prototypes; all that kind of stuff that heads-down developers rarely get to do (and which the PhD might be better at anyways).
However, putting a PhD in a development position has been uniformly disastrous at all three companies (huge, medium, and startup) I've worked at. Even at the senior developer level, there's too much compromising and too much "wiring code" to make most PhD's happy; and their tendency to pursue elegance at the expense of expedience no matter what the situation can slow everybody else down too.
Son, if you can't learn the lesson from Chicago (that electricity cost can directly lead to people dying) and not understand why that lesson applies to the issues in California, then you're beyond hope. Go jerk off to Ayn Rand.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been given a slap on the wrist, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did. No new competitor will be able to survive the onslaught of the Microsoft alternative, funded as a loss-leader by monopolist billions and tied to the must-have Windows OS.
No major computer maker preloads linux on the desktop for more than a tiny niche market. No major computer maker preloads a competing office suite for more than a tiny niche market. Nobody's making money on browsers, directly or indirectly. Etc.
People who keep thinking that the IBM model can occur here are fooling themselves - IBM voluntarily restrained from anticompetitive behavior because they were scared to death of the antitrust proceedings. Microsoft (for good reason) has no fear of the government here, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did.
I never got sound to work on my (new) system, with RedHat 9. With ALSA. "It works for me" as a tolerated answer is why linux has the image it does.
That's ridiculous. He said he was comparing on the desktop; and the distro(s) he used were clearly packaged for desktop use. It's like saying that I shouldn't think an SUV's gas mileage is too low for commuting to and from work, since it could also go off-road. Problem is - I wasn't rating it on off-road capabilities; I was evaluating it for use as a commuter vehicle.
He said he identified the hardware in the InfoWeek forum. You are exactly the kind of bad actor he's been complaining about.
Your diesel engine is also dirtier than most SUVs. Beetle TDI Prius SUVs
Prius is mid-size; not sure about the Golf. The '04 Prius is completely different from the small, chintzy-looking compact Prius from '03 and earlier. I fit comfortably in the back seat of our '04 Prius (average-sized male) which I can't say about any compact car. It is a bit smaller than a Camry, though.
The original Workplace Shell developers are all over the country, most not at IBM. Even the Warp 4 team is all over the place now (including me). A few people in Austin still work on it, including a good friend of mine who actually still works on the OS/2 browser from time to time. Some support is done in India. That's all, though.
I was talking about OS/2 v3, which had networking. I worked at IBM at the time, and had sufficient contacts in the IBM PC Company to know what their customers were asking for. (They, by the way, were not happy about having to turn away those customers either). Primarily, preloading OS/2 was a cost-saving measure for those companies - didn't have to pay for a Windows license which was superfluous (since OS/2 at that time included a copy of Windows 3 itself). But a lot of the bigger, dumber, customers (banks, mostly) would in fact run with the preload indefinitely despite the fact that it stunk.
Plenty of buyers (20-30% according to internal rumors) wanted OS/2 preloaded. Problem was that Microsoft told IBM's PC arm that if they did so, they'd pay full retail for Windows for the other 70-80%.
That's a load of crap. A bunch of bicycles going 3 mph (even if we accepted that ludicrous contention) take up much less space than the same number of cars going 60. (The same is true for cars, after all; you need much less space between vehicles when travelling slowly).
Bicycles take up about 1/20 as much space on the roadway as a car does. People using transit take up about 1/100 as much space as they would one-to-a-car.
There's no non-trivial number of jobs out there offering anything different than 50-hours-a-week with 2-shitty-weeks-off-per-year.
When asked to explain this, the typical libertarian falls back on "well, OBVIOUSLY people don't WANT more vacation", which is a load of crap; but is just simple enough for them to wrap their brains around. Never mind that we never had anything like a 40-hour work-week until labor unions fought (and some members died) for that privilege to be written into law.
If pair programming becomes required; don't we both have to take our long lunches and vacations at the same time?
Fabulous. So now our profession is nothing more than short-order fry cook. No possibility of turning on the headphones and going into the zone. No chance of browsing the web for new and interesting por^H^H^Hstuff.
Spam is the best example these days of the tragedy of the commons. Perhaps they should have read that chapter of their economics book instead of reading Ayn Rand in the bathroom for the 46th time.
Thinking it's worthwhile to save a one-time 50 bucks per-employee on cheap chairs or a monthly 100 bucks per-employee on rent is very telling in our industry, where the average employee is supposed to be generating several times that revenue for your business every single day.
Bankers don't put up with cubicles. Lawyers and doctors don't. Neither do architects (at least the ones I've seen). Why do programmers? Because too many of us buy into this shit that we're going to benefit later on by squeezing a few pennies now.
All other things being equal, the private office is far superior to the cubicle. Of course, in your case, the other things may not be equal...
I commented in his forum that it's turning into Lake Woebegone around here; every software developer only hires the top 1%.
No reputable scientists ever predicted a short-term anthropogenic ice age in a peer-reviewed journal; and the repetition of this claim is straight out of Rush Limbaugh's Guide To Shouting Down Science. http://www.wmc.care4free.net/sci/iceage/ The things they theorized about were long-term natural climate cycles; NOT short-term human-forced changes in climate; and in fact, they are not even contradictory. The right-wingers of the world would have me believe that if I stop my car on an uphill, start rolling backwards (downhill), and then hit the gas and start going uphill, that I've just disproved gravity.
Oh, come on; how many of us had some classes in real physical college where we rarely showed up for class, and yet did the work and got an A? Well, how many of us here on Slashdot, anyways?
Read it first.
1. More likely to leave for reasons beyond our control (even if we do our best to make work happy, they may decide to go off and do research or go teach)
2. Less likely to work well in the compromise-heavy environment required in commercial development (prefer an elegant solution; sometimes to the point of a huge productivity loss for everybody else, when all that was needed was a select-sort or some other quick get-it-done-because-it's-late solution)
I've worked with a lot of PhD's despite the two caveats above, and have generally observed that if you can get the right PhD in the right position, you can play to their strengths. This usually means hiring them for an architecture position where they can interact with professional organizations; do long-range planning; write neat prototypes; all that kind of stuff that heads-down developers rarely get to do (and which the PhD might be better at anyways).
However, putting a PhD in a development position has been uniformly disastrous at all three companies (huge, medium, and startup) I've worked at. Even at the senior developer level, there's too much compromising and too much "wiring code" to make most PhD's happy; and their tendency to pursue elegance at the expense of expedience no matter what the situation can slow everybody else down too.
Son, if you can't learn the lesson from Chicago (that electricity cost can directly lead to people dying) and not understand why that lesson applies to the issues in California, then you're beyond hope. Go jerk off to Ayn Rand.