Ballmer's dismissal of Google's depth is interesting coming on the heels of the Slashdot post a couple of items down about a potential Google mobile phone. Is that 'cute'? Or could such a phone actually realize the kinds of service convergence people have been wishing for almost as long as flying cars? And probably be half the cost of the iPhone.
The question of the 20% time is very interesting. One of the innovations Enron touted was how its employees were free to work on whatever projects they wanted. Then it turned out Enron really was only good at trading energy, and not good enough at that. On the other hand, Google is delivering. Things like the phone will determine how deep they get. I think skeptical optimism is the stance to take.
On the hiring note, of course Google can't keep up its hiring practices forever. They'd run out of warm human bodies eventually. More broadly, I heard Chad Fowler last month note that as baby boomers retire, there won't be enough developers in the US to take the software jobs the boomers leave behind. Even tapping talent overseas and outsourcing like mad, there's likely to be tremendous demand. I liked the comment that someone in the gathering made to Fowler's observation: then let's hire fewer developers.
Oh, THAT's why Britain lost its pre-eminence. I always thought it had something to do with overextending itself to run a world-wide empire and fighting two ruinous world wars. Actually, the problem was that in the automobile's infancy, they didn't embrace it. That's why they had all that rationing in the 1950's. It wasn't because they alone fought Hitler to a standstill before the US got off its butt to help them. San Francisco had better let all those Segway drivers roll down those sidewalks or else the multibillion dollar Segway industry (not to mention genetic technology, robotics, and nanotech) will be developed somewhere less bleeding-heart.
Man, you are flexible. I haven't seen anyone stretch that much since the old Elastic Man cartoons
From Bloomberg: Linux is developed in a so-called open-source environment in which the software code generally isn't owned by any one company. That, as well as programs such as music-sharing software from Napster Inc., means the world's largest software maker has to do a better job of talking to policymakers, he said.
What exactly would Micrsoft be talking to policymakers about? The benefits of C# and.NET, or Windows XP? Or maybe that if Open Source isn't stopped, it will hurt US corporations. There are plenty of "policymakers" who think that the business of America is corporate business, and they'll be willing to do things to defend Microsoft and other big corporations from competition. Not necessarily outlawing, but who knows what Microsoft might have in mind.
It sounds like they're encouraged by the RIAA's apparent successes in crippling Napster as a competitive threat, and they seem to think that politicians and judges might be willing to give them the same sort of help. It's an awfully brazen thing to pursue, though, right after they demo this vaporware OS that is such an obvious knockoff of OS X. I wonder if they're so intoxicated with the prospect of President Dubya calling off the DOJ that they're back to thinking they control the world.
I'm NOT a congenital MS basher, but their behavior lately is so arrogant and disgusting that it leaves me almost breathless.
I read the first book,...Explained, last year, when I was trying to get the failing dot-com employing me to actually adopt a process for application development. We never really tried it out, so unfortunately I can't weigh in with actual experiences.
By my memory, the book handles risk in two ways: the planning process calls for the people making the business rules to describe in some detail what they want to see, one feature at a time, and rank these by importance. This way, you solve important problems first. To take your example, if integration with an app server is a high priority, then it tends to get done first, and if it's a big nightmare, you find out sooner. If it's not relatively important, then its difficulty is not a big of a problem.
The second way I remember risk being addressed is that after the business folks set down their stories, the development people evaluate how long they think each feature will take and how comfortable they are with their estimate. If you as a developer see "integrate with app server so that..." written on a card, it's up to you to say, "Whoa, that could be a nightmare." and go from there.
One other thing I forgot. The short iteration, with another planning process each time, means that in a four-month project, the team will have at least three or four chances to realize the app server integration is a monster, instead of having ot catch it at the beginning in the all-determining "requirements phase".
Finally, yes, I think you should read the book. XP isn't a silver bullet, of course, but I see development as a battle against the laziness within human nature. (Like why am I posting to Slashdot right now....) If you find a process that engages you and keeps you working fruitfully, then that's the right one.
Katz has done an injustice to Hamlet on the Holodeck by mentioning it in the same breath in which he shills for MyVideoGame.com.
Hamlet is not a Toffler-esque "The Future is coming!" screed. Katz, like the folks he started out with seems to think everything written about New Media must point to a transformative future with miraculous developments like jet cars, eternal life, and libertarianism. (Actually, to be fair, he didn't say as much in his article. Maybe I'm reading the futurist schlock into his article, but whatever, it's fun.)
Hamlet on the Holodeck is actually a fairly modest book that was written for people who care about writing, storytelling, and art. It's a book not about society, but about narrative and storytelling. I happen to ardently love good RPGs, digital or dice-based or whatever. I happen to have a near-religious belief in the impossible dream of collective authoring enabling all of us to be social, creative, and thus fulfilled. No jet cars necessary. I am a freak. This is a great book for me. It is not a book for everyone.
That said, the book does offer a lot of really cool background on narrative and storytelling in a lot of genres--including fiction writing and video games--that might be interesting to a lot of folks. In the way it offers a great overview of broad themes across art forms it is a lot like Scott McCloud's dazzlingly outstanding book Understanding Comics, which focusses on comic books but also contains the best 15-minute gloss on art history that I've ever encountered.
As for the site that Katz rhapsodizes about: please!
There are a dozen game sites at least as good as this one. It's nothing new.
How many articles focusing on "Games are violent" "I'm addicted to games" "I play games... and I'm a girl!" can you possibly stand?
The writers are smug, but in the wrong way. Rather than obsessing on their own substance abuse or misspent youth, maybe they should talk about the games, point their hip cynical cleverness at the true topic at hand. For my money, a site like Something Awful does a much better job of expressing game "culture" by writing well about games themselves. And yes, some of the reviews are hilarious bitchslaps, but that's appropriate. SA's writers are contributing to gaming culture's smart-aleck, blunt, trash-talking nature, not writing article's spelling out these attributes.
I recommend you read about Seymour Papert's Constructionist learning theory. Seymour is an MIT Media Lab fellow, an author, and a teacher. He invented LOGO, the drawing-oriented programming language that made me into a programmer at age 10. He was a student of Piaget, one of the most important pedegogical thinkers. Find out all about him at his site: www.papert.org.
The basic thrust of Seymour's idea is that children want very badly to learn--about everything--but schools for the most part suck. If you let children investigate things and follow their interests, they will learn rapidly and want to keep learning. If you lead them by the nose, force-feeding them lectures and rigid textbook reading, they'll get bored and resentful.
Computers offer a great opportunity for teachers to become guides facilitating individuals or small groups of kids to investigate the things a computer does. Show them how to interact with the machine. Give them things to do that will make them feel like they're discovering something, accomplishing something. Without fail, little Jane will ask how it all works, and that's when you crack open the box and tell them about CPUs and hard drives. Have them start making Web pages, and little Joe will ask how to do something advanced. That's when you say, "Sure, you can do that. You just have to learn about CGI." etc.
The approach is up to you. The amount of freedom you want to give the kids is up to you as well. Check out Seymour. He's much better at explaining this stuff than I am.
No matter what you do, however, do NOT teach them how to use spreadsheets, word processors, specific OSes, or anything else. There will be time enough for them to learn those miserable skills on their own. Teach them to love producing things, making things, learning how to make the machine do cool, useful, funny, spooky, profound things.
Also, unless this is some sort of honors class, do NOT target things for "elite" students. There will be plenty of time for that clique-forming crap if they want to go on and study in college. I'm convinced computers are built for children, and not just the math junkies or the model airplane crowd. They appeal to kids in a way that will turn most children into engaged expert users.
When do I listen to radio? 1. In a car. 2. In the morning when I'm waking up. 3. When I want continuous, high-quality audio. 4. When I want up-to-the minute information (in emergencies).
Which of these do the 'Net and the Web supplant? None. (The thought of turning on my PC at 7AM and sitting in front of it in my bathrobe is so depressing I can't even picture it.)
Furthermore, you can't expect me to believe that there are nearly as many households out there with a good 'Net connection, a PC, and audio-playing software as there are with an old beat-up FM radio. Radio has survived TV, and it will survive the Internet, and the thing after the Internet too.
The opening up of the FM band to low-wattage stations is potentially revolutionary--more so than putting some streaming audio up on Shoutcast and hoping 50 people will tune in for some choppy, jumping, artifact-filled audio. In a community like mine in Brooklyn, NY, you could reach a million listeners with just a 4-mile radius. You better believe more of us have radios than a good 'Net connection (Thanks for nothing, Bell Atlantic).
Radio still matters, and this is a bright day for people who think that the media should belong to the people, not to a few people.
"Now children, this isn't covered in the curriculum, but I wanted to spend a few minutes going over this theory that some scientists have about the reason things fall to the ground. They call this gravity."
"Now, no one can prove gravity exists, since no one's actually seen it. Ever since the state board took gravity out of our science curriculum, there's been a lot of pressure for us teachers to teach the commonly accepted view that objects are attracted to each other in consistent and predictable ways because of magic pixies that live inside everything."
"I just wanted you to know about it, because there are parts of the world where people take this Theory of Gravity to be truth. Now we'll go back to explaining how the Earth is only five thousand years old and how the devil put all those 4-billion-year-old rocks all over the place..."
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer's dismissal of Google's depth is interesting coming on the heels of the Slashdot post a couple of items down about a potential Google mobile phone. Is that 'cute'? Or could such a phone actually realize the kinds of service convergence people have been wishing for almost as long as flying cars? And probably be half the cost of the iPhone.
The question of the 20% time is very interesting. One of the innovations Enron touted was how its employees were free to work on whatever projects they wanted. Then it turned out Enron really was only good at trading energy, and not good enough at that. On the other hand, Google is delivering. Things like the phone will determine how deep they get. I think skeptical optimism is the stance to take.
On the hiring note, of course Google can't keep up its hiring practices forever. They'd run out of warm human bodies eventually. More broadly, I heard Chad Fowler last month note that as baby boomers retire, there won't be enough developers in the US to take the software jobs the boomers leave behind. Even tapping talent overseas and outsourcing like mad, there's likely to be tremendous demand. I liked the comment that someone in the gathering made to Fowler's observation: then let's hire fewer developers.
Oh, THAT's why Britain lost its pre-eminence. I always thought it had something to do with overextending itself to run a world-wide empire and fighting two ruinous world wars. Actually, the problem was that in the automobile's infancy, they didn't embrace it. That's why they had all that rationing in the 1950's. It wasn't because they alone fought Hitler to a standstill before the US got off its butt to help them. San Francisco had better let all those Segway drivers roll down those sidewalks or else the multibillion dollar Segway industry (not to mention genetic technology, robotics, and nanotech) will be developed somewhere less bleeding-heart.
Man, you are flexible. I haven't seen anyone stretch that much since the old Elastic Man cartoons
What exactly would Micrsoft be talking to policymakers about? The benefits of C# and
It sounds like they're encouraged by the RIAA's apparent successes in crippling Napster as a competitive threat, and they seem to think that politicians and judges might be willing to give them the same sort of help. It's an awfully brazen thing to pursue, though, right after they demo this vaporware OS that is such an obvious knockoff of OS X. I wonder if they're so intoxicated with the prospect of President Dubya calling off the DOJ that they're back to thinking they control the world.
I'm NOT a congenital MS basher, but their behavior lately is so arrogant and disgusting that it leaves me almost breathless.
mike
By my memory, the book handles risk in two ways: the planning process calls for the people making the business rules to describe in some detail what they want to see, one feature at a time, and rank these by importance. This way, you solve important problems first. To take your example, if integration with an app server is a high priority, then it tends to get done first, and if it's a big nightmare, you find out sooner. If it's not relatively important, then its difficulty is not a big of a problem.
The second way I remember risk being addressed is that after the business folks set down their stories, the development people evaluate how long they think each feature will take and how comfortable they are with their estimate. If you as a developer see "integrate with app server so that..." written on a card, it's up to you to say, "Whoa, that could be a nightmare." and go from there.
One other thing I forgot. The short iteration, with another planning process each time, means that in a four-month project, the team will have at least three or four chances to realize the app server integration is a monster, instead of having ot catch it at the beginning in the all-determining "requirements phase".
Finally, yes, I think you should read the book. XP isn't a silver bullet, of course, but I see development as a battle against the laziness within human nature. (Like why am I posting to Slashdot right now....) If you find a process that engages you and keeps you working fruitfully, then that's the right one.
mike
Hamlet is not a Toffler-esque "The Future is coming!" screed. Katz, like the folks he started out with seems to think everything written about New Media must point to a transformative future with miraculous developments like jet cars, eternal life, and libertarianism. (Actually, to be fair, he didn't say as much in his article. Maybe I'm reading the futurist schlock into his article, but whatever, it's fun.)
Hamlet on the Holodeck is actually a fairly modest book that was written for people who care about writing, storytelling, and art. It's a book not about society, but about narrative and storytelling. I happen to ardently love good RPGs, digital or dice-based or whatever. I happen to have a near-religious belief in the impossible dream of collective authoring enabling all of us to be social, creative, and thus fulfilled. No jet cars necessary. I am a freak. This is a great book for me. It is not a book for everyone.
That said, the book does offer a lot of really cool background on narrative and storytelling in a lot of genres--including fiction writing and video games--that might be interesting to a lot of folks. In the way it offers a great overview of broad themes across art forms it is a lot like Scott McCloud's dazzlingly outstanding book Understanding Comics, which focusses on comic books but also contains the best 15-minute gloss on art history that I've ever encountered.
As for the site that Katz rhapsodizes about: please!
Just my $.02.
goodmike
The basic thrust of Seymour's idea is that children want very badly to learn--about everything--but schools for the most part suck. If you let children investigate things and follow their interests, they will learn rapidly and want to keep learning. If you lead them by the nose, force-feeding them lectures and rigid textbook reading, they'll get bored and resentful.
Computers offer a great opportunity for teachers to become guides facilitating individuals or small groups of kids to investigate the things a computer does. Show them how to interact with the machine. Give them things to do that will make them feel like they're discovering something, accomplishing something. Without fail, little Jane will ask how it all works, and that's when you crack open the box and tell them about CPUs and hard drives. Have them start making Web pages, and little Joe will ask how to do something advanced. That's when you say, "Sure, you can do that. You just have to learn about CGI." etc.
The approach is up to you. The amount of freedom you want to give the kids is up to you as well. Check out Seymour. He's much better at explaining this stuff than I am.
No matter what you do, however, do NOT teach them how to use spreadsheets, word processors, specific OSes, or anything else. There will be time enough for them to learn those miserable skills on their own. Teach them to love producing things, making things, learning how to make the machine do cool, useful, funny, spooky, profound things.
Also, unless this is some sort of honors class, do NOT target things for "elite" students. There will be plenty of time for that clique-forming crap if they want to go on and study in college. I'm convinced computers are built for children, and not just the math junkies or the model airplane crowd. They appeal to kids in a way that will turn most children into engaged expert users.
goodmike
When do I listen to radio?
1. In a car.
2. In the morning when I'm waking up.
3. When I want continuous, high-quality audio.
4. When I want up-to-the minute information (in emergencies).
Which of these do the 'Net and the Web supplant? None. (The thought of turning on my PC at 7AM and sitting in front of it in my bathrobe is so depressing I can't even picture it.)
Furthermore, you can't expect me to believe that there are nearly as many households out there with a good 'Net connection, a PC, and audio-playing software as there are with an old beat-up FM radio. Radio has survived TV, and it will survive the Internet, and the thing after the Internet too.
The opening up of the FM band to low-wattage stations is potentially revolutionary--more so than putting some streaming audio up on Shoutcast and hoping 50 people will tune in for some choppy, jumping, artifact-filled audio. In a community like mine in Brooklyn, NY, you could reach a million listeners with just a 4-mile radius. You better believe more of us have radios than a good 'Net connection (Thanks for nothing, Bell Atlantic).
Radio still matters, and this is a bright day for people who think that the media should belong to the people, not to a few people.
"Now children, this isn't covered in the curriculum, but I wanted to spend a few minutes going over this theory that some scientists have about the reason things fall to the ground. They call this gravity."
"Now, no one can prove gravity exists, since no one's actually seen it. Ever since the state board took gravity out of our science curriculum, there's been a lot of pressure for us teachers to teach the commonly accepted view that objects are attracted to each other in consistent and predictable ways because of magic pixies that live inside everything."
"I just wanted you to know about it, because there are parts of the world where people take this Theory of Gravity to be truth. Now we'll go back to explaining how the Earth is only five thousand years old and how the devil put all those 4-billion-year-old rocks all over the place..."