This is because deep down most people believe that entertainment is an optional extra. People make the rational decision when given the option of paying for it or not paying for it. They save their resources and pay for the necessities.
Not true. Personally, I pay for my music. You know why? Partly to reward the artist, but most importantly because it's easier. I can go onto Amazon, hit a few buttons, pay a few pounds and I've got a new album on my iPod including cover art within minutes. That works for me.
I got the urge to watch Die Hard and realised that I didn't have it recently. To buy it from iTunes would have cost me £8 (double the DVD price), would have been locked into things that play iTunes and I'd either have to watch it on my PC or move my PC next to my TV. Even if the movie was free, piracy would have been a better option (as it happens I just changed my mind).
I think that desktop growth is slowing because desktop's aren't improving at the rate they were. I used to upgrade almost every year because the difference from the user experience perspective was huge. Using something like MS Word was noticeably faster on a P166 with 32mb of ram over a P75 with 16mb of ram.
Now, I did replace my laptop recently, but the previous one was over 4 years old. My desktop PC is 3 years old. My parent's laptop is 5 years old.
Of course this highlights a big problem with corporate governance, namely that boards are elected by stockholders, but a combination of stockholder disinterest and large institutional and mutual fund investment in firms has led to the composition of the board ballot being decided by the CEO and management.
I don't invest in any company where the people in charge doesn't have an "emotional" interest in the company. That means that either you founded the company, or have worked for the company for decades and come up through the ranks. I've yet to see a company where a faceless, parachuted-in CEO came into a business and dramatically improved it, and the reason is that they have never been entrepreneurs, nor do they have any understanding of the company. At best they keep it ticking along.
And it is THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
I know a large corporate where the message from the top is that nothing can be done that doesn't have a payoff within 12 months. I suspect that's entirely about annual reporting, and the effect on the CEO bonus, but the medium/long-term effect of such a decision is that it becomes a death spiral. You don't do sensible things that have a return over a reasonable term, so you don't get the extra income, so you lose money.
I know another company that just goes crazy for the outsourcing. They hired a shitty company in India, completely farking hopeless. They fucked up the system big time. So, they went out and hired a company in Poland. These guys were good, and reasonably priced. I wish that wasn't so because they could undercut people like me, but that is the truth. The Poles did a great job fixing the site, getting it running smoothly. So what did the company do once it got to this point? Oh yeah, they dropped the Polish company because they found a cheaper company in Bangalore. Guess what happened next...
What I wish a lot of managers would grasp is how vital IT is, and how much it's like the arteries of the business, and to stop treating it with all the seriousness of the people who print their business cards or sort out the company party. And yes, one reason I like working for small businesses is that they actually give a shit about IT working because they OWN the business. They're not going to fuck off a few years later with a golden parachute to another company.
The vast majority of the technology people attribute to NASA are really attributable to miltary expendatures. GPS, miniaturized electronics, rugged electronics, cryptography, vast swaths of material science, engine efficiency developments, jet planes, computers, the Internet, the technology behind rocketry, pressure suits, velcro, even things like long-shelf life food, a huge swath of medical technology -- those are all *miltary* funded innovation.
Actually, they aren't. Velcro was invented in Switzerland. The transistor was invented by AT&T to improve the reliability in telephone exchanges, computers were mostly developed by people in civilian life.
And while there's always going to be spin-offs from military research, it's a fallacy to assume that spending money on the military or money on war is going to make you richer. What's made the US richer for the past century was that they were far more pro-free market than the rest of the world.
I wish I was joking about this, but the support for open source software that is freely provided is typically better than that provided by vendors of enterprise software. Not just "better because it's free", but actually better.
With major open source projects (like Subversion, Tortoise, Wordpress, CakePHP), I've never had a bug that wasn't resolved within a few hours. You hit a forum or Stack Overflow or whatever, post a question, and you have responses within hours. Often it's that I've missed something, or there's some workaround that someone else has discovered, but either way, the problem gets solved.
Exactly. If you want a better heart pacemaker battery, spend money on developing one. It's a lot cheaper.
All sorts of research and technology has spin-offs. Viagra was a happy accident, originally designed as a blood pressure drug. Photosynth (Microsoft's 3D thing) originally came from research into Gutenberg's printing.
MS stuff is like swimming in a pool of golden unicorn tears compared to most "enterprise software". The reason is quite simple: a lot of small companies use MS stuff, and if it was as hideous as most "enterprise" software, people wouldn't buy it or upgrade.
In enterprises, the purchasing decisions are made by people who don't use it day-in-day-out. They look at things like the reporting module, see that's great and buy it. I worked in an organisation that dumped a working in-house change control system for a hideous IBM system.
The 2 key words about a startup are "fail cheap". Spend as little as you can to deliver the business functionality that you need on day 1. Because if the customers don't come, you haven't lost much. If they do come, you'll have plenty of money to rewrite it, or be able to get the funding for it.
Personally, I'm doing a startup in.net because I know.net, and can code faster in it. So, that's a smaller cost. The main downside is hosting charges, but even that has a tiny per-transaction cost difference.
all "enterprise" tools or software that you can buy are overpriced shit. That's not an anti paid-for software comment. Stuff like Visual Studio is great, but is also used in smaller companies.
The most hateful examples are enterprise helpdesk systems. It's like someone designed them that just hated users. Bugzilla's less nasty (and still nasty), but at least it's free.
I have worked on many projects in the private sector and heard about plenty more where the IT director has believed what a salesman told them and ended up with an absolute disaster.
Yeah, but the difference is that they make it work. They hold the company to the contract, have clauses about non-delivery, that sort of thing. The government will just let stuff die.
Because it's not their money, and they're not spending it upon themselves.
Milton Friedman identified 4 types of spending:
Spending your money on yourself. You'll get what you perceive is the best value.
Spending your money on someone else (like a present). You'll be quite careful how much you spend, but perhaps less careful about what it goes on
Spending other people's money on yourself (you're given a budget to buy a PC). You'll buy the best thing you can, but not care too much about value
Spending other people's money on someone else (most government spending). You don't care about how much is spent, nor do you care too much about what its spent on
I've done work on government projects and seen money thrown at projects that made absolutely no sense at all. Projects that just fizzled out or never got implemented. It doesn't happen in the competitive private sector. People do a project because it makes/saves money, and then make it work.
You are blowing serious amounts of money on college, thousands to pay for worthless non-core classes to fill your year - yet you gripe over doing work that is beneficial to your career, gratis?
That assumes that it is beneficial to their career. My suspicion is that a lot of people, through desperation, are getting scammed into doing crummy, low-grade jobs.
Here's the dilemma: if they're doing serious work, then what sort of company do they have experience in that would take such risks for important work (if you're unpaid, you can walk off site without any notice). If it's not serious work, it's worthless. Either way, it's a bad plan
Secondly, good companies with a future don't do free internships. They plan their investment.
Personally, I run a small business, and I would certainly not want someone unpaid doing work for me. If a project works out as paying sub minimum wage in dev costs then it isn't worth doing.
In business school the biggest case of outsourcing (cloud included) is that they are not in the I.T. business. They are in the (insert banking, finance, construction, etc) business. Should a major bank with no knowledge of food preperation have it's own cafeteria or should they outsource to someone who does just that?
The difference is that IT isn't just about writing code. It's about understanding the business problems and having the experience of the business type or company that you're working in. You need no knowledge of banking whatsoever to print the business cards or run the canteen for a bank. To write code, you need to understand about banking, and more specifically, the rules of the company you're working in.
This is also why external consultants aren't any cheaper than IT departments. Because IT development and support of customised systems doesn't scale.
I'm not against cloud services, but I've seen users do this sort of thing with 3rd party suppliers or with packages.It all sounds great. Some company supplies something and you don't have pesky IT getting in the way.
But then the business wants to change its process in some way. Does the 3rd party company's software allow that change? No. OK, either you now have to work out some Rube Goldberg process, where your users have to put something into 2 systems, or pay through the nose for that 3rd party company to make a change. And you'll have to wait behind all the priorities to other customers. What I've seen in a few places is that after a few years, they realise they're getting shafted by the 3rd party company, and the reason is that users completely underestimated how many changes they'd need to do.
People running companies need to quit thinking about IT as something that they can just drop in. It's more like the arteries of the business. That doesn't mean you can't use packages or clouds, but it does mean that those things better be easy to integrate, or be flexible in a way that you can change them without being forced to go to a 3rd party supplier. That either means having a web service, or the source code. I've worked on systems where we couldn't get our own data out without paying the company a 5 figure sum for the a CSV dump.
No, it takes standard 2.5" drives. But good to know as it might become a server or something, in which case I may eventually put an SSD in.
Only after clicking did I realise I hadn't thanked you for your advice. So thank you.
It's an IDE drive. I thought adapters were pricey? But also, it is getting a bit old with battery troubles and so forth, so I'm up for an upgrade anyway, I think.
I have a 5 year old Thinkpad, and I'm only just getting to the point of upgrading, and that's on a machine that I write asp.net/c# stuff on. Mostly because I want something smaller and something that I can put an SSD in.
Exactly. And I think what's funny is how a lot of stuff seems to be hitting maturity at the same time. PCs? Over. iPods? Over. Sat Nav? Pretty much dead. Phones? The iPhone 5 might still have people queueing up, but after that, they'll be greeted like MBP upgrades. TVs? Done. Blu-Ray? I sense people are upgrading when DVD players die, or when the kid wants a DVD player. Playstation/Xbox? Perhaps more innovation, but again I sense that we've reached a level of graphic resolution and gameplay detail that means people aren't clamouring for something more.
The other thing is that what's dragging down people's speed now is the hard drive and internet connection.
I remember a time when I was doing Word on a 486/66 and had to switch from "formatted" mode just to make it useable. It just couldn't keep up. I'd upgrade every couple of years because it made a huge difference. Today, I can't tell that much difference. I was in a shop and I booted up Win 7 on a laptop and it was a bit quicker than my XP machine, but not so much that I'd care.
This is, however, why I'm considering an SSD in my next machine.
The simple rule with patents is "would this happen without patents". Drugs simply won't happen without patents, and I suspect things like video compression improvements might not happen with it. But some of Apple's patents are just ludicrous. There's one which is little more than about making windows minimise and maximise in a pretty way, and people have been doing things about prettiness in computing without patents for decades.
One thing with cheaper coders is that for 99% of IT, they're often better than hardcore guys. I've met some real geniuses in my time, MENSA members, guys with masters degrees, and in most cases, they're a liability in an IT department. I've seen people write their own XML-based frameworks that sit on top of the asp.net framework because it was "more correctly abstracted", but of course, because code is imperfect, you then had thousands more lines that could be wrong. I also saw someone build his own scripting language because the ones out there didn't correctly fit the requirements.
In both cases, the projects failed and were rewritten because they just became unmanageable. The overhead of all the extra code just didn't make sense to solve the problem. And rewritten by someone who was far more pragmatic and just made something that worked and could be easily maintained.
It's not just fanboys. It's also people who see something super new and amazing and can't ask "but does it actually make my life better". A lot of technology is flashy, does something new and amazing technologically, but actually doesn't improve your life as a tool.
I can look at an iPad and see that it's an amazing engineering achievement, but I can't look and it and say "and it would improve my life because...". It's like all the problems of a phone (smaller screen, limited UI, restrictive functionality) with all the problems of a laptop (doesn't fit in my pocket, doesn't double as a phone).
What happens with amazing yet impractical technology is that it doesn't last for long. I remember the fad over sandwich toasters. People bought lots of them for a couple of years and then they pretty much disappeared off the market. Reason being that people realised that they never used them. I can't think of anyone I know who's been convinced to buy one by seeing someone else's. That simply wasn't the case with the iPod or the iPhone.
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This is because deep down most people believe that entertainment is an optional extra. People make the rational decision when given the option of paying for it or not paying for it. They save their resources and pay for the necessities.
Not true. Personally, I pay for my music. You know why? Partly to reward the artist, but most importantly because it's easier. I can go onto Amazon, hit a few buttons, pay a few pounds and I've got a new album on my iPod including cover art within minutes. That works for me.
I got the urge to watch Die Hard and realised that I didn't have it recently. To buy it from iTunes would have cost me £8 (double the DVD price), would have been locked into things that play iTunes and I'd either have to watch it on my PC or move my PC next to my TV. Even if the movie was free, piracy would have been a better option (as it happens I just changed my mind).
I think that desktop growth is slowing because desktop's aren't improving at the rate they were. I used to upgrade almost every year because the difference from the user experience perspective was huge. Using something like MS Word was noticeably faster on a P166 with 32mb of ram over a P75 with 16mb of ram.
Now, I did replace my laptop recently, but the previous one was over 4 years old. My desktop PC is 3 years old. My parent's laptop is 5 years old.
Of course this highlights a big problem with corporate governance, namely that boards are elected by stockholders, but a combination of stockholder disinterest and large institutional and mutual fund investment in firms has led to the composition of the board ballot being decided by the CEO and management.
I don't invest in any company where the people in charge doesn't have an "emotional" interest in the company. That means that either you founded the company, or have worked for the company for decades and come up through the ranks. I've yet to see a company where a faceless, parachuted-in CEO came into a business and dramatically improved it, and the reason is that they have never been entrepreneurs, nor do they have any understanding of the company. At best they keep it ticking along.
And it is THAT, that right there, that to me marks the dufus problem in a nutshell. it is upward failure where doing dumbshit yields a quick gain followed by a HORRIBLE outcome, but the gain gets the dufus moved up or a "selling point" on his resume and he/she is out of their before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
I know a large corporate where the message from the top is that nothing can be done that doesn't have a payoff within 12 months. I suspect that's entirely about annual reporting, and the effect on the CEO bonus, but the medium/long-term effect of such a decision is that it becomes a death spiral. You don't do sensible things that have a return over a reasonable term, so you don't get the extra income, so you lose money.
I know another company that just goes crazy for the outsourcing. They hired a shitty company in India, completely farking hopeless. They fucked up the system big time. So, they went out and hired a company in Poland. These guys were good, and reasonably priced. I wish that wasn't so because they could undercut people like me, but that is the truth. The Poles did a great job fixing the site, getting it running smoothly. So what did the company do once it got to this point? Oh yeah, they dropped the Polish company because they found a cheaper company in Bangalore. Guess what happened next...
What I wish a lot of managers would grasp is how vital IT is, and how much it's like the arteries of the business, and to stop treating it with all the seriousness of the people who print their business cards or sort out the company party. And yes, one reason I like working for small businesses is that they actually give a shit about IT working because they OWN the business. They're not going to fuck off a few years later with a golden parachute to another company.
The vast majority of the technology people attribute to NASA are really attributable to miltary expendatures. GPS, miniaturized electronics, rugged electronics, cryptography, vast swaths of material science, engine efficiency developments, jet planes, computers, the Internet, the technology behind rocketry, pressure suits, velcro, even things like long-shelf life food, a huge swath of medical technology -- those are all *miltary* funded innovation.
Actually, they aren't. Velcro was invented in Switzerland. The transistor was invented by AT&T to improve the reliability in telephone exchanges, computers were mostly developed by people in civilian life.
And while there's always going to be spin-offs from military research, it's a fallacy to assume that spending money on the military or money on war is going to make you richer. What's made the US richer for the past century was that they were far more pro-free market than the rest of the world.
I wish I was joking about this, but the support for open source software that is freely provided is typically better than that provided by vendors of enterprise software. Not just "better because it's free", but actually better.
With major open source projects (like Subversion, Tortoise, Wordpress, CakePHP), I've never had a bug that wasn't resolved within a few hours. You hit a forum or Stack Overflow or whatever, post a question, and you have responses within hours. Often it's that I've missed something, or there's some workaround that someone else has discovered, but either way, the problem gets solved.
Exactly. If you want a better heart pacemaker battery, spend money on developing one. It's a lot cheaper.
All sorts of research and technology has spin-offs. Viagra was a happy accident, originally designed as a blood pressure drug. Photosynth (Microsoft's 3D thing) originally came from research into Gutenberg's printing.
MS stuff is like swimming in a pool of golden unicorn tears compared to most "enterprise software". The reason is quite simple: a lot of small companies use MS stuff, and if it was as hideous as most "enterprise" software, people wouldn't buy it or upgrade.
In enterprises, the purchasing decisions are made by people who don't use it day-in-day-out. They look at things like the reporting module, see that's great and buy it. I worked in an organisation that dumped a working in-house change control system for a hideous IBM system.
The 2 key words about a startup are "fail cheap". Spend as little as you can to deliver the business functionality that you need on day 1. Because if the customers don't come, you haven't lost much. If they do come, you'll have plenty of money to rewrite it, or be able to get the funding for it.
Personally, I'm doing a startup in .net because I know .net, and can code faster in it. So, that's a smaller cost. The main downside is hosting charges, but even that has a tiny per-transaction cost difference.
all "enterprise" tools or software that you can buy are overpriced shit. That's not an anti paid-for software comment. Stuff like Visual Studio is great, but is also used in smaller companies.
The most hateful examples are enterprise helpdesk systems. It's like someone designed them that just hated users. Bugzilla's less nasty (and still nasty), but at least it's free.
Yeah, but the difference is that they make it work. They hold the company to the contract, have clauses about non-delivery, that sort of thing. The government will just let stuff die.
Because it's not their money, and they're not spending it upon themselves.
Milton Friedman identified 4 types of spending:
I've done work on government projects and seen money thrown at projects that made absolutely no sense at all. Projects that just fizzled out or never got implemented. It doesn't happen in the competitive private sector. People do a project because it makes/saves money, and then make it work.
That assumes that it is beneficial to their career. My suspicion is that a lot of people, through desperation, are getting scammed into doing crummy, low-grade jobs.
Here's the dilemma: if they're doing serious work, then what sort of company do they have experience in that would take such risks for important work (if you're unpaid, you can walk off site without any notice). If it's not serious work, it's worthless. Either way, it's a bad plan
Secondly, good companies with a future don't do free internships. They plan their investment.
Personally, I run a small business, and I would certainly not want someone unpaid doing work for me. If a project works out as paying sub minimum wage in dev costs then it isn't worth doing.
The difference is that IT isn't just about writing code. It's about understanding the business problems and having the experience of the business type or company that you're working in. You need no knowledge of banking whatsoever to print the business cards or run the canteen for a bank. To write code, you need to understand about banking, and more specifically, the rules of the company you're working in.
This is also why external consultants aren't any cheaper than IT departments. Because IT development and support of customised systems doesn't scale.
I'm not against cloud services, but I've seen users do this sort of thing with 3rd party suppliers or with packages.It all sounds great. Some company supplies something and you don't have pesky IT getting in the way.
But then the business wants to change its process in some way. Does the 3rd party company's software allow that change? No. OK, either you now have to work out some Rube Goldberg process, where your users have to put something into 2 systems, or pay through the nose for that 3rd party company to make a change. And you'll have to wait behind all the priorities to other customers. What I've seen in a few places is that after a few years, they realise they're getting shafted by the 3rd party company, and the reason is that users completely underestimated how many changes they'd need to do.
People running companies need to quit thinking about IT as something that they can just drop in. It's more like the arteries of the business. That doesn't mean you can't use packages or clouds, but it does mean that those things better be easy to integrate, or be flexible in a way that you can change them without being forced to go to a 3rd party supplier. That either means having a web service, or the source code. I've worked on systems where we couldn't get our own data out without paying the company a 5 figure sum for the a CSV dump.
It's just v3 that isn't allowed. But go Android if you want choice.
No, it takes standard 2.5" drives. But good to know as it might become a server or something, in which case I may eventually put an SSD in. Only after clicking did I realise I hadn't thanked you for your advice. So thank you.
It's an IDE drive. I thought adapters were pricey? But also, it is getting a bit old with battery troubles and so forth, so I'm up for an upgrade anyway, I think.
I have a 5 year old Thinkpad, and I'm only just getting to the point of upgrading, and that's on a machine that I write asp.net/c# stuff on. Mostly because I want something smaller and something that I can put an SSD in.
Exactly. And I think what's funny is how a lot of stuff seems to be hitting maturity at the same time. PCs? Over. iPods? Over. Sat Nav? Pretty much dead. Phones? The iPhone 5 might still have people queueing up, but after that, they'll be greeted like MBP upgrades. TVs? Done. Blu-Ray? I sense people are upgrading when DVD players die, or when the kid wants a DVD player. Playstation/Xbox? Perhaps more innovation, but again I sense that we've reached a level of graphic resolution and gameplay detail that means people aren't clamouring for something more.
The other thing is that what's dragging down people's speed now is the hard drive and internet connection.
I remember a time when I was doing Word on a 486/66 and had to switch from "formatted" mode just to make it useable. It just couldn't keep up. I'd upgrade every couple of years because it made a huge difference. Today, I can't tell that much difference. I was in a shop and I booted up Win 7 on a laptop and it was a bit quicker than my XP machine, but not so much that I'd care.
This is, however, why I'm considering an SSD in my next machine.
The simple rule with patents is "would this happen without patents". Drugs simply won't happen without patents, and I suspect things like video compression improvements might not happen with it. But some of Apple's patents are just ludicrous. There's one which is little more than about making windows minimise and maximise in a pretty way, and people have been doing things about prettiness in computing without patents for decades.
One thing with cheaper coders is that for 99% of IT, they're often better than hardcore guys. I've met some real geniuses in my time, MENSA members, guys with masters degrees, and in most cases, they're a liability in an IT department. I've seen people write their own XML-based frameworks that sit on top of the asp.net framework because it was "more correctly abstracted", but of course, because code is imperfect, you then had thousands more lines that could be wrong. I also saw someone build his own scripting language because the ones out there didn't correctly fit the requirements.
In both cases, the projects failed and were rewritten because they just became unmanageable. The overhead of all the extra code just didn't make sense to solve the problem. And rewritten by someone who was far more pragmatic and just made something that worked and could be easily maintained.
All these people moaning that Amazon have pulled out of it, yet none of them seem to have made any moves to step in and take over...
It's not just fanboys. It's also people who see something super new and amazing and can't ask "but does it actually make my life better". A lot of technology is flashy, does something new and amazing technologically, but actually doesn't improve your life as a tool.
I can look at an iPad and see that it's an amazing engineering achievement, but I can't look and it and say "and it would improve my life because...". It's like all the problems of a phone (smaller screen, limited UI, restrictive functionality) with all the problems of a laptop (doesn't fit in my pocket, doesn't double as a phone).
What happens with amazing yet impractical technology is that it doesn't last for long. I remember the fad over sandwich toasters. People bought lots of them for a couple of years and then they pretty much disappeared off the market. Reason being that people realised that they never used them. I can't think of anyone I know who's been convinced to buy one by seeing someone else's. That simply wasn't the case with the iPod or the iPhone.