“The GSS asked respondents the following question: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them [the Scientific Community]?”(page 172)
Not quite the same thing as not trusting science. I can trust a process without particularly trusting process participants.
Who cares what the problem is? If a geek can't figure it out, it's going to be a nightmare for the normal office user. (S)he will open the document take a look at the incorrect linebreaking and scream for help.
And we're not even talking about workflow issues yet: I tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement for Office and while it's a nice stand-alone product, it just doesn't work in a business context where you're exchanging documents with other people who are still office users:
- do you want to send an important business document with broken linebreaks/pagebreaks to your customer/investor?
- do you want to compare contracts word for word when your lawyers send you a Word file with change markup that OpenOffice converts to: "the document has changes starting on page 4 and ending on page 17..."
There's too much network effect in documents to simply replace the application that creates/displays the documents.
You might be right under certain circumstances, but then I would rephrase my point:
While a business plan based on support for incompetent users might work, I wouldn't want to make my living with it.
In your example, you're talking about general computer support. I don't want to have to answer "My mouse doesn't work!" kind of questions when I'm trying to make a living from selling easy-to-use language integration tools to developers. Call me an arrogant SOB for that, but I just plain don't want to!
I guess the answer is this: there are some business domains that are better suited for a support-based model than others.
Trying to make a living from support eventually creates applications like WebSphere or Oracle or SAP. When the money is in selling help, you need to demonstrate that the users need help, otherwise they won't renew support.
We've had this problem, so I'm not speaking theoretically. Most of our users bought support with the purchase of our commercial product, but after one year many of them didn't want to renew because they hadn't had any problems and didn't know what they were paying for.
A business plan that is based on support is at direct cross purposes with creating high-quality, easy-to-use software.
That --together with undercapitalization-- is probably the number one reason why tech startups don't make it: the believe that the marketing and business side is easy and almost automatic if you have a great product.
Reality check: 99.9% of your potential customers will never know your product even exists unless you a) are lucky enough to be working on the new killer app that would need to be drawn, shot, and quartered to die or b) spend a lot of time and/or money on marketing.
You paid for a pretty box, a CD, MS's expenses, and a large chunk for pure MS profit.
What do you pay for when you buy a Linux distro? Clearly there is some value in burning some additional products or tools on a CD, thereby obviating the need of having to download them, but really, is that worth the price?
With all the bundled software in Linux, I often find myself pruning down a system to just what I need (an application development system). What's more, I frequently end up downloading the latest versions of software anyway, even if I have the CDs. Most of my purchased copies of Linux distros have only historical value (just look at the release cycle for RedHat).
I really agree with the author's opinion: the vendors are asking a lot:
for a collection of software packages that they did not invest a lot of R&D dollars in
for a collection of software packages that will be obsolete within 6 months
taking into account that they don't employ hordes of lawyers who are lobbying on their behalf (someone needs to pay their salaries;-)
taking into account that they offer the same bad support MS does (I don't even blame them: good support costs real money, certainly more than what they're charging)
1) Install XP Home
2) Download Apache and install it
3) Download StarOffice or OpenOffice and install it
4) Download JDK from Sun and install it
5) Download free MSVC++ compiler from Microsoft and install it
6) Download free C# compiler from Microsoft and install it
7) etc.
While it is true that we're comparing distros here it would still be good to remember that you can also install free or cheap software on Windows machines. True, I might have to download some stuff, but I regularly do that anyway.
Unlimited client-licensed connections might be an issue, but tell me how many people care about that on their desktops and how many people are perfectly happy with just the ability to see one shared volume somewhere on an intranet. You can get a lot done with such a puny XP Home box...
I'm not trying to be cute here. I once was faced with a stack of paperwork about half an inch high. By the time I had read everything, I figured I could sign everything but the NDA which was just totally ridiculous. I told HR that the NDA was not Ok in its current form and that they should get me a new one. I never heard back from them until they noticed that it was still unsigned when I left the firm more than a year later.
I was actually at a meeting with the guy who wrote the memo and I couldn't help but think that there was a lot of muddled thinking going on:
there was absolutely no understanding of what "open standards" actually means. He used the non-controversial HTTP standard as an example, but when audience members tried to get clarification on Java (ubiquitous but company controlled spec),.NET (MS but ECMA), C++ (public standards process but levels of non-compliance), there was just one thing that became clear: in his mind "open standards" means free software. It's not about philosophy, it's just about money.
there was absolutely no understanding of open architectures. One pretty famous guy in the audience pointed out that Outlook talking to a POP3 server was actually an open architecture whereas Outlook talking to Exchange was not. Again, the approach was that if it costs anything, it's not open.
all examples that he gave had to do with savings on licensing costs. Even some very OSS-friendly people in the audience cautioned him that there are many other costs and that he should not expect any significant savings right away.
he mentioned that the real problem was that they had told contractors to just go and implement. Which the contractors did with predictable consequences (closed architectures, no interoperability, etc.) I would reccommend that he hire some good architects to write decent RFPs instead of throwing out commercial software. I see the character of lock-in changing from corporate to project-based. You might for example find yourself to be locked into struts when everyone has moved on to the next new thing (JSF or whatever). Getting rid of struts 20 years from now will be expensive, no matter what else you do.
One thing became pretty clear to me: there is indeed no stopping the OSS train. Based on my experience in creating and selling commercial software, price beats every other argument in the long run, and there is no competing with free and open source is mostly associated with free. You have to be and continue to be 10x better than the closest free competitor and that is really hard to do in the long run. Even if there is no free competitor that really does what you do, customers will use the free software as a tool to press you on price (and you almost always have to give in because you never know whether they really are so clueless to believe that the student project they found solves their problem).
In that context I mourne the state of the world, because commercial software quality is actively discouraged in such an environment.
Between offshoring and free software, I'm giving local, commercial software another 20 years, and then the problem will have solved itself, with government agencies having the coice between foreign software and free software.
You're right, but weren't we talking about finding jobs in the same field? And let me just throw out one more totally unresearched assertion:
With the highly paid software jobs going away, a large amount of discretionary spending is going away too. This inevitably has a trickle-down effect on the rest of the local economy and causes many suppliers, vendors, and service providers to scale back or shut down too. If you had been in Richardson, TX, you wouldn't assume that you can necessarily get a job as an office clerk or even a burger flipper because the offices and burger joints closed too.
I wasn't talking about your job, I was talking about the jobs you mentioned: providing IT support and programming services to dentists, other professionals, or non-profits. These jobs are of course out there and will always be out there. You can't tell me that those opportunities (at least not the vast majority of them) have any benefits associated with them.
I fully agree with you that you have to be adaptable and that some people will have trouble no matter what, but I think you are improperly generalizing based on your experience.
I have visited areas that have been devastated by the combination of structural crisis and outsourcing. Consider Richardson, TX, the former nirvana of the telecommunications industry. Many employers shut down, others outsourced and the consequence is an economic bust of epic proportions.
You might say: "Why don't you just move someplace else?"
The reply is easy: with so many jobless and foreclosures, many people can't sell their houses without losing too much.
It's not always the person and even if it were: not all of us are cut out to be self-selling, self-advertising, self-promoting, customer-facing. How many good engineers do you know who have none of these qualities?
So you've been working for four years now and everything has worked out beautifully. I wonder how you'll feel in 20 years when you have kids, worry about college tuition, retirement, health expenses/conditions, and the mortgage.
Do you think you can put yourself in these people's shoes and see why they might not all be able to take on part-time positions without benefits? How many of the opportunities you list offer benefits? How many of these opportunities offer a salary on which a family of four can survive when it has fixed epxenses?
We're not all straight out of college and if you have any imagination, you will see that even you who never had a problem getting a job might have to worry a little bit when you look into the future.
I can see the headlines and bumperstickers already:
Download for freedom!
Violate copyrights against oppression!
I download to fight corruption!
Rip Rip RIAA!
Can someone tell me what's so horrible with someone charging money for a song? Is a street performer a bad person when she asks you for money? Is a musician a bad person when she asks you to buy a ticket to be allowed to visit her show? Is she a bad person when she initiates legal procedings against people who repeatedly enter her shows without paying or people who start distributing illegal videotapes of her shows?
How did you determine that free song downloads were a god-given right on the order of human self-determination?
It seems to me that activists and extortionists who are using the legal system to pursue their goals are representatives of opposite ends of the spectrum but they use identical means.
I'm not going to make a judgement on the people suing the makers of GTA because I can't read their minds and I have no clue about their motivations;
they might very well feel honest anger about GTA, I know that I find the premise and details of the game thoroughly disgusting. I wouldn't sue them over it, but then I haven't been shot by anyone either.
Maybe someone feels that the world would be a better place if a game like GTA vanished from the market and is using the legal system to try to achieve that goal. The motivation could even be altruism rather than personal gain.
Hard to tell from here what it is. I feel with the victims, but I hate the litigation approach with a vengeance. Unfortunately that includes "going after the parents" for negligence. Just think about the can of worms that would open: litigation lawyers being able to hold the threat of an "unfit parent" declaration plus child removal over someone's head.
Java vs. .NET
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 5, Informative
I would like to point out that there are now several solutions that allow the integration of Java into.NET, so it does not have to be an either/or decision. I have run into many shops that love using Java on the server side and also love using truly native GUIs on the Windows desktops. Using the right tools, you can easily do that.
My favorite tool for the integration is JuggerNET, which transparently starts up a JVM in the CLR process and the developer simply codes against generated.NET classes. I am affiliated with Codemesh, so I'm somewhat biased (take a look at Stu Halloway's great website for alternatives) but working with both platforms for a living, I just can't get excited about controversial this or that is dying statements. Both platforms have their strong and their weak points.
I love the platform portability of Java, but I think Java is too closed in terns of language integration. Doing JNI by hand is an abomination, and most people at Sun admit it.
I love the language portability of.NET (it's not perfect, but then, neither is Java's platform portability) but I hate the exception model.
So, there you have it. Neither will kill each other, they will just coexist uncomfortably until they both get replaced with something new.
Re:An important thing to point out:
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
You're certainly right with Java != J2EE, but you're also certianly wrong with.NET vs. J2EE being the more valid comparison.
Everyone seems to focus on the area that they are working in. Java is a platform for developing and deploying software and.NET is the same. They have different strengths and weaknesses:
Java is more platform portable,.NET is more language portable.
Java has some syntactical kludges, C# has no exception specification,
etc., etc.
Can we agree that all shops that care about platform-portability will continue to use Java and all shops that only care about Microsoft stuff will move from C++ and COM to C# and.NET and they will both co-exist until they get blown out of the water by the next big thing?
Ah, the evil corporations at it again... we should disband all of them, then we wouldn't have any problems left.
I think it's totally normal that some corporations and individuals will try to corrupt anything that is good and pure. I also think it is normal that the harder they work at it, the bigger a backlash they will cause eventually. Just look at how monopolist practices in software have given a huge boost to Linux without anybody footing the bill.
I just hope that we don't involve the government in everything to protect us from ourselves.
I'm all for public services, but there is a reason that we have a distinction between the public and the private sector. I can see how something like this would start out very nicely and end up as a massive make-work project where politicians can dump their relatives and gradually take over the management of the project.
And who exactly would be paying whom exactly for what exactly?
It's only not a null-sum game as long as there will be ever more people to consume ever more goods. How long that can be sustained is anyone's guess.
But you're missing my point: I'm not concerned about the world's GNP, I'm concerned about the US and European GDP. It is possible for the world GDP to increase quite nicely while the first world GDPs stagnate or shrink (growth in China, India, recession in US, Europe).
I have no objections to other countries growing their GDPs, in fact, I'm very happy for them! At the same time, I'm still saying that I would like to see an impact analysis of these shifts. And even though most real world issues seem to be driven by money matters, I'm not just talking about the economy.
This is rapidly turning into a discussion about the benefits of outsourcing to other countries.
I would be interested to see some projections on where this is leading in the longer term. I can see the following problems but I have yet to see a (rational) discussion on them:
As more and more highly paid jobs move away from the first world, discretionary spending is affected disproportionately. How does the loss of 450,000 software jobs compare to the loss of the same number of factory jobs in economic terms?
Will the first world lose its edge in terms of science and engineering? Who wants to study engineering when you know that more and more jobs are going away.
Who is going to buy all these products that are made more cheaply overseas? It's not going to be the jobless people here.
What's the impact on national security? I'm not even thinking about the possiblity of foreign nationals sneaking insiduously clever trojan horses into products, but about our economy (at some point) relying mostly on services from abroad. That's a lot of power that migrates to the other side of the ocean.
I can't help feeling a little glum about this, kind of like the weavers must have felt when the mechanical loom came around first. Sure it's just another structural change, but I wonder whether we'll see some surprising consequences from structural changes in the knowledge economy; after all, that's what the dominance of the western countries has been based on in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
“The GSS asked respondents the following question: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them [the Scientific Community]?”(page 172) Not quite the same thing as not trusting science. I can trust a process without particularly trusting process participants.
And why?
How about teaching *writing*! Writing is so much more than just a support topic for the sciences. Not everyone needs math and science *all the time*.
Let's just eradicate them once and for all. A homogenous Linux monoculture will be easier to maintain and be to the benefit of all of us.
Who cares what the problem is? If a geek can't figure it out, it's going to be a nightmare for the normal office user. (S)he will open the document take a look at the incorrect linebreaking and scream for help. And we're not even talking about workflow issues yet: I tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement for Office and while it's a nice stand-alone product, it just doesn't work in a business context where you're exchanging documents with other people who are still office users: - do you want to send an important business document with broken linebreaks/pagebreaks to your customer/investor? - do you want to compare contracts word for word when your lawyers send you a Word file with change markup that OpenOffice converts to: "the document has changes starting on page 4 and ending on page 17..." There's too much network effect in documents to simply replace the application that creates/displays the documents.
While a business plan based on support for incompetent users might work, I wouldn't want to make my living with it.
In your example, you're talking about general computer support. I don't want to have to answer "My mouse doesn't work!" kind of questions when I'm trying to make a living from selling easy-to-use language integration tools to developers. Call me an arrogant SOB for that, but I just plain don't want to!
I guess the answer is this: there are some business domains that are better suited for a support-based model than others.
We've had this problem, so I'm not speaking theoretically. Most of our users bought support with the purchase of our commercial product, but after one year many of them didn't want to renew because they hadn't had any problems and didn't know what they were paying for.
A business plan that is based on support is at direct cross purposes with creating high-quality, easy-to-use software.
And if yes, should there be one?
Reality check: 99.9% of your potential customers will never know your product even exists unless you a) are lucky enough to be working on the new killer app that would need to be drawn, shot, and quartered to die or b) spend a lot of time and/or money on marketing.
What do you pay for when you buy a Linux distro? Clearly there is some value in burning some additional products or tools on a CD, thereby obviating the need of having to download them, but really, is that worth the price?
With all the bundled software in Linux, I often find myself pruning down a system to just what I need (an application development system). What's more, I frequently end up downloading the latest versions of software anyway, even if I have the CDs. Most of my purchased copies of Linux distros have only historical value (just look at the release cycle for RedHat).
I really agree with the author's opinion: the vendors are asking a lot:
1) Install XP Home 2) Download Apache and install it 3) Download StarOffice or OpenOffice and install it 4) Download JDK from Sun and install it 5) Download free MSVC++ compiler from Microsoft and install it 6) Download free C# compiler from Microsoft and install it 7) etc. While it is true that we're comparing distros here it would still be good to remember that you can also install free or cheap software on Windows machines. True, I might have to download some stuff, but I regularly do that anyway. Unlimited client-licensed connections might be an issue, but tell me how many people care about that on their desktops and how many people are perfectly happy with just the ability to see one shared volume somewhere on an intranet. You can get a lot done with such a puny XP Home box...
... and why do you hate your mother so much?
I'm not trying to be cute here. I once was faced with a stack of paperwork about half an inch high. By the time I had read everything, I figured I could sign everything but the NDA which was just totally ridiculous. I told HR that the NDA was not Ok in its current form and that they should get me a new one. I never heard back from them until they noticed that it was still unsigned when I left the firm more than a year later.
- there was absolutely no understanding of what "open standards" actually means. He used the non-controversial HTTP standard as an example, but when audience members tried to get clarification on Java (ubiquitous but company controlled spec),
.NET (MS but ECMA), C++ (public standards process but levels of non-compliance), there was just one thing that became clear: in his mind "open standards" means free software. It's not about philosophy, it's just about money.
- there was absolutely no understanding of open architectures. One pretty famous guy in the audience pointed out that Outlook talking to a POP3 server was actually an open architecture whereas Outlook talking to Exchange was not. Again, the approach was that if it costs anything, it's not open.
- all examples that he gave had to do with savings on licensing costs. Even some very OSS-friendly people in the audience cautioned him that there are many other costs and that he should not expect any significant savings right away.
- he mentioned that the real problem was that they had told contractors to just go and implement. Which the contractors did with predictable consequences (closed architectures, no interoperability, etc.)
One thing became pretty clear to me: there is indeed no stopping the OSS train. Based on my experience in creating and selling commercial software, price beats every other argument in the long run, and there is no competing with free and open source is mostly associated with free. You have to be and continue to be 10x better than the closest free competitor and that is really hard to do in the long run. Even if there is no free competitor that really does what you do, customers will use the free software as a tool to press you on price (and you almost always have to give in because you never know whether they really are so clueless to believe that the student project they found solves their problem).I would reccommend that he hire some good architects to write decent RFPs instead of throwing out commercial software. I see the character of lock-in changing from corporate to project-based. You might for example find yourself to be locked into struts when everyone has moved on to the next new thing (JSF or whatever). Getting rid of struts 20 years from now will be expensive, no matter what else you do.
In that context I mourne the state of the world, because commercial software quality is actively discouraged in such an environment.
Between offshoring and free software, I'm giving local, commercial software another 20 years, and then the problem will have solved itself, with government agencies having the coice between foreign software and free software.
You're right, but weren't we talking about finding jobs in the same field? And let me just throw out one more totally unresearched assertion:
With the highly paid software jobs going away, a large amount of discretionary spending is going away too. This inevitably has a trickle-down effect on the rest of the local economy and causes many suppliers, vendors, and service providers to scale back or shut down too. If you had been in Richardson, TX, you wouldn't assume that you can necessarily get a job as an office clerk or even a burger flipper because the offices and burger joints closed too.
I fully agree with you that you have to be adaptable and that some people will have trouble no matter what, but I think you are improperly generalizing based on your experience.
I have visited areas that have been devastated by the combination of structural crisis and outsourcing. Consider Richardson, TX, the former nirvana of the telecommunications industry. Many employers shut down, others outsourced and the consequence is an economic bust of epic proportions.
You might say: "Why don't you just move someplace else?"
The reply is easy: with so many jobless and foreclosures, many people can't sell their houses without losing too much.
It's not always the person and even if it were: not all of us are cut out to be self-selling, self-advertising, self-promoting, customer-facing. How many good engineers do you know who have none of these qualities?
Do you think you can put yourself in these people's shoes and see why they might not all be able to take on part-time positions without benefits? How many of the opportunities you list offer benefits? How many of these opportunities offer a salary on which a family of four can survive when it has fixed epxenses?
We're not all straight out of college and if you have any imagination, you will see that even you who never had a problem getting a job might have to worry a little bit when you look into the future.
Download for freedom!
Violate copyrights against oppression!
I download to fight corruption!
Rip Rip RIAA!
Can someone tell me what's so horrible with someone charging money for a song? Is a street performer a bad person when she asks you for money? Is a musician a bad person when she asks you to buy a ticket to be allowed to visit her show? Is she a bad person when she initiates legal procedings against people who repeatedly enter her shows without paying or people who start distributing illegal videotapes of her shows?
How did you determine that free song downloads were a god-given right on the order of human self-determination?
I'm not going to make a judgement on the people suing the makers of GTA because I can't read their minds and I have no clue about their motivations; they might very well feel honest anger about GTA, I know that I find the premise and details of the game thoroughly disgusting. I wouldn't sue them over it, but then I haven't been shot by anyone either.
Maybe someone feels that the world would be a better place if a game like GTA vanished from the market and is using the legal system to try to achieve that goal. The motivation could even be altruism rather than personal gain.
Hard to tell from here what it is. I feel with the victims, but I hate the litigation approach with a vengeance. Unfortunately that includes "going after the parents" for negligence. Just think about the can of worms that would open: litigation lawyers being able to hold the threat of an "unfit parent" declaration plus child removal over someone's head.
My favorite tool for the integration is JuggerNET, which transparently starts up a JVM in the CLR process and the developer simply codes against generated .NET classes. I am affiliated with Codemesh, so I'm somewhat biased (take a look at Stu Halloway's great website for alternatives) but working with both platforms for a living, I just can't get excited about controversial this or that is dying statements. Both platforms have their strong and their weak points.
I love the platform portability of Java, but I think Java is too closed in terns of language integration. Doing JNI by hand is an abomination, and most people at Sun admit it.
I love the language portability of .NET (it's not perfect, but then, neither is Java's platform portability) but I hate the exception model.
So, there you have it. Neither will kill each other, they will just coexist uncomfortably until they both get replaced with something new.
Everyone seems to focus on the area that they are working in. Java is a platform for developing and deploying software and .NET is the same. They have different strengths and weaknesses:
- Java is more platform portable,
.NET is more language portable. - Java has some syntactical kludges, C# has no exception specification,
- etc., etc.
Can we agree that all shops that care about platform-portability will continue to use Java and all shops that only care about Microsoft stuff will move from C++ and COM to C# andBTW: It's possible to integrate the two quite well.
I think it's totally normal that some corporations and individuals will try to corrupt anything that is good and pure. I also think it is normal that the harder they work at it, the bigger a backlash they will cause eventually. Just look at how monopolist practices in software have given a huge boost to Linux without anybody footing the bill.
I just hope that we don't involve the government in everything to protect us from ourselves.
And who exactly would be paying whom exactly for what exactly?
I don't think I want to go there...
But you're missing my point: I'm not concerned about the world's GNP, I'm concerned about the US and European GDP. It is possible for the world GDP to increase quite nicely while the first world GDPs stagnate or shrink (growth in China, India, recession in US, Europe).
I have no objections to other countries growing their GDPs, in fact, I'm very happy for them! At the same time, I'm still saying that I would like to see an impact analysis of these shifts. And even though most real world issues seem to be driven by money matters, I'm not just talking about the economy.
I would be interested to see some projections on where this is leading in the longer term. I can see the following problems but I have yet to see a (rational) discussion on them:
I can't help feeling a little glum about this, kind of like the weavers must have felt when the mechanical loom came around first. Sure it's just another structural change, but I wonder whether we'll see some surprising consequences from structural changes in the knowledge economy; after all, that's what the dominance of the western countries has been based on in the past.