However, technical issues have resulted in the project's discontinuation.
Anyone know what this means exactly?
Possible explanations I can think of are:
1) Servers weren't scalable enough and had insurmountable lag problems. 2) Games like EQ2 have insanely cool gfx and models, especially on high-end hardware, and DE would have had to redo their engine AND all their models to compete, given their release date. 3) It was purely financial and blaming "technology" is just a way to save face and retreat.
Second Life is going to ensure its swift demise with this new pricing scheme. They have gone to a lot of trouble to create an architecture which allows them to essentially outsource the creation of artistic content in the world to the players, instead of having a team responsible for building it. By charging for this, they are basically saying that their most dedicated, valuable and creative talents in the user community will now be the most heavily charged (and therefore penalized) players in the game.
So first they wanted to save money by letting people create content, then *shock* discovered that content storage and persistence costs money too? This is the fundamental issue with remote storage and persistence of game worlds anyway. Their real costs are not with the creators, but with the freeloaders who are not creating anything but merely taking up bandwidth and resources chatting and exploring, because their cost of operation is not offset by content productivity.
Well, as one data point, Enter the Matrix has sold more than 4 million copies, which equates to revenues in excess of $200 million for it.
GTA3 Vice City sold 8.5 million copies and is still going strong. That's $400 million in sales for a game that uses the same engine as GTA3 (also insanely profitable) and thus had development costs that were practically zero.
Even their title Max Payne (the first one) made Take Two more than $100 million in profit.
These games mostly cost $2-3 million to make and if they can sell >50,000 copies then essentially everything else is profit to be split up between the retailer, the publisher and the developer.
When the average age of viewers is probably about 16 and the average age of the posters "hatin'" is probably about 13, what do you expect them to say? I never met a 13 yr old boy who liked things because he appreciated their potential.
However, a lot of the criticisms are totally valid too for the current state of affairs.
- Ronilyn on Pulse could be a blowup doll considering the mechanical way she reads the teleprompter.
- Diane Mizota does a better job, and is hotter, but it is pretty clear she never touched a computer game in her life before getting her gig on Filter.
- What's with all the freakin' one word show titles? Pulse, Portal, Filter, Arena, Blister, Sweat, Cheat, . People should watch Judgement Day just to show G4 we can handle two word titles of shows.
- What kind of budget does this channel really have for making shows? Arena must cost them about $8 per show to film, and they've only made about 25 shows in 3 years. They should do that one like Wheel of Fortune and shoot 10 a day. It would also be much better if they actually bracketed the teams and made true champion each season instead of "win 3 shows and join the Hall of Champions".
- I would probably nominate Portal as the worst show on TV, on any channel in existence. Anyone have a worse one?
The two shows that are at least making an effort to be fun and informative are Judgement Day and G4TV.com. Pulse is ok if you can ignore how Ronilyn reads and just focus on her "assets". Arena is worth watching if nothing else is on just to hear all the nicknames for Stacy Barcelata. Other than that, you'll have more fun and learn more watching the gold necklace show on QVC than anything on G4.
The reason they don't talk about market share is because the data doesn't exist, or because it is difficult for the press to acquire that data.
Revenues are widely published, whether the companies involved are public or private, so that becomes the measuring stick.
This is true when awards are given out for the "Fastest Growing Companies" "The Fast 50" or whatever. They use revenue growth instead of profitability growth (the only truly relevant number), because private companies won't publish profitability numbers. This is arguably how the whole hype/publicity/growth spiral around the dot-coms was created.
You can't report what isn't measured, measurable, or publicly accesssible by a reporter.
I am not particularly religious, but I thought your comments needed a rebuttal nonetheless.
First of all, every one of your quotes is from the Old Testament (and all but one are from the Torah). They are the laws of the Jewish people, not of Christians.
Here was Jesus' take on those laws:
Luke 20:46-47: Jesus: "Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."
Mark 11:18 "The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching."
Mark 1:21-22 "Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."
Matthew 22:37-40 Jesus replied: "`Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: `Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 5:20 "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
Mark 2:27 And he said unto them, "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath"
He repeatedly broke the old laws, or at least gave new interpretations, to show that there was a new order now.
Find a brutal New Testament order, and then we can have a good debate...:)
The single most helpful thing I learned about the dot com boom/bust back in like 1998 is this:
The crucial skill for a VC is NOT to be a good business person. The crucial skill is the ability to/raise money/. Being successful with your ventures and having a good track record makes fund raising easier, but a) most VCs by 99 or 2000 were first time people, and b) Spin Control matters more than track record in a gold rush like the dot com boom.
Don't think there is anything magical about VC's. My experience with them is that what they invest in has a lot more to do with "fashion" and their ability to brag at cocktail parties because it has a cool name than it does with actual technical reality.
What I've found in my 12 year career so far is that your enjoyment of a job is going to be much more related to the/people/ you work with and not really so much about what you are doing. Finish your degree and find a job at a company that seems like it has other people like you there. Work there and get to know everyone. You will find that your team has much more to do with whether you want to get up in the morning or not.
Secondly, pretty much every job out there can either be categorized as "production", "admin" or "sales". CS is production. Accounting is admin. Business development, marketing, salespeople and most executive positions actually are just sales roles. Most programmers I know *hate* both accounting and sales.
It may be that you're a little burned out right now, but even solving off by one bugs all day is a lot better than selling copiers.
p.s. It pays better than selling copiers too, even in these down times.;)
My theory about why it's the new fad is because they HAVE to.
With the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox/etc., the capabilities of these consoles have gotten better and better. Their graphics and sound are better than on PCs, and for the most part they are played on bigger, more immersive screens. If you want a FPS, play it on a console.
So what kinds of games can't be played on consoles? PCs have better connectivity and more versatile input devices (keyboards) and that's about it. Therefore as a PC game designer, you need to make a game which uses the keyboard in a meaningful way, which means "talking" which implies some kind of roleplay.
Who do you talk to? You can talk to NPCs, but that gets really repetitive and stupid. You also can't charge $10/month to talk to NPCs. Let people talk to other people, and all of a sudden people spend 200 hrs a month playing the game. That phenomenon is real and every game development company sees it.
The MMPORPG is just a way to keep the PC relevant in gaming, while giving them annuity revenue models.
I don't really agree with your point of view on this issue. Why does it have to be sustainable to be worth doing?
If he takes the $5 million and goes to build a business, even if it fails (which it might not), he is going to have a huge learning experience. There is really no substitute for running your own company to understand what it takes. (People who have done it all say it's required and people who haven't all say it isn't.:-) Then he gets another job a year older and many years wiser.
I also think it is silly to think that grants are "less damaging" to an economy than a failed investment because it is known ahead of time that the money is going to be gone. In fact, I disagree with the whole premise that failed investments hurt the economy. The money invested in those companies doesn't "disappear". It goes to pay engineers salaries and buy Aeron chairs, whose purchase price goes to pay salespeople and assembly line workers and castor manufacturers. The engineers take the money and buy computers and pay for daycare for their kids and go to McDonald's with that money.
All it really is is redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the technically advanced. And I'm in favor of that.:-)
Overall, you are exactly right. They are about wealth maximization.
Where you are wrong is in calling it "their" money. VC funds have gotten contributions from tens or hundreds of other people out there to make up their funds. Their own money is almost always a very small (1%) proportion.
I agree with the comments above, but there doesn't seem to be an understanding of WHY VCs are so vulture-like.
It is really very simple. There is no such thing as a "win-win". Or rather there is no reason why a win-win has to be 50-50.
When dollars are on the line, it is a zero sum game. What the VC gets, you don't get. What you get, he doesn't get. What he doesn't get, his investors don't get.
If you were an investor in a VC fund, you would want that guy chiseling every percent he could from the companies he funded. As the entrepreneur, you want to chisel every percent for yourself. Both sides are justifiable and equivalent.
The first 90% of the article is dead on. VC's don't get technology very well and they are definitely vulnerable to herd mentality. (There are fashions in the VC world just like having the latest cell phone or the hottest computer.)
Where he goes wrong though is when he says that it shouldn't work that way and that somehow the investors are jerks and want all these things to fail. Let's examine the loss state (out of business) for both parties in the transaction.
VCs
A VC takes in money from private investors, distributes it out to these startups, hopes that they work and that he can get his money back out. His job is to make rich people 20-40% a year and that doesn't happen till the money comes back out.
When a company is going in the shitter, the LAST thing he wants to do is shut it down, because then he has to recognize the loss on his books (and explain it to his investors). Instead he puts more money in (sometimes) to keep it alive. However now he's really puckered up because the stakes have gotten higher and the risks are also known to be higher. He is like a First World bank lending more and more money to the Third World to enable them to pay the interest on their original loans. Also, he feels that the company is in the shitter for a reason, so when he puts more money in he often dictates management and strategy changes in a desperate attempt to "fix" whatever got them where they are now. Taking control and changing strategies is an alternative to DEATH for the company--many times death is what happens instead. Which is better? Depends.
So in the worst case (which happens a lot), the company finally does die at some point after a few millions. The VC takes the phone calls from his investors and explains how the next one is going to make it all up and how they are all high-risk and only one or two have to hit to get the returns they are looking for. If those one or two don't hit, the investors' billions are GONE. And from a personal perspective, if his fund returns suck, his career is DONE. He can go work at Starbucks because his days of managing rich people's money are over.
Engineers/Technologists
- Have an idea.
- Get Millions of dollars in exchange for a piece of paper called a stock certificate.
- Sit on Aeron chairs and work on the technology. Maybe it gets done and maybe it doesn't.
- Earn a salary the whole time.
If it goes in the toilet, give them another piece of paper (and perhaps voting control of the company) and you get to rinse/repeat.
If they don't give you more money, shut the company down and get another job somewhere in a couple weeks or a month. Big deal.
The VCs are the ones at risk in these deals. I suppose there could be a couple of examples where VCs took control on a late round, booted the original inventors and made it huge, but I would challenge someone to actually come up with a NAME of one. I think it's a myth.
What the author of the article is missing is that what he calls "File Type" is actually representing two (or more) things.
1. The type of data represented by the file. This can be used to help an application know how to load the data, or more importantly, to help the USER know what is contained in that file.
2. The application which the user prefers to view/edit this file with. This depends on the user, on the machine, on what apps are installed, etc.
IMHO, he is too tied to the one-type-one-app view of the world. For example, take C++ programming. Most people use a directory for a project. In that directory, there are numerous files many of which have the same names. You end up with Foo.cpp, Foo.h, Foo.obj, Foo.exe, etc.
In a world where all those files are called "Foo", you end up with a very confusing directory listing. That directory listing to be usable has to display the type attributes anyway in order to enable to user to know what to point and click on.
Another alternative would be to disallow files with the same names in the same directories, so what happens to those files? One option would be to rename the files "Foo Source" and "Foo Header" etc. but this is cumbersome and stupid. Another option would be to offload the helper files into other directories, but then you end up encoding type information in directory names instead of file extensions, which I'm sure we'd all agree is even worse.
Another example of how this is messed up would be transferring files from another computer. If I transfer Foo.cpp from one Mac to another, the Creator information comes with the file. What if the file was created on emacs and I use vi? Or What if I use MS Visual Studio? What if I uninstall MSVS and install the Borland IDE? Do all my files break? Now I can't launch anything?
What application to launch really doesn't have much to do with the creator field. And file extensions have other uses besides indicating a launch target.
The common language is still being created
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What an amazing essay. I think a lot of his points are very valid. He worries about how programmers and designers today are going to learn from the mistakes of their elders if the source code is not available for them to see. He also worries that as the size and complexity of systems rise, we are going to get Towers of Babel instead of cathedrals.
I think the main disagreement I have is that programming is STILL a very nascent art form. He talks of centuries of cathedral builders all sharing the same design language and not needing a top-down design. But it took church builders *centuries* to develop those languages. How many attempted cathedrals collapsed under their own weight? How many people were killed building them?
In programming, we are still learning how to bake adobe bricks and he wants to talk about cathedrals. We can buy as much RAM as existed in the world in 1965 for $19.00 today, and we can fill up that RAM. But what about in 2035 when $19 will buy you today's world full of RAM?
We are making progress though. First it was binary switches, then hex codes, then ASM, then modular programming, structured programming, object-oriented, component-based, service-based. We are developing a common vocabulary of things like Design Patterns which programmers can use to communicate architecture decisions in 1/100th of the time. There is probably 1000 times the raw amount of source code in the public domain now as there was in the 70's.
I agree with his overall points, but I think we have a tendency to compare ourselves too early to the cathedral builders when we are still figuring out how to bake bricks. We are still in the equivalent of the 1200's, not the 1600's. Let's be patient, and see what the software designers 200 or 400 years from now come up with. I bet it makes us feel like cavemen.
Check out RLX to read about a company that is going whole hog into the Transmeta-based server market. They are down here in Houston and appear to have a lot of traction. I don't know how their sales are going though.
Prima donnas willing to come work in Houston are welcome to email me their resume's and I will take a look. I'm always on the lookout for bona fide J2EE or Oracle development experts.
Take the spam out of the email address to reach me.
I run a consulting firm that specializes in this type of "prima donna" coder to some extent, and no comment I read (including the useless recruiting website article) really explains how to handle them or channel them. Everyone is suggesting that you muzzle them or get rid of them. We should be trying to RAISE the talent level in organizations, not lower it.
Here's what I've found about how to do it:
1. Give them what they want and let go of the things that aren't essential. Set some groundrules about overlapping hours but let them come in late. Who really cares if they are in at 8:00am? Some roles in an organization require regular hours, but coding isn't one of them.
2. These do typically want the hairiest most complicated problems in the organization. Give those problems to them. The mundane shit will bore them and they will quit even if you can tolerate them. The hairy stuff will get done; it will work; and it will get done faster than if you give it to your average IT guy.
3. Some don't work well in teams at all. We call them "Cowboy" coders. They want to ride in on the white horse and save the day by themselves. Look for ways to carve that kind of work out. If no solo work is there and they have to be on a team, don't put them in charge of architecture, which takes a lot of communication with a team. Put them in charge of an entire vertical section--not a horizontal one.
4. Most of them want to be accountable for results, not methods. So HOLD them accountable. Don't manage their hours or how they get something done, but agree on an acceptable deadline and bust their ass if they don't make it. Bust their ass by managing their hours and making them write status reports on the next project!
5. Give them other smart people to work with. Others have already made the point that these guys don't cost 10x as much. For another $10K, you can replace the average guy sitting next to your prima donna with another prima donna. They'll probably get along better and work together better.
In other words, just go WITH the grain instead of always against it and they will produce amazing things for you. It is a lot like the open source movement. You can get amazing production from people by just staying out of their hair and letting them prove whose dick is bigger. If you can find ways to let them do it their way, your organization will be the richer for it.
I don't understand how the government allows advertising to be fundamentally different from the terms of service of the product being advertised. We are constantly being inundated with this shit too--it's the rule not the exception.
- How many FREE products are out there where the ad says FREE 50 times in 60 seconds, but in fine print it says there is a $8.00 S&H charge? I call on the FCC to define the meaning of the word "FREE" as "no money changes hands for you to get this product or service".
- If the courts know that it isn't for LIFE but instead until the company goes under, why do advertising regulators allow the phrase FOR LIFE in ANY ads??? I call on the regulators to require that ads FOR LIFE have money in trust in case they go under if they use that phrase.
- Why are ads for diet pills and get rich quick schemes allowed to show testimonial after testimonial of people talking about how product X helped them become smarter, thinner or richer while the tiny print says "Results Not Typical"? Let's require TYPICAL testimonials, how about that! Or require the really skinny people to say in their testimonial "I was AMAZED at how much weight I lost since my results were so atypical!"
I really don't get it. My wife is from Europe, where truthfulness in ads seems to be something the governments still care about, and it has taken her YEARS to build up enough skepticism of ads to not believe all the patently fraudulent bullshit that is perpetrated here.
I understand caveat emptor and all that, but it has really gotten out of hand. When was the last time you saw an ad that was TRUTHFUL! Coke won't make you happy. Miller Lite won't get you girls. A Lexus doesn't make you a successful business man. You can't "Set it and Forget It" with that cheesy chicken roaster. Drinking parseley juice from your $200 juicers isn't going to make you feel younger. Diet-ZX isn't free. OxyClean won't clean your carpets. I doubt Massengil really gives you that "fresh" feeling either.
What are the rules that have to be followed? Are there ANY? Does anyone CHECK the ads? IS ANYONE OUT THERE???
Crash
Re:Here's how Webvan should have worked:
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I agree that conserving their cash should have been job 1. However, in order to win over their customers they needed to do a few things besides just survive:
a) Make the ordering process SHORTER. It takes almost as long to place a lengthy grocery order on a website as it does to just go shopping.
b) Be smarter about item selection (see "a" above). The value I add to my wife when I go shopping is she says "We need milk, eggs and cheese" and I know she means "a gallon of Peveley 2% milk with the blue top, a dozen generic brand jumbo eggs and a 24-pack of Kraft American singles". I also know that if there is no 2% milk I can just get 1% and not come home empty handed. NO grocery website has figured out how to do this yet.
c) They have to SAVE a TRIP. If they don't save me a trip, I might as well just go myself. The overhead of driving there, driving back and standing in line is almost the same no matter how many items I buy. My last web order, I got like 20 things, but they forgot the bananas. I can't make banana cream pie without bananas, so I get totally pissed off after having spent an hour ordering everything, giving them all my personal info for the order, and waiting a DAY for delivery that I STILL have to go to the store myself. What if you ordered a pizza from Domino's but they "forgot" the pepperoni and told you to just go to the store and get your own pepperoni? Domino's CEO and WebVan's CEO would be on job search together.
What these guys (like lots of others) lost sight of is that the new experience has to be BETTER than the old experience or people will avoid it. The Internet way had the POTENTIAL of being a better experience, but sadly, their companies' attempts were worse.
Crash
Re:Criminal CEO's Golden Parachute
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Actually, the news article said that Shaheen would have to line up alongside all the other unsecured creditors and probably had no hope of getting any money out of it.
(They have about $30 million I believe in assets, and something like 80-90 million in debts. Shaheen is part of the 80-90 million.)
I think the issue is INFOGLUT, both in terms of the number of sites and the expense of each one.
There are simply too many friggin sites out there to subscribe to them. Period. People here have alluded to what a pain it is to register and give your life history and to the "camel's nose in the tent" leading to higher and higher charges, but I think those are both symptoms.
The real issue is that I (like a lot of people I imagine) get my news on the Internet from probably 100 or 200 different sites at different times. It is CERTAINLY not worth $5.00 or even $1.00 per site per month to subscribe to all these. My opinion is that until there is some kind of aggregation model for these payments it will never happen.
Cable/Satellite TV is a good example. I pay $50 a month for my Dish Network and I get about 180 working channels for that (no premiums of course!). Would I pay $.50 a month to get American Movie Classics by itself? Hell no. But as part of a package, I buy it and sometime I might watch it if something catches my eye. But even though it includes things I don't want, it also includes most everything I do want and it is ONE bill.
Now that I think about it, those economics are probably about right. I pay $50 for 180 channels. Call it $5 to the aggregator, and it's $45 to all the channels, which are each averaging about $.25 a month per viewer then. Would I pay an average of $.25 a month for Slashdot, CNet, CNN, NYTimes, Playboy, Yahoo, ESPN, SciAm, Gamasutra, Google, and 100 others? Yeah I might if they were on one bill.
The problem is that no one is charging $.25 a month and no one will be able to make any money at $.25 a month either, given that they are depending on $10.00 a month to stay alive right now. Until the Internet content industry figures out how to fix this, they are going to be broke and people will not subscribe.
I actually think English is closer to Dutch than to German. Much more similar grammar (with some French grammar thrown in) and word order similar to Olde Englishe. A few transliterations like "y" for "ij" in the middle of words (which looks almost identical when written in cursive) and you end up with something a lot like English.
The issue isn't whether the weather converges to a stable attractor or not, but whether its exact point on the attractor is knowable or not. Even with the millions of nanobots soaring through the air, we will still not know enough about initial conditions to determine the future very far in advance.
This is what Gleick was referring to with his famous and often misunderstood reference to the butterfly in Tokyo causing a hurricane in New York City two months from now. He was saying, rightfully, that even the flap of a butterfly's wings is enough to throw off initial conditions enough to make the weather totally unpredictable at some future point.
The bottom line is that when you don't know the exact initial conditions (unknowable ever, it seems) and you don't know the exact nonlinear equations which make up the model (which do seem to be improving) you are really just making really high-powered guesses about what is coming next. And my grandma with her bum knee can still do a better job of predicting rain than the weather man on tv.
Don't forget... ZD is owned in part by Vulcan Ventures,
- which is owned by Paul Allen,
- who was a part of Microsoft
- and made his money off of code
- programmed by children in Pakistan
- forced to listen to Kathy Lee Gifford.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know what this means exactly?
Possible explanations I can think of are:
1) Servers weren't scalable enough and had insurmountable lag problems.
2) Games like EQ2 have insanely cool gfx and models, especially on high-end hardware, and DE would have had to redo their engine AND all their models to compete, given their release date.
3) It was purely financial and blaming "technology" is just a way to save face and retreat.
Second Life is going to ensure its swift demise with this new pricing scheme. They have gone to a lot of trouble to create an architecture which allows them to essentially outsource the creation of artistic content in the world to the players, instead of having a team responsible for building it. By charging for this, they are basically saying that their most dedicated, valuable and creative talents in the user community will now be the most heavily charged (and therefore penalized) players in the game.
So first they wanted to save money by letting people create content, then *shock* discovered that content storage and persistence costs money too? This is the fundamental issue with remote storage and persistence of game worlds anyway. Their real costs are not with the creators, but with the freeloaders who are not creating anything but merely taking up bandwidth and resources chatting and exploring, because their cost of operation is not offset by content productivity.
RIP 2nd Life.
Well, as one data point, Enter the Matrix has sold more than 4 million copies, which equates to revenues in excess of $200 million for it.
GTA3 Vice City sold 8.5 million copies and is still going strong. That's $400 million in sales for a game that uses the same engine as GTA3 (also insanely profitable) and thus had development costs that were practically zero.
Even their title Max Payne (the first one) made Take Two more than $100 million in profit.
These games mostly cost $2-3 million to make and if they can sell >50,000 copies then essentially everything else is profit to be split up between the retailer, the publisher and the developer.
It IS insanely profitable.
When the average age of viewers is probably about 16 and the average age of the posters "hatin'" is probably about 13, what do you expect them to say? I never met a 13 yr old boy who liked things because he appreciated their potential.
However, a lot of the criticisms are totally valid too for the current state of affairs.
- Ronilyn on Pulse could be a blowup doll considering the mechanical way she reads the teleprompter.
- Diane Mizota does a better job, and is hotter, but it is pretty clear she never touched a computer game in her life before getting her gig on Filter.
- What's with all the freakin' one word show titles? Pulse, Portal, Filter, Arena, Blister, Sweat, Cheat, . People should watch Judgement Day just to show G4 we can handle two word titles of shows.
- What kind of budget does this channel really have for making shows? Arena must cost them about $8 per show to film, and they've only made about 25 shows in 3 years. They should do that one like Wheel of Fortune and shoot 10 a day. It would also be much better if they actually bracketed the teams and made true champion each season instead of "win 3 shows and join the Hall of Champions".
- I would probably nominate Portal as the worst show on TV, on any channel in existence. Anyone have a worse one?
The two shows that are at least making an effort to be fun and informative are Judgement Day and G4TV.com. Pulse is ok if you can ignore how Ronilyn reads and just focus on her "assets". Arena is worth watching if nothing else is on just to hear all the nicknames for Stacy Barcelata. Other than that, you'll have more fun and learn more watching the gold necklace show on QVC than anything on G4.
The reason they don't talk about market share is because the data doesn't exist, or because it is difficult for the press to acquire that data.
Revenues are widely published, whether the companies involved are public or private, so that becomes the measuring stick.
This is true when awards are given out for the "Fastest Growing Companies" "The Fast 50" or whatever. They use revenue growth instead of profitability growth (the only truly relevant number), because private companies won't publish profitability numbers. This is arguably how the whole hype/publicity/growth spiral around the dot-coms was created.
You can't report what isn't measured, measurable, or publicly accesssible by a reporter.
I am not particularly religious, but I thought your comments needed a rebuttal nonetheless.
:)
First of all, every one of your quotes is from the Old Testament (and all but one are from the Torah). They are the laws of the Jewish people, not of Christians.
Here was Jesus' take on those laws:
Luke 20:46-47: Jesus: "Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows' houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely."
Mark 11:18 "The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching."
Mark 1:21-22 "Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law."
Matthew 22:37-40 Jesus replied: "`Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: `Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 5:20 "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
Mark 2:27 And he said unto them, "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath"
He repeatedly broke the old laws, or at least gave new interpretations, to show that there was a new order now.
Find a brutal New Testament order, and then we can have a good debate...
The single most helpful thing I learned about the dot com boom/bust back in like 1998 is this:
/raise money/. Being successful with your ventures and having a good track record makes fund raising easier, but a) most VCs by 99 or 2000 were first time people, and b) Spin Control matters more than track record in a gold rush like the dot com boom.
The crucial skill for a VC is NOT to be a good business person. The crucial skill is the ability to
Don't think there is anything magical about VC's. My experience with them is that what they invest in has a lot more to do with "fashion" and their ability to brag at cocktail parties because it has a cool name than it does with actual technical reality.
What I've found in my 12 year career so far is that your enjoyment of a job is going to be much more related to the /people/ you work with and not really so much about what you are doing. Finish your degree and find a job at a company that seems like it has other people like you there. Work there and get to know everyone. You will find that your team has much more to do with whether you want to get up in the morning or not.
;)
Secondly, pretty much every job out there can either be categorized as "production", "admin" or "sales". CS is production. Accounting is admin. Business development, marketing, salespeople and most executive positions actually are just sales roles. Most programmers I know *hate* both accounting and sales.
It may be that you're a little burned out right now, but even solving off by one bugs all day is a lot better than selling copiers.
p.s. It pays better than selling copiers too, even in these down times.
My theory about why it's the new fad is because they HAVE to.
With the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox/etc., the capabilities of these consoles have gotten better and better. Their graphics and sound are better than on PCs, and for the most part they are played on bigger, more immersive screens. If you want a FPS, play it on a console.
So what kinds of games can't be played on consoles? PCs have better connectivity and more versatile input devices (keyboards) and that's about it. Therefore as a PC game designer, you need to make a game which uses the keyboard in a meaningful way, which means "talking" which implies some kind of roleplay.
Who do you talk to? You can talk to NPCs, but that gets really repetitive and stupid. You also can't charge $10/month to talk to NPCs. Let people talk to other people, and all of a sudden people spend 200 hrs a month playing the game. That phenomenon is real and every game development company sees it.
The MMPORPG is just a way to keep the PC relevant in gaming, while giving them annuity revenue models.
I don't really agree with your point of view on this issue. Why does it have to be sustainable to be worth doing?
:-) Then he gets another job a year older and many years wiser.
:-)
If he takes the $5 million and goes to build a business, even if it fails (which it might not), he is going to have a huge learning experience. There is really no substitute for running your own company to understand what it takes. (People who have done it all say it's required and people who haven't all say it isn't.
I also think it is silly to think that grants are "less damaging" to an economy than a failed investment because it is known ahead of time that the money is going to be gone. In fact, I disagree with the whole premise that failed investments hurt the economy. The money invested in those companies doesn't "disappear". It goes to pay engineers salaries and buy Aeron chairs, whose purchase price goes to pay salespeople and assembly line workers and castor manufacturers. The engineers take the money and buy computers and pay for daycare for their kids and go to McDonald's with that money.
All it really is is redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the technically advanced. And I'm in favor of that.
Crash
Overall, you are exactly right. They are about wealth maximization.
Where you are wrong is in calling it "their" money. VC funds have gotten contributions from tens or hundreds of other people out there to make up their funds. Their own money is almost always a very small (1%) proportion.
Crash
I agree with the comments above, but there doesn't seem to be an understanding of WHY VCs are so vulture-like.
It is really very simple. There is no such thing as a "win-win". Or rather there is no reason why a win-win has to be 50-50.
When dollars are on the line, it is a zero sum game. What the VC gets, you don't get. What you get, he doesn't get. What he doesn't get, his investors don't get.
If you were an investor in a VC fund, you would want that guy chiseling every percent he could from the companies he funded. As the entrepreneur, you want to chisel every percent for yourself. Both sides are justifiable and equivalent.
It's nothing personal.
The first 90% of the article is dead on. VC's don't get technology very well and they are definitely vulnerable to herd mentality. (There are fashions in the VC world just like having the latest cell phone or the hottest computer.)
Where he goes wrong though is when he says that it shouldn't work that way and that somehow the investors are jerks and want all these things to fail. Let's examine the loss state (out of business) for both parties in the transaction.
VCs
A VC takes in money from private investors, distributes it out to these startups, hopes that they work and that he can get his money back out. His job is to make rich people 20-40% a year and that doesn't happen till the money comes back out.
When a company is going in the shitter, the LAST thing he wants to do is shut it down, because then he has to recognize the loss on his books (and explain it to his investors). Instead he puts more money in (sometimes) to keep it alive. However now he's really puckered up because the stakes have gotten higher and the risks are also known to be higher. He is like a First World bank lending more and more money to the Third World to enable them to pay the interest on their original loans. Also, he feels that the company is in the shitter for a reason, so when he puts more money in he often dictates management and strategy changes in a desperate attempt to "fix" whatever got them where they are now. Taking control and changing strategies is an alternative to DEATH for the company--many times death is what happens instead. Which is better? Depends.
So in the worst case (which happens a lot), the company finally does die at some point after a few millions. The VC takes the phone calls from his investors and explains how the next one is going to make it all up and how they are all high-risk and only one or two have to hit to get the returns they are looking for. If those one or two don't hit, the investors' billions are GONE. And from a personal perspective, if his fund returns suck, his career is DONE. He can go work at Starbucks because his days of managing rich people's money are over.
Engineers/Technologists
- Have an idea.
- Get Millions of dollars in exchange for a piece of paper called a stock certificate.
- Sit on Aeron chairs and work on the technology. Maybe it gets done and maybe it doesn't.
- Earn a salary the whole time.
If it goes in the toilet, give them another piece of paper (and perhaps voting control of the company) and you get to rinse/repeat.
If they don't give you more money, shut the company down and get another job somewhere in a couple weeks or a month. Big deal.
The VCs are the ones at risk in these deals. I suppose there could be a couple of examples where VCs took control on a late round, booted the original inventors and made it huge, but I would challenge someone to actually come up with a NAME of one. I think it's a myth.
I would hate to be a VC these days...
Crash
What the author of the article is missing is that what he calls "File Type" is actually representing two (or more) things.
1. The type of data represented by the file. This can be used to help an application know how to load the data, or more importantly, to help the USER know what is contained in that file.
2. The application which the user prefers to view/edit this file with. This depends on the user, on the machine, on what apps are installed, etc.
IMHO, he is too tied to the one-type-one-app view of the world. For example, take C++ programming. Most people use a directory for a project. In that directory, there are numerous files many of which have the same names. You end up with Foo.cpp, Foo.h, Foo.obj, Foo.exe, etc.
In a world where all those files are called "Foo", you end up with a very confusing directory listing. That directory listing to be usable has to display the type attributes anyway in order to enable to user to know what to point and click on.
Another alternative would be to disallow files with the same names in the same directories, so what happens to those files? One option would be to rename the files "Foo Source" and "Foo Header" etc. but this is cumbersome and stupid. Another option would be to offload the helper files into other directories, but then you end up encoding type information in directory names instead of file extensions, which I'm sure we'd all agree is even worse.
Another example of how this is messed up would be transferring files from another computer. If I transfer Foo.cpp from one Mac to another, the Creator information comes with the file. What if the file was created on emacs and I use vi? Or What if I use MS Visual Studio? What if I uninstall MSVS and install the Borland IDE? Do all my files break? Now I can't launch anything?
What application to launch really doesn't have much to do with the creator field. And file extensions have other uses besides indicating a launch target.
What an amazing essay. I think a lot of his points are very valid. He worries about how programmers and designers today are going to learn from the mistakes of their elders if the source code is not available for them to see. He also worries that as the size and complexity of systems rise, we are going to get Towers of Babel instead of cathedrals.
I think the main disagreement I have is that programming is STILL a very nascent art form. He talks of centuries of cathedral builders all sharing the same design language and not needing a top-down design. But it took church builders *centuries* to develop those languages. How many attempted cathedrals collapsed under their own weight? How many people were killed building them?
In programming, we are still learning how to bake adobe bricks and he wants to talk about cathedrals. We can buy as much RAM as existed in the world in 1965 for $19.00 today, and we can fill up that RAM. But what about in 2035 when $19 will buy you today's world full of RAM?
We are making progress though. First it was binary switches, then hex codes, then ASM, then modular programming, structured programming, object-oriented, component-based, service-based. We are developing a common vocabulary of things like Design Patterns which programmers can use to communicate architecture decisions in 1/100th of the time. There is probably 1000 times the raw amount of source code in the public domain now as there was in the 70's.
I agree with his overall points, but I think we have a tendency to compare ourselves too early to the cathedral builders when we are still figuring out how to bake bricks. We are still in the equivalent of the 1200's, not the 1600's. Let's be patient, and see what the software designers 200 or 400 years from now come up with. I bet it makes us feel like cavemen.
Crash
Check out RLX to read about a company that is going whole hog into the Transmeta-based server market. They are down here in Houston and appear to have a lot of traction. I don't know how their sales are going though.
Crash
Prima donnas willing to come work in Houston are welcome to email me their resume's and I will take a look. I'm always on the lookout for bona fide J2EE or Oracle development experts.
Take the spam out of the email address to reach me.
Crash
I run a consulting firm that specializes in this type of "prima donna" coder to some extent, and no comment I read (including the useless recruiting website article) really explains how to handle them or channel them. Everyone is suggesting that you muzzle them or get rid of them. We should be trying to RAISE the talent level in organizations, not lower it.
Here's what I've found about how to do it:
1. Give them what they want and let go of the things that aren't essential. Set some groundrules about overlapping hours but let them come in late. Who really cares if they are in at 8:00am? Some roles in an organization require regular hours, but coding isn't one of them.
2. These do typically want the hairiest most complicated problems in the organization. Give those problems to them. The mundane shit will bore them and they will quit even if you can tolerate them. The hairy stuff will get done; it will work; and it will get done faster than if you give it to your average IT guy.
3. Some don't work well in teams at all. We call them "Cowboy" coders. They want to ride in on the white horse and save the day by themselves. Look for ways to carve that kind of work out. If no solo work is there and they have to be on a team, don't put them in charge of architecture, which takes a lot of communication with a team. Put them in charge of an entire vertical section--not a horizontal one.
4. Most of them want to be accountable for results, not methods. So HOLD them accountable. Don't manage their hours or how they get something done, but agree on an acceptable deadline and bust their ass if they don't make it. Bust their ass by managing their hours and making them write status reports on the next project!
5. Give them other smart people to work with. Others have already made the point that these guys don't cost 10x as much. For another $10K, you can replace the average guy sitting next to your prima donna with another prima donna. They'll probably get along better and work together better.
In other words, just go WITH the grain instead of always against it and they will produce amazing things for you. It is a lot like the open source movement. You can get amazing production from people by just staying out of their hair and letting them prove whose dick is bigger. If you can find ways to let them do it their way, your organization will be the richer for it.
Crash
I don't understand how the government allows advertising to be fundamentally different from the terms of service of the product being advertised. We are constantly being inundated with this shit too--it's the rule not the exception.
- How many FREE products are out there where the ad says FREE 50 times in 60 seconds, but in fine print it says there is a $8.00 S&H charge? I call on the FCC to define the meaning of the word "FREE" as "no money changes hands for you to get this product or service".
- If the courts know that it isn't for LIFE but instead until the company goes under, why do advertising regulators allow the phrase FOR LIFE in ANY ads??? I call on the regulators to require that ads FOR LIFE have money in trust in case they go under if they use that phrase.
- Why are ads for diet pills and get rich quick schemes allowed to show testimonial after testimonial of people talking about how product X helped them become smarter, thinner or richer while the tiny print says "Results Not Typical"? Let's require TYPICAL testimonials, how about that! Or require the really skinny people to say in their testimonial "I was AMAZED at how much weight I lost since my results were so atypical!"
I really don't get it. My wife is from Europe, where truthfulness in ads seems to be something the governments still care about, and it has taken her YEARS to build up enough skepticism of ads to not believe all the patently fraudulent bullshit that is perpetrated here.
I understand caveat emptor and all that, but it has really gotten out of hand. When was the last time you saw an ad that was TRUTHFUL! Coke won't make you happy. Miller Lite won't get you girls. A Lexus doesn't make you a successful business man. You can't "Set it and Forget It" with that cheesy chicken roaster. Drinking parseley juice from your $200 juicers isn't going to make you feel younger. Diet-ZX isn't free. OxyClean won't clean your carpets. I doubt Massengil really gives you that "fresh" feeling either.
What are the rules that have to be followed? Are there ANY? Does anyone CHECK the ads? IS ANYONE OUT THERE???
Crash
I agree that conserving their cash should have been job 1. However, in order to win over their customers they needed to do a few things besides just survive:
a) Make the ordering process SHORTER. It takes almost as long to place a lengthy grocery order on a website as it does to just go shopping.
b) Be smarter about item selection (see "a" above). The value I add to my wife when I go shopping is she says "We need milk, eggs and cheese" and I know she means "a gallon of Peveley 2% milk with the blue top, a dozen generic brand jumbo eggs and a 24-pack of Kraft American singles". I also know that if there is no 2% milk I can just get 1% and not come home empty handed. NO grocery website has figured out how to do this yet.
c) They have to SAVE a TRIP. If they don't save me a trip, I might as well just go myself. The overhead of driving there, driving back and standing in line is almost the same no matter how many items I buy. My last web order, I got like 20 things, but they forgot the bananas. I can't make banana cream pie without bananas, so I get totally pissed off after having spent an hour ordering everything, giving them all my personal info for the order, and waiting a DAY for delivery that I STILL have to go to the store myself. What if you ordered a pizza from Domino's but they "forgot" the pepperoni and told you to just go to the store and get your own pepperoni? Domino's CEO and WebVan's CEO would be on job search together.
What these guys (like lots of others) lost sight of is that the new experience has to be BETTER than the old experience or people will avoid it. The Internet way had the POTENTIAL of being a better experience, but sadly, their companies' attempts were worse.
Crash
Actually, the news article said that Shaheen would have to line up alongside all the other unsecured creditors and probably had no hope of getting any money out of it.
(They have about $30 million I believe in assets, and something like 80-90 million in debts. Shaheen is part of the 80-90 million.)
Crash
I think the issue is INFOGLUT, both in terms of the number of sites and the expense of each one.
There are simply too many friggin sites out there to subscribe to them. Period. People here have alluded to what a pain it is to register and give your life history and to the "camel's nose in the tent" leading to higher and higher charges, but I think those are both symptoms.
The real issue is that I (like a lot of people I imagine) get my news on the Internet from probably 100 or 200 different sites at different times. It is CERTAINLY not worth $5.00 or even $1.00 per site per month to subscribe to all these. My opinion is that until there is some kind of aggregation model for these payments it will never happen.
Cable/Satellite TV is a good example. I pay $50 a month for my Dish Network and I get about 180 working channels for that (no premiums of course!). Would I pay $.50 a month to get American Movie Classics by itself? Hell no. But as part of a package, I buy it and sometime I might watch it if something catches my eye. But even though it includes things I don't want, it also includes most everything I do want and it is ONE bill.
Now that I think about it, those economics are probably about right. I pay $50 for 180 channels. Call it $5 to the aggregator, and it's $45 to all the channels, which are each averaging about $.25 a month per viewer then. Would I pay an average of $.25 a month for Slashdot, CNet, CNN, NYTimes, Playboy, Yahoo, ESPN, SciAm, Gamasutra, Google, and 100 others? Yeah I might if they were on one bill.
The problem is that no one is charging $.25 a month and no one will be able to make any money at $.25 a month either, given that they are depending on $10.00 a month to stay alive right now. Until the Internet content industry figures out how to fix this, they are going to be broke and people will not subscribe.
Crash
What about dike (not dyke) and sluice and dam?
I actually think English is closer to Dutch than to German. Much more similar grammar (with some French grammar thrown in) and word order similar to Olde Englishe. A few transliterations like "y" for "ij" in the middle of words (which looks almost identical when written in cursive) and you end up with something a lot like English.
Crash
The issue isn't whether the weather converges to a stable attractor or not, but whether its exact point on the attractor is knowable or not. Even with the millions of nanobots soaring through the air, we will still not know enough about initial conditions to determine the future very far in advance.
This is what Gleick was referring to with his famous and often misunderstood reference to the butterfly in Tokyo causing a hurricane in New York City two months from now. He was saying, rightfully, that even the flap of a butterfly's wings is enough to throw off initial conditions enough to make the weather totally unpredictable at some future point.
The bottom line is that when you don't know the exact initial conditions (unknowable ever, it seems) and you don't know the exact nonlinear equations which make up the model (which do seem to be improving) you are really just making really high-powered guesses about what is coming next. And my grandma with her bum knee can still do a better job of predicting rain than the weather man on tv.
Crash
Don't forget... ZD is owned in part by Vulcan Ventures,
:-)
- which is owned by Paul Allen,
- who was a part of Microsoft
- and made his money off of code
- programmed by children in Pakistan
- forced to listen to Kathy Lee Gifford.
It's eeeeevil.....
Crash