There were certainly bad project managers at 3D realms but there were also pretty bad investors behind. Who would invest $12 million in such a never ending project?
Well I'm no Australian but considering the size of your population I seriously doubt promoting mostly national projects would help your scientists and the overall return on investment.
If all these European countries (having roughly a population similar to yours) have founded the ESA, this is precisely to share costs and having bigger projects. (see for example the special relationship between Canada and ESA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESA
Why not Australia as well?
Ok, how much would it cost us to fund such a project in-house and how many times would it take to find the right persons to do it?
Compared to: how much would it costs us to buy an existing company/team and an existing product?
So in this case they think it would be more reasonable to buy an existing company/team.
"But" you are entrepreneurs, your motivation is essentially "big money". If you loose that appeal and if you receive just a salary instead, you will be less productive. Remember them that fact to negotiate significant shares.
Something else worth to remember, developing a product is the easiest part of the job (I'm a developer and entrepreneur as well). The real difficulty is to sell it.
Usually computer engineers have a very poor estimation on that part of the project.
Science for science sake is worth while no matter the cost or the expect benefit.
I call BS. Demonstration please, using the example above.
I do practical stuffs all day long, I'm a business owner. Some people are glad to subsidize painters, opera, religions, armies... I prefer things like the CERN.
They try to answer at their level the big "why". Why am I here ? What are we made of and what is this strange world we live in?
And between a LCD screen and discovering the complexity of the universe, I assure you that my interest goes to the later as a taxpayer.
There are protests around the world where women basically go topless and get arrested for it
Not in most european countries IMHO (Techno parades, beaches,etc).
I didn't think that the restrictive Facebook policy could be that conservative. Topless "forbidden!", mothers breast feeding children "forbidden!"...I'm quite surprised.
American media companies have no problem to show a crime scene with blood everywhere and a victim lying on the ground. but a healthy female body is considered more obscene than that. I find it so absurd in a way.
Well it makes me think that Geocities could be a relatively strong brand nowadays. a so 90's brand, it could work with those born in the 90's, who could have a "vintage" address:-) or older guys like us who had their first web site hosted on geocities. Ah those good pionneer years:-). Mmmmh...If only I had the money:-)
unmantainable compared to their circa 1996 network enabled desktop application cousins.
Web apps are a historical regression.
Well continue to develop 1996 applications while I develop 2009 web based applications. You will be right and out of job, I will be wrong and rich. It sounds like a good deal to me:-).
I've been reading about the death of PC gaming since the early 90s, but the doomsayers always ignore the fact that the number of PC gamers has steadily increased. Regardless of market share, a system with 30 million players (and growing) will still get developer attention.
Me too and since 1988 or something. I remember a friend of mine who told me to take a console instead of a PC (80286) because PC games will soon disapear. I had the pleasure to play Wing Commander, X-wing, Tie fighter and countless of unforgivable games. He had a SEGA and dumb games such as Sonic:-).
The truth is that messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys gave me a work: computer engineer.
But well I don't enjoy the last games I have played lately. I find them boring and repetitive (FPS mainly). I've got more interesting things to do. I guess I'm getting too old that stuff:-).
You got the vocabulary, so I guess it could be first language. Which would really be a shame.:)
Not my native tongue either. He made interesting points, nothing to be ashamed.
You have shown your incapacity to focus on the essential: the content, rather than the spelling. I feel like it is more serious than few typos personally.
Yes that's why we all moved to the web development side:-). I used to be one of those "webmasters" in 1996. We were rock stars:-), because well most of the developers of that time had no clue how Internet works to put it simply. Most network related development happened in large multinationals or any big organization and those outside of it were focused on desktop development and to some extent LAN development (without TCP/IP).
I remember few meetings were "computer engineers" as they used to call themselves were impressed by a HTML source code and a couple of copy/pasted customized CGI scripts:o). At that time you weren't negotiating with the communication department for a web site, you were dealing directly with the IT department.
You wanted the contract? An animated gif was your best weapon! Like a 3D version of their logo:-). now they call us webmonkey, tsss...They used to be the Neanderthal's men;-)
In 1997 I launched my web agency. The first months were really castatrophic to a point that I couldn't pay my Internet connection anymore:-). (28.8 dial up modem I think). "But" prior to that deconnection I finally managed to get an important contract. The kind of one that could save me from bankruptcy at 22 years old:-).
I made the whole web site on a public library computer. Hopefully the PC wasn't protected. I installed discretly a couple of shareware, FTP client and so on and for a week or so I worked there.
I witnessed this also in the european HQ of a big asiatic carmaker around 2003.
The CIO invested millions of Euro into a inhouse CMS for every national branches. Dozens of consultants (+ 1000 Euro per day) were working on the last Java based application.
It was trendy, the IT department was in charge of the "tubes", while the experienced consultants were developing the new programs. Pure politic, the IT department had a very bad press internally (well to be honest they were really bureaucratic)
He was almost a rock star internally during the first months . Then after months (even years) of development the "masterpiece" was released, full of bugs, limited features, cumbersome processes. Only 3 out of 27 branches have chosen to use it (they had an option not to).
He was fired. They finally opted for a commercial application for a fraction of this price.
I'm currently using the FLASH 10 player on my kde4 opensuse 11 (Firefox).
Anyway Flash or Silverlight as User Interfaces are dead horses. Canvas (to be fairly supported by IE8 and already supported by Firefox 3 and Safari imho) is "maybe" the way to go (MS poor SVG support, the way they did with Java).
There are already some nice experiments in the Mozilla labs heavily based on canvas/JS/CSS. Impressive online app.
You won't need $$$$ IDE, you won't need proprietary format, your content will be easily indexed by search engine, etc.
the only Flash real advantage for the years to come is its impressive video capabilities. I don't see any alternative able to match it in a near future.
I did buy once an ACER Linux desktop two years ago. The Linux distribution they have chosen was the worst I have ever seen : Linpus (Taiwan) version 9.3 in my case.
Outdated application versions, packages library almost empty, no community, no support, nothing.
Well as a Frenchspeaking european, we simply love those cousins:-). It is a bit like watching an independent Gallic village right in the middle of the Roman Empire.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well being a programmer myself and using Linux as my main desktop, this is "also" my problem. I'm an end-user as well.
The last irritating things I have found: I just installed opensuse 11, running KDE 4. Well I love it and I don't understand all the fuss around it. Anyway I had to zip several files. I had to send them by email to a client....So simple is it? I openned this new dolhpin. I selected them, right click,actions and then the list appeared:
Archive & Encrypt folder
Start a slideshow
Decrypt & verify all files in folder
Archive sign & Encrypt folder
Archive & Encrypt folder
Open terminal here
What kind of paranoid menu is this ? I've got 4 encryption features out of six. I simply need a very simple "compress..." or "Archive" like KDE 3.X to make a simple "zip file" or a tar.gz, I will attach it to my email and that's it. I couldn't find it, so I openned terminal and I typed the proper command line...
See how stupid it is?
Sometimes you feel like what Linux lacks the most is simply "common sense". Sure I will customise that annoying/stupid action submenu when I will have the required time to document myself...But It is truly annoying, even if you are a developer. Some guy out there was so proud of his encryption scheme that he puts 4 commands.
Not all problems are driver related, user-friendliness is also a "big" problem.
I speak three languages and I certainly don't feel that my cognitive/memory skills are better than the average. But well that's just me.
Practically it is easier to learn a new language...Well a new western european language in my case, I can easily spot latin/germanic roots while reading it, I get a (very) rough idea of the content. I know Dutch and when I read German (and surprisingly sometimes Scandinavian texts), I can find words sharing similar roots.
Your native tongue influences your way of thinking in some ways. So the more you know, the better. A Russian friend of mine once told me that learning a new language is like discovering a new point of view. For example there are funny things I read in English and they cannot be translated in French properly. the classic: Cheesing eating surrender monkeys. There is no good translation for that, it would loose all its humour to a point it would become rude/stupid. i don't mean its meaning (WWII/French love affair with cheeses), I mean the way you make this sentence, the way it sounds, this is hilarious:-).
Well I had a real case lately. The father of a female friend. He is retired, he took a computer few months ago and he tried "internet". Within days he started receiving emails from friends and family...And spam. He iss in his 60's, first time ever in front of SPAM. He got caught by a Casino spam promising him thousands of dollar if he joins.
He gave his credit card number sadly. The Internet is quite cruel with newcomers imho.
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There were certainly bad project managers at 3D realms but there were also pretty bad investors behind. Who would invest $12 million in such a never ending project?
Well I'm no Australian but considering the size of your population I seriously doubt promoting mostly national projects would help your scientists and the overall return on investment.
If all these European countries (having roughly a population similar to yours) have founded the ESA, this is precisely to share costs and having bigger projects. (see for example the special relationship between Canada and ESA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESA Why not Australia as well?
Well you can negotiate.
Usually corporations think that way:
So in this case they think it would be more reasonable to buy an existing company/team.
"But" you are entrepreneurs, your motivation is essentially "big money". If you loose that appeal and if you receive just a salary instead, you will be less productive. Remember them that fact to negotiate significant shares.
Something else worth to remember, developing a product is the easiest part of the job (I'm a developer and entrepreneur as well). The real difficulty is to sell it.
Usually computer engineers have a very poor estimation on that part of the project.
Science for science sake is worth while no matter the cost or the expect benefit.
I call BS. Demonstration please, using the example above.
I do practical stuffs all day long, I'm a business owner. Some people are glad to subsidize painters, opera, religions, armies... I prefer things like the CERN.
They try to answer at their level the big "why". Why am I here ? What are we made of and what is this strange world we live in?
And between a LCD screen and discovering the complexity of the universe, I assure you that my interest goes to the later as a taxpayer.
There are protests around the world where women basically go topless and get arrested for it
Not in most european countries IMHO (Techno parades, beaches,etc).
I didn't think that the restrictive Facebook policy could be that conservative. Topless "forbidden!", mothers breast feeding children "forbidden!"...I'm quite surprised.
American media companies have no problem to show a crime scene with blood everywhere and a victim lying on the ground. but a healthy female body is considered more obscene than that. I find it so absurd in a way.
Well it makes me think that Geocities could be a relatively strong brand nowadays. a so 90's brand, it could work with those born in the 90's, who could have a "vintage" address :-) or older guys like us who had their first web site hosted on geocities. Ah those good pionneer years :-). Mmmmh...If only I had the money :-)
unmantainable compared to their circa 1996 network enabled desktop application cousins. Web apps are a historical regression.
Well continue to develop 1996 applications while I develop 2009 web based applications. You will be right and out of job, I will be wrong and rich. It sounds like a good deal to me :-).
I've been reading about the death of PC gaming since the early 90s, but the doomsayers always ignore the fact that the number of PC gamers has steadily increased. Regardless of market share, a system with 30 million players (and growing) will still get developer attention.
Me too and since 1988 or something. I remember a friend of mine who told me to take a console instead of a PC (80286) because PC games will soon disapear. I had the pleasure to play Wing Commander, X-wing, Tie fighter and countless of unforgivable games. He had a SEGA and dumb games such as Sonic :-).
The truth is that messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys gave me a work: computer engineer.
But well I don't enjoy the last games I have played lately. I find them boring and repetitive (FPS mainly). I've got more interesting things to do. I guess I'm getting too old that stuff :-).
Oracle will surely kill (or at least castrate) MySQL.
Well it would be stupid. MySQL has Open Source competitors, they can easily replace it. they would destroy their asset value and nothing else.
You got the vocabulary, so I guess it could be first language. Which would really be a shame. :)
Not my native tongue either. He made interesting points, nothing to be ashamed.
You have shown your incapacity to focus on the essential: the content, rather than the spelling. I feel like it is more serious than few typos personally.
I used to be a conscript in the famous Belgian army :-) and in my case it was more like Monty python's version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxik87W5m5E&feature=related
What a waste o time really :-)
I have never read the book but I remember that I had the comic books while student. I don't know how well preseverd the story was, but I really enjoyed it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War_(comics)
Yes that's why we all moved to the web development side :-). I used to be one of those "webmasters" in 1996. We were rock stars :-), because well most of the developers of that time had no clue how Internet works to put it simply. Most network related development happened in large multinationals or any big organization and those outside of it were focused on desktop development and to some extent LAN development (without TCP/IP).
I remember few meetings were "computer engineers" as they used to call themselves were impressed by a HTML source code and a couple of copy/pasted customized CGI scripts :o). At that time you weren't negotiating with the communication department for a web site, you were dealing directly with the IT department.
You wanted the contract? An animated gif was your best weapon! Like a 3D version of their logo :-). now they call us webmonkey, tsss...They used to be the Neanderthal's men ;-)
In 1997 I launched my web agency. The first months were really castatrophic to a point that I couldn't pay my Internet connection anymore :-). (28.8 dial up modem I think). "But" prior to that deconnection I finally managed to get an important contract. The kind of one that could save me from bankruptcy at 22 years old :-).
I made the whole web site on a public library computer. Hopefully the PC wasn't protected. I installed discretly a couple of shareware, FTP client and so on and for a week or so I worked there.
Ah those were the days :-).
I witnessed this also in the european HQ of a big asiatic carmaker around 2003.
The CIO invested millions of Euro into a inhouse CMS for every national branches. Dozens of consultants (+ 1000 Euro per day) were working on the last Java based application.
It was trendy, the IT department was in charge of the "tubes", while the experienced consultants were developing the new programs. Pure politic, the IT department had a very bad press internally (well to be honest they were really bureaucratic)
He was almost a rock star internally during the first months . Then after months (even years) of development the "masterpiece" was released, full of bugs, limited features, cumbersome processes. Only 3 out of 27 branches have chosen to use it (they had an option not to).
He was fired. They finally opted for a commercial application for a fraction of this price.
I'm currently using the FLASH 10 player on my kde4 opensuse 11 (Firefox).
Anyway Flash or Silverlight as User Interfaces are dead horses. Canvas (to be fairly supported by IE8 and already supported by Firefox 3 and Safari imho) is "maybe" the way to go (MS poor SVG support, the way they did with Java).
There are already some nice experiments in the Mozilla labs heavily based on canvas/JS/CSS. Impressive online app.
You won't need $$$$ IDE, you won't need proprietary format, your content will be easily indexed by search engine, etc.
the only Flash real advantage for the years to come is its impressive video capabilities. I don't see any alternative able to match it in a near future.
I did buy once an ACER Linux desktop two years ago. The Linux distribution they have chosen was the worst I have ever seen : Linpus (Taiwan) version 9.3 in my case.
Outdated application versions, packages library almost empty, no community, no support, nothing.
Well I can send a couple of Belgian beers, almost the same effect ;-)
I do pour (i=0 vers i=10,++i) { Imprimer "Je parle francais" } You insensible mangeur d'hamburger! ;-)
Well as a Frenchspeaking european, we simply love those cousins :-). It is a bit like watching an independent Gallic village right in the middle of the Roman Empire.
Well being a programmer myself and using Linux as my main desktop, this is "also" my problem. I'm an end-user as well.
The last irritating things I have found: I just installed opensuse 11, running KDE 4. Well I love it and I don't understand all the fuss around it. Anyway I had to zip several files. I had to send them by email to a client....So simple is it? I openned this new dolhpin. I selected them, right click,actions and then the list appeared:
What kind of paranoid menu is this ? I've got 4 encryption features out of six. I simply need a very simple "compress..." or "Archive" like KDE 3.X to make a simple "zip file" or a tar.gz, I will attach it to my email and that's it. I couldn't find it, so I openned terminal and I typed the proper command line...
See how stupid it is?
Sometimes you feel like what Linux lacks the most is simply "common sense". Sure I will customise that annoying/stupid action submenu when I will have the required time to document myself...But It is truly annoying, even if you are a developer. Some guy out there was so proud of his encryption scheme that he puts 4 commands.
Not all problems are driver related, user-friendliness is also a "big" problem.
Well I've got an old Sony-Ericsson p990i (2006) with a built-in USB modem. I wonder how they could control such things.
I speak three languages and I certainly don't feel that my cognitive/memory skills are better than the average. But well that's just me.
Practically it is easier to learn a new language...Well a new western european language in my case, I can easily spot latin/germanic roots while reading it, I get a (very) rough idea of the content. I know Dutch and when I read German (and surprisingly sometimes Scandinavian texts), I can find words sharing similar roots.
Your native tongue influences your way of thinking in some ways. So the more you know, the better. A Russian friend of mine once told me that learning a new language is like discovering a new point of view. For example there are funny things I read in English and they cannot be translated in French properly. the classic: Cheesing eating surrender monkeys. There is no good translation for that, it would loose all its humour to a point it would become rude/stupid. i don't mean its meaning (WWII/French love affair with cheeses), I mean the way you make this sentence, the way it sounds, this is hilarious :-).
Well I had a real case lately. The father of a female friend. He is retired, he took a computer few months ago and he tried "internet". Within days he started receiving emails from friends and family...And spam. He iss in his 60's, first time ever in front of SPAM. He got caught by a Casino spam promising him thousands of dollar if he joins. He gave his credit card number sadly. The Internet is quite cruel with newcomers imho.