I also think that Cloud Computing is the worse idea in the world, but I seem to be getting shot down by the Myth-Makers. We'll have to see how it goes.
In some ways I think cloud computing is the new 'outsourcing projects to India' -- both are/were good for some things, but were / will be applied to a bunch of business cases that they really don't make sense for. Both have/will resulted in a lot of failed projects, not because they're inherently bad ideas, but because of myopically focusing on their strengths and ignoring their drawbacks.
Some people, if given a hammer, quickly see everything as a nail. Instead of learning the right lesson from the failures of this strategy, they just try to find a better hammer.
Out of curiousity, what don't you like about XAML?
I'm not saying I'm in love with it myself, but I'm curious about your angle because I agree with a lot of the rest of what you had to say there and I'm wondering if there's something I missed.
Yes, but which IE version should you target, seeing as how they all have different bugs?
Duh, all of them.:)
I know it's little consolation, but it's not *quite* as bad/inconsisent as the different versions of Netscape were before it died. At least, post-IE6 IE isn't.
Is it me or does there seem to be a concerted attack on the very idea of democracy these days? As if there is some assumption that only bright educated people can govern?
If you really think about it, the U.S. Constitution (and a lot of other countries' constitutions) are clearly written as though that assumption were obviously true. Otherwise, why have (for one example) an electoral college?
So if by 'these days' you mean 'for the last several hundred or more years', sure.
My father-in-law is tragically gifted at breaking computers, and when he had a Windows machine, we were doing tech support for him all the time.
Now he's got a Mac, and, you know? He somehow manages to get crap on it and break it just as much, but now I can legitimately claim ignorance and it becomes the Apple Store's problem. The Apple Geniuses loss is my gain.
It is just a shame what was a good law passed for noble reasons is being exploited by ambulance chasers and douchebags.
It is a shame, but stuff like that is why lawmaking/government, like science, has to be an iterative process. You take the best stab at it you can and plug the loopholes as you go. Ideally.
And that is the reason I chose to end a friendship with someone, who chose to ignore that, offer his soul to the vultures, and praise Vista so much that he bought it.
I'd say your ex-friend got the better end of that deal, and not because he got to have a copy of Vista.
An ideal job is one you enjoy. If you enjoy coding in your spare time, then coding is your ideal job.
Sure; however, the reverse isn't necessarily true -- if you don't enjoy coding in your spare time, coding could still be your ideal job.
I coded a lot in my spare time before becoming a full-time coder; now I do it in my spare time very little. I enjoy coding, but 40+ hours of it in a week is generally enough for me. I still spend more time coding in a week than I spend doing probably anything else, and I still enjoy my work, but, for me (and some other people, I'd wager), that's enough. It's something I enjoy doing, and it's something I enjoy doing probably more than anything else that I can get paid for, but it's not the only interest in my life.
No offense, but you're basically responding to something that isn't really my point at all.
According to the article, Ontario needed a medical tracking system, and there exists an open source system which does that. At this point we're not talking about the firewalls and stuff around that, we're just trying to solve that central problem.
Where the article and I disagree is that it suggests "Hey, we want X, there's a system for X, we'll just install that and we're done! $Billion saved!"
Whereas I'm saying "That's a great starting point and worth doing, but you're probably still going to spend half the money on customizing the open source medical tracking system, because what it provides isn't exactly what Ontario law most likely says it will need to."
The thing with working on something like an open source word processor is that if there's functionality it's missing, probably, it's something a lot of different people in different industries would be interested in. Working on it and improving it probably makes the word processor better for everyone. Conversely, working on something like a tracking system for a government entity probably requires developing a bunch of functionality that no one else will want, but is required by the specific arcane laws or codes of that government entity. Which, again, doesn't mean the open source solution isn't a good idea and doesn't mean it doesn't save money and time, but it's also not a silver bullet.
No, it doesn't oversimplify. It says that the open source solution would have been cheaper, not free. You are making up things that aren't true, then proving them false
The article doesn't say free, and neither did I. It does say that they basically only need to pay for the hardware and some support staff (as in, the billion dollars spent on custom development goes away), and so did I.
The inherent problem with healthcare (or especially, health insurance) as a purely capitalist system is that its goals are at odds with what the goals of healthcare should be. A health insurance corporation is driven to achieve the best result and largest profits for its shareholders, rather than the best health for its customers. One that can take your money in premiums for your entire lifetime and then manage to deny you coverage when it comes time to pay out has essentially won and is performing well from a capitalist perspective, but it isn't providing good healthcare.
Healthcare is also a curiously localized/monopolized industry in that people typically have a very limited ability to shop around, in part because in any emergency or for most non-elective procedures or conditions you most likely will end up going to the closest hospital rather than the best or cheapest hospital.
That's not to say that putting everything in the hands of government is the ideal solution, either. Government can be its own kind of clusterfuck, and government agencies by their very nature have a tendency to reward mediocrity more than they reward excellence or punish failure.
Mostly, it means that anyone who tells you there's an easy solution, no matter what it is, to making healthcare work great is missing something.
Is there an open source software that does something pretty close to what they spent a pile of money building a custom solution for? Apparently there is.
Is the open source solution close enough to the needs of the Ontario government that, as the article alleges, all you need to do is buy some servers and set it up and there are negligible other costs? I seriously doubt it. I would be willing to bet heavily against it. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably hasn't spent much time developing software for government.
Probably they could have saved money by using the open source software as a starting point for customizations -- but they're going to have to do some, because the business model or set of civic statutes the software is built for aren't the same as what that particular government requires. Who does those customizations? Why, there you're probably back to hiring software consultants again.
I'm currently working on a government project (as a developer consultant) that's very similar to the idealized case laid out in the article, and it's not my first such project; in my estimation, in most cases, if you can repurpose something open source that's very similar to what the government agency in question is asking for, you can save maybe half the money of building a complete solution from scratch. At first you may estimate that you're going to be able to do a lot better than that, but as you get further into the project you find that there's just too many odd requirements unique to any given government entity or municipality that don't exist anywhere else and are completely inflexible because they're a matter of law.
So, yeah. You can save money, and that's a good thing, but you can't save what the dude in the article thinks you can save.
But but.. silverlight will solve all these problems and more, no?
Since you tongue-in-cheekily asked, just some of them.:)
It's a hell of a lot easier/faster to make a good/responsive/pretty web UI in Silverlight than by dicking around with JavaScript libraries. Obviously, that approach also has other downsides. Depending on what you're doing they may or may not matter.
The advantage is you can fix the flaw by releasing a new build of the app against the new library.
With SxS assemblies, your app keeps linking against the old version of the DLL which might never get the patch (?)
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding what you're saying, that doesn't really bear out as an advantage -- someone using dynamic linking could (and probably would) equally release a new build of the app which links against the new version of the DLL.
What if you want to meet chicks - particularly straight and relatively presentable ones?
Probably (if we're staying within the realm of retail) you should work at one of the many clothing stores at the mall that cater to young women, or something like a Sephora store.
Granted, those women will probably assume you're gay until you start hitting on them, but you're going to see a lot of straight and relatively presentable women come through your doors.
An interesting thing is, Apple pays really well for retail
Really? I have a few friends who work at the local Apple store, and they'd said the exact opposite -- that, barring being selected for "Genius" training, they could make more money working almost anywhere else in the same mall. They work for less money because they love all things Apple.
You can't fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements.
That's very idealistic, but it doesn't reflect reality in the business world. I've seen the (by the metrics) best developer in a company or on a team fired many times.
In none of these cases would I say this was a smart choice by management, but they were nonetheless the choices made.
Sure, and the IPod is basically the same thing as an AM radio.
Both of these statements oversimplify something to the point of ridiculousness.
X-Box is... innovative how, exactly?
Although there are things you could point to, it's not, really. Neither was the IPod.
I'm on my second IPod. I'm not some rapid Apple hater. I enjoy it for what it is, but it is what it is -- and for several generations, it wasn't a lot different than any of the other mp3 players on the market. Now it's morphed into something else entirely, but I'd argue that still isn't especially innovative. Apple, in several ways, polished the hell out of the mp3 player, but it's not like they invented cold fusion.
Apple takes previous work and one-ups it. Microsoft takes previous work and copies it. There is a subtle but important difference.
In my opinion, you're seeing what you want to see and not what's actually there.
Something like an IPhone or an IPod isn't more of an innovation over what came before it than, say, Sharepoint or an XBox is, even if it has more hipster cred.
Slashdot Mirror
I also think that Cloud Computing is the worse idea in the world, but I seem to be getting shot down by the Myth-Makers. We'll have to see how it goes.
In some ways I think cloud computing is the new 'outsourcing projects to India' -- both are/were good for some things, but were / will be applied to a bunch of business cases that they really don't make sense for. Both have/will resulted in a lot of failed projects, not because they're inherently bad ideas, but because of myopically focusing on their strengths and ignoring their drawbacks.
Some people, if given a hammer, quickly see everything as a nail. Instead of learning the right lesson from the failures of this strategy, they just try to find a better hammer.
I don't think it's fair to call JavaScript a crime against humanity -- most humans aren't software developers...
Out of curiousity, what don't you like about XAML?
I'm not saying I'm in love with it myself, but I'm curious about your angle because I agree with a lot of the rest of what you had to say there and I'm wondering if there's something I missed.
Yes, but which IE version should you target, seeing as how they all have different bugs?
Duh, all of them. :)
I know it's little consolation, but it's not *quite* as bad/inconsisent as the different versions of Netscape were before it died. At least, post-IE6 IE isn't.
The short answer is, they're not trying to solve the problem you think (or want) they're trying to solve.
Wait... you mean it's better to be Microsoft than it is to be Flash or Shockwave?
I'd say it's better that there's competition between the two, than having just one or the other.
As long as IE has a majority of the market, whatever IE does is the effective web standard, regardless of what any standards body has to say.
(Note, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but I'm pragmatic.)
Is it me or does there seem to be a concerted attack on the very idea of democracy these days? As if there is some assumption that only bright educated people can govern?
If you really think about it, the U.S. Constitution (and a lot of other countries' constitutions) are clearly written as though that assumption were obviously true. Otherwise, why have (for one example) an electoral college?
So if by 'these days' you mean 'for the last several hundred or more years', sure.
Eh. Word usage changes over time. You can only do so much to put that genie back in the bottle no matter how much you'd like to.
You did know what he meant by using the word piracy, right?
It's kinda true.
My father-in-law is tragically gifted at breaking computers, and when he had a Windows machine, we were doing tech support for him all the time.
Now he's got a Mac, and, you know? He somehow manages to get crap on it and break it just as much, but now I can legitimately claim ignorance and it becomes the Apple Store's problem. The Apple Geniuses loss is my gain.
It is just a shame what was a good law passed for noble reasons is being exploited by ambulance chasers and douchebags.
It is a shame, but stuff like that is why lawmaking/government, like science, has to be an iterative process. You take the best stab at it you can and plug the loopholes as you go. Ideally.
And that is the reason I chose to end a friendship with someone, who chose to ignore that, offer his soul to the vultures, and praise Vista so much that he bought it.
I'd say your ex-friend got the better end of that deal, and not because he got to have a copy of Vista.
An ideal job is one you enjoy. If you enjoy coding in your spare time, then coding is your ideal job.
Sure; however, the reverse isn't necessarily true -- if you don't enjoy coding in your spare time, coding could still be your ideal job.
I coded a lot in my spare time before becoming a full-time coder; now I do it in my spare time very little. I enjoy coding, but 40+ hours of it in a week is generally enough for me. I still spend more time coding in a week than I spend doing probably anything else, and I still enjoy my work, but, for me (and some other people, I'd wager), that's enough. It's something I enjoy doing, and it's something I enjoy doing probably more than anything else that I can get paid for, but it's not the only interest in my life.
No offense, but you're basically responding to something that isn't really my point at all.
According to the article, Ontario needed a medical tracking system, and there exists an open source system which does that. At this point we're not talking about the firewalls and stuff around that, we're just trying to solve that central problem.
Where the article and I disagree is that it suggests "Hey, we want X, there's a system for X, we'll just install that and we're done! $Billion saved!"
Whereas I'm saying "That's a great starting point and worth doing, but you're probably still going to spend half the money on customizing the open source medical tracking system, because what it provides isn't exactly what Ontario law most likely says it will need to."
The thing with working on something like an open source word processor is that if there's functionality it's missing, probably, it's something a lot of different people in different industries would be interested in. Working on it and improving it probably makes the word processor better for everyone. Conversely, working on something like a tracking system for a government entity probably requires developing a bunch of functionality that no one else will want, but is required by the specific arcane laws or codes of that government entity. Which, again, doesn't mean the open source solution isn't a good idea and doesn't mean it doesn't save money and time, but it's also not a silver bullet.
No, it doesn't oversimplify. It says that the open source solution would have been cheaper, not free. You are making up things that aren't true, then proving them false
The article doesn't say free, and neither did I. It does say that they basically only need to pay for the hardware and some support staff (as in, the billion dollars spent on custom development goes away), and so did I.
The inherent problem with healthcare (or especially, health insurance) as a purely capitalist system is that its goals are at odds with what the goals of healthcare should be. A health insurance corporation is driven to achieve the best result and largest profits for its shareholders, rather than the best health for its customers. One that can take your money in premiums for your entire lifetime and then manage to deny you coverage when it comes time to pay out has essentially won and is performing well from a capitalist perspective, but it isn't providing good healthcare.
Healthcare is also a curiously localized/monopolized industry in that people typically have a very limited ability to shop around, in part because in any emergency or for most non-elective procedures or conditions you most likely will end up going to the closest hospital rather than the best or cheapest hospital.
That's not to say that putting everything in the hands of government is the ideal solution, either. Government can be its own kind of clusterfuck, and government agencies by their very nature have a tendency to reward mediocrity more than they reward excellence or punish failure.
Mostly, it means that anyone who tells you there's an easy solution, no matter what it is, to making healthcare work great is missing something.
Is there an open source software that does something pretty close to what they spent a pile of money building a custom solution for? Apparently there is.
Is the open source solution close enough to the needs of the Ontario government that, as the article alleges, all you need to do is buy some servers and set it up and there are negligible other costs? I seriously doubt it. I would be willing to bet heavily against it. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably hasn't spent much time developing software for government.
Probably they could have saved money by using the open source software as a starting point for customizations -- but they're going to have to do some, because the business model or set of civic statutes the software is built for aren't the same as what that particular government requires. Who does those customizations? Why, there you're probably back to hiring software consultants again.
I'm currently working on a government project (as a developer consultant) that's very similar to the idealized case laid out in the article, and it's not my first such project; in my estimation, in most cases, if you can repurpose something open source that's very similar to what the government agency in question is asking for, you can save maybe half the money of building a complete solution from scratch. At first you may estimate that you're going to be able to do a lot better than that, but as you get further into the project you find that there's just too many odd requirements unique to any given government entity or municipality that don't exist anywhere else and are completely inflexible because they're a matter of law.
So, yeah. You can save money, and that's a good thing, but you can't save what the dude in the article thinks you can save.
But but.. silverlight will solve all these problems and more, no?
Since you tongue-in-cheekily asked, just some of them. :)
It's a hell of a lot easier/faster to make a good/responsive/pretty web UI in Silverlight than by dicking around with JavaScript libraries. Obviously, that approach also has other downsides. Depending on what you're doing they may or may not matter.
The advantage is you can fix the flaw by releasing a new build of the app against the new library.
With SxS assemblies, your app keeps linking against the old version of the DLL which might never get the patch (?)
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding what you're saying, that doesn't really bear out as an advantage -- someone using dynamic linking could (and probably would) equally release a new build of the app which links against the new version of the DLL.
What if you want to meet chicks - particularly straight and relatively presentable ones?
Probably (if we're staying within the realm of retail) you should work at one of the many clothing stores at the mall that cater to young women, or something like a Sephora store.
Granted, those women will probably assume you're gay until you start hitting on them, but you're going to see a lot of straight and relatively presentable women come through your doors.
An interesting thing is, Apple pays really well for retail
Really? I have a few friends who work at the local Apple store, and they'd said the exact opposite -- that, barring being selected for "Genius" training, they could make more money working almost anywhere else in the same mall. They work for less money because they love all things Apple.
And, I must admit you were able to get remarkable performance from your Windows installations; most people need to reboot several times a day.
Dude, it's not 1996 anymore.
If I reboot my Vista desktop once a month, that's a lot. Probably it's closer to something like 5 or 6 times a year.
You can't fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements.
That's very idealistic, but it doesn't reflect reality in the business world. I've seen the (by the metrics) best developer in a company or on a team fired many times.
In none of these cases would I say this was a smart choice by management, but they were nonetheless the choices made.
SharePoint is... an interesting proprietary Wiki.
Sure, and the IPod is basically the same thing as an AM radio.
Both of these statements oversimplify something to the point of ridiculousness.
X-Box is... innovative how, exactly?
Although there are things you could point to, it's not, really. Neither was the IPod.
I'm on my second IPod. I'm not some rapid Apple hater. I enjoy it for what it is, but it is what it is -- and for several generations, it wasn't a lot different than any of the other mp3 players on the market. Now it's morphed into something else entirely, but I'd argue that still isn't especially innovative. Apple, in several ways, polished the hell out of the mp3 player, but it's not like they invented cold fusion.
Apple takes previous work and one-ups it.
Microsoft takes previous work and copies it.
There is a subtle but important difference.
In my opinion, you're seeing what you want to see and not what's actually there.
Something like an IPhone or an IPod isn't more of an innovation over what came before it than, say, Sharepoint or an XBox is, even if it has more hipster cred.