Whatever you think about RMS and FSF you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry.
I'm not 100% convinced this is true. On the surface it seems good, but I'm sure there's secondary fallout that's not being considered. Analogous (but obviously not exactly like) to the: if you can't patent drugs, sick people can get more drugs... but now the incentive and funding to research drugs has dropped dramatically, so there's a cost for that to everyone down the line.
I do think that virtually everyone can agree that software patents in their current form are seriously borked. Anything that gets some of that looked at and improved has to be a good thing.
IMHO, what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.
He's trapped in the past. I'm sure there'd be an argument for why programming innovations of the last 10 years aren't really interesting or aren't as important as his Golden Age, just as there are people who think you can mathematically prove that rock was perfected in 1968. At best, you can make it work with a very narrow definition of what qualifies, just as you can prove that modern music has little innovation if you decide that only Gregorian Chant really qualifies as music.
Meanwhile, the world moves on and a generation of programming pioneers trades their vision for early admission to Future Fossil Fuels university.
Where we diverge is that I see the Cathedral and the Bazaar as complementary rather than antithetical, encouraging the growth of technology taken as a whole, not stifling it.
There are kinds of software that each, in a vacuum, is good at producing, and kinds of software that they aren't good at producing. If Open Office is "good enough" for many purposes, it's because it stands on the shoulders of Cathedral giants like Office. If Windows Server 2008 is a good server OS, it's because it's learned so much about how to make a good one from Linux. (Although I'd probably pick Team Foundation Server as a much better example of what I see as a great closed source product that absolutely could not have existed without a dozen great open source projects blazing trails in different areas.)
Some projects need a single, unifying vision or the willingness to write code that the developer doesn't personally want; some projects really need strong security or any of a hundred other things that a thousand pairs of eyes on the source provide. I think we're better for a world where both are possible.
FYI, when older versions of Office are faced with the Office 2007 format, they ask to download patches that let them deal with it. To say that you can't open Office 2007 documents in older versions of Office isn't entirely accurate.
The Office 2007 UI is really different from Office 2003. I hated it at first sight, but it didn't take long for me to realize that the older Office UI was a lot worse and a lot less intuitive -- it was just a kind of worse I was used to dealing with.
If we're being honest, there's a lot of "stealing" going on all over the place.
You'd be very hard pressed to find much if anything Open Source in the extremely broad category of "things that developers don't want, on average, more than non-developers" that doesn't owe a serious debt of inspiration, if not more, to the Closed Source world. E.g. Open Office, Firefox, GIMP.
You'd equally be very hard pressed to find much if anything in the Closed Source world produced in the last 10+ years in the broad category of "things that developers want more than non-developers" that doesn't owe a serious debt to the Open Source world. A lot more than just developer-y things, honestly, but that's where it's most prevalent/obvious.
The ultimate result is that we can do a lot more cool things with computers now than ten years ago, and everybody wins.
He/they have learned something from Open Source software and principles.
It may not have been what you wanted them to learn, though. Frankly, a Microsoft may (metaphorically) buy things at your church bake sale or play basketball with your kids, but they're never going to convert to your religion.
The trade embargo with Cuba hasn't seemed to have worked...it's proponents have had enough time to prove it. So why would sanctions just magically work here? How would oppressing the already oppressed people China in the EU help?
I'm not saying that I think the EU's plan would work, but one big difference here is that a big part of China's economy is based upon exporting stuff to the West. As far as I know a big part of Cuba's economy isn't?
1) A lot of people have said networking/referrals; this is absolutely true. The best people don't generally need to hit the job sites when they do need work -- they just let their friends in the industry know that they're looking and work will find them. More likely, they'll get poached away from their current job long before it even gets to that point, and it's not because they're posting their resume or taking lots of calls from headhunters. Does this mean you'll need to throw a lot of money at them to get them to come over? Not necessarily, but it may. If you're unwilling to do this, you don't value quality people as much as you think you do.
Related to this: You need to make your company as ridiculously good a place to work for your current employees as you can. Bonuses for referals are helpful, even important, but alone they're not enough. There's a level of job satisfaction where your better employees will tell their out of work or looking friends to apply, and there's a higher level where your better employees become a constant and fantastic advertisement for your company because they're so happy with their job and want so much to share the joy of a great job with their friends. You really want to be in this second category.
Side question that I don't have a good answer to but that I'd be interested in hearing other people's answers to: Given that the value of networking in getting the best people and, on the other side, finding the best jobs is so high, how do you pull good people from other areas (geographically mostly, but also technologically if, say, your company is mostly Java programmers but you really really need to bring on one great embedded C guy)? Same deal with being a programmer looking to relocate -- there are definitely moves I'd personally make if I could find the right opportunity for it, but without that kind of network in play it'd most likely need to be too blind a move.
2) Value education. I mean really, really value education. Be willing to pay for all kinds of education for your people -- books, conferences, classes, whatever. Whatever it is they want, even if it doesn't directly relate to the job. Often, the best people are passionate about technology even in their private life, but I find they're often as passionate about some other kind of learning, be it music, philosophy, political science, etc. You absolutely need to encourage (and by encourage, put your money where your mouth is) technical education to even be in the race, but encouraging education in all its forms will put you ahead of the pack and offer a benefit that is hard to replace or pass up.
Be willing to give them paid time off work to do these things. Yes, this costs. It's worth it.
3) Consider hiring consultants for shorter-term projects. Yes, we've all worked with lots and lots of terrible consultants. If you draw one of those people, when their contract is up you're done with them and you don't hire them again. It cost you something, but a job search isn't cheap, and at least you probably got some useful work out of them. On the other hand, some consultants will blow you away. A few of these will be ready to do something different in their career, and if you're willing to make them the right offer, you can get them. I've seen a lot of the best consultants I've worked with transition to non-consulting companies this way -- they got to a point in their lives where they wanted steady hours to ease the strain on their families, or they wanted to move towards a management position, or they wanted to do design as a bigger part of their job, or they wanted to work from home more often, whatever -- they were great at what they did and ready for something else from their job, and one of their clients was smart enough to offer it to them.
4) Decide what kind(s) of people you need, and hire accordingly. What is a superstar, really?
There's a passage in the Art of War that goes: The skillful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, th
Yeah, I remember seeing a lot of job postings like that in that era.
I'd often send them my resume with a very nice cover letter saying, in essence, "The person you're looking for does not and cannot exist because you've made this literally impossible demand. I suggest you consider my resume instead."
Somehow I never got a call from one of those. I'm theoretically more diplomatic now.
You never know when making a good impression on someone will help you later in life.
Several years ago I was working in a job I didn't intend to keep for long. I made a good impression on one of the guys on my team there.
Flash forward to a few years later and I'm working somewhere else at a job I hated. Long story short, I was lied to in a bad way during the interview process and the job was completely unlike the answers I had gotten to my questions while interviewing. Out of the blue I was offered a much better job because of the guy at the first job.
My story is more about quality of work than matching belts, but it never hurts to make a better impression when you can.
Maybe they're thinking that people who regularly turn off their phones at night (and why at night?) will be obvious Taliban sympathizers and hunted down during the day? Beats me.
If you don't have the source, you cannot know it--and I don't give a damn how wonderful your knowledge base is. MS's knowledge base IS good, and it's the standard response I get to this from Windows zealots. But they remain blind to the fact...that they are blind, ultimately, as you are forbidden from truly understanding your server software.
Considering I know a great many successful web server admins (using a wide variety of technologies) and none of them have ever gone mucking about in the source code, that's bullshit.
with SAP Microsoft will gain a product lineup with large customers that pay for service, can't migrate easily and SAP's product will have synergies with Microsoft's other products where they can sell more products to a customer.
But I'm of the opinion that Microsoft can (and does, in fact, have their eyes on) get most of the benefit there without having to buy SAP to do it.
I don't see SAP alone as being a major growth product at this point in time. It's aimed at fairly massive corporations, and I think by this point, most of the existing companies that see a need for something like SAP have already implemented one.
I think the synergy potential between existing SAP systems and Office/.NET/Windows Workflow/BizTalk/etc. is enormous. Company A has SAP implemented already? Well, maybe they'd like an application that sits in Outlook and automatically grabs order e-mails from customers and pre-fills most of the data in their SAP order entry forms and auto-archives the e-mails sorted by customer across all salespeople in some searchable central repository, making their salespeople that much more efficient and eliminating a lot of operator error.
On the surface, that doesn't make Microsoft a lot of money, but it ensures that all the people at that company definitely need Office (and not just something that can work with the same file formats, not that anyone's rushing to get away from Office at the moment), need a Windows server, need consultants with MS-tech expertise to set it up, etc. It gets people thinking of MS as a business solutions company and not just an OS/Office company, which it isn't to a lot of people yet.
It doesn't take a lot in the way of SAP/MS cooperation to make the SAP interface part of this easy, and my understanding from people that have worked on projects in this mold is that it's already there.
... right. Because Google would never, for example, ditch their internally-developed Google Video for a giant buyout of YouTube. They're too much about innovation for that.
There's nothing wrong with buying up a competitor that does something better than you do. There's a lot more examples of Microsoft doing it because they've been around longer and have a bigger wad of cash, but there's nothing new under the sun here.
It's in this latter category that I see promise in Silverlight -- if not directly, it's got to force Adobe to do a little more work to appeal to developers.
(For the 80% of replies that didn't seriously examine this before firing off knee-jerk... this is about replacing a Flash interface with a Silverlight interface. It's not about encoding all the contents of the Library of Congress in Silverlight and then burning all the original sources.)
I think if I had posted a year ago predicting that half the posters here would be frothing at the mouth that someone would dare replace a Flash interface with something cross-platform and developer friendly, I'd have been mocked by one and all.
Damn it, people! You let Microsoft turn you into a bunch of Flash Fanboys!.
Flash has been able to be crap in a lot of ways for years for lack of any real competition. Now it's getting some. That's a good thing. If five years from now Flash is dead and Microsoft is doing something retarded with Silverlight, I'm sure something else will rise up to challenge it as Firefox challenges IE now.
Writing your congressman because the LOC is dumping Flash of all stupid things only perpetuates the negative stereotypes of our community.
Actually, it sounds like he weighed the evidence, as a juror should, and made a judgment as to which of the evidence is relevant or not.
"I once removed a seat from my car for a reason that isn't relevant to Reiser and also isn't the reason Reiser said that he removed his." sounds fairly within the realm of not relevant to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Au contraire!
Large corporations are frequently evil, yes.
They're even more frequently stupid, forgetful, or incompetent.
Whatever you think about RMS and FSF you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry.
I'm not 100% convinced this is true. On the surface it seems good, but I'm sure there's secondary fallout that's not being considered. Analogous (but obviously not exactly like) to the: if you can't patent drugs, sick people can get more drugs... but now the incentive and funding to research drugs has dropped dramatically, so there's a cost for that to everyone down the line.
I do think that virtually everyone can agree that software patents in their current form are seriously borked. Anything that gets some of that looked at and improved has to be a good thing.
IMHO, what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.
He's trapped in the past. I'm sure there'd be an argument for why programming innovations of the last 10 years aren't really interesting or aren't as important as his Golden Age, just as there are people who think you can mathematically prove that rock was perfected in 1968. At best, you can make it work with a very narrow definition of what qualifies, just as you can prove that modern music has little innovation if you decide that only Gregorian Chant really qualifies as music.
Meanwhile, the world moves on and a generation of programming pioneers trades their vision for early admission to Future Fossil Fuels university.
General rule of dealing with humanity:
Never ascribe to malice what could as easily be caused by incompetence, stupidity, or forgetfulness.
This is true in dealing with large corporations, and it is extra true in marriage.
I'd consider myself practical as well, really.
Where we diverge is that I see the Cathedral and the Bazaar as complementary rather than antithetical, encouraging the growth of technology taken as a whole, not stifling it.
There are kinds of software that each, in a vacuum, is good at producing, and kinds of software that they aren't good at producing. If Open Office is "good enough" for many purposes, it's because it stands on the shoulders of Cathedral giants like Office. If Windows Server 2008 is a good server OS, it's because it's learned so much about how to make a good one from Linux. (Although I'd probably pick Team Foundation Server as a much better example of what I see as a great closed source product that absolutely could not have existed without a dozen great open source projects blazing trails in different areas.)
Some projects need a single, unifying vision or the willingness to write code that the developer doesn't personally want; some projects really need strong security or any of a hundred other things that a thousand pairs of eyes on the source provide. I think we're better for a world where both are possible.
FYI, when older versions of Office are faced with the Office 2007 format, they ask to download patches that let them deal with it. To say that you can't open Office 2007 documents in older versions of Office isn't entirely accurate.
The Office 2007 UI is really different from Office 2003. I hated it at first sight, but it didn't take long for me to realize that the older Office UI was a lot worse and a lot less intuitive -- it was just a kind of worse I was used to dealing with.
(Cue Stockholm Syndrome jokes.)
If we're being honest, there's a lot of "stealing" going on all over the place.
You'd be very hard pressed to find much if anything Open Source in the extremely broad category of "things that developers don't want, on average, more than non-developers" that doesn't owe a serious debt of inspiration, if not more, to the Closed Source world. E.g. Open Office, Firefox, GIMP.
You'd equally be very hard pressed to find much if anything in the Closed Source world produced in the last 10+ years in the broad category of "things that developers want more than non-developers" that doesn't owe a serious debt to the Open Source world. A lot more than just developer-y things, honestly, but that's where it's most prevalent/obvious.
The ultimate result is that we can do a lot more cool things with computers now than ten years ago, and everybody wins.
He/they have learned something from Open Source software and principles.
It may not have been what you wanted them to learn, though. Frankly, a Microsoft may (metaphorically) buy things at your church bake sale or play basketball with your kids, but they're never going to convert to your religion.
The trade embargo with Cuba hasn't seemed to have worked...it's proponents have had enough time to prove it. So why would sanctions just magically work here? How would oppressing the already oppressed people China in the EU help?
I'm not saying that I think the EU's plan would work, but one big difference here is that a big part of China's economy is based upon exporting stuff to the West. As far as I know a big part of Cuba's economy isn't?
1) A lot of people have said networking/referrals; this is absolutely true. The best people don't generally need to hit the job sites when they do need work -- they just let their friends in the industry know that they're looking and work will find them. More likely, they'll get poached away from their current job long before it even gets to that point, and it's not because they're posting their resume or taking lots of calls from headhunters. Does this mean you'll need to throw a lot of money at them to get them to come over? Not necessarily, but it may. If you're unwilling to do this, you don't value quality people as much as you think you do.
Related to this: You need to make your company as ridiculously good a place to work for your current employees as you can. Bonuses for referals are helpful, even important, but alone they're not enough. There's a level of job satisfaction where your better employees will tell their out of work or looking friends to apply, and there's a higher level where your better employees become a constant and fantastic advertisement for your company because they're so happy with their job and want so much to share the joy of a great job with their friends. You really want to be in this second category.
Side question that I don't have a good answer to but that I'd be interested in hearing other people's answers to: Given that the value of networking in getting the best people and, on the other side, finding the best jobs is so high, how do you pull good people from other areas (geographically mostly, but also technologically if, say, your company is mostly Java programmers but you really really need to bring on one great embedded C guy)? Same deal with being a programmer looking to relocate -- there are definitely moves I'd personally make if I could find the right opportunity for it, but without that kind of network in play it'd most likely need to be too blind a move.
2) Value education. I mean really, really value education. Be willing to pay for all kinds of education for your people -- books, conferences, classes, whatever. Whatever it is they want, even if it doesn't directly relate to the job. Often, the best people are passionate about technology even in their private life, but I find they're often as passionate about some other kind of learning, be it music, philosophy, political science, etc. You absolutely need to encourage (and by encourage, put your money where your mouth is) technical education to even be in the race, but encouraging education in all its forms will put you ahead of the pack and offer a benefit that is hard to replace or pass up.
Be willing to give them paid time off work to do these things. Yes, this costs. It's worth it.
3) Consider hiring consultants for shorter-term projects. Yes, we've all worked with lots and lots of terrible consultants. If you draw one of those people, when their contract is up you're done with them and you don't hire them again. It cost you something, but a job search isn't cheap, and at least you probably got some useful work out of them. On the other hand, some consultants will blow you away. A few of these will be ready to do something different in their career, and if you're willing to make them the right offer, you can get them. I've seen a lot of the best consultants I've worked with transition to non-consulting companies this way -- they got to a point in their lives where they wanted steady hours to ease the strain on their families, or they wanted to move towards a management position, or they wanted to do design as a bigger part of their job, or they wanted to work from home more often, whatever -- they were great at what they did and ready for something else from their job, and one of their clients was smart enough to offer it to them.
4) Decide what kind(s) of people you need, and hire accordingly. What is a superstar, really?
There's a passage in the Art of War that goes: The skillful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, th
Yeah, I remember seeing a lot of job postings like that in that era.
I'd often send them my resume with a very nice cover letter saying, in essence, "The person you're looking for does not and cannot exist because you've made this literally impossible demand. I suggest you consider my resume instead."
Somehow I never got a call from one of those. I'm theoretically more diplomatic now.
You never know when making a good impression on someone will help you later in life.
Several years ago I was working in a job I didn't intend to keep for long. I made a good impression on one of the guys on my team there.
Flash forward to a few years later and I'm working somewhere else at a job I hated. Long story short, I was lied to in a bad way during the interview process and the job was completely unlike the answers I had gotten to my questions while interviewing. Out of the blue I was offered a much better job because of the guy at the first job.
My story is more about quality of work than matching belts, but it never hurts to make a better impression when you can.
Last I checked you can install the media player of your choice on Windows just fine. Also, WMP plays lots of non-Windows-specific formats just fine.
Ah, I get it now. Thanks for clearing that up.
Hmm. But couldn't they just leave their phones at home before they roll out?
I assume the Slashdot editors are just doing their part to remain vigilant against a resurgence of sidetalking.
It's a serious matter and everyone must do their part!
I had the same thought.
Maybe they're thinking that people who regularly turn off their phones at night (and why at night?) will be obvious Taliban sympathizers and hunted down during the day? Beats me.
If you don't have the source, you cannot know it--and I don't give a damn how wonderful your knowledge base is. MS's knowledge base IS good, and it's the standard response I get to this from Windows zealots. But they remain blind to the fact...that they are blind, ultimately, as you are forbidden from truly understanding your server software.
Considering I know a great many successful web server admins (using a wide variety of technologies) and none of them have ever gone mucking about in the source code, that's bullshit.
It doesn't take a programmer to be a good admin.
Well... probably most end users will just end up installing both.
I mean, it's not a money decision on the scale of buying your choice of player and a ton of movies.
I definitely agree with this:
with SAP Microsoft will gain a product lineup with large customers that pay for service, can't migrate easily and SAP's product will have synergies with Microsoft's other products where they can sell more products to a customer.
But I'm of the opinion that Microsoft can (and does, in fact, have their eyes on) get most of the benefit there without having to buy SAP to do it.
I don't see SAP alone as being a major growth product at this point in time. It's aimed at fairly massive corporations, and I think by this point, most of the existing companies that see a need for something like SAP have already implemented one.
I think the synergy potential between existing SAP systems and Office/.NET/Windows Workflow/BizTalk/etc. is enormous. Company A has SAP implemented already? Well, maybe they'd like an application that sits in Outlook and automatically grabs order e-mails from customers and pre-fills most of the data in their SAP order entry forms and auto-archives the e-mails sorted by customer across all salespeople in some searchable central repository, making their salespeople that much more efficient and eliminating a lot of operator error.
On the surface, that doesn't make Microsoft a lot of money, but it ensures that all the people at that company definitely need Office (and not just something that can work with the same file formats, not that anyone's rushing to get away from Office at the moment), need a Windows server, need consultants with MS-tech expertise to set it up, etc. It gets people thinking of MS as a business solutions company and not just an OS/Office company, which it isn't to a lot of people yet.
It doesn't take a lot in the way of SAP/MS cooperation to make the SAP interface part of this easy, and my understanding from people that have worked on projects in this mold is that it's already there.
... right. Because Google would never, for example, ditch their internally-developed Google Video for a giant buyout of YouTube. They're too much about innovation for that.
There's nothing wrong with buying up a competitor that does something better than you do. There's a lot more examples of Microsoft doing it because they've been around longer and have a bigger wad of cash, but there's nothing new under the sun here.
I'm of two minds here.
I don't mind Flash as a web user.
I hate Flash as a web developer.
It's in this latter category that I see promise in Silverlight -- if not directly, it's got to force Adobe to do a little more work to appeal to developers.
(For the 80% of replies that didn't seriously examine this before firing off knee-jerk... this is about replacing a Flash interface with a Silverlight interface. It's not about encoding all the contents of the Library of Congress in Silverlight and then burning all the original sources.)
I think if I had posted a year ago predicting that half the posters here would be frothing at the mouth that someone would dare replace a Flash interface with something cross-platform and developer friendly, I'd have been mocked by one and all.
Damn it, people! You let Microsoft turn you into a bunch of Flash Fanboys!.
Flash has been able to be crap in a lot of ways for years for lack of any real competition. Now it's getting some. That's a good thing. If five years from now Flash is dead and Microsoft is doing something retarded with Silverlight, I'm sure something else will rise up to challenge it as Firefox challenges IE now.
Writing your congressman because the LOC is dumping Flash of all stupid things only perpetuates the negative stereotypes of our community.
Get started on converting those videos to plain text or XML then. I'll wait. :)
Actually, it sounds like he weighed the evidence, as a juror should, and made a judgment as to which of the evidence is relevant or not.
"I once removed a seat from my car for a reason that isn't relevant to Reiser and also isn't the reason Reiser said that he removed his." sounds fairly within the realm of not relevant to me.