Personally, I wonder if the cost of living gets too much weight sometimes in an equation. I'm a sofware engineer on Kauai, and it is pretty expensive to live here but I get paid more than I made on the mainland. I'm pretty sure that smart people can always find ways to save money wherever they live. For example, I'm convinced that if you know where to look, you can get a sit down dinner anywhere in the US for around $10 a head. Housing is another story, but how much is your housing budget in relation to your salary? Once you get to a certain salary level it isn't such a big deal.
Quality of life- now that is what rarely gets any weight because it is so subjective. You (and your family) have got to (1) be happy, (2) be able to afford your lifestyle, and (3) tend to your career. How a person prioritizes those three items is entirely up to them.
I worked for one of the largest banks in the US for several years, and I can tell you that they were in no position to contribute code back to an OSS effort. You see, they are not a software company. They make money by lending money and taking deposits. Software developers and the departments they work in are an overhead cost. The quality of the workforce often suffered and the big bank mentality was to keep substandard people around- everyone is overhead anyway, right? Software was typically developed in huge, monolithic waterfall cycles. Much of what comes out years later was shelfware and low quality. Concepts like continual integration and automated testing were non-existent. Invoking change was nearly impossible due to complex, top heavy org charts. Even if you had a developer or two that was sharp and wanted to contribute to an OSS effort, he'd have to do it in his own time after hours and he'd risk getting in all kinds of trouble for even the mere possibility that he was sharing intellectual property.
It is easy to say that banks should contribute. It is equally as easy to tell a farmer that he should convice his roosters laying eggs. Making it happen? Thats another story.
is raising VC money because it has "ajax" in the name.
Much in the same way back in the late 90's any business plan out there could get VC money just because it was an "Internet" business. Someone could be selling toe jam but if they were doing it via the net, they'd get 20 million from someone. (after all, who doesn't want to buy iToeJam?)
Personally I'm kinda getting sick of all this ajax spin. As a software developer I will run like hell the first time someone asks me to do maintenance on a large ajax app- because you just know it is going to be a mess that can only be understood by the dude who wrote it. So much for modern languages like Java and C#... the new "big thing" is to write up a mother load of javascript, cross-browser checks, and server side code.
We delivered a rich client to our customers years ago using WebStart. They loved it and the developers could actually maintain it and leverage code already written. Go figure.
Take a look at Iraq. It seems that, if they really want it, the handful of civilians have a reasonable chance.
True, put a sniper in every home in America and things get difficult. However, with out luck the military would probably just nuke us all. It might end up being only foreign countries where they are concerned about tapdancing around markets, mosques, etc.
It costs me close to $70.00 by the time I'm done with paying for:
*Babysitting
*Parking
*Ticket
*Crap to eat
It costs me approx. $15.00 for a DVD.
I get the point you're trying to make. But to be honest, now you're sitting at home with a DVD, screaming kids, and nothing to eat. To compare apples to apples you'd still want to get a babysitter and go out to eat in either case. Those two things have nothing to do with the movies.
If a couple of giants take over and end up playing the same crap as your monolithic FM broadcasters, I think we'll have plenty of pirate stations. Used to be you had to have broadcasting equipment and you could get caught easily. Now all you need is a server and it is slightly less difficult to get caught.
Publicly traded corporations have one duty -- to make profit. If the Board of Directors thought that they'd make more money by turning in "dissident journalists", then they will do so.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard yet today (although the day is still young.) I'm an employee that works pretty much only for the purpose of receiving a paycheck (making $$$) yet I am ethical and have morals. If my boss tells me to go do something unethical I just won't do it. To say he has some sort of magical power over me that will make me do things I wouldn't ordinarly do if I didn't work for him is ridiculous. To say that an individual or individuals are incapable of having morals because they work or make money is really selling our species short.
Yeah, you'll have executives who do things unethical, and you'll have priests who molest kids. The only thing that keeps people from being moral is a lack of morals. It has nothing to do with a person's occupation.
If Microsoft is not prepared to support their products on competitor's operating systems, they should not be allowed to develop closed formats, APIs or interfaces.
That is spot-on. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. I use my two weeks vacation every year to travel to Redmond and protest with signs out in front of their office. You see, I own an Amiga 500. It beats the shit out of anything you guys on here probably use. Microsoft isn't supporting Windows Media Player on my platform. Most of the signs I hold up say things like "Burn in Hell you non-Amiga supporting pieces of shit."
If I've heard you right, and I think I have- I'll get started on making you a sign. See ya in April! (God it's nice to know I'm not alone any more!)
My parents have mentioned some form of media that apparently you went to a store and bought. You'd insert it in some kind of device (portable player, your car stereo, home rack system, PC, your FRIEND's stereo, your OFFICE PC, etc.) and it would just play.
I pretty much called bullshit though. I mean, come on. Things get BETTER over time for the consumer, right? And they tried to tell me at one point:
1) You actually got physical media
2) The media even came with little booklets with song lyrics (and it wasn't illegal)
3) Price was about the same price or cheaper than what you get from iTMS, Nap$ster, etc.
4) You could play the stuff practically ANYWHERE
5) Sound quality was great- even better than the downloaded stuff
6) You could sell the media (LEGALLY!) to a friend, store, or whatever when you were done with it.
7) Nobody ever got sued for any of this
Either my parents are full of shit or they grew up in a much better time. Next thing you know they'll tell me about the days when the theater charged less than than $8.50 a person and they weren't loaded with commercials.
Yeah, I can't believe this even made the news. For me, a new product or service is newsworthy. Some marketing/advertising/other scheme means nothing. I can't think of a single time that I've cared when someone cross selling something or coming out with a new advertisment or rebundling stuff that already exists.
Google shouldn't have a free ticket here. Their stock is high and they've done some good stuff, but that doesn't mean the whole world cares when they take a shit and something like Google Pack drops into the toilet.
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission.
Try telling that to an F-22 pilot who just recieved word during his mission briefing that all SAM sites will be disabled by hacking into the enemy's network, minutes before he is supposed to enter hostile territory.
What? Google can be used to facilitate this sort of thing? I guess the RIAA will be after them next for the same reasons they are going after every other "facilitator".
We use XPlanner as well. Seems to work pretty good except I think the burn downs are produced via a batch job every night? It would be slick to get real time burn down charts. I haven't looked into it enough to really understand what the limitation is. Do you have the same issue?
I think larger organizations are the ones that would have issues implementing scrum. They're typically in love with their monolithic waterfall methodologies just because that is how business has "always been done."
On the other hand, I've worked for really small companies where it wouldn't work either. This is the kind of shop where people would piss on their desk if a client said so, because the finances are so bad. The "do anything for a buck" mentality. With scrum, if pissing on the desk isn't in the sprint backlog, you can't do it.
I suppose I'm fortunate to work for a smaller company that is very successful. We have a very strong adoption of Scrum at all levels. I believe Ken Schwaber has even sat in on some of our ativities.
Well, yeah, we call that a daily team meeting. Been going on since, oh, forever.
The daily stand-up is only a small component of Scrum. And the purpose of the meeting is strictly related to which tasks from the sprint backlog you were working yesterday, which ones you'll be working today, and whether or not you have any impediments. Only pigs are allowed to speak in the daily stand-up. This means that chickens (product owners, business folks, etc.) are only observers and can't butt in and introduce scope creep. How many times in a traditional waterfall methodology have you had someone add to your scope in a daily meeting? Every day they want to change a page, add a column to the database, change the way something works, etc. This goes on to the point where the product never gets delivered. Under scrum you deliver something every 30 days and at that point the product owner can decide if he really wants to change something- and he does this by adding it to the product backlog- not by grabbing someone in the hallway.
Rumor on the street is that Italy openly embraced Linux/OSS which led to the cost savings. I also heard that Open Office led to productivity gains, and using Gnome for an interface made their employees more or less immune to the influenza virus.
I'd like to see their definition of information. Certainly, a lot of things that are already of common interest are on the net. Occasionally, I find things that aren't available online but the greatest majority of the time google is able to find what I want.
To further the example: at work we have several filing cabinets that haven't been opened in years. There are lots of papers and stuff in there, I can vouch for that. Some might consider it "information." But in reality all that stuff could be burned and I doubt it would make the slightest difference in the way the future rolls out. None of it is stuff that would ever be needed by an IRS audit or anything like that either. Does google consider this kind of stuff as part of their efforts? Because I think they can safely ignore it.
Well, as long as the people didn't lose, I don't see any problem. Sometimes being loose is a good thing- means you're stretching correctly and so forth.
For some reason or another all the major care providers (hospitals, primary care networks, etc.) where I live have some sort of religious affiliation (Baptist and St. Vincent's.) I've heard that St. Vincents (Catholic) won't prescribe birth control and I think I recall hearing that they also have policies against abortion even when the mother's life is at risk, etc. This isn't exactly what you were saying but at the same time I find it disturbing.
"If one can grow the Sterne strain in these units, one could also grow the Ames strain, which is quite lethal."
Right. And I'm sure I've bought hundreds of items over the last year for perfectly innocent purposes, but when processed together could form some sort of illegal drug, an explosive, etc.
Just last week I filled up a gas can so I could mow my lawn:
"If one can purchase gasoline for their lawnmower, one could also use this gasoline as an agent to burn down their neighbor's house."
Man, my neighbors musta been scared shitless when they saw me getting the gas can out of the car!
I agree, in most cases portable video in an iPod form factor is ridiculous. However, it could be handy if I could grab a video podcast on my iPod every day. When you are talking about podcasting, it is literally the difference between radio and TV. A picture does make a big difference when you're taking about stuff OTHER than music... And people are podcasting just about everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrghhh. Christ, our government is stupid. Or worse. I'm having flashbacks to V is for Vendetta.
Personally, I wonder if the cost of living gets too much weight sometimes in an equation. I'm a sofware engineer on Kauai, and it is pretty expensive to live here but I get paid more than I made on the mainland. I'm pretty sure that smart people can always find ways to save money wherever they live. For example, I'm convinced that if you know where to look, you can get a sit down dinner anywhere in the US for around $10 a head. Housing is another story, but how much is your housing budget in relation to your salary? Once you get to a certain salary level it isn't such a big deal.
Quality of life- now that is what rarely gets any weight because it is so subjective. You (and your family) have got to (1) be happy, (2) be able to afford your lifestyle, and (3) tend to your career. How a person prioritizes those three items is entirely up to them.
I worked for one of the largest banks in the US for several years, and I can tell you that they were in no position to contribute code back to an OSS effort. You see, they are not a software company. They make money by lending money and taking deposits. Software developers and the departments they work in are an overhead cost. The quality of the workforce often suffered and the big bank mentality was to keep substandard people around- everyone is overhead anyway, right? Software was typically developed in huge, monolithic waterfall cycles. Much of what comes out years later was shelfware and low quality. Concepts like continual integration and automated testing were non-existent. Invoking change was nearly impossible due to complex, top heavy org charts. Even if you had a developer or two that was sharp and wanted to contribute to an OSS effort, he'd have to do it in his own time after hours and he'd risk getting in all kinds of trouble for even the mere possibility that he was sharing intellectual property.
It is easy to say that banks should contribute. It is equally as easy to tell a farmer that he should convice his roosters laying eggs. Making it happen? Thats another story.
I think they should have also bought a computer an an Apple store to see how they measure up.
is raising VC money because it has "ajax" in the name.
Much in the same way back in the late 90's any business plan out there could get VC money just because it was an "Internet" business. Someone could be selling toe jam but if they were doing it via the net, they'd get 20 million from someone. (after all, who doesn't want to buy iToeJam?)
Personally I'm kinda getting sick of all this ajax spin. As a software developer I will run like hell the first time someone asks me to do maintenance on a large ajax app- because you just know it is going to be a mess that can only be understood by the dude who wrote it. So much for modern languages like Java and C#... the new "big thing" is to write up a mother load of javascript, cross-browser checks, and server side code.
We delivered a rich client to our customers years ago using WebStart. They loved it and the developers could actually maintain it and leverage code already written. Go figure.
Take a look at Iraq. It seems that, if they really want it, the handful of civilians have a reasonable chance.
True, put a sniper in every home in America and things get difficult. However, with out luck the military would probably just nuke us all. It might end up being only foreign countries where they are concerned about tapdancing around markets, mosques, etc.
It costs me close to $70.00 by the time I'm done with paying for:
*Babysitting *Parking *Ticket *Crap to eat
It costs me approx. $15.00 for a DVD.
I get the point you're trying to make. But to be honest, now you're sitting at home with a DVD, screaming kids, and nothing to eat. To compare apples to apples you'd still want to get a babysitter and go out to eat in either case. Those two things have nothing to do with the movies.
If a couple of giants take over and end up playing the same crap as your monolithic FM broadcasters, I think we'll have plenty of pirate stations. Used to be you had to have broadcasting equipment and you could get caught easily. Now all you need is a server and it is slightly less difficult to get caught.
Publicly traded corporations have one duty -- to make profit. If the Board of Directors thought that they'd make more money by turning in "dissident journalists", then they will do so.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard yet today (although the day is still young.) I'm an employee that works pretty much only for the purpose of receiving a paycheck (making $$$) yet I am ethical and have morals. If my boss tells me to go do something unethical I just won't do it. To say he has some sort of magical power over me that will make me do things I wouldn't ordinarly do if I didn't work for him is ridiculous. To say that an individual or individuals are incapable of having morals because they work or make money is really selling our species short.
Yeah, you'll have executives who do things unethical, and you'll have priests who molest kids. The only thing that keeps people from being moral is a lack of morals. It has nothing to do with a person's occupation.
If Microsoft is not prepared to support their products on competitor's operating systems, they should not be allowed to develop closed formats, APIs or interfaces.
That is spot-on. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. I use my two weeks vacation every year to travel to Redmond and protest with signs out in front of their office. You see, I own an Amiga 500. It beats the shit out of anything you guys on here probably use. Microsoft isn't supporting Windows Media Player on my platform. Most of the signs I hold up say things like "Burn in Hell you non-Amiga supporting pieces of shit."
If I've heard you right, and I think I have- I'll get started on making you a sign. See ya in April! (God it's nice to know I'm not alone any more!)
My parents have mentioned some form of media that apparently you went to a store and bought. You'd insert it in some kind of device (portable player, your car stereo, home rack system, PC, your FRIEND's stereo, your OFFICE PC, etc.) and it would just play.
I pretty much called bullshit though. I mean, come on. Things get BETTER over time for the consumer, right? And they tried to tell me at one point:
1) You actually got physical media
2) The media even came with little booklets with song lyrics (and it wasn't illegal)
3) Price was about the same price or cheaper than what you get from iTMS, Nap$ster, etc.
4) You could play the stuff practically ANYWHERE
5) Sound quality was great- even better than the downloaded stuff
6) You could sell the media (LEGALLY!) to a friend, store, or whatever when you were done with it.
7) Nobody ever got sued for any of this
Either my parents are full of shit or they grew up in a much better time. Next thing you know they'll tell me about the days when the theater charged less than than $8.50 a person and they weren't loaded with commercials.
Yeah, I can't believe this even made the news. For me, a new product or service is newsworthy. Some marketing/advertising/other scheme means nothing. I can't think of a single time that I've cared when someone cross selling something or coming out with a new advertisment or rebundling stuff that already exists.
Google shouldn't have a free ticket here. Their stock is high and they've done some good stuff, but that doesn't mean the whole world cares when they take a shit and something like Google Pack drops into the toilet.
This is an attempt to stop MS from illegally putting more people, with better products, and who actually innovate, out of business.
,,,, key too,
Oh, this slashdot crowd. You, guys never, stop, with the "Apple is dead" stuff. Hey, I'm having trouble with my
Frankly I think it's ridiculously outside of their mission.
Try telling that to an F-22 pilot who just recieved word during his mission briefing that all SAM sites will be disabled by hacking into the enemy's network, minutes before he is supposed to enter hostile territory.
What? Google can be used to facilitate this sort of thing? I guess the RIAA will be after them next for the same reasons they are going after every other "facilitator".
We use XPlanner as well. Seems to work pretty good except I think the burn downs are produced via a batch job every night? It would be slick to get real time burn down charts. I haven't looked into it enough to really understand what the limitation is. Do you have the same issue?
I think larger organizations are the ones that would have issues implementing scrum. They're typically in love with their monolithic waterfall methodologies just because that is how business has "always been done."
On the other hand, I've worked for really small companies where it wouldn't work either. This is the kind of shop where people would piss on their desk if a client said so, because the finances are so bad. The "do anything for a buck" mentality. With scrum, if pissing on the desk isn't in the sprint backlog, you can't do it.
I suppose I'm fortunate to work for a smaller company that is very successful. We have a very strong adoption of Scrum at all levels. I believe Ken Schwaber has even sat in on some of our ativities.
Well, yeah, we call that a daily team meeting. Been going on since, oh, forever.
The daily stand-up is only a small component of Scrum. And the purpose of the meeting is strictly related to which tasks from the sprint backlog you were working yesterday, which ones you'll be working today, and whether or not you have any impediments. Only pigs are allowed to speak in the daily stand-up. This means that chickens (product owners, business folks, etc.) are only observers and can't butt in and introduce scope creep. How many times in a traditional waterfall methodology have you had someone add to your scope in a daily meeting? Every day they want to change a page, add a column to the database, change the way something works, etc. This goes on to the point where the product never gets delivered. Under scrum you deliver something every 30 days and at that point the product owner can decide if he really wants to change something- and he does this by adding it to the product backlog- not by grabbing someone in the hallway.
Also, what is this article supposed to be about? Windows Media Player, or Vista?
What about other factors?
Rumor on the street is that Italy openly embraced Linux/OSS which led to the cost savings. I also heard that Open Office led to productivity gains, and using Gnome for an interface made their employees more or less immune to the influenza virus.
I'd like to see their definition of information. Certainly, a lot of things that are already of common interest are on the net. Occasionally, I find things that aren't available online but the greatest majority of the time google is able to find what I want.
To further the example: at work we have several filing cabinets that haven't been opened in years. There are lots of papers and stuff in there, I can vouch for that. Some might consider it "information." But in reality all that stuff could be burned and I doubt it would make the slightest difference in the way the future rolls out. None of it is stuff that would ever be needed by an IRS audit or anything like that either. Does google consider this kind of stuff as part of their efforts? Because I think they can safely ignore it.
4. Microsoft wins. Lawyers win. People loose.
Well, as long as the people didn't lose, I don't see any problem. Sometimes being loose is a good thing- means you're stretching correctly and so forth.
if Christian doctors refused to treat homosexuals
For some reason or another all the major care providers (hospitals, primary care networks, etc.) where I live have some sort of religious affiliation (Baptist and St. Vincent's.) I've heard that St. Vincents (Catholic) won't prescribe birth control and I think I recall hearing that they also have policies against abortion even when the mother's life is at risk, etc. This isn't exactly what you were saying but at the same time I find it disturbing.
"If one can grow the Sterne strain in these units, one could also grow the Ames strain, which is quite lethal."
Right. And I'm sure I've bought hundreds of items over the last year for perfectly innocent purposes, but when processed together could form some sort of illegal drug, an explosive, etc.
Just last week I filled up a gas can so I could mow my lawn:
"If one can purchase gasoline for their lawnmower, one could also use this gasoline as an agent to burn down their neighbor's house."
Man, my neighbors musta been scared shitless when they saw me getting the gas can out of the car!
I agree, in most cases portable video in an iPod form factor is ridiculous. However, it could be handy if I could grab a video podcast on my iPod every day. When you are talking about podcasting, it is literally the difference between radio and TV. A picture does make a big difference when you're taking about stuff OTHER than music... And people are podcasting just about everything.