It's her job to paint him as a criminal, diverting your attention away from their failed product.
It's too bad she can't do her publicity job without lying. It'd be great if she could instead say something along the lines of, "Obviously, we'd have preferred that this not be published. We do need to increase the security level on this aging protocol, and we have new technology in development that will be ready for adoption soon. In practice, the actual risk compromising the security is not that great, but we are hastening to introduce new technology that drastically reduces that risk."
Now, maybe they don't have new technology in development. Or maybe telling the actual truth would open them up to increased potential liability or litigation. But I strongly believe that when you can't stand up and tell the truth, something is very wrong. This is true in normal life as well as business. Any time you're tempted to lie, that's a great indication that something has gone wrong, and you should have done some things differently in the past to not get into this situation. I wouldn't want to have to lie for a living.
Sounds plausible to me. Not all banks are created equally, and different banks have different policies. It is a good idea for various reasons to have a backup, and not have all the money you eat and survive with locked up into a single bank. All that needs to happen is for something funny to happen to you just once and you may decide the same thing. For me, it was when I moved, they started declining my card until I called in to verify that I really did move. (!)
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.)
What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there?
Embedded systems, for one! Consider your TV set top box, the code in your calculator, wristwatch, printer, fetal heart monitor...
Just for fun, I have entered "Cafe World" on over a dozen computers... and it takes up from 380mb to 550mb of ram on all of them. *For a flash game*. Yea, those guys at Zynga are really good programmers...
Not to nitpick, but maybe they really are really good programmers. In game programming, it's quite difficult to both come up with an idea that people will want to play, and then actually execute it. Maybe they're not all that bad after all. Further, it's really OK for an application that is taking front and center of a user's attention to go ahead and take 25% of the available memory on the machine, regardless of its development platform. Live a little! If the app had to be written in C++, it wouldn't exist.
"Improved user experience" is a multi syllable way of saying "making stuff better." But yes, it's either a feature upgrade or a bug fix. Just because someone releases a new version of software doesn't mean that the prior release was irresponsibly broken, or intentionally crippled.
But perhaps we're just coming at this from different perspectives. My perspective is that I write software for a living, and my team and I work really hard to make things as delightful as we can for our customers. We do regular releases as part of that process, making things better and better each time. Your perspective just seems to be that "the computer industry" is out to screw people over, and the fact that software gets periodically released as clear evidence of the evil of "the computer industry." There's some evil out there in the world, but the fact that software gets released and patched is not by itself evidence of evil.
Having lots of updates is not in any way impressive, it means they didn't do things right the first damn time and rushed it to market.
Releasing updates is not always an admission of failure. It's delivering an improved user experience.
Taking your argument to the absurd helps illustrate the fault in your logic: if your statement were always true, and all companies always did the right thing, then no software would be released to the world yet, at all, because we have not yet written and perfected every feature that everyone wants. A ludicrous idea, of course. The idea I'm trying to illustrate is that it is desirable to periodically release software when it is good, and release it again later when it's even better or does even more.
At this point, if you aren't already making money from social gaming (in whatever capacity), you won't be able to get on board now and make any money from it at all.
I agree that there is a lot of momentum and a lot of competition in the social gaming space. But I think I disagree with what you're saying in general. I think social gaming is still a relatively young, vibrant, and fertile landscape for making money somewhat easily.
I remember in around 1995 or 1997, around the time Netscape 3.0 came out, thinking to myself: "Damn! Too bad I'm too late to get in on the internet porn business, it's saturated, there are too many big competitors." Of course, that was silly-- there was still tons of room in internet porn then. Social gaming, phone gaming, casual gaming, may be much the same: just getting started, rather than saturated or too late to compete.
Some people you just can't please! Cmon, Google maps, Chrome, gmail, elevating the state of the art in distributed redundant reliable scalable systems, AdSense, Javascript compilers, Google Web Toolkit, Google Gears... if you're not seeing brilliant things come out of Google other than the search engine, you're incorrigible or ignorant. A lot of those technologies they acquired, but they're part of Google now.
And the only reason there aren't any viruses or trojans yet is because no one uses it yet. People will write them when the user base shifts. To imagine that there aren't any flaws in the system is a sad joke in naitivity
Perhaps you should consider reading up on how Chrome OS is designed. The argument you posted above sounds like you're applying the same kind of logic to Chrome OS that you would to any other flavor of Linux. Chrome OS is actually an entirely different ball game, and fundamentally does not let you install software on the machine. This and other design considerations make it radically more secure from security attacks than conventional operating systems.
I think Google likes selling the technology like Andriod to phone mfgs as that is low risk and high payback.
Actually, Android is open source. They give it away; they don't sell it. They make money off ad revenue. How that all works out is a little mysterious to me, I'll admit... But Android's Gmail integration is better than what you get on iPhone. And the Google navigation app is better than what's available on iPhone. I can see how things like that lead to more ad revenue for Google indirectly. Still, though, it's a fairly mind blowing approach.
Is it even possible now for a new competitor to come in... I don't see how, so I don't dare get my hopes up...
I understand how you feel, but take heart. I used to feel the same way about telephone companies, operating systems, cable companies, network television, and other things. In each case, radical technological changes have taken what seemed like hopeless situations and turned it into something radically different than most people expected. Consider:
Operating systems. A while back it was difficult to imagine anyone being able seriously compete with Windows. But now Linux is really viable on the desktop, thanks in large part to the fact that most things people need to do they can do with just web apps. Also consider the game-changing aspect of smartphones, as they overtake the desktop as the number one way people connect to the internet in the next couple of years.
Cable companies. 20 years ago I lamented the fact that the cable companies had a monopoly in each area, and there was no viable competition. This was true for a while, but satellite TV has come out since then. And television itself has taken a backseat to other forms of entertainment.
Network television. Had a huge stranglehold on the thoughts and ideas of the world for a while. But new technology is mostly obliterating mass media in general. It's possible for little guys to build their own media empires now, thanks to technology.
Is it possible for a new player to come in and be a major player now? I don't know. But maybe there are ways it can happen in an unexpected way. New wireless or satellite technologies maybe. You could be right, that there's no way. But maybe the unexpected can happen.
OMG, that Optimus Maximus is... really something. I'm sure it's a godsend for someone, but it kinda looks like a really bad idea for a $2000 keyboard to me!
Why is it that if I butcher a human being, it's possible to get out of prison in a few years...
Keep in mind that civil liability are different and on top of criminal penalties.
So while it's true that you might get out of prison in a few years (or even be found innocent of criminal wrongdoing), more than likely your troubles are just beginning with regard to civil liability.
It does makes some rational sense. All TV shows are carefully crafted around those breaks. Pausing at a random moment-- say in the middle of an intense conversation between characters-- can make it difficult to mentally keep track of what is going on in the show compared to breaking at the pre-defined breaks built into the show.
Exactly. The excellent book Guns, Germs, and Steel talks all about how the rise of technological and economic dominance of civilizations traces directly back to how many calories per acre you can raise, and how agriculture was the first major step.
as if i was the janitor. which didn't offend me. what did offend me was she thought i could be a janitor too stupid to find the garbage can
She does sound like a jerk. Here's some ideas on how to reduce how often this happens, though.
Consider shaving and neatly grooming yourself, and wearing more professional clothes that have been recently laundered correctly. Make a conscious effort to hone some social skills: exude confidence as you approach the customer, look alert, and engage them warmly and announce what you are there to do.
Look the part, play the part, and people's reactions will follow.
Given power to shut down the internet at will, the excuses for doing so will only continue to grow.
Exactly. It's like Patriot Act all over again. It saddens and terrifies me how we let legislators pass such things. Reminds me of something discussed recently on Sons of Anarchy: People mostly just want the freedom to be comfortable, but because freedom is not comfortable, they end up sacrificing their freedom.
Sorry, my creativity is running a little dry here. Why would I want this? Is the idea to keep this by the couch and use it as my living room computer, and run video off it to my TV wirelessly with UWB?
I have kids, and think he's being over the top about it. Spending time with the fam is important. But if you want to be the best developer you can be, you're going to need to spend at least some time contemplating things outside of the normal grind of work. Perhaps he does that during work hours, or perhaps the normal grind of his work does and always will encompass staying on top of his game. Or perhaps his attitude will eventually get the best of him, and he'll become obsolete more quickly than an enthusiastic person would.
The problem I have is how hard line he's being about it. I mean, it'd be much better if he said something like, "Well, I took a couple days to see if Python was worth using instead of Perl back in 98" or something. But he's just so over-the-top strident about never ever messing with computers outside of work hours.
Anyway people have all kinds of things they use to discriminate on hiring, like only wanting social drinkers, only wanting people that play golf, or sail, or whatever. Not hiring people that don't do at least some professional development on their own time makes a lot of sense in comparison.
But not coding in your free time also shows balance.
Perhaps, but never coding in your free time, not ever, and saying that you've never enjoyed writing code to explore or learn something: that shows a distinct lack of balance.
Article summary: Smug douchebag knows it all, or gets to learn it all on the job.
Good for him. But for normal people who are, say, coding ASP or Visual Basic 6 at work-- if they would like to have some professional development, I hope they're doing some coding on the side to reinvent themselves. People that don't generally end up doing something like working on COBOL systems principally written in the 60's and 70's. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying: most people need to do some personal development off the the side of their job, or else they're stagnating. Plenty of people will disagree with me on this point, and have in the past on Slashdot. But generally speaking, those people have quit growing, and will of course deny it.
You should listen to your customers, but do so understanding most requests aren't for what they're asking for, it's for a more fundamental desire...
That's fine. But the Innovator's Dilemma is a wholly unrelated to that form of customers not knowing what they want. Here is an excellent introduction to the Innovator's Delemma. The article talks about the rapid changes in the hard drive industry over.
This article isn't about customers not knowing what they want. It's about how over time, who your customers are can radically change as brand new markets emerge. For example, hard disk business with mainframes was all about cost per megabyte. But in the new desktop computer market, the criteria by which things are judged is totally different than just cost per megabyte. Overall cost for the unit is more important, and physical size. A mainframe customer wouldn't be interested in a drive that costs more per megabyte but is smaller and has an overall lower price per unit-- but a desktop customer would be interested. The topic of the article is that if you exclusively listen to your customers without contemplating how the world is changing, you can sink yourself. Same situation with the newspaper industry: over-focus on existing markets and existing business lines can cause you to not see the opportunity in emerging markets, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.
Nobody really cares about what other people do, generally. Unless your answer to the question "What do you do" is something like one of the following:
I train dolphins
I'm a test pilot
I am a fireman
I'm a cattle breeder, and my specialty is artificial insemination. I also am a broker for thoroughbred stud services.
Regarding computer programming, though, you're right: it's transformed from something rare to something more common over the last 20 years. 20 years ago, when I told people I was a computer programmer, most of them couldn't even really envision what that might mean, other than just sitting in front of a boring computer with blinking lights all day long.
So true. I know so many people who I'm tempted to call them "good coders", except for the fact that they freakin never ship anything. They'll polish, and goof off, and talk about how their implementation covers all aspects of things that don't matter in the slightest to just delivering the app to the users.
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It's too bad she can't do her publicity job without lying. It'd be great if she could instead say something along the lines of, "Obviously, we'd have preferred that this not be published. We do need to increase the security level on this aging protocol, and we have new technology in development that will be ready for adoption soon. In practice, the actual risk compromising the security is not that great, but we are hastening to introduce new technology that drastically reduces that risk."
Now, maybe they don't have new technology in development. Or maybe telling the actual truth would open them up to increased potential liability or litigation. But I strongly believe that when you can't stand up and tell the truth, something is very wrong. This is true in normal life as well as business. Any time you're tempted to lie, that's a great indication that something has gone wrong, and you should have done some things differently in the past to not get into this situation. I wouldn't want to have to lie for a living.
Sounds plausible to me. Not all banks are created equally, and different banks have different policies. It is a good idea for various reasons to have a backup, and not have all the money you eat and survive with locked up into a single bank. All that needs to happen is for something funny to happen to you just once and you may decide the same thing. For me, it was when I moved, they started declining my card until I called in to verify that I really did move. (!)
Embedded systems, for one! Consider your TV set top box, the code in your calculator, wristwatch, printer, fetal heart monitor...
Not to nitpick, but maybe they really are really good programmers. In game programming, it's quite difficult to both come up with an idea that people will want to play, and then actually execute it. Maybe they're not all that bad after all. Further, it's really OK for an application that is taking front and center of a user's attention to go ahead and take 25% of the available memory on the machine, regardless of its development platform. Live a little! If the app had to be written in C++, it wouldn't exist.
"Improved user experience" is a multi syllable way of saying "making stuff better." But yes, it's either a feature upgrade or a bug fix. Just because someone releases a new version of software doesn't mean that the prior release was irresponsibly broken, or intentionally crippled.
But perhaps we're just coming at this from different perspectives. My perspective is that I write software for a living, and my team and I work really hard to make things as delightful as we can for our customers. We do regular releases as part of that process, making things better and better each time. Your perspective just seems to be that "the computer industry" is out to screw people over, and the fact that software gets periodically released as clear evidence of the evil of "the computer industry." There's some evil out there in the world, but the fact that software gets released and patched is not by itself evidence of evil.
Releasing updates is not always an admission of failure. It's delivering an improved user experience.
Taking your argument to the absurd helps illustrate the fault in your logic: if your statement were always true, and all companies always did the right thing, then no software would be released to the world yet, at all, because we have not yet written and perfected every feature that everyone wants. A ludicrous idea, of course. The idea I'm trying to illustrate is that it is desirable to periodically release software when it is good, and release it again later when it's even better or does even more.
I agree that there is a lot of momentum and a lot of competition in the social gaming space. But I think I disagree with what you're saying in general. I think social gaming is still a relatively young, vibrant, and fertile landscape for making money somewhat easily.
I remember in around 1995 or 1997, around the time Netscape 3.0 came out, thinking to myself: "Damn! Too bad I'm too late to get in on the internet porn business, it's saturated, there are too many big competitors." Of course, that was silly-- there was still tons of room in internet porn then. Social gaming, phone gaming, casual gaming, may be much the same: just getting started, rather than saturated or too late to compete.
Some people you just can't please! Cmon, Google maps, Chrome, gmail, elevating the state of the art in distributed redundant reliable scalable systems, AdSense, Javascript compilers, Google Web Toolkit, Google Gears... if you're not seeing brilliant things come out of Google other than the search engine, you're incorrigible or ignorant. A lot of those technologies they acquired, but they're part of Google now.
Perhaps you should consider reading up on how Chrome OS is designed. The argument you posted above sounds like you're applying the same kind of logic to Chrome OS that you would to any other flavor of Linux. Chrome OS is actually an entirely different ball game, and fundamentally does not let you install software on the machine. This and other design considerations make it radically more secure from security attacks than conventional operating systems.
Actually, Android is open source. They give it away; they don't sell it. They make money off ad revenue. How that all works out is a little mysterious to me, I'll admit... But Android's Gmail integration is better than what you get on iPhone. And the Google navigation app is better than what's available on iPhone. I can see how things like that lead to more ad revenue for Google indirectly. Still, though, it's a fairly mind blowing approach.
I understand how you feel, but take heart. I used to feel the same way about telephone companies, operating systems, cable companies, network television, and other things. In each case, radical technological changes have taken what seemed like hopeless situations and turned it into something radically different than most people expected. Consider:
Is it possible for a new player to come in and be a major player now? I don't know. But maybe there are ways it can happen in an unexpected way. New wireless or satellite technologies maybe. You could be right, that there's no way. But maybe the unexpected can happen.
OMG, that Optimus Maximus is... really something. I'm sure it's a godsend for someone, but it kinda looks like a really bad idea for a $2000 keyboard to me!
Keep in mind that civil liability are different and on top of criminal penalties. So while it's true that you might get out of prison in a few years (or even be found innocent of criminal wrongdoing), more than likely your troubles are just beginning with regard to civil liability.
It does makes some rational sense. All TV shows are carefully crafted around those breaks. Pausing at a random moment-- say in the middle of an intense conversation between characters-- can make it difficult to mentally keep track of what is going on in the show compared to breaking at the pre-defined breaks built into the show.
Exactly. The excellent book Guns, Germs, and Steel talks all about how the rise of technological and economic dominance of civilizations traces directly back to how many calories per acre you can raise, and how agriculture was the first major step.
She does sound like a jerk. Here's some ideas on how to reduce how often this happens, though.
Consider shaving and neatly grooming yourself, and wearing more professional clothes that have been recently laundered correctly. Make a conscious effort to hone some social skills: exude confidence as you approach the customer, look alert, and engage them warmly and announce what you are there to do.
Look the part, play the part, and people's reactions will follow.
David Caruso CSI Miami montage is the meme.
Exactly. It's like Patriot Act all over again. It saddens and terrifies me how we let legislators pass such things. Reminds me of something discussed recently on Sons of Anarchy: People mostly just want the freedom to be comfortable, but because freedom is not comfortable, they end up sacrificing their freedom.
Sorry, my creativity is running a little dry here. Why would I want this? Is the idea to keep this by the couch and use it as my living room computer, and run video off it to my TV wirelessly with UWB?
I have kids, and think he's being over the top about it. Spending time with the fam is important. But if you want to be the best developer you can be, you're going to need to spend at least some time contemplating things outside of the normal grind of work. Perhaps he does that during work hours, or perhaps the normal grind of his work does and always will encompass staying on top of his game. Or perhaps his attitude will eventually get the best of him, and he'll become obsolete more quickly than an enthusiastic person would.
The problem I have is how hard line he's being about it. I mean, it'd be much better if he said something like, "Well, I took a couple days to see if Python was worth using instead of Perl back in 98" or something. But he's just so over-the-top strident about never ever messing with computers outside of work hours.
Anyway people have all kinds of things they use to discriminate on hiring, like only wanting social drinkers, only wanting people that play golf, or sail, or whatever. Not hiring people that don't do at least some professional development on their own time makes a lot of sense in comparison.
Perhaps, but never coding in your free time, not ever, and saying that you've never enjoyed writing code to explore or learn something: that shows a distinct lack of balance.
Article summary: Smug douchebag knows it all, or gets to learn it all on the job.
Good for him. But for normal people who are, say, coding ASP or Visual Basic 6 at work-- if they would like to have some professional development, I hope they're doing some coding on the side to reinvent themselves. People that don't generally end up doing something like working on COBOL systems principally written in the 60's and 70's. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying: most people need to do some personal development off the the side of their job, or else they're stagnating. Plenty of people will disagree with me on this point, and have in the past on Slashdot. But generally speaking, those people have quit growing, and will of course deny it.
That's fine. But the Innovator's Dilemma is a wholly unrelated to that form of customers not knowing what they want. Here is an excellent introduction to the Innovator's Delemma. The article talks about the rapid changes in the hard drive industry over.
This article isn't about customers not knowing what they want. It's about how over time, who your customers are can radically change as brand new markets emerge. For example, hard disk business with mainframes was all about cost per megabyte. But in the new desktop computer market, the criteria by which things are judged is totally different than just cost per megabyte. Overall cost for the unit is more important, and physical size. A mainframe customer wouldn't be interested in a drive that costs more per megabyte but is smaller and has an overall lower price per unit-- but a desktop customer would be interested. The topic of the article is that if you exclusively listen to your customers without contemplating how the world is changing, you can sink yourself. Same situation with the newspaper industry: over-focus on existing markets and existing business lines can cause you to not see the opportunity in emerging markets, as the Rocky Mountain News learned.
Nobody really cares about what other people do, generally. Unless your answer to the question "What do you do" is something like one of the following:
Regarding computer programming, though, you're right: it's transformed from something rare to something more common over the last 20 years. 20 years ago, when I told people I was a computer programmer, most of them couldn't even really envision what that might mean, other than just sitting in front of a boring computer with blinking lights all day long.
So true. I know so many people who I'm tempted to call them "good coders", except for the fact that they freakin never ship anything. They'll polish, and goof off, and talk about how their implementation covers all aspects of things that don't matter in the slightest to just delivering the app to the users.