No doubt he's a genius, and the advanced designer can learn tons from him.
However the posting is asking about basic web design.
This is like me saying I have a problem figuring out the best way to point my drain spout off my house, and SlashDot readers coming back and saying "well, that's essentially a physics problem. Einstein was a Physics genius, so you should probably look to his research for the answer"
I like open source projects (mysql and subversion are tops in my book), but I have to take exeption with the notion that open source software is great because thousands of people from around the world are looking at and trying to fix the code.
I think this is bull$h!t.
Open source code is coded by a small fraction of it's userbase. And each project still has one, or myme two people at the top that approve and integrate each real change. It's not this automated machine. When developing any kind of software, you still need a someone in charge.
Any software project needs a way to align the needs of the market with the efforts of the developers. In closed-source software, this is provided by the market. Money. And coordinated by non-coders, who try to find the greatest need in the market and fill it, because there's cash to be made.
In open source, there's no such mechanism. Coders with features because they need them for their particular purpose, or because they are cool. As a result, some important features always seem to get overlooked.
You and your follow IT folks are in an uncomfortable situation, and you should admit that to yourself.
And the typical reaction of someone placed in a situation like this is to be as passive-agressive as possible.
However, I would reccomend a different approach.
There are two reasons why this beancounter wants you to quantify everything with numbers.
1) They don't know jack about how IT works,
2) They want to be able to divide those numbers into dollars, to get ratios and to figure out where adding dollars improves performance.
Arm yourself wisely. Read a book of TQM (Total Quality Management) that deals with software development or technical management.
You are going to have to understand a little bit of where they are coming from.
Second, tell the manager that you would be HAPPY to provide statistics (even if this isn't exactly true), but this doesn't come for free. If you're going to do this right, you need to be able to dedicate time and $$$ for your team to meet and tackle this problem, come up with a plan, and do the number crunching needed. This is important for them to understand, so you'll probably have to say it several times in several meetings.
Then get yourself to work on the stats. There's no single bullet, but understand you'll have both quantitative stats (uptime, number of tickets, number of tickets resolved/unresolved, gigs of network storage, bandwidth used, access time) and qualitative stats that you may need to assess with a survey of general or helpdesk users (happiness, responsiveness, satisfaction with IT tasks, network and application functions, etc.)
Provide the requested stats on a regular basis, and understand yourself how and why they fluctuate. And, this is the IMPORTANT part, use the stats yourself when debating with your boss over where to allocate resources and dollars. If they are going to make you collect them and are going to judge you on them, they need to involve you in decisions that will have a direct relation to the stats.
The Google Video store was nothing more than a cheap attempt to boost the stock price by creating press releases that made it sound like they had created something that was the best of you tube and iTunes store blended together.
It was never really any good, and no one other than CNBC anchors ever thought it was for real.
Bought into the service in Feburary, spent two months trying to get it to work.
Got nowhere.
Called up and canceled, got a pro-rated refund, but also got to keep the gizmo and free phone. Back in April.
After a lot of debugging, it seemed to me they were robbing Peter to pay Paul. My gizmo would connect without error 50% of the time, giving me a dial tone, but not enough time to make a call (it re-connects every 30 seconds).
If you complained enough they would make changes on their end that would give you better service, but it seemed to me they didn't have enough reliable servers up and running to handle their clients.
I survived the Dot Com Bust very well, thank you. Here's what I did:
1) I only worked for Cash, not Options.
2) Keep good developers, not wanna-bees. Fire the rest, or move to a different department. If you can't do that, put them on projects that can't derail the important tasks.
3) Learn the core business you're dealing with, not just the code.
4) Ask how they plan to make money. Really. Ask. Ask the President, the VC's, everyone. If you don't like the answer, give them less of your time.
5) Stay independent. Be a contractor for several organizations. If one gets hurt, you have multiple revenue streams.
6) After things crash, companies will try to fire whole departements, not realizing until it is too late that their function is core to the business. Step in to cover the work as needed.
What is going to make AppleTV worth the money is this:
Video Podcasting.
There are already a plethera of great video podcasts available, and with AppleTV you can sit and watch them in your livingroom, not on a computer or 2" ipod video screen.
Sure, a bit of effort every day, you can download the same content and burn it to DVD, or get it to play some other way on your TV, but with AppleTV and a smart iTunes playlist, you can have a couple hours of content that's new and interesting and commercial-free every single night.
This isn't a strike at Tivo, this is a stike at Prime Time programming of all kinds.
If a Prius costs $3.25 per mile and runs 100,000 miles, that's a cost of $325,000. I'm pretty sure even with green tax breaks, a Prius doesn't cost that much.
And while I've never shopped for a hummer, I'm pretty sure they don't cost $585,000.
The problem with games as instructional tools is that most instructional objectives don't translate well into the world of gaming.
Sure, you want to teach resource management, the locations of states, or where in the world one can find Waldo, you can turn these things into games.
However, try teaching the periodic table, the works of Shakespeare, calculus, or Dukheim's study of Suicide in a game format.
Sure, you can easily create a game that incorporates something to do with the topic, but is it a game that really teaches what they need to know in an efficient format? No.
1) IT folk need to understand that they are there to solve business problems, not IT problems, and need to leave a little more about business, instead of making business people learn the IT language.
2) Currently, if you're good at your job, you will be promoted to management in IT, which means you will no longer code, and have to learn to manage people. What would be better is to create a senior position that has the money of management, but allows a great coder to remain a great coder.
3) People in the organization have to be punished for causing problems that they look to IT to fix. Due to others lack of planning, we're constantly having to pull micicles out of our asses. But while we take the risk, others get the reward. This has got to change.
I write a shareware program (BlueBox Invoices) that lots of people have registered over the course of the past 9 years it has been around.
It is a fully functional program WITHOUT registering, yet many people take the suggestion to register, and it pays for continued development.
If you're going to get your panties in a knot over some people using your software, you probably should be writing some software more innovative than a screen caputure utility. The world is already filled with those.
Sounds to me like someone is still bitter about being taxed on a boatload of options that became wallpaper in 2000.
Your observations, while grounded, are kind of nowhere near the point I was making.
For the record, the laws regarding options grants are indeed all messed up, are are all about pshing the risk away from the company and toward the employee.
Taxes (with a couple exceptions) apply to profits, not assets. Profits must be realized in order to be taxed, which usually means something is sold. If you do not sell it, then there is nothing to be taxed.
Second, profit does not equal value. Profit is the difference between what you paid and what you recieved when you sold it. If you paid what you sold something for, there's no profit.
While you may think you didn't pay something for that online sword that you found, you're forgetting that you are paying blizzard $$$ every month for the opportunity to find such sword. You would have to subtract any $$$ you shelled out before they could claim you made a profit. Plus, you would be able to make a case at that point that the computer was needed to gain that profit, and the high end graphics card, and your fancy chair.
Trust me, after you were done filling out the schedule C, you wouldn't have any profit left.
Second life is more compicated, since they are essentially running an offshore bank. As a citizen of the US, you have to pay taxes on profits in offshore accounts. If you run a business via SL, then you could find yourself taxed on profits if you are generating profits. Of course if SL taxed you, they could issue tax credits that would go against your US taxes.
Anyone else expect to see a Mac OSX Xserve running these babies in 2008?
And I can't wait. While the MacOS has positioned itself capable of hoping from platform to platform in record time, windows still has a hard time running modern Intel chips...
And yes, I am happy to see Linux run on the cell processors. I think that says a lot about it's adaptability as well.
Slashdot Mirror
How are we going to tell the difference between this law and the OTHER Megan's law?
www.deviantart.com is filled with all sorts of fractal and computer generated art.
My own page,
thefusa.deviantart.com
Includes many pieces created with the help of home-grown Java filters and tools.
I see several people have recommended Tuffle.
Tuffle? That's silly.
No doubt he's a genius, and the advanced designer can learn tons from him.
However the posting is asking about basic web design.
This is like me saying I have a problem figuring out the best way to point my drain spout off my house, and SlashDot readers coming back and saying "well, that's essentially a physics problem. Einstein was a Physics genius, so you should probably look to his research for the answer"
The greatest design tool ever invented is: an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper
Bring you own pen or pencil.
Don't worry about the technology, that comes second. Worry about what you want to user experience to be. The message. The structure.
Define the business solution, THEN apply the technology.
However, there's also one other path worth mentioning (that for some reason, every other post here missed:
PAY THEM FOR THE CODE THEN DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH IT.Bad marketing ideas are the cause of problems like this.
They will try to make your internet service as complicated as your cell phone plan.
Powerful and easy to learn do not have to be mutually exclusive.
The kids were stupid. If they mailed in pictures to the newspaper of them doing the same things, there would be the same punishment.
:-)
Don't be stupid.
And get off my lawn.
I like open source projects (mysql and subversion are tops in my book), but I have to take exeption with the notion that open source software is great because thousands of people from around the world are looking at and trying to fix the code. I think this is bull$h!t. Open source code is coded by a small fraction of it's userbase. And each project still has one, or myme two people at the top that approve and integrate each real change. It's not this automated machine. When developing any kind of software, you still need a someone in charge. Any software project needs a way to align the needs of the market with the efforts of the developers. In closed-source software, this is provided by the market. Money. And coordinated by non-coders, who try to find the greatest need in the market and fill it, because there's cash to be made. In open source, there's no such mechanism. Coders with features because they need them for their particular purpose, or because they are cool. As a result, some important features always seem to get overlooked.
You and your follow IT folks are in an uncomfortable situation, and you should admit that to yourself.
And the typical reaction of someone placed in a situation like this is to be as passive-agressive as possible.
However, I would reccomend a different approach.
There are two reasons why this beancounter wants you to quantify everything with numbers.
1) They don't know jack about how IT works,
2) They want to be able to divide those numbers into dollars, to get ratios and to figure out where adding dollars improves performance.
Arm yourself wisely. Read a book of TQM (Total Quality Management) that deals with software development or technical management.
You are going to have to understand a little bit of where they are coming from.
Second, tell the manager that you would be HAPPY to provide statistics (even if this isn't exactly true), but this doesn't come for free. If you're going to do this right, you need to be able to dedicate time and $$$ for your team to meet and tackle this problem, come up with a plan, and do the number crunching needed. This is important for them to understand, so you'll probably have to say it several times in several meetings.
Then get yourself to work on the stats. There's no single bullet, but understand you'll have both quantitative stats (uptime, number of tickets, number of tickets resolved/unresolved, gigs of network storage, bandwidth used, access time) and qualitative stats that you may need to assess with a survey of general or helpdesk users (happiness, responsiveness, satisfaction with IT tasks, network and application functions, etc.)
Provide the requested stats on a regular basis, and understand yourself how and why they fluctuate. And, this is the IMPORTANT part, use the stats yourself when debating with your boss over where to allocate resources and dollars. If they are going to make you collect them and are going to judge you on them, they need to involve you in decisions that will have a direct relation to the stats.
Good Luck.
The Google Video store was nothing more than a cheap attempt to boost the stock price by creating press releases that made it sound like they had created something that was the best of you tube and iTunes store blended together.
It was never really any good, and no one other than CNBC anchors ever thought it was for real.
Anyone else have laugh when they looked at the cover of the book?
A Flock of Birds?
To symbolize beautiful code?
Flock-of-Birds-style code is the UGLIEST code out there!
Used only by those who haven't learned to use case statements, build databases, or define arrays.
Is this beautiful code???
if(something==interesting)
if(somethingelse==goodcode)
if(somethingother==blahblahblah)
if(somestupidbookcover=birds)
doSomethingUseful();
else
else
else
else
if(somethingelse==goodcode)
if(somethingother==blahblahblah)
if(somestupidbookcover=birds)
doSomethingUseful();
else
else
else
end if
Bought into the service in Feburary, spent two months trying to get it to work.
Got nowhere.
Called up and canceled, got a pro-rated refund, but also got to keep the gizmo and free phone. Back in April.
After a lot of debugging, it seemed to me they were robbing Peter to pay Paul. My gizmo would connect without error 50% of the time, giving me a dial tone, but not enough time to make a call (it re-connects every 30 seconds).
If you complained enough they would make changes on their end that would give you better service, but it seemed to me they didn't have enough reliable servers up and running to handle their clients.
I survived the Dot Com Bust very well, thank you. Here's what I did:
1) I only worked for Cash, not Options.
2) Keep good developers, not wanna-bees. Fire the rest, or move to a different department. If you can't do that, put them on projects that can't derail the important tasks.
3) Learn the core business you're dealing with, not just the code.
4) Ask how they plan to make money. Really. Ask. Ask the President, the VC's, everyone. If you don't like the answer, give them less of your time.
5) Stay independent. Be a contractor for several organizations. If one gets hurt, you have multiple revenue streams.
6) After things crash, companies will try to fire whole departements, not realizing until it is too late that their function is core to the business. Step in to cover the work as needed.
7) Profit.
Am I the only one who thought "Boy, the Chineese must LOVE this idea"?
What is going to make AppleTV worth the money is this:
Video Podcasting.
There are already a plethera of great video podcasts available, and with AppleTV you can sit and watch them in your livingroom, not on a computer or 2" ipod video screen.
Sure, a bit of effort every day, you can download the same content and burn it to DVD, or get it to play some other way on your TV, but with AppleTV and a smart iTunes playlist, you can have a couple hours of content that's new and interesting and commercial-free every single night.
This isn't a strike at Tivo, this is a stike at Prime Time programming of all kinds.
If a Prius costs $3.25 per mile and runs 100,000 miles, that's a cost of $325,000. I'm pretty sure even with green tax breaks, a Prius doesn't cost that much. And while I've never shopped for a hummer, I'm pretty sure they don't cost $585,000.
The problem with games as instructional tools is that most instructional objectives don't translate well into the world of gaming.
Sure, you want to teach resource management, the locations of states, or where in the world one can find Waldo, you can turn these things into games.
However, try teaching the periodic table, the works of Shakespeare, calculus, or Dukheim's study of Suicide in a game format.
Sure, you can easily create a game that incorporates something to do with the topic, but is it a game that really teaches what they need to know in an efficient format? No.
1) IT folk need to understand that they are there to solve business problems, not IT problems, and need to leave a little more about business, instead of making business people learn the IT language.
2) Currently, if you're good at your job, you will be promoted to management in IT, which means you will no longer code, and have to learn to manage people. What would be better is to create a senior position that has the money of management, but allows a great coder to remain a great coder.
3) People in the organization have to be punished for causing problems that they look to IT to fix. Due to others lack of planning, we're constantly having to pull micicles out of our asses. But while we take the risk, others get the reward. This has got to change.
Just my opinions...
I write a shareware program (BlueBox Invoices) that lots of people have registered over the course of the past 9 years it has been around.
It is a fully functional program WITHOUT registering, yet many people take the suggestion to register, and it pays for continued development.
If you're going to get your panties in a knot over some people using your software, you probably should be writing some software more innovative than a screen caputure utility. The world is already filled with those.
Is $29 more or less than buying a PC to test your application on?
Is $29 more or less than buying a new desk to hold your new computer?
Is $29 more or less than your hourly rate?
The only useful evolution of tags I can see is to give it a dot format, general to specific, such as:
->USA.Nevada.LasVegas
->Literature.HunterThompson
Similar to OOP coding or Usenet. But, you wouldn't want to set a fixed standard, you would want it to evolve as it's used.
Sounds to me like someone is still bitter about being taxed on a boatload of options that became wallpaper in 2000.
Your observations, while grounded, are kind of nowhere near the point I was making.
For the record, the laws regarding options grants are indeed all messed up, are are all about pshing the risk away from the company and toward the employee.
Taxes (with a couple exceptions) apply to profits, not assets. Profits must be realized in order to be taxed, which usually means something is sold. If you do not sell it, then there is nothing to be taxed.
Second, profit does not equal value. Profit is the difference between what you paid and what you recieved when you sold it. If you paid what you sold something for, there's no profit.
While you may think you didn't pay something for that online sword that you found, you're forgetting that you are paying blizzard $$$ every month for the opportunity to find such sword. You would have to subtract any $$$ you shelled out before they could claim you made a profit. Plus, you would be able to make a case at that point that the computer was needed to gain that profit, and the high end graphics card, and your fancy chair.
Trust me, after you were done filling out the schedule C, you wouldn't have any profit left.
Second life is more compicated, since they are essentially running an offshore bank. As a citizen of the US, you have to pay taxes on profits in offshore accounts. If you run a business via SL, then you could find yourself taxed on profits if you are generating profits. Of course if SL taxed you, they could issue tax credits that would go against your US taxes.
Just my opinion.
Anyone else expect to see a Mac OSX Xserve running these babies in 2008?
And I can't wait. While the MacOS has positioned itself capable of hoping from platform to platform in record time, windows still has a hard time running modern Intel chips...
And yes, I am happy to see Linux run on the cell processors. I think that says a lot about it's adaptability as well.
Bill Gates who?