This is a good example of the fact that all products live in an ecosytem, and the brilliance of TI was at least as much in marketing and sales as in technology. This is a great example of "stickiness" of a prouct and the retuns a company can acheive by getting products adopted as standards. These calculators are still a good fit, becuase they don't do too much. The challenge for everyone (TI included) is how to avoid being frozen here forever. TI has put out more powerful calculators, but the gatekeeps (teachers, standardized test administrators) have not accepted them (and from their points of view, for good reasons).
I hope your software development lifecycle doesn't start with coding.
Scratch - LOGO in spirit for a new century?
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Forty Years of LOGO
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· Score: 2, Informative
I recently introduced my kids to programming with Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ rather than LOGO. It does include everything that LOGO does, but it has a lot of benefits that make the feedback from programming more immediate and accessible, and the web site is great for sharing ideas, sprites, etc.
Recently I heard about a bank in China whose on-line system grew (or is growing -- don't remember which) from zero to 340 million user accounts in three years. This was from a technical guy who consulted on the project. One weekend they added 24 million accounts, no problem. Mainframes make a lot of sense at this scale for many reasons: low cost-per-transaction, great security, hardware and software scalability, data security, low latency with data and application program proximity, and a much lower growth curve of administration cost and effort as systems grow compared to other HW/SW platforms.
As Chinese companies create world-class IT infrastructure, the size and scale is mind-boggling. And this is before considering web commerce, which is still largely undeveloped.
Project management is about managing the trade-offs among finite resources (time, people, money) to reach some defined goals in the context of an organization. Yes, you need (1) good skills in working with people and (2) domain-specific skills (IT operations, development, etc). In addition you need to develop specific skills and knowledge in project management.
The project management profession has grown out of the experiece of failures and successes across many industries, organizations, and types of projects. Learn from those who have figured out what works and what is likely to go wrong. The Project Management Institute http://www.pmi.org/ has a lot of good reasources, and PMI certification would probably be worthwhile for you if you wish to pursue project management as a career focus. Learn the PMBOK - project management body of knowledge -- as well as the latest ideas specific to software projects.
Project management is cross-disciplinary, so a generalist is often more valuable than a specialist. Plan to keep reading and learning across all the relevant disciplines.
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This is a good example of the fact that all products live in an ecosytem, and the brilliance of TI was at least as much in marketing and sales as in technology. This is a great example of "stickiness" of a prouct and the retuns a company can acheive by getting products adopted as standards. These calculators are still a good fit, becuase they don't do too much. The challenge for everyone (TI included) is how to avoid being frozen here forever. TI has put out more powerful calculators, but the gatekeeps (teachers, standardized test administrators) have not accepted them (and from their points of view, for good reasons).
Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I hope your software development lifecycle doesn't start with coding.
I recently introduced my kids to programming with Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/ rather than LOGO. It does include everything that LOGO does, but it has a lot of benefits that make the feedback from programming more immediate and accessible, and the web site is great for sharing ideas, sprites, etc.
Recently I heard about a bank in China whose on-line system grew (or is growing -- don't remember which) from zero to 340 million user accounts in three years. This was from a technical guy who consulted on the project. One weekend they added 24 million accounts, no problem. Mainframes make a lot of sense at this scale for many reasons: low cost-per-transaction, great security, hardware and software scalability, data security, low latency with data and application program proximity, and a much lower growth curve of administration cost and effort as systems grow compared to other HW/SW platforms.
As Chinese companies create world-class IT infrastructure, the size and scale is mind-boggling. And this is before considering web commerce, which is still largely undeveloped.
The project management profession has grown out of the experiece of failures and successes across many industries, organizations, and types of projects. Learn from those who have figured out what works and what is likely to go wrong. The Project Management Institute http://www.pmi.org/ has a lot of good reasources, and PMI certification would probably be worthwhile for you if you wish to pursue project management as a career focus. Learn the PMBOK - project management body of knowledge -- as well as the latest ideas specific to software projects.
Project management is cross-disciplinary, so a generalist is often more valuable than a specialist. Plan to keep reading and learning across all the relevant disciplines.