This is actually very sound advice - the "do what you love to do" part. My guess is that whatever unique qualities you have to offer this world they will come out regardless of the kind of education you choose. Twenty years ago I decided that even though I was probably leaning more towards CS that something more was neeeded, so I choose an education that combined CS and Business Administration.
My CS skills probably never got developed the way they might have been had I chosen to go the pure CS way, but since my interest was mostly there I made up for it in my own studies along the way. And having an understanding of business helped me work within the financial sector.
Overall I'd say this has worked out for me, but there has been times of frustration when I wondered if having a straight CS education might have been better for me. For a lot of years I was the business-oriented guy who tended to get the techie problems because they seemed to get solved when sent my way. Now, being older I find that I tend to leave the technical problems to younger programmers who like the challenge of doing the technical stuff for it's own sake, while focusing more on the business rules and how to best support the clients i work with in getting solutions that work at a low development cost.
So, I guess my point is that you should not be frightened about making choices because what you learn during your studies may come in handy at another time in your career, and what you don't learn during your studies you can always make up for later in life if your priorities change.
I belive that in the case of Dave Cockrum there was some money paid towards his medical expenses from Marvel, but since I don't have the source where I read at hand I originally did not want to post this information. I think they found a way to do it, like you suggest, but I don't know how much it was and I'm pretty sure that it's only a fraction of the profits made from Nightcrawler merchandise. So it's still sad that the guy had to be dying before it happened (guess that was already expresse by Neal Adams in the previous post), but that's the thing with business, any corporation is only responsible to it's shareholders, and since I've put a bit of my retirement fund into Marvel stock that's ok with me.
There's actually a minor error in what I wrote above, Dave Cockrum didn't create X-Men, Lee and Kirby did, but he invented the new team with members like Nightcrawler and so on - the X-Men we know from todays comics and movies. Nightcrawler for instance was originally created for another book, but Cockrum decided to use him when he had to do the first X-Men story.
Another interesting case where a creator didn't get the recognition, financially and otherwise, that his work deserved was Bill Finger who the Bill Finger Award is named after (http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_otherawards.shtm l). His name actually went into common use among creators where expressing things like "I've been fingered" means that you were not given proper credit for what you did.
It's actually not the lawyers of Stan Lee, but the lawyers of his former business partners who are trying to make money out of it. Stan Lee's company is called POW!, while Stan Lee media is not owned by him. If you read his autobiography "Excelsior!" (and I'd recommend it to any fans of Marvel comics) he does not claim at any point to own any of the characters he created, which would also be unfair since part of the creation of many classic Marvel characters was done working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others (another issue that Stan Lee also adresses in his biography).
However there is some valid point to the argument for paying the creators fairly, if not legally then morally. For instance the creator of X-Men Dave Cockrum died recently while having a lot of problems paying his medical bills. Legally he did not own any of his creations and he was unfortunate enough to work at Marvel before they changed their policy. As I understand it was after this that The Hero Initiative was set up (http://www.heroinitiative.org/). Both Stan Lee and current editor-in-chief Joe Quesada contributed their time to making a DVD to raise money for the cause.
I'm in no way an expert on US copyright laws, but I would suspect that if Marvel felt obliged to pay any one creator who'd fallen on hard times for his works they might open themselves up to a number of lawsuits, so it makes business sense for them to stick to the original agreements with the creators.
Ah, german TV - now that brings back memories. Our TV used to be so bad that even dubbed german TV was considered a big step up when I was younger:-)
One of our channels were actually doing a pretty decent job with Buffy, Dark Angel and so on - and though you can't have too many series with babes who kick ass:-) it's not real sci-fi. Recently the government decided to sell their stake in the channel however and to make themselves more marketable they decided to replace the cool series with more sports and more mainstream series.
I don't know why - science fiction has just always been a much maligned genre, both on TV and in litterature, even though we actually have some really good writers.
But enough of my whining about the state of things here:-) My point was actually that I see a lot of my fellow geeks going on the net to get things like Star Trek, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica and so on on DVD, and it just occured to me that content providers seem to be missing the opportunity to get to the niche markets globally. You may not get enough revenue from one series if you try to get it on the network in ten countries where theres perhaps only ten percent of the viewers interested in it - but if you put the content on the net and let people subscribe to it then you stand a fair chance of reaching an audience that you would never reach.
The problem is that they seem to have a supermarket mindset when they could actually open a second channel that would get additional revenue by thinking like a specialist store. It's like Carlsberg - they make ok beer, nothing special certainly not "probably the best beer i the world":-) but now that people are getting into microbreweries and so on they're recognising that there's a second market out there and have started two lines of very nice beers aimed at the non-mass-market.
Must say I don't see the football angle here, since our TV system offers plenty of both kinds, domestic, british and american.
But what I see as more important in this regard is that we might finally get access to the sci-fi and fantasy that other civilized countries get. I grew up in the seventies when our socialist government decided that that kind of TV probably wasn't good for you, and it' kind of stuck ever since. So this kind of tech would enable us to finally get at things that we never see like Farscape, Dr. Who (the latest episodes with Chistopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are in the words of the doctor himself 'fantastic') and so on.
Now I don't want to infringe the copyrights of anybody here, but it seems that even though I pay my taxes etc etc. and everything else that goes towards financing TV around here I either get the choice for highbrow mumbo jumbo about allegedly serious issues, reruns of american sitcoms or whatever is the latest incarnation of the "survivor" franchise. So I really don't get why the content owners don't cash in on geeks like me - I'm sure we aren't a broad audience, but I'm pretty sure a lot of us would pay good cash to get what we want:-)
Well, I did work with such such a service contract as being part of the dept. responsible for such contracts when the support for 2.11 ran out, and I'm working with the same company now under a similar contract for the latest version of OS/2 (can't remember the name, but it's calls something like e-business server) - so on the whole I'd say that I have a pretty good idea of what such a contract consists of at least in my geographical area.
I'd say that all in all I've some 3-4 years of experience with working at a company that has this kind of contract, both as a system programmer and in middle management - which leads me to believe that I have a pretty good idea of "what it is to have a service contract with IBM on a product that is past it's end of life".
Contracts may be different from geographical region to region - but but it's pretty safe to assume that withing my own region I have plenty of hands on experience with the exact terms and conditions of such contracts.
I think the point where we see things differently is in what the term "service contract" means. I think theres a distinction between service contracts and on-site consultants which may have been somewhat blurry in my previous post.
What I mean is, that IBM has service contracts with these customers, meaning they will fix a bug for the customer if the customer can provide sample code to reproduce it, and they provide service packs that consist of stable releases of the bugs that they fix for their customers.
IBM may or may not do development on their own on the product as well, but very importantly service contracts are paid up front - they get the money whether their own engineers do the fix or if their own engineers just take a fix that was done in Open Source by somebody else, run it through QA and then put it in an IBM servicepack.
In the case where you have on-site consultants from IBM at these customers they are usually not developers but technical people, i.e. they test new fixes with the specific setup of the customer, make sure the fixes get distributet correctly through the customer network etc.
So even though a number of bugs could be fixed by Open Source people IBM could still justify their on-site consultants because the value they add isn't as much knowledge of the source code of the OS as it is knowledge about how the OS is used at that particular customer site.
This way of doing service and support isn't really specific to IBM, I've seen similar business models for Oracle and Sybase (where I used to work as part of their professional services in my country).
That depends on what the release schedules are for these things. Large corporations are not early adopters of fixes, so even if a smalltime user fixes a bug and commits it it's very likely that large corporations will still pay to have IBM QA the fix and guarantee that it works with their specific version of the software.
The revenue from support contracts to large companies are often more like insurance policies than actual purchase of services - if stuff goes wrong you call IBM and let them bail you out. But very often it does involve that you do most of the work in isolating the bug.
Another thing is that if you have the support contract from IBM, then you can push for them to work on a specific bug. Bugs that are just submitted by smalltime users don't get any guarantee of attention from IBM. Large corps will prefer this to relying on somebody out there looking into the bug - and by releasing the source IBM could allow for others to look into those bugs that aren't high priority to their customers at present (but might be later on - I reported and got IBM to fix a bug recently through a customer and it was well known on the net, but my customer hadn't seen it until recently).
Some of this can sound a bit weird to those who haven't worked with IBM and large corps. for a period of time:-)
The advantage would be having smaller developers to look into the code and submit possible fixes, then doing QA and integration testing with other stuff and releasing "IBM approved" servicepacks.
That way they could still maintain their large customers who may be reluctant to just accept fixes right off the internet.
For instance I've worked with a number of financial customers who are ok with doing in-house development on Tomcat and Apache but still insisted on running the production version on BEA, not because there were any measurable differences in performance or anything, but because that product came form a named provider - which basically meant they had somebody to blame if things fell apart.
The combination of open source and IBM proprietary releases are a bit like what they are doing with Eclipse and the Websphere Application Developer product.
As somebody already mentioned a lot of big financial customers still run OS/2 - I'm working with one of them right now and they're still paying IBM to support the system.
So from the perspective of IBM there would be the advantage of getting somebody outside look into the code and fix bugs. This is of course a problem the other way around in that financial customers would be reluctant to use fixes that were done outside of IBM since that could compromise security in their systems.
Given that IBM is into having long working relationships with these kind of large customers they might be at some risk by allowing others - for example system programmers at the customer site the possibility to do their own fixes. Again you could argue the other way around that current corporate culture at financial corps. isn't into having large in-house knowledge of the OS like it was back in the early days of the OS wars (ah, nostalgia:-)
I'm a bit rusty on the design of OS/2, but as I recall most of the 32 bit code was written by IBM in-house after the divorce from MS. And the support for Windows/DOS/Posix is modularised into subsystems - so even with possible legal problems it might be possible to release OS/2 as a pure 32 bit OS without any support for other sub-OS'es.
The greatest obstacle would probably be to make sure that only the IBM parts would get out. That's pure cost to IBM.
Another thing apart from WPS that would be a good thing to release to Open Source was the Java VM for OS/2. There are a lot of quirks and things in there that could benefit from some open source efforts - as it is now it seems that it's only those bugs that are reproducable and reported by larger companies that gets fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually very sound advice - the "do what you love to do" part. My guess is that whatever unique qualities you have to offer this world they will come out regardless of the kind of education you choose. Twenty years ago I decided that even though I was probably leaning more towards CS that something more was neeeded, so I choose an education that combined CS and Business Administration.
My CS skills probably never got developed the way they might have been had I chosen to go the pure CS way, but since my interest was mostly there I made up for it in my own studies along the way. And having an understanding of business helped me work within the financial sector.
Overall I'd say this has worked out for me, but there has been times of frustration when I wondered if having a straight CS education might have been better for me. For a lot of years I was the business-oriented guy who tended to get the techie problems because they seemed to get solved when sent my way. Now, being older I find that I tend to leave the technical problems to younger programmers who like the challenge of doing the technical stuff for it's own sake, while focusing more on the business rules and how to best support the clients i work with in getting solutions that work at a low development cost.
So, I guess my point is that you should not be frightened about making choices because what you learn during your studies may come in handy at another time in your career, and what you don't learn during your studies you can always make up for later in life if your priorities change.
I belive that in the case of Dave Cockrum there was some money paid towards his medical expenses from Marvel, but since I don't have the source where I read at hand I originally did not want to post this information. I think they found a way to do it, like you suggest, but I don't know how much it was and I'm pretty sure that it's only a fraction of the profits made from Nightcrawler merchandise. So it's still sad that the guy had to be dying before it happened (guess that was already expresse by Neal Adams in the previous post), but that's the thing with business, any corporation is only responsible to it's shareholders, and since I've put a bit of my retirement fund into Marvel stock that's ok with me.
There's actually a minor error in what I wrote above, Dave Cockrum didn't create X-Men, Lee and Kirby did, but he invented the new team with members like Nightcrawler and so on - the X-Men we know from todays comics and movies. Nightcrawler for instance was originally created for another book, but Cockrum decided to use him when he had to do the first X-Men story.
m l). His name actually went into common use among creators where expressing things like "I've been fingered" means that you were not given proper credit for what you did.
Another interesting case where a creator didn't get the recognition, financially and otherwise, that his work deserved was Bill Finger who the Bill Finger Award is named after (http://www.comic-con.org/cci/cci_otherawards.sht
It's actually not the lawyers of Stan Lee, but the lawyers of his former business partners who are trying to make money out of it. Stan Lee's company is called POW!, while Stan Lee media is not owned by him. If you read his autobiography "Excelsior!" (and I'd recommend it to any fans of Marvel comics) he does not claim at any point to own any of the characters he created, which would also be unfair since part of the creation of many classic Marvel characters was done working with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others (another issue that Stan Lee also adresses in his biography).
However there is some valid point to the argument for paying the creators fairly, if not legally then morally. For instance the creator of X-Men Dave Cockrum died recently while having a lot of problems paying his medical bills. Legally he did not own any of his creations and he was unfortunate enough to work at Marvel before they changed their policy. As I understand it was after this that The Hero Initiative was set up (http://www.heroinitiative.org/). Both Stan Lee and current editor-in-chief Joe Quesada contributed their time to making a DVD to raise money for the cause.
I'm in no way an expert on US copyright laws, but I would suspect that if Marvel felt obliged to pay any one creator who'd fallen on hard times for his works they might open themselves up to a number of lawsuits, so it makes business sense for them to stick to the original agreements with the creators.
Ah, german TV - now that brings back memories. Our TV used to be so bad that even dubbed german TV was considered a big step up when I was younger :-)
:-) it's not real sci-fi. Recently the government decided to sell their stake in the channel however and to make themselves more marketable they decided to replace the cool series with more sports and more mainstream series.
:-) My point was actually that I see a lot of my fellow geeks going on the net to get things like Star Trek, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica and so on on DVD, and it just occured to me that content providers seem to be missing the opportunity to get to the niche markets globally. You may not get enough revenue from one series if you try to get it on the network in ten countries where theres perhaps only ten percent of the viewers interested in it - but if you put the content on the net and let people subscribe to it then you stand a fair chance of reaching an audience that you would never reach.
:-) but now that people are getting into microbreweries and so on they're recognising that there's a second market out there and have started two lines of very nice beers aimed at the non-mass-market.
One of our channels were actually doing a pretty decent job with Buffy, Dark Angel and so on - and though you can't have too many series with babes who kick ass
I don't know why - science fiction has just always been a much maligned genre, both on TV and in litterature, even though we actually have some really good writers.
But enough of my whining about the state of things here
The problem is that they seem to have a supermarket mindset when they could actually open a second channel that would get additional revenue by thinking like a specialist store. It's like Carlsberg - they make ok beer, nothing special certainly not "probably the best beer i the world"
Must say I don't see the football angle here, since our TV system offers plenty of both kinds, domestic, british and american.
:-)
But what I see as more important in this regard is that we might finally get access to the sci-fi and fantasy that other civilized countries get. I grew up in the seventies when our socialist government decided that that kind of TV probably wasn't good for you, and it' kind of stuck ever since. So this kind of tech would enable us to finally get at things that we never see like Farscape, Dr. Who (the latest episodes with Chistopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are in the words of the doctor himself 'fantastic') and so on.
Now I don't want to infringe the copyrights of anybody here, but it seems that even though I pay my taxes etc etc. and everything else that goes towards financing TV around here I either get the choice for highbrow mumbo jumbo about allegedly serious issues, reruns of american sitcoms or whatever is the latest incarnation of the "survivor" franchise. So I really don't get why the content owners don't cash in on geeks like me - I'm sure we aren't a broad audience, but I'm pretty sure a lot of us would pay good cash to get what we want
Well, I did work with such such a service contract as being part of the dept. responsible for such contracts when the support for 2.11 ran out, and I'm working with the same company now under a similar contract for the latest version of OS/2 (can't remember the name, but it's calls something like e-business server) - so on the whole I'd say that I have a pretty good idea of what such a contract consists of at least in my geographical area.
I'd say that all in all I've some 3-4 years of experience with working at a company that has this kind of contract, both as a system programmer and in middle management - which leads me to believe that I have a pretty good idea of "what it is to have a service contract with IBM on a product that is past it's end of life".
Contracts may be different from geographical region to region - but but it's pretty safe to assume that withing my own region I have plenty of hands on experience with the exact terms and conditions of such contracts.
I think the point where we see things differently is in what the term "service contract" means. I think theres a distinction between service contracts and on-site consultants which may have been somewhat blurry in my previous post.
What I mean is, that IBM has service contracts with these customers, meaning they will fix a bug for the customer if the customer can provide sample code to reproduce it, and they provide service packs that consist of stable releases of the bugs that they fix for their customers.
IBM may or may not do development on their own on the product as well, but very importantly service contracts are paid up front - they get the money whether their own engineers do the fix or if their own engineers just take a fix that was done in Open Source by somebody else, run it through QA and then put it in an IBM servicepack.
In the case where you have on-site consultants from IBM at these customers they are usually not developers but technical people, i.e. they test new fixes with the specific setup of the customer, make sure the fixes get distributet correctly through the customer network etc.
So even though a number of bugs could be fixed by Open Source people IBM could still justify their on-site consultants because the value they add isn't as much knowledge of the source code of the OS as it is knowledge about how the OS is used at that particular customer site.
This way of doing service and support isn't really specific to IBM, I've seen similar business models for Oracle and Sybase (where I used to work as part of their professional services in my country).
That depends on what the release schedules are for these things. Large corporations are not early adopters of fixes, so even if a smalltime user fixes a bug and commits it it's very likely that large corporations will still pay to have IBM QA the fix and guarantee that it works with their specific version of the software. The revenue from support contracts to large companies are often more like insurance policies than actual purchase of services - if stuff goes wrong you call IBM and let them bail you out. But very often it does involve that you do most of the work in isolating the bug. Another thing is that if you have the support contract from IBM, then you can push for them to work on a specific bug. Bugs that are just submitted by smalltime users don't get any guarantee of attention from IBM. Large corps will prefer this to relying on somebody out there looking into the bug - and by releasing the source IBM could allow for others to look into those bugs that aren't high priority to their customers at present (but might be later on - I reported and got IBM to fix a bug recently through a customer and it was well known on the net, but my customer hadn't seen it until recently). Some of this can sound a bit weird to those who haven't worked with IBM and large corps. for a period of time :-)
The advantage would be having smaller developers to look into the code and submit possible fixes, then doing QA and integration testing with other stuff and releasing "IBM approved" servicepacks. That way they could still maintain their large customers who may be reluctant to just accept fixes right off the internet. For instance I've worked with a number of financial customers who are ok with doing in-house development on Tomcat and Apache but still insisted on running the production version on BEA, not because there were any measurable differences in performance or anything, but because that product came form a named provider - which basically meant they had somebody to blame if things fell apart. The combination of open source and IBM proprietary releases are a bit like what they are doing with Eclipse and the Websphere Application Developer product.
As somebody already mentioned a lot of big financial customers still run OS/2 - I'm working with one of them right now and they're still paying IBM to support the system.
:-)
So from the perspective of IBM there would be the advantage of getting somebody outside look into the code and fix bugs. This is of course a problem the other way around in that financial customers would be reluctant to use fixes that were done outside of IBM since that could compromise security in their systems.
Given that IBM is into having long working relationships with these kind of large customers they might be at some risk by allowing others - for example system programmers at the customer site the possibility to do their own fixes. Again you could argue the other way around that current corporate culture at financial corps. isn't into having large in-house knowledge of the OS like it was back in the early days of the OS wars (ah, nostalgia
I'm a bit rusty on the design of OS/2, but as I recall most of the 32 bit code was written by IBM in-house after the divorce from MS. And the support for Windows/DOS/Posix is modularised into subsystems - so even with possible legal problems it might be possible to release OS/2 as a pure 32 bit OS without any support for other sub-OS'es.
The greatest obstacle would probably be to make sure that only the IBM parts would get out. That's pure cost to IBM.
Another thing apart from WPS that would be a good thing to release to Open Source was the Java VM for OS/2. There are a lot of quirks and things in there that could benefit from some open source efforts - as it is now it seems that it's only those bugs that are reproducable and reported by larger companies that gets fixed.