I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. I do not speak or write fluently in any language other than English, and even then, it is hardly with out error.
The goal of my statement was not to insult your grammar, but to explain why someone would discredit your request with out a second thought. If I were to send a serious technical or business request to a company in Austria, and I wrote that request in German (of which my language skills are severely lacking from a decade of not being in Germany:(), I would either appologise for the rough translation in the message, or call up one of my more fluent friends and ask them for a hand in composing the letter.
If I just sent that poorly written message to a company in Austria with no explaination of my poor use of the language, I wouldn't have very high hopes for them to take it seriously. Especially given the similarity in form between such an email, and one of the generic phishing scams coming out of Nigeria.
Nothing personal against you. When you send an email to a person in a business, that person has existing responsibilities. If your email doesn't strike them as being important enough to bump their regular work load, they will just blow you off. If you had a friend who is more fluent in English help you tune up your message, perhaps Mr Veng would have been more interested in the issue.
Or you can just cc Mr Reinfeldt everything. That's actually not a bad idea...
I'm not even in Sweden (My great-great-grandfather was kicked out for marrying a Norwegian lass), but I think Mr Reinfeldt might like to know about my emails.
All of them.
Every day.
Including system notices.
Sure, my emails aren't that great in number, but what if a couple hundred people were to do such a thing? A couple thousand? Hundreds of thousands?
Think about Space Invaders, Galaga and Galaxian - same gameplay, different sprites. I don't think that's quite the right analogy though.
Think of this more like someone took a picture of the screen when you were playing Space Invaders, then used that image as a background for their RTS space domination game.
I think this case could really present itself to be a very interesting legal president. It sure looks like it could fall under fair use and derivative work. The game is vastly different than all of the games that the artwork was taken from. Which would move it into the derivative work direction. Then the question would seem to be, does Bethesda's copyrights extend beyond the actual content of the game and into images taken of the game? If it does, it would imply that distributing screen shots and FRAPS videos with out the game copyright holder's permission would be a violation as well.
And even if that is the finding, they could still argue fair use. If 2 Live Crew can sell a single of Pretty Woman, if Vanila Ice can go platinum while taking a note for note copy of Queen, well, why can't this company use modified screen shots of existing work to develop an entirely new game?
Not sure I entirely like the thought, but I'm not entirely sure I like the alternative either.
I would agree whole heartedly with you. Setting up a process up front with the GPL code is the best option. But if you are Joe-Blow the middle manager, and you are not intimately familiar with the GPL, and you get a poorly written email like that, what would you do?
Heck, if it were one of my non-IT coworkers/managers I would hope that they would delete it. Poor grammar/spelling, check. Unknown sender, check. Vague legal threat, check. Link to an unfamiliar domain, check. Must be a phishing email, delete it.;) How many times have we all harped on our not-so-technical friends and co-workers about clicking on links from unknown senders?
As for promotions based on a person's incompetence, there is a theory to it, the Peter Principle. You'll get some of that everywhere.
A Dell Optiplex 740n with XP cost $393. In another 3 weeks, that same PC will cost $443 and the Vista version will likely drop to $393 or $403 base.
A Dell Optiplex 740n with FreeDos costs $373 base.
Do you think Dell is licensing XP at $20 a pop? Or could it be that the extra costs of a wider variety of options is distributed across the price of the FreeDos boxes?
Looking at the email linked in the summary, it seems the guy is from Austria. How's your german grammmar?
You know the internet is not limited to the US or English as the mother tongue countries... A bit rusty, I haven't been to Germany or Austria in far too long. Man do I miss the beer, and the ale, and the beer gardens, and the weekend drinking festivals, and the drinking games... Hrm, maybe I shouldn't go back, my liver isn't quite what it used to be.
My initial thought was that Markus was writing ESL, which could very well be. But his grammar is inconsistent. Some times he uses the correct capitalization and grammar, sometimes not. The inconsistencies lead me to believe that he wrote the emails in haste, until the public posts which appear to be more well edited. Had his initial request been written at the same level as his later posts, I would have been more inclined to listen to what he was saying.
I don't know if I would say it's reasonable, only that it is realistic. And I wouldn't say it's okay so long as they don't get called out on it. I would say that it is okay to prioritize risk management though.
A single kid making noise? The settlement cost would be less that the bandwidth bill for 6 months, and that is based on a really low likelihood of the kid getting out of his basement and pressing the issue.
A copyright holder with out an attorney? Not the biggest threat on the plate, but definitely something that is on the radar. Might be worth it to have a contingency plan in place so that if this treat grows the organization can deal with it quickly and effectively. No sense in blowing resources unnecessarily though.
A certified letter from an attorney demanding we correct our licensing deficiencies? Time to spin up that contingency plan!
A summons? Those files better be on the website before I have to explain to the CEO why we are being sued!
Again, just to make sure no one is going to confuse me for a GPL abusing bastard, in that case I would have ensured the GPL code was available on the website and have avoided the situation all together. I'm not saying this stuff is right, only that it is realistic, and that you will get a LOT further in the business world by writing respectfully than writing in SMS shorthand.
Very true. But out of the hundreds of anonymous threats of action that an organization may field in a month, how are we to identify those that are real threats from those that are just simple saber rattling?
The fastest way to determine threats is to look at the amount of energy someone put into developing their threat. If someone writes a very clear email, with a strong, yet respectful tone, and cites specific license violations, and put some obvious effort into doing so, they are with all likelihood better educated, more motivated, and present a much higher threat to the organization. If someone throws a random pile of characters, words and a link to a license into an email that would make almost any spell checker pop up a message box that says, "Warning, if you send this you will look like an idiot!" it means to me that they aren't willing to spend enough time on the issue to run a spell checker, so they likely aren't willing to spend enough time on the issue to do much else.
If we took threats like Markus' seriously, lawyers would start sending out letters in crayon that read "u bad give $$$" so that they could get back to the golf courses sooner.
To skip to my real problem here... I loathe lawyers. Had Markus not been an idiot and Mr. Vang not been a douche, the lawyers could have been left out of it.
Which goes to show: a lawsuit is far more powerful than the saber rattling of an anonymous e-mailer with bad grammar.
Just think, with proper grammar and some respect, Markus might have been able to motivate Mr. Vang to be a bit more interested in meeting the requirements of using GPL code. This whole thing might have been resolved with out lining the pockets of more lawyers.
GPL doesn't force me to do anything. What it does do is give the creator of the code that I am using specific powers. Powers that I have agreed to by using their code knowing the license requirements. I can choose not to honor those agreements, and if I do so, the owner can sue.
Some kid threatening to report me because I won't do what he wants isn't a concern. A copyright holder with a lawyer on retainer however IS a concern. Think of how many pissed off customers threaten to sue over any number of issues. Some of those issues are likely even legally sound basis for lawsuits. But compare that complaint volume to the actual number of lawsuits. If organizations responded to every single disorganized threat of action, they would spend more time on legal protection than on development. It's a matter of risk assessment, and reading the initial emails from 'mindbender' I see nothing that would compel me to even respond.
Like I said, me personally, I would have put the GPL code up from the start (I even just had this conversation with my VP of R&D on a number of OS libraries we will likely be using in an upcoming project). I am not saying that it is right to withhold GPL'd code, but it is realistic that Markus was blown off and that the company did nothing until there was actually a threat (the GPL code was posted 2 days after the lawsuits were filed).
From the download page on their site:
myshare Source Files
The myshare source files are made available under various open source code licenses, including the GNU General Public License (GPL). Please review the license terms included with each download for the rights, obligations and restrictions associated with the open source file. Installation instructions title / description download posted release notes
Myshare Home v.1 GPL Source Code
47.6 MB 06/11/08
Myshare Home v.2 GPL Source Code
158.1 06/11/08
Myshare Office v.2 GPL Source Code
220.8 MB 06/11/08 Looks like they just got them up last week (apparently 5 months after the GPL-Violations post).
If someone sent me a demand for code in poor grammar with some cheesy pseudonym, I would probably blow them off as well.
Now maybe if Markus has written a halfway compelling email, he would have received a more informative response. But when you send a jumble of words that fails to reach the 6th grade reading level to someone who has other priorities, it shouldn't come as a surprise that you get blown off.
Of course, if I were distributing a project based in part on GPL code, I would make darn sure to have the GPL'd code available for people to download with out hassling me or the engineers.
I appreciate your sarcasm, but have you ever run a low overhead high efficiency production line?
If you have exactly the right amount of resources to distribute Vista as per your current plan, where are you going to get the resources to distribute XP? Sure, maybe it's 1 extra man-hour a day to get the installs done, or to swap bins and output trays for pre-loaded XP hard drives. But that's 1 hour of labor that you have to pay for only because you are offering XP. 1 hour could be $20 payment for a union factory worker with seniority. Figure another $10 in taxes, SS, UE, etc on top of that, $4 to the health care plan, and another $1 to the retirement plan. You've just paid an extra $35 for 1 hour of labor.
Now you also need to update your sales catalog to reflect the new availability and pricing.
Update you web site to include the configuration option.
Update your marketing material to let consumers know they have the choice.
Update your support documentation so that your Tier 1 script readers know to ask "Do you have Windows XP or Vista?"
Duplicate your warehouse and distribution organization to handle identical models of PCs and laptops with both OS's.
Continuously review production and sales data to determine if you need to increase, decrease, or suspend production of XP PC/Laptops.
etc...
And, if what another commenter has mentioned is true, about Dell no longer having distribution rights to XP to allow them to use pre-loaded HD's, you are looking at having to pay the labor to have each and every laptop loaded manually.
So yeah, it costs a bit extra for them to offer it. Could part of the $50 be due to MS trying to push them away from the selling it? Likely. Could some of the $50 be due to Dell trying to dissuade people from buying it? Also likely. But to claim that running extra product varieties on an existing production line will not increase production costs is just short sighted.
The HD's are likely all imaged with a single Vista image. In order to mass market XP, they will likely have to re-tool slightly to continue producing XP imaged drives in addition to Vista imaged drives. It's not much, but it does add to the labor, and while $50 is a bit steep, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the combination of tooling, labor, and licensing adds up to close to that amount.
I'm not real big on the fishing expedition either, but...
If he does see a few responses that hit on points he is researching, he could attempt to contact those specific people and conduct more traditional interviews. And interviewing industry professionals, last I heard, is an acceptable form of research. Not enough to write a thesis on, but enough to get some more detailed statements than can be quoted and attributed as supporting arguments.
Absolutely, the trick of being able to slide through all of the departments well, and know what and who to avoid is an art form. One company I worked for was extremely politicized. Employees from different departments were all but verboten from communicating with each other. Strategic use of smoke breaks (even as a non-smoker) and the lunch hour a long with training and site inspections did allow for a great deal of opportunities to speak with other employees and power users with out the politically charged mid level management getting in the way.
There are times when more isolation is needed. For instance, if a developer is not actively working on an accounting project, and the accounting project is not of a urgent manner, there is no reason to be dragging your developers off to the accounting department. On the other hand, if your developer is knee deep in an invoicing application and struggling with complex business rules, getting them face time with the accounting department can be critical. In larger organizations, with a more structured IT department, you will likely have a project manager and IT management to help control these situations. In a smaller IT department, you'll have to find a way to balance those demands on your own.
Obviously, as a programmer, you still need to focus on programming. But as a developer in a small IT shop, you'll be wearing a lot more hats than just that of a code monkey.
I would agree with you in large situations with more significant IT departments. But in the small business sector (up to 500 employees) your looking at an internal IT staff of roughly 4-12 people, likely split into Developers and Network/Support, with two or three of the positions being low/mid management (2 technical supervisors and an IT manager who reports to an exec in Accounting or some other non-CIO executive). With the split between Programmers, Network Admins, and General IT/Network Support leaning more heavily to the support side of things.
In these kinds of situations, the person defining the requirements and communicating with all departments is likely going to be the programming side supervisor. The same person who is also likely responsible for scheduling, performance reviews, technical comment in departmental meetings, and is likely in their position as a result of being promoted from a programmer position after 5+ years. This person, while likely very skilled, is also likely the key contact for any number of legacy systems, and is probably so busy that developing a test plan is not even on their radar.
In these small development shops, you are not likely going to be hired on as a 'coder'. You are going to be hired on as a 'developer'. You'll have high ownership of the project from start to finish, meaning you may get specs handed to you, but you will likely have direct contact with the users, and you will be responsible for architecture, design, interfaces, testing, deployment, documentation, and training.
Once you get into a slightly larger IT department, and you have 4+ developers, you'll start to see more specialization and distinction. At 4+ underlings, the supervisor is going to be leaving their technical work behind and focusing almost explicitly on management and communication. But I have yet to see a company under 500 employees run more than 3 developers (with the exception of consultants brought in for very specific jobs). And once you get over 1000 employees, you are more likely to have a CIO to get IT a seat at the grown-up table and an independant process improvement unit that fullfills some of the problem spotting that IT would perform in smaller organizations.
I happened upon this post late, but part of it made me laugh.
"If you're not paying your part to the public, I don't see why I should let you use even a public sidewalk that I helped pay."
You don't get a say. The government gets to say. Ideally there would be no public property. What's to stop me from buying out the roads and property surrounding your house and telling you that you have no permission to trespass on my property. In addition, since the responsibility of private property protection would fall on to the owner and the private police force they contract with, what's to stop me from sitting in front of your house with a loaded gun and waiting for you to get too close to the property line? Heck, even if I don't shoot you, I could just wait for you to die of dehydration or starvation. Your heirs want access to your property? Sure, $10,000 per axle that crosses my property, both ways. I would have to pay the upkeep on my road some how.
Heck, it would be perfectly legal under your 'damn the government and public property' stance.
Obviously, I'm a nice guy, and I wouldn't do such a thing, but personally, I'm fine with paying taxes an knowing that no one would be able to do such a thing to me.
There were no results in your selected language(s). Showing worldwide web results for "The Magical Business Layer".
Web Information No results found for "The Magical Business Layer". Tried it with out the "The" and with out the quotes, I found nothing on the top page to elude to a contrary point of view.
I am curious about your thesis though if you are opposed to data abstraction and an independent business layer. Please, do tell!
I would disagree about insulating coders from the "noise from corporate" in many situations.
If you are doing development for a small organization say, 1-500 employees, you as a programmer, are not likely to have a whole lot of insight into the business rules of some department on the other side of the building. Playing opperator for specs having management relaying messages from the accountant isn't going to help your situation.
IT has a great place as a strategic process improvement center for most companies. Everyone uses IT resources now. Accounting, shipping, sales, collections, lease/loan departments, etc... You, as a programmer, have a chance to see into the life of every department in your organization. You have the oppertunity to see process inefficiencies and recommend improvements. People as a whole, like the path of least resistance. If Jim in sales is used to entering his deals into the company's sales system, then Jill from Accounting prints out the sales report and types it into the accounting software, and finally Sally gets a copy of the bill and packages up the order in the ware house where she enters the information into the inventory system... All of these people will keep doing the exact same dual entry because that's the way they are used to doing it. But being in IT and getting to see these processes, you can see the obvious problems, the likelihood of error, and the wasted time.
But you need to get out of the IT cave and get into action with the other departments.
On the other hand, if you like coding and hate people, you can always get into a code ware house where an absurd number of programmers do naught but code off of specs with no input, no chance to design, no chance to see the larger picture...
To go even further on this path, abstraction and frameworks have improved my code quality and reduced my time to production.
Abstracting code as much as appropriate allows you to reuse a significant portion of your code base. And with designing a framework for your applications that utilize that abstracted functionality to allow for a modular design of the actual business logic will greatly improve almost all projects.
The business layer should have no idea what the database is or how it works.
The presentation layer should have no idea what the business layer is doing or how it works.
We really pushed these principals on a project I worked on a few years ago. We had a reporting system that had to access 3 different databases, 2 3rd-party systems, and interface with business rules over 4 different departments and employees/sales in 3 different states. We created a custom data access layer that handled all of the data-related functionality for us. So in the business layer code, we never had to care about the data source, we had objects that represented the data in memory that all inherited from the same base data object/collection. Each specific report or functionality was based on one of 4 specialized frameworks that handled Crystal Reports, Office automation, work flow, and HTML generation. Each of the frameworks was based off of an even more basic type that handled the underlying multi-threading and work flow of the process. And all of that functionality was designed to be abstracted from the user interface so that we could build a Windows based interface to start with, and as the 3rd party apps gained more flexibility we could directly call our application's business logic and work flow from the other applications.
Anyway, one of the first projects I look at when stepping into a new project or job is to get the abstraction and design cleaned up. There is no sense beating on business logic when the underlying technology is going to cause you more headaches and piss off your users. And once you get that technology straightened out, you can focus on business logic and get the users a product that not only meets their needs, but also meets your needs in support and maintenance requirements.
They don't even need to pass a law to boot us. The UN resolution that allows us to have a military presence in Iraq is going to expire in a few months, and it sounds like the Bush administrations "this isn't a treaty!" treaty has about a snowballs chance of getting through.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. I do not speak or write fluently in any language other than English, and even then, it is hardly with out error.
:(), I would either appologise for the rough translation in the message, or call up one of my more fluent friends and ask them for a hand in composing the letter.
The goal of my statement was not to insult your grammar, but to explain why someone would discredit your request with out a second thought. If I were to send a serious technical or business request to a company in Austria, and I wrote that request in German (of which my language skills are severely lacking from a decade of not being in Germany
If I just sent that poorly written message to a company in Austria with no explaination of my poor use of the language, I wouldn't have very high hopes for them to take it seriously. Especially given the similarity in form between such an email, and one of the generic phishing scams coming out of Nigeria.
Nothing personal against you. When you send an email to a person in a business, that person has existing responsibilities. If your email doesn't strike them as being important enough to bump their regular work load, they will just blow you off. If you had a friend who is more fluent in English help you tune up your message, perhaps Mr Veng would have been more interested in the issue.
-Rick
I'm not even in Sweden (My great-great-grandfather was kicked out for marrying a Norwegian lass), but I think Mr Reinfeldt might like to know about my emails.
All of them.
Every day.
Including system notices.
Sure, my emails aren't that great in number, but what if a couple hundred people were to do such a thing? A couple thousand? Hundreds of thousands?
-Rick
Think of this more like someone took a picture of the screen when you were playing Space Invaders, then used that image as a background for their RTS space domination game.
I think this case could really present itself to be a very interesting legal president. It sure looks like it could fall under fair use and derivative work. The game is vastly different than all of the games that the artwork was taken from. Which would move it into the derivative work direction. Then the question would seem to be, does Bethesda's copyrights extend beyond the actual content of the game and into images taken of the game? If it does, it would imply that distributing screen shots and FRAPS videos with out the game copyright holder's permission would be a violation as well.
And even if that is the finding, they could still argue fair use. If 2 Live Crew can sell a single of Pretty Woman, if Vanila Ice can go platinum while taking a note for note copy of Queen, well, why can't this company use modified screen shots of existing work to develop an entirely new game?
Not sure I entirely like the thought, but I'm not entirely sure I like the alternative either.
-Rick
I would agree whole heartedly with you. Setting up a process up front with the GPL code is the best option. But if you are Joe-Blow the middle manager, and you are not intimately familiar with the GPL, and you get a poorly written email like that, what would you do?
;) How many times have we all harped on our not-so-technical friends and co-workers about clicking on links from unknown senders?
Heck, if it were one of my non-IT coworkers/managers I would hope that they would delete it. Poor grammar/spelling, check. Unknown sender, check. Vague legal threat, check. Link to an unfamiliar domain, check. Must be a phishing email, delete it.
As for promotions based on a person's incompetence, there is a theory to it, the Peter Principle. You'll get some of that everywhere.
-Rick
And 9 days before it got Duped on slashdot.
-Rick
A Dell Optiplex 740n with XP cost $393. In another 3 weeks, that same PC will cost $443 and the Vista version will likely drop to $393 or $403 base.
A Dell Optiplex 740n with FreeDos costs $373 base.
Do you think Dell is licensing XP at $20 a pop? Or could it be that the extra costs of a wider variety of options is distributed across the price of the FreeDos boxes?
-Rick
You know the internet is not limited to the US or English as the mother tongue countries... A bit rusty, I haven't been to Germany or Austria in far too long. Man do I miss the beer, and the ale, and the beer gardens, and the weekend drinking festivals, and the drinking games... Hrm, maybe I shouldn't go back, my liver isn't quite what it used to be.
My initial thought was that Markus was writing ESL, which could very well be. But his grammar is inconsistent. Some times he uses the correct capitalization and grammar, sometimes not. The inconsistencies lead me to believe that he wrote the emails in haste, until the public posts which appear to be more well edited. Had his initial request been written at the same level as his later posts, I would have been more inclined to listen to what he was saying.
-Rick
I don't know if I would say it's reasonable, only that it is realistic. And I wouldn't say it's okay so long as they don't get called out on it. I would say that it is okay to prioritize risk management though.
A single kid making noise? The settlement cost would be less that the bandwidth bill for 6 months, and that is based on a really low likelihood of the kid getting out of his basement and pressing the issue.
A copyright holder with out an attorney? Not the biggest threat on the plate, but definitely something that is on the radar. Might be worth it to have a contingency plan in place so that if this treat grows the organization can deal with it quickly and effectively. No sense in blowing resources unnecessarily though.
A certified letter from an attorney demanding we correct our licensing deficiencies? Time to spin up that contingency plan!
A summons? Those files better be on the website before I have to explain to the CEO why we are being sued!
Again, just to make sure no one is going to confuse me for a GPL abusing bastard, in that case I would have ensured the GPL code was available on the website and have avoided the situation all together. I'm not saying this stuff is right, only that it is realistic, and that you will get a LOT further in the business world by writing respectfully than writing in SMS shorthand.
-Rick
Very true. But out of the hundreds of anonymous threats of action that an organization may field in a month, how are we to identify those that are real threats from those that are just simple saber rattling?
The fastest way to determine threats is to look at the amount of energy someone put into developing their threat. If someone writes a very clear email, with a strong, yet respectful tone, and cites specific license violations, and put some obvious effort into doing so, they are with all likelihood better educated, more motivated, and present a much higher threat to the organization. If someone throws a random pile of characters, words and a link to a license into an email that would make almost any spell checker pop up a message box that says, "Warning, if you send this you will look like an idiot!" it means to me that they aren't willing to spend enough time on the issue to run a spell checker, so they likely aren't willing to spend enough time on the issue to do much else.
If we took threats like Markus' seriously, lawyers would start sending out letters in crayon that read "u bad give $$$" so that they could get back to the golf courses sooner.
To skip to my real problem here... I loathe lawyers. Had Markus not been an idiot and Mr. Vang not been a douche, the lawyers could have been left out of it.
-Rick
Which goes to show: a lawsuit is far more powerful than the saber rattling of an anonymous e-mailer with bad grammar.
Just think, with proper grammar and some respect, Markus might have been able to motivate Mr. Vang to be a bit more interested in meeting the requirements of using GPL code. This whole thing might have been resolved with out lining the pockets of more lawyers.
-Rick
GPL doesn't force me to do anything. What it does do is give the creator of the code that I am using specific powers. Powers that I have agreed to by using their code knowing the license requirements. I can choose not to honor those agreements, and if I do so, the owner can sue.
Some kid threatening to report me because I won't do what he wants isn't a concern. A copyright holder with a lawyer on retainer however IS a concern. Think of how many pissed off customers threaten to sue over any number of issues. Some of those issues are likely even legally sound basis for lawsuits. But compare that complaint volume to the actual number of lawsuits. If organizations responded to every single disorganized threat of action, they would spend more time on legal protection than on development. It's a matter of risk assessment, and reading the initial emails from 'mindbender' I see nothing that would compel me to even respond.
Like I said, me personally, I would have put the GPL code up from the start (I even just had this conversation with my VP of R&D on a number of OS libraries we will likely be using in an upcoming project). I am not saying that it is right to withhold GPL'd code, but it is realistic that Markus was blown off and that the company did nothing until there was actually a threat (the GPL code was posted 2 days after the lawsuits were filed).
-Rick
The myshare source files are made available under various open source code licenses, including the GNU General Public License (GPL). Please review the license terms included with each download for the rights, obligations and restrictions associated with the open source file.
Installation instructions
title / description download posted release notes
Myshare Home v.1 GPL Source Code
47.6 MB 06/11/08
Myshare Home v.2 GPL Source Code
158.1 06/11/08
Myshare Office v.2 GPL Source Code
220.8 MB 06/11/08 Looks like they just got them up last week (apparently 5 months after the GPL-Violations post).
-Rick
If someone sent me a demand for code in poor grammar with some cheesy pseudonym, I would probably blow them off as well.
Now maybe if Markus has written a halfway compelling email, he would have received a more informative response. But when you send a jumble of words that fails to reach the 6th grade reading level to someone who has other priorities, it shouldn't come as a surprise that you get blown off.
Of course, if I were distributing a project based in part on GPL code, I would make darn sure to have the GPL'd code available for people to download with out hassling me or the engineers.
-Rick
I appreciate your sarcasm, but have you ever run a low overhead high efficiency production line?
If you have exactly the right amount of resources to distribute Vista as per your current plan, where are you going to get the resources to distribute XP? Sure, maybe it's 1 extra man-hour a day to get the installs done, or to swap bins and output trays for pre-loaded XP hard drives. But that's 1 hour of labor that you have to pay for only because you are offering XP. 1 hour could be $20 payment for a union factory worker with seniority. Figure another $10 in taxes, SS, UE, etc on top of that, $4 to the health care plan, and another $1 to the retirement plan. You've just paid an extra $35 for 1 hour of labor.
Now you also need to update your sales catalog to reflect the new availability and pricing.
Update you web site to include the configuration option.
Update your marketing material to let consumers know they have the choice.
Update your support documentation so that your Tier 1 script readers know to ask "Do you have Windows XP or Vista?"
Duplicate your warehouse and distribution organization to handle identical models of PCs and laptops with both OS's.
Continuously review production and sales data to determine if you need to increase, decrease, or suspend production of XP PC/Laptops.
etc...
And, if what another commenter has mentioned is true, about Dell no longer having distribution rights to XP to allow them to use pre-loaded HD's, you are looking at having to pay the labor to have each and every laptop loaded manually.
So yeah, it costs a bit extra for them to offer it. Could part of the $50 be due to MS trying to push them away from the selling it? Likely. Could some of the $50 be due to Dell trying to dissuade people from buying it? Also likely. But to claim that running extra product varieties on an existing production line will not increase production costs is just short sighted.
-Rick
The HD's are likely all imaged with a single Vista image. In order to mass market XP, they will likely have to re-tool slightly to continue producing XP imaged drives in addition to Vista imaged drives. It's not much, but it does add to the labor, and while $50 is a bit steep, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the combination of tooling, labor, and licensing adds up to close to that amount.
-Rick
I'm not real big on the fishing expedition either, but...
If he does see a few responses that hit on points he is researching, he could attempt to contact those specific people and conduct more traditional interviews. And interviewing industry professionals, last I heard, is an acceptable form of research. Not enough to write a thesis on, but enough to get some more detailed statements than can be quoted and attributed as supporting arguments.
-Rick
Absolutely, the trick of being able to slide through all of the departments well, and know what and who to avoid is an art form. One company I worked for was extremely politicized. Employees from different departments were all but verboten from communicating with each other. Strategic use of smoke breaks (even as a non-smoker) and the lunch hour a long with training and site inspections did allow for a great deal of opportunities to speak with other employees and power users with out the politically charged mid level management getting in the way.
There are times when more isolation is needed. For instance, if a developer is not actively working on an accounting project, and the accounting project is not of a urgent manner, there is no reason to be dragging your developers off to the accounting department. On the other hand, if your developer is knee deep in an invoicing application and struggling with complex business rules, getting them face time with the accounting department can be critical. In larger organizations, with a more structured IT department, you will likely have a project manager and IT management to help control these situations. In a smaller IT department, you'll have to find a way to balance those demands on your own.
Obviously, as a programmer, you still need to focus on programming. But as a developer in a small IT shop, you'll be wearing a lot more hats than just that of a code monkey.
-Rick
I would agree with you in large situations with more significant IT departments. But in the small business sector (up to 500 employees) your looking at an internal IT staff of roughly 4-12 people, likely split into Developers and Network/Support, with two or three of the positions being low/mid management (2 technical supervisors and an IT manager who reports to an exec in Accounting or some other non-CIO executive). With the split between Programmers, Network Admins, and General IT/Network Support leaning more heavily to the support side of things.
In these kinds of situations, the person defining the requirements and communicating with all departments is likely going to be the programming side supervisor. The same person who is also likely responsible for scheduling, performance reviews, technical comment in departmental meetings, and is likely in their position as a result of being promoted from a programmer position after 5+ years. This person, while likely very skilled, is also likely the key contact for any number of legacy systems, and is probably so busy that developing a test plan is not even on their radar.
In these small development shops, you are not likely going to be hired on as a 'coder'. You are going to be hired on as a 'developer'. You'll have high ownership of the project from start to finish, meaning you may get specs handed to you, but you will likely have direct contact with the users, and you will be responsible for architecture, design, interfaces, testing, deployment, documentation, and training.
Once you get into a slightly larger IT department, and you have 4+ developers, you'll start to see more specialization and distinction. At 4+ underlings, the supervisor is going to be leaving their technical work behind and focusing almost explicitly on management and communication. But I have yet to see a company under 500 employees run more than 3 developers (with the exception of consultants brought in for very specific jobs). And once you get over 1000 employees, you are more likely to have a CIO to get IT a seat at the grown-up table and an independant process improvement unit that fullfills some of the problem spotting that IT would perform in smaller organizations.
-Rick
You don't get a say. The government gets to say. Ideally there would be no public property. What's to stop me from buying out the roads and property surrounding your house and telling you that you have no permission to trespass on my property. In addition, since the responsibility of private property protection would fall on to the owner and the private police force they contract with, what's to stop me from sitting in front of your house with a loaded gun and waiting for you to get too close to the property line? Heck, even if I don't shoot you, I could just wait for you to die of dehydration or starvation. Your heirs want access to your property? Sure, $10,000 per axle that crosses my property, both ways. I would have to pay the upkeep on my road some how.
Heck, it would be perfectly legal under your 'damn the government and public property' stance.
Obviously, I'm a nice guy, and I wouldn't do such a thing, but personally, I'm fine with paying taxes an knowing that no one would be able to do such a thing to me.
-Rick
Web
Information No results found for "The Magical Business Layer". Tried it with out the "The" and with out the quotes, I found nothing on the top page to elude to a contrary point of view.
I am curious about your thesis though if you are opposed to data abstraction and an independent business layer. Please, do tell!
-Rick
I would disagree about insulating coders from the "noise from corporate" in many situations.
If you are doing development for a small organization say, 1-500 employees, you as a programmer, are not likely to have a whole lot of insight into the business rules of some department on the other side of the building. Playing opperator for specs having management relaying messages from the accountant isn't going to help your situation.
IT has a great place as a strategic process improvement center for most companies. Everyone uses IT resources now. Accounting, shipping, sales, collections, lease/loan departments, etc... You, as a programmer, have a chance to see into the life of every department in your organization. You have the oppertunity to see process inefficiencies and recommend improvements. People as a whole, like the path of least resistance. If Jim in sales is used to entering his deals into the company's sales system, then Jill from Accounting prints out the sales report and types it into the accounting software, and finally Sally gets a copy of the bill and packages up the order in the ware house where she enters the information into the inventory system... All of these people will keep doing the exact same dual entry because that's the way they are used to doing it. But being in IT and getting to see these processes, you can see the obvious problems, the likelihood of error, and the wasted time.
But you need to get out of the IT cave and get into action with the other departments.
On the other hand, if you like coding and hate people, you can always get into a code ware house where an absurd number of programmers do naught but code off of specs with no input, no chance to design, no chance to see the larger picture...
-Rick
To go even further on this path, abstraction and frameworks have improved my code quality and reduced my time to production.
Abstracting code as much as appropriate allows you to reuse a significant portion of your code base. And with designing a framework for your applications that utilize that abstracted functionality to allow for a modular design of the actual business logic will greatly improve almost all projects.
The business layer should have no idea what the database is or how it works.
The presentation layer should have no idea what the business layer is doing or how it works.
We really pushed these principals on a project I worked on a few years ago. We had a reporting system that had to access 3 different databases, 2 3rd-party systems, and interface with business rules over 4 different departments and employees/sales in 3 different states. We created a custom data access layer that handled all of the data-related functionality for us. So in the business layer code, we never had to care about the data source, we had objects that represented the data in memory that all inherited from the same base data object/collection. Each specific report or functionality was based on one of 4 specialized frameworks that handled Crystal Reports, Office automation, work flow, and HTML generation. Each of the frameworks was based off of an even more basic type that handled the underlying multi-threading and work flow of the process. And all of that functionality was designed to be abstracted from the user interface so that we could build a Windows based interface to start with, and as the 3rd party apps gained more flexibility we could directly call our application's business logic and work flow from the other applications.
Anyway, one of the first projects I look at when stepping into a new project or job is to get the abstraction and design cleaned up. There is no sense beating on business logic when the underlying technology is going to cause you more headaches and piss off your users. And once you get that technology straightened out, you can focus on business logic and get the users a product that not only meets their needs, but also meets your needs in support and maintenance requirements.
-Rick
Nope, just 1 for a power indicator. http://ringdev.com/images/NewPC3.JPG
-Rick
Who the hell left colored drop lights laying all over the server room!?
-Rick
They don't even need to pass a law to boot us. The UN resolution that allows us to have a military presence in Iraq is going to expire in a few months, and it sounds like the Bush administrations "this isn't a treaty!" treaty has about a snowballs chance of getting through.
-Rick