All these analyst opinions seem to be based around repeating the common mantra that soon enough, digital downloads will overtake whatever disc based format and therefore Blu-Ray will not be profitable. This is rubbish.
1) More people can see a difference between the quality of download films vs bought media (DVD or Blu-Ray), compared to audio. This means to become mainstream, downloaded films are going to have to close that quality gap. Doing that will require more bandwidth and storage space than is currently available.
2) Even now, download audio is not anywhere near the mainstream option - CDs still sell far higher numbers.
3) Films don't have the casually listen and flick between tracks aspect that music does. The big selling point of MP3 players is storing multiple albums and jumping between whatever tracks you want to listen to right now. Watching a movie is a 2 hour investment of time - you can't watch 5 minutes of Bourne Identity, then decide you'd like a comedy and watch 5 minutes of Knocked Up.
4) Lots of people who don't use MP3 players simply prefer the simplicity of putting in a CD. The benefits of MP3 are outweighed by the complexity of even the relatively easy to use PC + iTunes. These people will only very slowly switch to downloaded media.
I should say at this point I have invested about £1500 in a media centre and have all my films ripped to a server. The server has lots of hard discs, makes lots of noise and so can't go in the living room, meaning I need two PCs and a network.
I do believe when someone makes is easy enough to do something similar to my setup, downloads will become mainstream. But I also believe it will be well over 10 years before the average Joe believes it is easy enough to do a media centre setup instead of just buying Blu-Rays.
Remember Scrabble is old enough now that everything has fallen into public domain, with the exception of the name which is trademarked and does expire unless it stops being used. I'm not sure of copyright lengths in India but I'd be surprised if its longer than 70 years.
I'd have thought all that can be done is to stop them using the name Scrabulous.
For your Starcraft example the game and the content are all copyright protected. The name is trademarked but that is the only similarity.
I think you are muddling things up here. There is a lot more to making money than having an idea and a lot more to having a sellable product than just having a product. Just looking at the Cittio website, their own product is based on dozens of open source components, most of which are fairly major pieces of work. Cittio has taken the extra step of building them all together and putting on nice front ends that allows someone to do a task easily. They have made something that people are willing to pay money for. They have also no doubt invested money in marketing and selling the end result, and providing support and guarantees to their customers.
Isn't the idea that an idea is worth a lot of money exactly why we all get so riled up about patent trolls?
During the day I develop commercial software - sometimes I make use of LGPL / BSD licenced software. I'm reasonably good at this and am paid more than I need to get by. When I have the spare time and inclination I also contribute to open source software. I don't feel any need to be paid for this as I am already benefitting from other free software, and I hope other developers benefit from my own freely provided work. If someone can make money off it, good for them.
Very strange. I picked up an old Sony 15" Trinitron monitor about 7 years ago. It was the best quality small screen I ever saw. Substantially better than my Belinea 19" monitor I bought a year before that. The text was vastly sharper and the colour much better. Despite the size difference, the sharpness meant it would more easily display any given resolution. Around the same time I actually bought a cheap 17" CTX monitor for my parents. Because of their eyesight, they preferred the bigger screen, but in my opinion the Sony was much better.
One of my mates bought a 24" widescreen Trinitron, and until I got my Dell 3007WFP, it had been the best monitor I had ever seen.
Just being a little pedantic, you're mentioning vertical monopolies here when really you're just talking about businesses entering vertical markets. Most typically companies do this to avoid monopolisation as hinted at in the rest of your post.
The analogy with transport is missing certain interesting points. Transport for a time depended on railroads which were very closely controlled, i.e. you can't just buy a train and drive about - you've got to arrange and pay for your routes and times. Today, transport is more about roads, and a major reason is that you can just buy a truck and set off. I think the internet currently is still at the railroad stage - things like municipal and community wifi are the start of the transition towards roads.
Right, I've covered trucks, it's also like a series of tubes...
I think none of that is important. Most of the people we hire don't have a CS / IT degree anyway and don't know most of the things you mentioned. I'm one of the exceptions but I rarely use a lot of things I know.
For 99% of things, the complexity class of a problem is irrelevant. Its the design up at higher levels that makes the real difference. Getting the design right / fixing it is something that masses of technical knowledge won't really tell you how to do. I'd like to see more use of design patterns, but I find people from (real) engineering backgrounds do this better and more than trained programmers anyway - the idea of using a well tested idea / component when available is more ingrained in that discipline.
Occasionally we do find something not working too well and have to get real programmers in to sort things out, but its quite rare in my experience that specific technical knowledge fixes something that more general logical and practical thinking can not.
The place I work has some top people working there. It also had one of the strangest interviews I ever did. I was barely asked about programming or anything related to my job. Just pointed to an engineering diagram of a chemical plant and asked how I'd tackle it. I'd never done chemistry and didn't understand the diagram, so I figured I was probably failing the interview. Another poster mentioned the difference between top grade programmers, and the real superstars that actually get things done. I think this was the type of question that was really aimed at separating those types of people. It was a question you didn't have to get 'right' - it was just to find out what you'd do to figure out how to figure out the answer.
Looking for a job straight out of uni, I did a lot of interviews heavy on the technical side. Looking back, I'm not sure what the point was. They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree. The major difference between programming academically vs industry always seems to me to be that in industry you're programming for users other than yourself. In most academic situations you've got fairly clear user requirements of what the software must do. Most of the work I have done since then has begun with vague ideas about what the system needs to accomplish. Getting from there to coding a system that meets the requirements is very much like that question in the interview - 'how would you tackle it?'.
Any technical questions will allow any good programmer to just fall back into answers they know. You'll be swamped with applicants who look good but are only mediocre.
Fantastic. We can now do conversions from a number of bytes to a value of money. Unfortunately an LOC converts to much less money than I'd hoped for. By that conversion rate I've barely done a cent of work today:(
Huh?!? Both types of disc can in theory be made with more layers. Both standards for discs and players supported single or dual layer. Blu-Ray has 40% higher capacity. I think Toshiba pulled a bit of a PR stunt with their 3 layer 51GB disc, just trumping Blu-Ray's 50GB, but didn't TDK just turn around and produce an 8-layer prototype supporting 200GB?
On which point, for all the Sony-haters out there it is worth remembering that this isn't Sony's format, although they were a major contributor. TDK at least provided several key technologies without which the format isn't possible, and I'm sure the other members also had significant input. Blu-Ray is way less proprietary than HD-DVD.
Also it's fairly open java-based interactive system always seemed like a much better alternative to HD-DVDs Microsoft-based system.
What I was talking about here was kettles, and instant coffee. Not sure what the US is like for instant coffee, but it's pretty common in the UK, where more people drink tea anyway. With a kettle the water is poured at nearly boiling point into the cup, quick stir and served there and then. For black instant coffee the serving temp would be well over 90 C. I've managed to splash the boiling water onto my hands and I can believe if I accidentally poured the water onto somewhere more sensitive I'd end up with very bad burns.
For real coffee, admittedly it shouldn't get as hot because the coffee gets burnt above 90C, and the temperature for coffee from a home coffee maker will be substantially lower. I've had coffee from both McDonalds and Starbucks and both places burn it so badly I don't buy from them any more. But I've never found the coffee to be any hotter than instant coffee made in a kettle at home.
Fact 0: Regardless of whatever temperature other places serve coffee, everyone who has a kettle at home makes tea and coffee at just under 100 C. It's just not possible for McDonalds to server coffee significantly hotter than it would be at home.
Despite the litigation culture, most people accept that spilling your coffee is *your* accident - unless they've served boiling hot coffee to a 3 year old, it's an unfortunate accident for which no one should be liable.
I've been having a couple of problems recently when some sites are doing load balancing by redirecting me to an IP address directly rather than a named address which is making whitelisting them tricky. But like you, I just can't imagine browsing without adblock and noscript. The web looks a pile of **** in IE these days.
Why is there such an overwhelmingly negative vibe here with all this stuff. I think that there are clearly a few litigious companies around and if you're unlucky enough to work for one, you could have problems. However most companies are actually pretty decent. They are mostly run by people who are pretty recognisably human beings. Most issues can be worked through in good faith.
The code being open sourced does not have to compete with the author's company's business. A majority of code is really infrastructure, particularly things you might want to open source. It sounds like in this example it's a module that been re-envisioned and swapped out for a different implementation. That sounds like a piece of background code that isn't by itself about to morph into a competitor product. It would be generic-ish code and suitable for many purposes.
Your argument is aimed at the wrong post here. This is a decent argument when talking about the filesharing type of piracy - people downloading stuff they weren't going to buy anyway. There's no realistic loss from this.
However, the article and comment are both talking about professional piracy - burning discs and printing manuals and shrinkwrapping in boxes that purport to be the real things. When someone honest goes and buys one of those, $60 that was heading to MS is snatched away. The fact the money never got as far as their bank account doesn't make a lot of difference - it would have got there if not for the piracy.
Even the slashdot crowd mostly condemn this sort of piracy.
At work I've been forced to upgrade to Vista after a hardware crash. With my old PC, I replaced the crashed hard disc and installed Ubuntu. I now have the two machines switchable via KVM. I've been using Vista day-to-day for quite a few months now and it doesn't improve when you're used to it.
In theory, the Ubuntu machine is mainly a server running Apache / MySQL / Oracle / FTP etc. to keep my main work PC clean and quick. For a lot of purposes though, the 5 year old Ubuntu machine (1.6GHz P4, 512MB, Intel 815 graphics) is still more responsive than the newish dual core Vista machine (Dual Core 2.2GHz, 4GB, NF6100? integrated graphics).
Not only is it more responsive, but most jobs can be done with a lot fewer clicks. The primary annoyance for me with Vista is that MS appear to have tried to simplify all their screens to look more like Apple. Apple have clearly spent a lot of time working out the use-cases and managed a simple screen with all the common settings ready and waiting just a click away. Ubuntu has the settings you want the same number of clicks away but the screens are more complex with more options. Its easy enough for me but I think most users would prefer OS X here.
Vista is just a nightmare - changing any setting I'd ever want to change is a big job requiring lots more clicking and searching than it should. Worst of all is networking. Almost every decision in how to change the dialogs from how they were in XP is just completely inexplicable. The networking dialogs are just atrocious - it's really genuinely hard to understand how bad they are given that XP was kinda OK.
With the possible exception of the phones sold in Apple stores, just how do you believe Apple knows when an iPhone is sold to a customer? All manufacturers talk about sales of items sold to stores. Apple might actually be able to get customer sales for the iPhone due to exclusivity contracts, but for iPods, they're sold everywhere. The shops that sell them are under no obligation to tell Apple when they've sold their stock.
Even most people in the countries (country?) who supported USA didn't believe the link - at least in the UK for the people I know. And given the 'Sorry, World' apology from the US, I'd guess the situation was pretty similar even there. But I guess most of us don't get the same sort of say as big oil in these matters.
Lenovo do have some nicer looking laptops with glossy coatings everywhere. One thing I've noticed though, is that the Lenovo / IBM look is a very durable look. The nearly black, matte mottled surface doesn't show fingerprints, scratches or grime and the plastic is the same colour underneath the surface.
My laptop is about a year old and only travels occasionally. It looks great except for all the scratches, discolouration, chips etc. Unless you always store your laptop in a padded laptop bag, in a separate compartment from the power adaptor and other accessories it will only stay pretty a few months.
You can just throw a Lenovo in the boot every day and a couple years later it will come out looking the same - see your comment above:)
Also compiling or running with the debugger in some cases initialises variables that otherwise are uninitialised etc. Unfortunately it is often the most horrible bugs to find the root cause of where a debugger is no help.
I agree that's a project manager job. However the programmers must also understand the boundaries and expectations and be willing to argue points with the project manager or client. It's possible to write wonderful code that doesn't do what is being asked of it. They should also understand that occasionally they will just have to make the best job they can of implementing something less than ideal, because that's what is being demanded. I've worked with very technical people who've written thousands of lines of great code that just didn't do anything. I've also myself spent ages coding a stupid overcomplicated design just as was ordered.
Currently I'm working as a technical lead and trying to get to grips with the balance of supplying what is ordered while also trying to improve the design of what was sold. There is interaction with the client and/or project manager in trying to explain why feature X doesn't work too well once you get into the details, and how we should do it instead. Since I'm essentially a techie geek this part of the job seems trickier than the programming. However in terms of operating a profitable business, I'm also forced to admit this project management type work is at least as important as pure programming.
Slashdot Mirror
All these analyst opinions seem to be based around repeating the common mantra that soon enough, digital downloads will overtake whatever disc based format and therefore Blu-Ray will not be profitable. This is rubbish.
1) More people can see a difference between the quality of download films vs bought media (DVD or Blu-Ray), compared to audio. This means to become mainstream, downloaded films are going to have to close that quality gap. Doing that will require more bandwidth and storage space than is currently available.
2) Even now, download audio is not anywhere near the mainstream option - CDs still sell far higher numbers.
3) Films don't have the casually listen and flick between tracks aspect that music does. The big selling point of MP3 players is storing multiple albums and jumping between whatever tracks you want to listen to right now. Watching a movie is a 2 hour investment of time - you can't watch 5 minutes of Bourne Identity, then decide you'd like a comedy and watch 5 minutes of Knocked Up.
4) Lots of people who don't use MP3 players simply prefer the simplicity of putting in a CD. The benefits of MP3 are outweighed by the complexity of even the relatively easy to use PC + iTunes. These people will only very slowly switch to downloaded media.
I should say at this point I have invested about £1500 in a media centre and have all my films ripped to a server. The server has lots of hard discs, makes lots of noise and so can't go in the living room, meaning I need two PCs and a network.
I do believe when someone makes is easy enough to do something similar to my setup, downloads will become mainstream. But I also believe it will be well over 10 years before the average Joe believes it is easy enough to do a media centre setup instead of just buying Blu-Rays.
Remember Scrabble is old enough now that everything has fallen into public domain, with the exception of the name which is trademarked and does expire unless it stops being used. I'm not sure of copyright lengths in India but I'd be surprised if its longer than 70 years. I'd have thought all that can be done is to stop them using the name Scrabulous. For your Starcraft example the game and the content are all copyright protected. The name is trademarked but that is the only similarity.
I think you are muddling things up here. There is a lot more to making money than having an idea and a lot more to having a sellable product than just having a product. Just looking at the Cittio website, their own product is based on dozens of open source components, most of which are fairly major pieces of work. Cittio has taken the extra step of building them all together and putting on nice front ends that allows someone to do a task easily. They have made something that people are willing to pay money for. They have also no doubt invested money in marketing and selling the end result, and providing support and guarantees to their customers.
Isn't the idea that an idea is worth a lot of money exactly why we all get so riled up about patent trolls?
During the day I develop commercial software - sometimes I make use of LGPL / BSD licenced software. I'm reasonably good at this and am paid more than I need to get by. When I have the spare time and inclination I also contribute to open source software. I don't feel any need to be paid for this as I am already benefitting from other free software, and I hope other developers benefit from my own freely provided work. If someone can make money off it, good for them.
Very strange. I picked up an old Sony 15" Trinitron monitor about 7 years ago. It was the best quality small screen I ever saw. Substantially better than my Belinea 19" monitor I bought a year before that. The text was vastly sharper and the colour much better. Despite the size difference, the sharpness meant it would more easily display any given resolution. Around the same time I actually bought a cheap 17" CTX monitor for my parents. Because of their eyesight, they preferred the bigger screen, but in my opinion the Sony was much better.
One of my mates bought a 24" widescreen Trinitron, and until I got my Dell 3007WFP, it had been the best monitor I had ever seen.
Just being a little pedantic, you're mentioning vertical monopolies here when really you're just talking about businesses entering vertical markets. Most typically companies do this to avoid monopolisation as hinted at in the rest of your post.
The analogy with transport is missing certain interesting points. Transport for a time depended on railroads which were very closely controlled, i.e. you can't just buy a train and drive about - you've got to arrange and pay for your routes and times. Today, transport is more about roads, and a major reason is that you can just buy a truck and set off. I think the internet currently is still at the railroad stage - things like municipal and community wifi are the start of the transition towards roads.
Right, I've covered trucks, it's also like a series of tubes...
Its already patented. That's the problem!
I think none of that is important. Most of the people we hire don't have a CS / IT degree anyway and don't know most of the things you mentioned. I'm one of the exceptions but I rarely use a lot of things I know.
For 99% of things, the complexity class of a problem is irrelevant. Its the design up at higher levels that makes the real difference. Getting the design right / fixing it is something that masses of technical knowledge won't really tell you how to do. I'd like to see more use of design patterns, but I find people from (real) engineering backgrounds do this better and more than trained programmers anyway - the idea of using a well tested idea / component when available is more ingrained in that discipline.
Occasionally we do find something not working too well and have to get real programmers in to sort things out, but its quite rare in my experience that specific technical knowledge fixes something that more general logical and practical thinking can not.
The place I work has some top people working there. It also had one of the strangest interviews I ever did. I was barely asked about programming or anything related to my job. Just pointed to an engineering diagram of a chemical plant and asked how I'd tackle it. I'd never done chemistry and didn't understand the diagram, so I figured I was probably failing the interview. Another poster mentioned the difference between top grade programmers, and the real superstars that actually get things done. I think this was the type of question that was really aimed at separating those types of people. It was a question you didn't have to get 'right' - it was just to find out what you'd do to figure out how to figure out the answer.
Looking for a job straight out of uni, I did a lot of interviews heavy on the technical side. Looking back, I'm not sure what the point was. They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree. The major difference between programming academically vs industry always seems to me to be that in industry you're programming for users other than yourself. In most academic situations you've got fairly clear user requirements of what the software must do. Most of the work I have done since then has begun with vague ideas about what the system needs to accomplish. Getting from there to coding a system that meets the requirements is very much like that question in the interview - 'how would you tackle it?'.
Any technical questions will allow any good programmer to just fall back into answers they know. You'll be swamped with applicants who look good but are only mediocre.
Fantastic. We can now do conversions from a number of bytes to a value of money. Unfortunately an LOC converts to much less money than I'd hoped for. By that conversion rate I've barely done a cent of work today :(
> HDDVD also had a path to higher capacities
Huh?!? Both types of disc can in theory be made with more layers. Both standards for discs and players supported single or dual layer. Blu-Ray has 40% higher capacity. I think Toshiba pulled a bit of a PR stunt with their 3 layer 51GB disc, just trumping Blu-Ray's 50GB, but didn't TDK just turn around and produce an 8-layer prototype supporting 200GB?
On which point, for all the Sony-haters out there it is worth remembering that this isn't Sony's format, although they were a major contributor. TDK at least provided several key technologies without which the format isn't possible, and I'm sure the other members also had significant input. Blu-Ray is way less proprietary than HD-DVD.
Also it's fairly open java-based interactive system always seemed like a much better alternative to HD-DVDs Microsoft-based system.
Workaround: swap the hard disc?
I'd assume on reboot the plan is to not reboot the installed OS but probably to boot up a basic OS from a CD that gives free access to all the memory.
What I was talking about here was kettles, and instant coffee. Not sure what the US is like for instant coffee, but it's pretty common in the UK, where more people drink tea anyway. With a kettle the water is poured at nearly boiling point into the cup, quick stir and served there and then. For black instant coffee the serving temp would be well over 90 C. I've managed to splash the boiling water onto my hands and I can believe if I accidentally poured the water onto somewhere more sensitive I'd end up with very bad burns.
For real coffee, admittedly it shouldn't get as hot because the coffee gets burnt above 90C, and the temperature for coffee from a home coffee maker will be substantially lower. I've had coffee from both McDonalds and Starbucks and both places burn it so badly I don't buy from them any more. But I've never found the coffee to be any hotter than instant coffee made in a kettle at home.
Great pic! Took a long time to load - how often does a link in a slashdot comment manage to slashdot a website?
Fact 0: Regardless of whatever temperature other places serve coffee, everyone who has a kettle at home makes tea and coffee at just under 100 C. It's just not possible for McDonalds to server coffee significantly hotter than it would be at home.
Despite the litigation culture, most people accept that spilling your coffee is *your* accident - unless they've served boiling hot coffee to a 3 year old, it's an unfortunate accident for which no one should be liable.
I've been having a couple of problems recently when some sites are doing load balancing by redirecting me to an IP address directly rather than a named address which is making whitelisting them tricky. But like you, I just can't imagine browsing without adblock and noscript. The web looks a pile of **** in IE these days.
Wow.
Why is there such an overwhelmingly negative vibe here with all this stuff. I think that there are clearly a few litigious companies around and if you're unlucky enough to work for one, you could have problems. However most companies are actually pretty decent. They are mostly run by people who are pretty recognisably human beings. Most issues can be worked through in good faith.
The code being open sourced does not have to compete with the author's company's business. A majority of code is really infrastructure, particularly things you might want to open source. It sounds like in this example it's a module that been re-envisioned and swapped out for a different implementation. That sounds like a piece of background code that isn't by itself about to morph into a competitor product. It would be generic-ish code and suitable for many purposes.
Your argument is aimed at the wrong post here. This is a decent argument when talking about the filesharing type of piracy - people downloading stuff they weren't going to buy anyway. There's no realistic loss from this.
However, the article and comment are both talking about professional piracy - burning discs and printing manuals and shrinkwrapping in boxes that purport to be the real things. When someone honest goes and buys one of those, $60 that was heading to MS is snatched away. The fact the money never got as far as their bank account doesn't make a lot of difference - it would have got there if not for the piracy.
Even the slashdot crowd mostly condemn this sort of piracy.
At work I've been forced to upgrade to Vista after a hardware crash. With my old PC, I replaced the crashed hard disc and installed Ubuntu. I now have the two machines switchable via KVM. I've been using Vista day-to-day for quite a few months now and it doesn't improve when you're used to it.
In theory, the Ubuntu machine is mainly a server running Apache / MySQL / Oracle / FTP etc. to keep my main work PC clean and quick. For a lot of purposes though, the 5 year old Ubuntu machine (1.6GHz P4, 512MB, Intel 815 graphics) is still more responsive than the newish dual core Vista machine (Dual Core 2.2GHz, 4GB, NF6100? integrated graphics).
Not only is it more responsive, but most jobs can be done with a lot fewer clicks. The primary annoyance for me with Vista is that MS appear to have tried to simplify all their screens to look more like Apple. Apple have clearly spent a lot of time working out the use-cases and managed a simple screen with all the common settings ready and waiting just a click away. Ubuntu has the settings you want the same number of clicks away but the screens are more complex with more options. Its easy enough for me but I think most users would prefer OS X here.
Vista is just a nightmare - changing any setting I'd ever want to change is a big job requiring lots more clicking and searching than it should. Worst of all is networking. Almost every decision in how to change the dialogs from how they were in XP is just completely inexplicable. The networking dialogs are just atrocious - it's really genuinely hard to understand how bad they are given that XP was kinda OK.
What a weird use for wireless communication - why wouldn't a wire do a better cheaper job?
With the possible exception of the phones sold in Apple stores, just how do you believe Apple knows when an iPhone is sold to a customer? All manufacturers talk about sales of items sold to stores. Apple might actually be able to get customer sales for the iPhone due to exclusivity contracts, but for iPods, they're sold everywhere. The shops that sell them are under no obligation to tell Apple when they've sold their stock.
Even most people in the countries (country?) who supported USA didn't believe the link - at least in the UK for the people I know. And given the 'Sorry, World' apology from the US, I'd guess the situation was pretty similar even there. But I guess most of us don't get the same sort of say as big oil in these matters.
Lenovo do have some nicer looking laptops with glossy coatings everywhere. One thing I've noticed though, is that the Lenovo / IBM look is a very durable look. The nearly black, matte mottled surface doesn't show fingerprints, scratches or grime and the plastic is the same colour underneath the surface.
:)
My laptop is about a year old and only travels occasionally. It looks great except for all the scratches, discolouration, chips etc. Unless you always store your laptop in a padded laptop bag, in a separate compartment from the power adaptor and other accessories it will only stay pretty a few months.
You can just throw a Lenovo in the boot every day and a couple years later it will come out looking the same - see your comment above
Also compiling or running with the debugger in some cases initialises variables that otherwise are uninitialised etc. Unfortunately it is often the most horrible bugs to find the root cause of where a debugger is no help.
I agree that's a project manager job. However the programmers must also understand the boundaries and expectations and be willing to argue points with the project manager or client. It's possible to write wonderful code that doesn't do what is being asked of it. They should also understand that occasionally they will just have to make the best job they can of implementing something less than ideal, because that's what is being demanded. I've worked with very technical people who've written thousands of lines of great code that just didn't do anything. I've also myself spent ages coding a stupid overcomplicated design just as was ordered.
Currently I'm working as a technical lead and trying to get to grips with the balance of supplying what is ordered while also trying to improve the design of what was sold. There is interaction with the client and/or project manager in trying to explain why feature X doesn't work too well once you get into the details, and how we should do it instead. Since I'm essentially a techie geek this part of the job seems trickier than the programming. However in terms of operating a profitable business, I'm also forced to admit this project management type work is at least as important as pure programming.