Big, stupid, and makes life miserable for geeks.
We despise its success, but that doesn't change the fact.
Much to our chagrin, the smartest candidate often loses out to the more boring, popular, and simpleminded one.
I predict that the cool-factor of this movie will largely depend on what technologies they choose to showcase.
One of the reasons why the original was so good was because, except for the super-intelligent AI computer, nearly all of the technology they used was reflective of actual technology that was common at the time. The kid's school had an old-fashioned mainframe. At home, he had a state-of-the-art IMSAI with an honest-to-god acoustic coupler modem. And were those 8" floppy drives that I saw in the background? You bet they were.
Compare and contrast that with movies like The Lawnmower Man which portray computer networks as virtual reality mazes and crap.
- If a worker offer a lower labor cost it's a gift to the american economy. The goods will be cheaper, the consumer will save money, invest in other sectors etc..
Yes, but what good are "cheap goods" when you don't have any money to buy them with?
It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
Umm, no. They probably don't want to engage in this debate because what you suggest as a "solution" is cold and heartless, and to answer it with silence is all they can do to prevent themselves from shouting at you.
Your "solution" presupposes that the only beings who need to survive on this planet are rich humans. What about the plants and animals? Y'know, other then the ones we eat? And what about the coastal countries where they don't have the money to build flood walls and run massive air conditioning installations?
Since you're such a fan of economics, I suggest that you crack open your econ textbook and review a chapter that it appears you missed on your first time through - the one on externalities.
Java was supposed to be "write once, run anywhere," but wound up being "write once, debug anywhere." It never lived up to its multiplatform reputation.
Even if it had delivered in this respect, I don't really think it would have mattered. (And I know that this is going to earn me some enmity from some of you, but I don't really care.) The fact is that nobody really cares that much about cross-platform compatibility. It's the sort of thing that geeks get excited about, but most people in the real world could care less about. Most people choose their computer to be task-specific. Whatever kind of software you make, chances are that most of your customers will use a single platform, and the rest are just not numerous enough to spend a lot of time worrying about.
HAH! I used to know a coder who was hooked on Adderall. He *loved* the stuff. He would go on and on about how it helped him to get in "the zone," and gave him a new understanding of programming. Guess what? He was one of the worst programmers I've ever known. Definitely had the thing where he would get so into what he was doing that he wouldn't realize that he was doing the completely wrong thing. The guy had absolutely no ability to jump scope. Incidentally, I've seen that tendency in every sort of speed freak I've ever known.
On top of it all, he was a totally grouchy asshole. What a guy!
Let's face it, Microsoft's documentation is crap. Their MSDN pages are worst then crap - they're misleading. The searching function will often point you some random topic like Windows Mobile when you're looking for something related to SQL Server. On top of that, the pages themselves often read like VCR instructions. And example code? Fuhgettaboutit.
This could be a step in the right direction, though. I've found various forums to be helpful, mostly because of the MVP system. For those who are not MS developers, MVPs are people in the industry who MS hooks up with various perks in exchange for them answering questions on forums. On a lot of MS forums, 80% of the questions are answered by 2% of the user base. These people are usually MVPs. So, yeah, the Wiki could be useful if the MVPs get involved.
The wiki could also give people the chance to post example code, which is sorely missing from a lot of the MS documentation.
However, it won't be incredibly useful unless they have decent searching. One problem with forums is that the same questions get asked and answered repeatedly. A decent searching feature would lead all askers to the same instance of the question, and the Wiki editing ability would give multiple contributors a chance to distill a really good answer.
"According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years"
Is it just me, or does $100M not seem like a whole lot of money for a company like BofA? I wonder if the whole thing was really worth it, given all the downsides of outsourcing.
This makes sense - Steve Jobs is a perfectionist
on
Apple Pulls Out of India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From everything I've read about Steve Jobs, this makes a lot of sense.
Here you have a man who is a total perfectionist. Obsessed with quality, down to the very last detail.
My guess is that some high-up Businesshead Suit Guy whispered in his ear, "Y'know, Steve, we could save a lot of money by outsourcing...."
Steve was probably reluctant at first, but then the Businesshead Suit Guy hyped it up with a bunch of Thomas-Friedman-speak, "This mind-blowing business practice will revolutionize how the world does business, like what corned beef did to sliced bread! Everybody and their brother is doing it! You don't want to be the guy who invented the pet rock! You want to be the guy who invented the pet WORLD! Don't get left behind! Outsource, outsource, outsource!"
Steve was probably like, "Oh, alright, I'll give it a shot. We'll start small, and see how it goes."
So he commits a small amount of money to his India project. Lo and behold, what he gets back is crap, and he's like, "What is this? This is crap! The quality is terrible! There are a million little widgets that are all in the wrong place. This little graphic thing was off by a whole 5 millimeters. 5 millimeters! My customers will hate it! I can't even get anyone on the damn phone to fix it! Every time I want bring someone to task over this, all they can talk about is their damn contract! Hey Businesshead Suit Guy? Where the hell are you?"
Unfortunately, Businesshead Suit Guy is nowhere to be found. He took the big fat bonus that he got from saving the company so much money through outsourcing, and is off vacationing someplace exotic.
Possibly even in India. I've heard that money goes a lot further down there.
We have all these various spam filters, right? Ones that are run by large providers (hotmail, gmail, yahoo), ones that are run by ISPs that do filtering, and ones run at the client level (the spam filtration on my Outlook). Now, if I am not mistaken, these all use some sort of probablistic AI that "learns" over time how to recognize spam. The idea is that the more data you feed them, the more they fine-tune their filter until they become "well-trained" to recognize spam.
How about we get all of these individual filters to work together? They can feed their "observations" about how to recognize spam to some sort of Big MotherBrain AI. The MotherBrain will then update all the little clients periodically with its meta-observations.
I really think you're overplaying the racism angle here. There is a genuine concern over losing jobs that has nothing at all to do with racism.
In fact, I'm really tired of seeing the race card played in outsourcing discussions. There's nothing racist about wanting an economy that's based on actually producing things.
I love the lengths they'll go to in movies to build suspense around computers. Sometimes they succeed, a la Wargames and Sneakers. Most of the time they fail.
What I love is how in these movies, you'll inevitably have one scene where the protagonist is using someone else's computer. They're sneaking around, pulling information off the machine, when all of a sudden, the music begins to change. Then we flash to the computer's rightful owner, who's walking back to their computer from the bathroom or wherever they were at. Then we flash back to the protagonist, who's still trying to pull stuff from the computer. Maybe there's something that holds them up, like an error or something. (ok, that much is realistic) Then we flash back to the computer's owner, who's still on his way. We flash back and forth like this several times, and the question in our mind the whole time is, "Will he get caught?" We think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught.... but then he doesn't!
The awful movie Antitrust did this, like 6 times. It was their main way of building suspense. It never works.
1) Get the BS in CS degree. Don't be tempted by one of the watered down BA in CS or "Information Science" degrees that don't actually teach you anything about how computers actually work. Even if whoever's doing the hiring doesn't initially know the difference between the degrees, your lack of specific knowledge will speak for itself.
2) Get a job working on something new. When you're seeking a job, take a really close look at what the company does, what it wants to do, and what you'll be working on. Don't get stuck working on the 1,000th implementation of a generic timesheet software or something, unless the company is wanting to put a seriously new spin on it and do something unique. Why? Because these problems have already been solved. Outsourcers, contractors, 3rd party providers of all stripes derive their bread-and-butter by providing "commodity code." Say you're some sort of 3rd party provider. You've already written one instance a timesheet software. How hard is it to re-purpose that code for a new client who wants basically the same thing? Make sure that the company you're interviewing with wants to do something new, or at least is interested in new ideas. Bonus points to companies trying to solve problems that either (A) haven't already been solved, (B) haven't already been solved *well* or (C) aren't easily solved by re-purposing some sort of standard pre-written code.
3) Keep your skills up to date. This could mean learning new languages, new versions of existing languages, or new APIs. It may even mean moving from a programming position to an architect/designer/manager position. Remember, the closer you are to the money, the more secure your job really is.
4) Don't be scared. (A) There's already a lot of backlash against outsourcing, and the People With the Money are already beginning to see the difference between having someone they can pull into meetings and someone who lives half the world away. (B) The internet will get bigger. Currently, only 20-30% of the US has broadband. Imagine what the market will look like for experienced web developers once this number looks more like 50%, or even 70-80% like what they have in S. Korea. (C) Lots of industries are still on paper. Hard to believe in this day and age, but its true. Even businesses that are computerized often are only so in the most trivial sense, and will need their systems re-built to take advantage of networking and business-to-business integration. Even among businesses that are already fully computerized, they still need their systems upgraded to take advantage of new technologies. Granted, some of these companies will only need the most generic sort of commodity code, but there are plenty that face problems which haven't been sufficiently solved yet.
In other words, to quote Tom Petty, "the future is wide open."
Man, have you ever missed the boat on why MS really sucks. MS sucks because they expend so much effort on backward-compatibility that their platform has become a hopeless house of cards built on hacks and workarounds. They actually care too much about backward compatibility, wheras a complete break from the past (similar to what Apple accomplished) would actually serve them well.
But just work that $200-a-seat savings into a contract with some software firm to get electronics or drafting software ported to Linux.
I think that anybody who has worked in the real world should see through the "use Linux to avoid paying licensing costs" argument. I would argue that any money you save on licensing costs are quickly eaten up by lost productivity due to users having to operate in an unfamiliar environment. Plus, you then have to manage the interoperation of applications running on various platforms. This is unless you plan on moving your entire shop over to Linux, and doing so in one fell swoop. (good luck) More IT costs. I also don't think that emulators are the answer. By adding an emulator, you're increasing the complexity of your system, and thus increasing the chances for things to go wrong. And then there's always the performance hit.
As irritated as I am with MS, and as much as I respect the Linux community, I think that we're stuck with Windows for a little while longer, until the webdev community gets its act together and produces a suite of viable web/ajax alternatives. If I were to make a prediction, I would say that Linux won't truly take off in the business or consumer markets until web/internet-based technologies render the OS to be largely irrelivent.
People will switch to Vista from WinXP for the same reason that I switched from Win2K to WinXP. Users will find that their new hardware just magically happens to work better on Vista then XP. Love it or hate it, this is the price that I (and others) pay for using the dominant platform.
I have a couple friends who work at MS. My impression is that how much you like your job there very much depends on what you're working on.
One of my friends works on.NET, and he loves his job. I mean, the man writes programming languages for a living. He's got a great job! Of course he loves it.
My other friend, on the other hand, works on a product that I will not name, except to say that MS totally undervalues its importance and does not dedicate nearly enough resources to it. Although I wouldn't say that he hates his job, I would say that he, at very best, tolerates it.
Regardless of your specific job at MS, I will say that Redmond is the most disappointing site you will ever see. You would think that the headquarters of the world's largest software maker would be impressive, right? Wrong. It's like every other crappy suburb that you've ever seen, except all the office parks are owned by one company. Lame. Although you don't have to live in Redmond to work at MS, your only alternative is to live in Seattle and make the > 1hr commute every day.
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Because, god knows, the one thing that the software industry doesn't have enough of is people telling us that we suck and that they hate our work.
Big, stupid, and makes life miserable for geeks. We despise its success, but that doesn't change the fact. Much to our chagrin, the smartest candidate often loses out to the more boring, popular, and simpleminded one.
I predict that the cool-factor of this movie will largely depend on what technologies they choose to showcase. One of the reasons why the original was so good was because, except for the super-intelligent AI computer, nearly all of the technology they used was reflective of actual technology that was common at the time. The kid's school had an old-fashioned mainframe. At home, he had a state-of-the-art IMSAI with an honest-to-god acoustic coupler modem. And were those 8" floppy drives that I saw in the background? You bet they were. Compare and contrast that with movies like The Lawnmower Man which portray computer networks as virtual reality mazes and crap.
Freedos 1.0 better have a working version of EDLIN. DOS just isn't DOS without EDLIN.
- If a worker offer a lower labor cost it's a gift to the american economy. The goods will be cheaper, the consumer will save money, invest in other sectors etc..
Yes, but what good are "cheap goods" when you don't have any money to buy them with?
It may be easier to build some flood walls than buy a zillion solar panels, for example. I rarely find that the left is even willing to engage in this debate, probably because they are on very weak footing there.
Umm, no. They probably don't want to engage in this debate because what you suggest as a "solution" is cold and heartless, and to answer it with silence is all they can do to prevent themselves from shouting at you.
Your "solution" presupposes that the only beings who need to survive on this planet are rich humans. What about the plants and animals? Y'know, other then the ones we eat? And what about the coastal countries where they don't have the money to build flood walls and run massive air conditioning installations?
Since you're such a fan of economics, I suggest that you crack open your econ textbook and review a chapter that it appears you missed on your first time through - the one on externalities.
Java was supposed to be "write once, run anywhere," but wound up being "write once, debug anywhere." It never lived up to its multiplatform reputation.
Even if it had delivered in this respect, I don't really think it would have mattered. (And I know that this is going to earn me some enmity from some of you, but I don't really care.) The fact is that nobody really cares that much about cross-platform compatibility. It's the sort of thing that geeks get excited about, but most people in the real world could care less about. Most people choose their computer to be task-specific. Whatever kind of software you make, chances are that most of your customers will use a single platform, and the rest are just not numerous enough to spend a lot of time worrying about.
HAH! I used to know a coder who was hooked on Adderall. He *loved* the stuff. He would go on and on about how it helped him to get in "the zone," and gave him a new understanding of programming. Guess what? He was one of the worst programmers I've ever known. Definitely had the thing where he would get so into what he was doing that he wouldn't realize that he was doing the completely wrong thing. The guy had absolutely no ability to jump scope. Incidentally, I've seen that tendency in every sort of speed freak I've ever known.
On top of it all, he was a totally grouchy asshole. What a guy!
So long as you know what function you're looking for, it's great.
Bingo.
Let's face it, Microsoft's documentation is crap. Their MSDN pages are worst then crap - they're misleading. The searching function will often point you some random topic like Windows Mobile when you're looking for something related to SQL Server. On top of that, the pages themselves often read like VCR instructions. And example code? Fuhgettaboutit. This could be a step in the right direction, though. I've found various forums to be helpful, mostly because of the MVP system. For those who are not MS developers, MVPs are people in the industry who MS hooks up with various perks in exchange for them answering questions on forums. On a lot of MS forums, 80% of the questions are answered by 2% of the user base. These people are usually MVPs. So, yeah, the Wiki could be useful if the MVPs get involved. The wiki could also give people the chance to post example code, which is sorely missing from a lot of the MS documentation. However, it won't be incredibly useful unless they have decent searching. One problem with forums is that the same questions get asked and answered repeatedly. A decent searching feature would lead all askers to the same instance of the question, and the Wiki editing ability would give multiple contributors a chance to distill a really good answer.
"According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years"
Is it just me, or does $100M not seem like a whole lot of money for a company like BofA? I wonder if the whole thing was really worth it, given all the downsides of outsourcing.
From everything I've read about Steve Jobs, this makes a lot of sense.
Here you have a man who is a total perfectionist. Obsessed with quality, down to the very last detail.
My guess is that some high-up Businesshead Suit Guy whispered in his ear, "Y'know, Steve, we could save a lot of money by outsourcing...."
Steve was probably reluctant at first, but then the Businesshead Suit Guy hyped it up with a bunch of Thomas-Friedman-speak, "This mind-blowing business practice will revolutionize how the world does business, like what corned beef did to sliced bread! Everybody and their brother is doing it! You don't want to be the guy who invented the pet rock! You want to be the guy who invented the pet WORLD! Don't get left behind! Outsource, outsource, outsource!"
Steve was probably like, "Oh, alright, I'll give it a shot. We'll start small, and see how it goes."
So he commits a small amount of money to his India project. Lo and behold, what he gets back is crap, and he's like, "What is this? This is crap! The quality is terrible! There are a million little widgets that are all in the wrong place. This little graphic thing was off by a whole 5 millimeters. 5 millimeters! My customers will hate it! I can't even get anyone on the damn phone to fix it! Every time I want bring someone to task over this, all they can talk about is their damn contract! Hey Businesshead Suit Guy? Where the hell are you?"
Unfortunately, Businesshead Suit Guy is nowhere to be found. He took the big fat bonus that he got from saving the company so much money through outsourcing, and is off vacationing someplace exotic.
Possibly even in India. I've heard that money goes a lot further down there.
We have all these various spam filters, right? Ones that are run by large providers (hotmail, gmail, yahoo), ones that are run by ISPs that do filtering, and ones run at the client level (the spam filtration on my Outlook). Now, if I am not mistaken, these all use some sort of probablistic AI that "learns" over time how to recognize spam. The idea is that the more data you feed them, the more they fine-tune their filter until they become "well-trained" to recognize spam.
How about we get all of these individual filters to work together? They can feed their "observations" about how to recognize spam to some sort of Big MotherBrain AI. The MotherBrain will then update all the little clients periodically with its meta-observations.
I'm sure someone's thought of it before.
I really think you're overplaying the racism angle here. There is a genuine concern over losing jobs that has nothing at all to do with racism.
In fact, I'm really tired of seeing the race card played in outsourcing discussions. There's nothing racist about wanting an economy that's based on actually producing things.
I love the lengths they'll go to in movies to build suspense around computers. Sometimes they succeed, a la Wargames and Sneakers. Most of the time they fail.
What I love is how in these movies, you'll inevitably have one scene where the protagonist is using someone else's computer. They're sneaking around, pulling information off the machine, when all of a sudden, the music begins to change. Then we flash to the computer's rightful owner, who's walking back to their computer from the bathroom or wherever they were at. Then we flash back to the protagonist, who's still trying to pull stuff from the computer. Maybe there's something that holds them up, like an error or something. (ok, that much is realistic) Then we flash back to the computer's owner, who's still on his way. We flash back and forth like this several times, and the question in our mind the whole time is, "Will he get caught?" We think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught.... but then he doesn't!
The awful movie Antitrust did this, like 6 times. It was their main way of building suspense. It never works.
The trick to beating the outsourcers :
1) Get the BS in CS degree. Don't be tempted by one of the watered down BA in CS or "Information Science" degrees that don't actually teach you anything about how computers actually work. Even if whoever's doing the hiring doesn't initially know the difference between the degrees, your lack of specific knowledge will speak for itself.
2) Get a job working on something new. When you're seeking a job, take a really close look at what the company does, what it wants to do, and what you'll be working on. Don't get stuck working on the 1,000th implementation of a generic timesheet software or something, unless the company is wanting to put a seriously new spin on it and do something unique. Why? Because these problems have already been solved. Outsourcers, contractors, 3rd party providers of all stripes derive their bread-and-butter by providing "commodity code." Say you're some sort of 3rd party provider. You've already written one instance a timesheet software. How hard is it to re-purpose that code for a new client who wants basically the same thing? Make sure that the company you're interviewing with wants to do something new, or at least is interested in new ideas. Bonus points to companies trying to solve problems that either (A) haven't already been solved, (B) haven't already been solved *well* or (C) aren't easily solved by re-purposing some sort of standard pre-written code.
3) Keep your skills up to date. This could mean learning new languages, new versions of existing languages, or new APIs. It may even mean moving from a programming position to an architect/designer/manager position. Remember, the closer you are to the money, the more secure your job really is.
4) Don't be scared.
(A) There's already a lot of backlash against outsourcing, and the People With the Money are already beginning to see the difference between having someone they can pull into meetings and someone who lives half the world away.
(B) The internet will get bigger. Currently, only 20-30% of the US has broadband. Imagine what the market will look like for experienced web developers once this number looks more like 50%, or even 70-80% like what they have in S. Korea.
(C) Lots of industries are still on paper. Hard to believe in this day and age, but its true. Even businesses that are computerized often are only so in the most trivial sense, and will need their systems re-built to take advantage of networking and business-to-business integration. Even among businesses that are already fully computerized, they still need their systems upgraded to take advantage of new technologies. Granted, some of these companies will only need the most generic sort of commodity code, but there are plenty that face problems which haven't been sufficiently solved yet.
In other words, to quote Tom Petty, "the future is wide open."
Man, have you ever missed the boat on why MS really sucks. MS sucks because they expend so much effort on backward-compatibility that their platform has become a hopeless house of cards built on hacks and workarounds. They actually care too much about backward compatibility, wheras a complete break from the past (similar to what Apple accomplished) would actually serve them well.
But just work that $200-a-seat savings into a contract with some software firm to get electronics or drafting software ported to Linux.
I think that anybody who has worked in the real world should see through the "use Linux to avoid paying licensing costs" argument. I would argue that any money you save on licensing costs are quickly eaten up by lost productivity due to users having to operate in an unfamiliar environment. Plus, you then have to manage the interoperation of applications running on various platforms. This is unless you plan on moving your entire shop over to Linux, and doing so in one fell swoop. (good luck) More IT costs. I also don't think that emulators are the answer. By adding an emulator, you're increasing the complexity of your system, and thus increasing the chances for things to go wrong. And then there's always the performance hit.
As irritated as I am with MS, and as much as I respect the Linux community, I think that we're stuck with Windows for a little while longer, until the webdev community gets its act together and produces a suite of viable web/ajax alternatives. If I were to make a prediction, I would say that Linux won't truly take off in the business or consumer markets until web/internet-based technologies render the OS to be largely irrelivent.
People will switch to Vista from WinXP for the same reason that I switched from Win2K to WinXP. Users will find that their new hardware just magically happens to work better on Vista then XP. Love it or hate it, this is the price that I (and others) pay for using the dominant platform.
I have a couple friends who work at MS. My impression is that how much you like your job there very much depends on what you're working on. One of my friends works on .NET, and he loves his job. I mean, the man writes programming languages for a living. He's got a great job! Of course he loves it.
My other friend, on the other hand, works on a product that I will not name, except to say that MS totally undervalues its importance and does not dedicate nearly enough resources to it. Although I wouldn't say that he hates his job, I would say that he, at very best, tolerates it.
Regardless of your specific job at MS, I will say that Redmond is the most disappointing site you will ever see. You would think that the headquarters of the world's largest software maker would be impressive, right? Wrong. It's like every other crappy suburb that you've ever seen, except all the office parks are owned by one company. Lame. Although you don't have to live in Redmond to work at MS, your only alternative is to live in Seattle and make the > 1hr commute every day.