Your consultancy won't go public, absent another dot-com boom. Recent history is littered with consultancies (Scient, Viant, Sapient, MarchFirst, Lante, iXL, Razorfish, Proxicom, Organic, etc.) who all went public then tanked (or at least, seriously underperformed the market) when the bubble burst.
Why not? General IT consultancies are a poor investment - they tend to have little in the way of proprietary IP or hard assets, so they're only worth as much as their employee/client base. Even that's fickle - if new management/owners make changes that alienate either of those constituencies, that value can evaporate overnight.
There's the possibility you could get bought, but you'd have to be in a high-value product/client space for this to make much sense. It also depends on the attitudes of majority owners, who are probably far too accustomed to running an independent business to want to sell out to someone else, even in response to offers you might consider very good.
Should you get bought, it's likely the new owners will make senior management (including you?) sign agreements to stay on and/or not flip their shares for a set period. You already sound like you're itching to leave - are you sure you'd want to stay on longer than five years?
You won't be in much position to see any return on your shares absent a sale or public offering - foregoing warnings about dilution, Hollywood accounting, different share classes etc. all apply. (Possible out: google "Rule 144" regarding sale of closely held stock after two years. Good luck finding a buyer though.)
My opinion: walk; your sanity is worth far more than the meager chance of a payout.
Disclaimer: used to work for an IT consultancy; spent good money for shares of closely-held stock, on which I'm now unlikely to see any return. Now an independent contractor; too happy to be bitter.
Why do all microwaves beep at ear-piercing volume every time you press a key?
The fact that the display changed is enough evidence that you registered my keypress; you don't need to emit a beep that my grandma could hear without her hearing aid (and she's dead).
Microwave manufacturers of the world, please build something that will let me nuke a light dinner at 11:30 PM without waking up the rest of the house. Cheers.
Vermont Yankee, a nuke plant just over the border in VT, is not pixellated. Seabrook Station, another plant just over the border in NH, is pixellated. Judging from color difference it looks like the Vermont Yankee pix came from a private source (Europa Technologies), while the Seabrook picture came from MassGIS. (So Massachusetts is censoring images of other states? Interesting...)
There's nothing in the water in India or the US that makes programmers/analysts in one country better or worse. Pull ten Indian developers off the street; pull ten American developers off the street. Set them to work on a software project under the same working conditions (IT infrastructure, level of interaction with the customer, familiarity with the problem space). The results will be comparable in quality. The author of the article doesn't seem to get this - he seems to take the opposite as an article of faith, offering scant proof to the contrary. (Same with many posters here - many of whose comments I find somewhere between cluelessly racist and blatantly racist.)
The main problems with offshoring to India - besides cost becoming less competitive, as salaries spiral upward - is the communication barrier. Not due to the difference in accent, but because India is literally halfway around the world from the US. If you're working in the same building as your customer, there are a whole range of interactions you can have with them during the development process - having meetings, walking through the app, bouncing ideas/questions off each other, having a beer after work - that simply don't take place when you can only talk to the customer over the phone the few hours of the day your sleep schedules coincide. The result is that you can build more closely to the customer's wishes. Most of the big Indian outsourcers try to get around this by writing thick specifications up front, then throwing them over the wall to the offshore development team. This is how the Big 5 consultancies (Accenture et al.) tend to do things in the US (write piles of incoherent documentation, then shove it in front of the developers); as their many spectacularly failed projects show, this isn't a viable way to do software.
For major corporations, back-office systems like accounting and inventory are seldom one-size-fits-all solutions; there's often a lot of customization involved around the specifics of the business. Contrary to the author's beliefs, these custom systems are the software projects that would benefit least from outsourcing - the communication barrier makes getting intricate requirements across to the development team more difficult. I tend to think shrink-wrapped type software outsources best. When Microsoft develops a new release of Office, their "customers" (i.e. people who set the fine-grained requirements) are program managers who are embedded with the development team. In a situation like this, there's no communication barrier to wipe out the cost efficiency gained by going offshore. We've been seeing something like this in the games industry for many years - lots of game titles are written "near-shore" in Canada, where the same amount of money will hire at least twice as many comparable developers.
Disclaimer: American coder here, working for a software company with offices in US and India (not MS, not Big 5). Will probably be out of a job in a few years, but hey, the software biz was getting boring anyway.
I use this all the time to get around the proxy at my large, sketchy employer, which blocks "tasteless" and "subversive" sites like Salon; and also occasionally to get around the severely broken transparent caches used by my cable modem provider. Note that this requires a shell account outside the proxy.
$OBSCURE_PORT_1 = obscure port # on your local machine $OBSCURE_PORT_2 = obscure port # on machine outside firewall
On the machine where you have the shell account, download and compile the ucspi-tcp package, and micro_proxy. Put the tcpserver and micro_proxy binaries in your $PATH; throw everything else away.
To run the proxy:
From your local machine, ssh -C -L $OBSCURE_PORT_1:127.0.0.1:$OBSCURE_PORT_2 -l [username] machine.where.you.have.shell.account.co.va
(or if you use some fancy Windoze SSH client, forward $OBSCURE_PORT_1 on your local machine to $OBSCURE_PORT_2 on the remote machine)
Once logged in, run tcpserver -DHlR 127.0.0.1 $OBSCURE_PORT_2 micro_proxy & on the remote machine
On your local machine, set your browser to use HTTP and HTTPS (IE)/SSL (Mozilla) proxies on host 127.0.0.1, port $OBSCURE_PORT_1
AOL, M$... two massive corporate succubuses with a long track record of running roughshod over consumer choice, user privacy and open standards, ignoring security issues, whose software and marketing strategies assumes the person behind the keyboard has the IQ of tree slime.
Does anyone really, honestly give half a rat's ass who wins this one? The consumer is fucked either way, so what does it matter?
They can both go rape dead syphyllitic goats for all I care. Me, I'm sticking with Debian and my mom-and-pop ISP.
...is a reference to "The Wave", an old ABC Afterschool Special. One of my (only semi-clueful) teachers showed it in class when I was in HS ten years ago; I'd highly recommend it. Here's a link:
I highly recommend The Millionaire Next Door, a book that studies who America's wealthy are and how they got that way. The authors found that, contrary to popular belief, only a small minority of millionaires inherited their wealth; most frequently, millionaires started their own successful businesses (machine shops and bakeries, not just.com's) and increased their savings by living frugally. Of course, you don't have to be an entrepreneur to become wealthy; the authors maintain that anyone can become a millionaire by living below their means and investing a significant portion of their income for the long term.
Does it bother anyone else that Steve Case and company now control the rights to the Matrix films?
I can see it now: "The Matrix - Special AOL Edition"... featuring character names like Morpheus63 and Neo4684... Morpheus makes first contact with Neo using AOLIM... that stupid "Goodbye!" sound effect whenever a character leaves the Matrix (provided they don't get a busy signal, of course)...
Woz, how do you feel about Apple's decision to go after Franklin in the early '80's? Do you think killing the early Apple II clones helped or hurt expansion of the Apple II community?
Background: Franklin was a company that produced a clone of the Apple II+ in the early '80's. They had moderate retail success (remember seeing some Franklins in Sears), but were successfully sued by Apple and forced out of the clone business - some sort of intellectual property infringement, I forget the specifics. (Can anyone fill in the details?) Franklin is still around (or was a few years ago); now they make electronic organizers/dictionaries.
Forte's previous product - I forget what it's called - was a distrubuted, transactional object-oriented language - sort of like Java/EJB, but a couple of years ahead of its time, robust and very scaleable. Setting up distributed object environments didn't involve the bestiality with deployment descriptors EJB developers currently face; instead there was a nice graphical interface you used to drag and drop objects and application partitions within your environment. SynerJ essentially aims to bring this ease of deployment to EJB. It's actually in beta 3 right now - loads o'bugs to be worked out, but if Sun remains committed and it lives up to its promise, it will become an industry-leading EJB development tool.
I really should attach this to another thread, but hey, I'm tired.
To prevent any one moderator from having too much influence over a post's rating, increase the score range a post can have from [-1,+5] to [-2,+10], then turn 2x the number of moderators loose. Either that or keep it [-1,+5], let moderators only make 0.5 point changes, and turn more moderators loose.
To prevent "grade inflation" as discussed in earlier replies, make moderating up highly-rated comments more expensive - for instance, moderating up any post with e.g. a score of +3 should cost 2 moderation points.
Another possible "grade inflation" fighter: cap moderation for posts moderated up as "funny" to +4, limit all other posts to +6. Also, limit the number of moderation points one can spend marking posts as "funny".
Finally, no (or longer) expiration on moderation points. When I was selected to moderate, I felt compelled to spend all my points in a few days on asinine stuff; I'd feel better if I could save them up and only spend them on a worthwhile comment.
Linux was my first real experience with a serious OS. Running a Linux box taught me a whole lot more about computing than my college's CS department - where a professor once asked me out of ignorance, "what's PPP?" I learned many OS concepts and became better at C by spending hours reading and tweaking the source for the kernel and other programs. As I've learned more and grown as a user and developer, my Linux projects have grown too - from lecturing to my local user group on IP masquerading to submitting kernel code.
The BSD OS'es seem pretty good, but I've been too involved with Linux for too long to just walk away casually; I suspect the millions of others who cut their teeth on Linux will feel the same. Even after Windows declines and all my AOL-lusing relatives start calling me with asinine questions about upgrading their Gateways to Red Hat 14.0, I'll probably still be hacking Linux.
As a general rule, brokerages don't disclose the criteria they use to judge applicants' suitability for these sorts of things (IPO's, approval for options trading, etc.) 'cause if they did, people would then fudge their answers to fit the profile. This would expose brokerages to greater legal liability - under the suitability princple (NASD manual sec. 2310 - i.e. brokers shouldn't recommend/should advise against investments not suitable for a client's investment capacity/goals/experience) and legal precedent, newbie clients who lost their shirts in volatile, advanced investment vehicles like options and IPO's have successfully sued brokerage houses for their losses.
Simple bumper music between segments is quite enough, thank you.
Also: the sooner you can take live callers, the better. I hosted a few talk shows on my college radio station. It was a lot more interesting when outside listeners called in to debate issues; without callers, my friends and I just ended up verbally harrassing each other on the air - while a lot of fun for us, this got boring to listen to very quickly.
This certainly won't be a magnum opus of literature. Writing good prose is like being pregnant; trying to get a baby in only one month by getting nine women pregnant doesn't work. Writing (and rewriting, revising, editing, etc.) a coherent piece of prose takes time - just like architecting, writing, testing, and improving a large, robust piece of software. (Think a worldwide team of OSS developers could recreate all of Linux in 24 hours?)
SCO. Yes folks, SCO has a booth at LWCE. Advertising their free-beer license for educational use and their "open source package" for UnixWare (just a CD of stuff like apache which is already freely downloadable - type of thing you can get from CheapBytes for <$5). And they wondered why nobody stopped and talked to them. Kind of symbolic how the booth was in the opposite corner of the exhibit floor from the FSF.
Slashdot Mirror
Your consultancy won't go public, absent another dot-com boom. Recent history is littered with consultancies (Scient, Viant, Sapient, MarchFirst, Lante, iXL, Razorfish, Proxicom, Organic, etc.) who all went public then tanked (or at least, seriously underperformed the market) when the bubble burst.
Why not? General IT consultancies are a poor investment - they tend to have little in the way of proprietary IP or hard assets, so they're only worth as much as their employee/client base. Even that's fickle - if new management/owners make changes that alienate either of those constituencies, that value can evaporate overnight.
There's the possibility you could get bought, but you'd have to be in a high-value product/client space for this to make much sense. It also depends on the attitudes of majority owners, who are probably far too accustomed to running an independent business to want to sell out to someone else, even in response to offers you might consider very good.
Should you get bought, it's likely the new owners will make senior management (including you?) sign agreements to stay on and/or not flip their shares for a set period. You already sound like you're itching to leave - are you sure you'd want to stay on longer than five years?
You won't be in much position to see any return on your shares absent a sale or public offering - foregoing warnings about dilution, Hollywood accounting, different share classes etc. all apply. (Possible out: google "Rule 144" regarding sale of closely held stock after two years. Good luck finding a buyer though.)
My opinion: walk; your sanity is worth far more than the meager chance of a payout.
Disclaimer: used to work for an IT consultancy; spent good money for shares of closely-held stock, on which I'm now unlikely to see any return. Now an independent contractor; too happy to be bitter.
Why do all microwaves beep at ear-piercing volume every time you press a key?
The fact that the display changed is enough evidence that you registered my keypress; you don't need to emit a beep that my grandma could hear without her hearing aid (and she's dead).
Microwave manufacturers of the world, please build something that will let me nuke a light dinner at 11:30 PM without waking up the rest of the house. Cheers.
Vermont Yankee, a nuke plant just over the border in VT, is not pixellated. Seabrook Station, another plant just over the border in NH, is pixellated. Judging from color difference it looks like the Vermont Yankee pix came from a private source (Europa Technologies), while the Seabrook picture came from MassGIS. (So Massachusetts is censoring images of other states? Interesting...)
There's nothing in the water in India or the US that makes programmers/analysts in one country better or worse. Pull ten Indian developers off the street; pull ten American developers off the street. Set them to work on a software project under the same working conditions (IT infrastructure, level of interaction with the customer, familiarity with the problem space). The results will be comparable in quality. The author of the article doesn't seem to get this - he seems to take the opposite as an article of faith, offering scant proof to the contrary. (Same with many posters here - many of whose comments I find somewhere between cluelessly racist and blatantly racist.)
The main problems with offshoring to India - besides cost becoming less competitive, as salaries spiral upward - is the communication barrier. Not due to the difference in accent, but because India is literally halfway around the world from the US. If you're working in the same building as your customer, there are a whole range of interactions you can have with them during the development process - having meetings, walking through the app, bouncing ideas/questions off each other, having a beer after work - that simply don't take place when you can only talk to the customer over the phone the few hours of the day your sleep schedules coincide. The result is that you can build more closely to the customer's wishes. Most of the big Indian outsourcers try to get around this by writing thick specifications up front, then throwing them over the wall to the offshore development team. This is how the Big 5 consultancies (Accenture et al.) tend to do things in the US (write piles of incoherent documentation, then shove it in front of the developers); as their many spectacularly failed projects show, this isn't a viable way to do software.
For major corporations, back-office systems like accounting and inventory are seldom one-size-fits-all solutions; there's often a lot of customization involved around the specifics of the business. Contrary to the author's beliefs, these custom systems are the software projects that would benefit least from outsourcing - the communication barrier makes getting intricate requirements across to the development team more difficult. I tend to think shrink-wrapped type software outsources best. When Microsoft develops a new release of Office, their "customers" (i.e. people who set the fine-grained requirements) are program managers who are embedded with the development team. In a situation like this, there's no communication barrier to wipe out the cost efficiency gained by going offshore. We've been seeing something like this in the games industry for many years - lots of game titles are written "near-shore" in Canada, where the same amount of money will hire at least twice as many comparable developers.
Disclaimer: American coder here, working for a software company with offices in US and India (not MS, not Big 5). Will probably be out of a job in a few years, but hey, the software biz was getting boring anyway.
With free-as-in-speech, not RA(N)D, licensing. Because I want to be able to build my own box that doesn't send all my viewership data back to the Man.
$OBSCURE_PORT_1 = obscure port # on your local machine
$OBSCURE_PORT_2 = obscure port # on machine outside firewall
On the machine where you have the shell account, download and compile the ucspi-tcp package, and micro_proxy. Put the tcpserver and micro_proxy binaries in your $PATH; throw everything else away.
To run the proxy:
From your local machine,
ssh -C -L $OBSCURE_PORT_1:127.0.0.1:$OBSCURE_PORT_2 -l [username] machine.where.you.have.shell.account.co.va
(or if you use some fancy Windoze SSH client, forward $OBSCURE_PORT_1 on your local machine to $OBSCURE_PORT_2 on the remote machine)
Once logged in, run tcpserver -DHlR 127.0.0.1 $OBSCURE_PORT_2 micro_proxy & on the remote machine
On your local machine, set your browser to use HTTP and HTTPS (IE)/SSL (Mozilla) proxies on host 127.0.0.1, port $OBSCURE_PORT_1
Surf to your heart's content.
Does anyone really, honestly give half a rat's ass who wins this one? The consumer is fucked either way, so what does it matter?
They can both go rape dead syphyllitic goats for all I care. Me, I'm sticking with Debian and my mom-and-pop ISP.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0083316
I highly recommend The Millionaire Next Door , a book that studies who America's wealthy are and how they got that way. The authors found that, contrary to popular belief, only a small minority of millionaires inherited their wealth; most frequently, millionaires started their own successful businesses (machine shops and bakeries, not just .com's) and increased their savings by living frugally. Of course, you don't have to be an entrepreneur to become wealthy; the authors maintain that anyone can become a millionaire by living below their means and investing a significant portion of their income for the long term.
I can see it now: "The Matrix - Special AOL Edition"... featuring character names like Morpheus63 and Neo4684... Morpheus makes first contact with Neo using AOLIM... that stupid "Goodbye!" sound effect whenever a character leaves the Matrix (provided they don't get a busy signal, of course)...
Background: Franklin was a company that produced a clone of the Apple II+ in the early '80's. They had moderate retail success (remember seeing some Franklins in Sears), but were successfully sued by Apple and forced out of the clone business - some sort of intellectual property infringement, I forget the specifics. (Can anyone fill in the details?) Franklin is still around (or was a few years ago); now they make electronic organizers/dictionaries.
Forte's previous product - I forget what it's called - was a distrubuted, transactional object-oriented language - sort of like Java/EJB, but a couple of years ahead of its time, robust and very scaleable. Setting up distributed object environments didn't involve the bestiality with deployment descriptors EJB developers currently face; instead there was a nice graphical interface you used to drag and drop objects and application partitions within your environment. SynerJ essentially aims to bring this ease of deployment to EJB. It's actually in beta 3 right now - loads o'bugs to be worked out, but if Sun remains committed and it lives up to its promise, it will become an industry-leading EJB development tool.
The BSD OS'es seem pretty good, but I've been too involved with Linux for too long to just walk away casually; I suspect the millions of others who cut their teeth on Linux will feel the same. Even after Windows declines and all my AOL-lusing relatives start calling me with asinine questions about upgrading their Gateways to Red Hat 14.0, I'll probably still be hacking Linux.
Basically, they're just covering their asses.
Also: the sooner you can take live callers, the better. I hosted a few talk shows on my college radio station. It was a lot more interesting when outside listeners called in to debate issues; without callers, my friends and I just ended up verbally harrassing each other on the air - while a lot of fun for us, this got boring to listen to very quickly.
The story refers to a previous one in the Los Angeles Times.
This certainly won't be a magnum opus of literature. Writing good prose is like being pregnant; trying to get a baby in only one month by getting nine women pregnant doesn't work. Writing (and rewriting, revising, editing, etc.) a coherent piece of prose takes time - just like architecting, writing, testing, and improving a large, robust piece of software. (Think a worldwide team of OSS developers could recreate all of Linux in 24 hours?)
And I used to respect him, too. Feh.
#include "really-appreciate-your-work-Rob.h"