It's just rather hard to get that kind of support going...
Damn right, especially these days, where the lack of the fear of communism has made driving these massive projects impossible. The problem is that the West requires consensus (or at least something resembling it) to do anything of that scale. China just has to have one guy snap his fingers.
Absolute power, when wielded by someone who knows how to use it, is very, very dangerous for his neighbours.
One thing that really hit me was how quickly they were able to expand their airport to accommodate for the Olympics. They now have the world's largest airport terminal, built up in almost no time at all. My home town (Vancouver, Canada) took nearly 20 years to build a single runway, between budget cutbacks, protests by residents, regulatory red tape, etc etc. Meanwhile here's a country that can completely rebuild an airport, make it into the world's largest, and still have time to make it an architectural masterpiece, all in 6 years. It's breathtaking and scary.
who regards the west as...savages.
Not really, they regard the West as hypocrites. The state media likes to play up images like Abu Ghraib and the various things going on at Gitmo. It's not entirely baseless, and that's the sad part.
This is more than a bunch of athletes my friend. Go back and watch the opening ceremonies, and tell me that country does not scare the fuck out of you. The level of discipline demonstrated by the performers, the sheer precision of it all... it all far exceeds anything the West could possibly pull off. And that's DAMNED scary.
China is living proof that, if not bound by troublesome concepts like fairness, freedom, and morality, you can achieve great things. That scares the bejesus out of me. The entire Olympic exercise, for China at least, is one of intimidation. Here's them flexing their muscle, showing the world that, at a moment's notice, they can throw away billions, not feel the pinch, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people without any messy bureaucracy, and completely transform the entire city nearly overnight (well, 6 years, that's damned short).
If you want to measure the value of an idea in terms of money, then yes, ideas are cheap.
True, though in the case of the OP he wants to sell his idea, not an implementation of it. The value of that is rather low.
Another problem is that those who can execute are generally also blessed with being idea-men. Why would they spend oodles of money buying your idea, when they have plenty of their own? Hell, they have so many they'll never have time to get to them all!
You're right about the idea stealing. An idea is valuable and ought to be protected, especially in an environment of skilled implementers. That being said, it still doesn't increase its monetary value. What you're afraid of here isn't the stealing of the idea per se, but rather someone beating you to the implementation - which, again, demonstrates that the the majority of the value in such things is in the execution.
AFAIK some company stole the idea of GUI from some other company who in turn had stolen the idea from someone else.
Absolutely, but that goes to further my point. The university professor who allegedly invented the "Windows" paradigm didn't go anywhere with it. If his idea wasn't stolen, it's doubtful it would have ever been anything more than an intriguing research project. His idea was great, but his execution obviously failed to inspire the world... until a better implementation came along (i.e. Apple and/or Microsoft).
However dealing with what we collect is a problem we need to figure out.
Well, nuclear waste problem is not entirely problem-free. If it were I'd consider it a completely clean power source. After all, who cares about dangerous radioactive waste if you can guarantee safe disposal at all times?
Still. Having your nuclear waste in a truck is a lot better than having it spewed out into the atmosphere. One is a lot easier to control, the other is impossible. So while neither power sources are perfect, one is leaps and bounds beyond the other. Not to mention that coal is not nearly as clean in most countries as it is in the West, and the generated soot is often radioactive. And lemme tell ya, I'd deal with a gamma source any day of the week before swallowing an alpha source.
The one that has trouble asserting its northern sovereignty because all it's got is literally a bunch of natives armed with WW2-era rifles up there. The one that's also spread itself thin in Afghanistan while recruitment numbers plummet.
While the rest of the world runs out of resources, us Canadians are sitting on a veritable goldmine of oil, precious metals, and uranium. This is suicide without a large military to assert your control over said resources.
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years, they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid at this point. If Russia is to reassert itself as a power its prime time is coming soon.
And that, boys and girls, is why the next world war will be fought between Russia and China.
What? China has no stake in the Arctic at *all*. I'm more worried about the Russkies making moves on Canada and Denmark, one of whom has a pathetically small military, the other is really too far away to do any good.
Yes, really. The blog post you linked doesn't claim that good ideas are worth money, just that great execution can't fix a terrible idea. But that's really just common sense.
Execution is IMHO worth more than a good idea, but only because fewer people can pull off great execution than people who can come up with great ideas. We've all had that "OMG GENIUS!" idea hit us at some point. Some of us get more of them than others, but in the end anyone who's reasonably observant and has good judgment can come up with good ideas.
Being able to pull it off is another story altogether. People who can do it are few and far between. Goes doubly if the idea requires a team. Good *team leaders* who can pull together the right people and execute the idea are truly one in ten thousand.
Here is a little process us whipper-snappers have come up with since you retired
Note that I'm a 20-something with zero experience with COBOL... but what you're talking about is ridiculous.
1. Make a copy
Simple enough... Unless your system is operating on such antiquated equipment that you'd have trouble cloning even the file system.
2. Work on that
Ok, sure, and...
3. Test it thoroughly
On what hardware? You think the state of California has a few spare 70s-era mainframes to run your production testing? There is absolutely no identical testing environment for you to do anything in. This is the cost of working on large legacy systems.
4. Put it into production.
And watch it go up in flames. Let's say you were able to create an emulated environment to run your stuff. What kind of data set are you testing with? You're not allowed to hit any live systems like printing the actual paychecks, or actually depositing any money. So basically the only stuff you can really put through the wringer is your core logic. Hmm.
Developing and debugging on large, antiquated mainframes is NOT like hitting make on a modern Linux distro. A system of that scale, even running on modern hardware and languages, is nearly impossible to fully debug before it hits production. I would know, I work with very large scale business computing every day.
Who modded the parent troll? Seriously, I'm a regular Apple developer. I write apps for both OS X and iPhone, and what the guy is saying is generally true.
Apple has piss poor support for their programmers. The quality of their documentation (or lack thereof) is perfect reflection on their philosophy: you will code for us whether you like it or not, because people use our hardware
Compare with MSDN, that has *superb* documentation, great developer support, and a never-ending flow of sample code, dev guides, and every resource imaginable to make a dev's life easy.
The way MS has treated 3rd party devs in the past has always been a symbiotic relationship. You make great apps for us, we'll support you in your task, and more people are locked into our platform. Everyone goes home happy.
Apple on the other hand has always done what they want, and forced developers to commit huge resources into keeping up, just because they feel like it. This has afforded them the luxury of being technologically up-to-date, at a heavy cost to their 3rd party developers, who get no love at all.
I am sure many programmers would be willing to work on their COBOL systems, but without the required "10 years of experience with COBOL" on their resume, they would never be hired.
And what happens when your amateur COBOL hackers bork a live, production system upon which tens of thousands of people rely on for their paychecks?
This isn't some lame Java app that's allowed to crash 5 times a day...
Right. That's step 1, "Embrace". I'm interested to see what "Extend" is in this context. Possibly a new open source license? They've made steps down that road, but not seriously.
As a college student nearing graduation (and thus target to a barrage of recruitment efforts), I don't really think MS is specifically after the classic "3E" method here.
What MS realizes right now is that their company is staffed by a lot of career types - people who want to clock their hours, get their paychecks, and spend time with their family. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they've also seen the effect of Google - a company full of people who would be willing to throw in insane hours and effort to get a cool, hip product out the door. Given MS's current obsession with *being like Google*, I suspect they want their share of the hip, dedicated, insanely motivated developer base... aka open source devs.
My school is very pro-open-source (what college isn't?), and recently MS has been sending more and more "open source evangelist" types to recruitment talks. The whole point is to convince people to join MS, because they're no longer evil, and are now doing cool open source, innovative projects!
Yeah, I've been guilty of hardcoding these things as well. The lack of a real layout manager is a pain point that will TOTALLY ASPLODE the moment Apple starts changing the UI...
The varying hardware feature set (camera, microphone, etc.) between the iPhone and iPod Touch are already diverse enough to make software marketing a bit dicey
If you poke around the API you will find that Apple has included ways to check the existence of various hardware capabilities (as well as network connectivity). Presumably they've already thought about devices that support different hardware profiles. For example, it is ill-advised to try and initialize the camera without first checking if it is available.
but I can't see Apple introducing a major new variation to the UI for smaller screens along with a whole new set of targeting constraints for developers.
Doubtful they will, but the same UI will work at different resolutions and screen sizes. I suspect the people who have hard-coded the screen width into their apps will be screwed at SOME point.
I dunno, the whole thing has always been somewhat goofy to me. I mean, they knew that the whole "big suit space marine" thing was cliche, and they poked fun at themselves for it. Nearly all of the unit voices were parodies of classic sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think that Starcraft was always intended a game that's not to be taken TOO seriously.
They've also been able to shove SLI video cards into laptops, doesn't make them common. The heat and power issues with quad cores still make it completely impossible to put into a laptop and retain a reasonable level of mobility and battery life.
Wha? Last I checked Starcraft and Warcraft 2 were both plenty cartoony. Even the original Diablo games had *glowing red monsters*... Blizzard has *never* been known for gritty, realistic rendering...
Correct me if I'm wrong... but aren't contracts breakable without termination charges if the service provider changes the contract? There's a time limit on this, but it's fairly generous. I know people who got out of their Bell/Telus contracts recently precisely BECAUSE of the SMS fee.
Now, the fact that all the wireless providers in Canada are dirty crooks is another story altogether. Quitting your contract won't help much, you'll just get gouged somewhere else.
I think Canadian telecom (and to a lesser extent in the US) is proof solid that a laissez-faire approach to regulation and the institution of "free market" principles in an industry where the government GUARANTEES monopoly (via last mile, etc.) simply doesn't work.
Jim Prentice is a corporate crony who should be kicked out of office, preferably thrown in jail for so blatantly selling out the Canadian people's interests. His broken-record touting of "free market will be best" on the telecom issue is laughably absurd for anyone who's had to pay a phone bill in the last 10 years. What a change the Conservative government has brought us. Now instead of the Liberals selling out the Canadian people little bits at a time under the table, the Conservatives are having a firesale blowout with no regard for public opinion.
To listen to your post one would think that there is some sort of master plan that all Muslims are aware of to sneak into the West and subvert us from the inside out.
Don't worry. In 40 years his family will be saying "we shouldn't judge grandpa, he was born in a different time..."
We've been down this path before, the irrational hatred of an ethnic/religious group because they're supposedly "taking over" and destroying our way of life. Do I need to remind anyone what happened last time we tread this path?
Even if we don't invoke Godwin's Law, we've had many shameful period in our lifetime, when other minorities were being massacred and brutalized for supposed transgressions - incidents that we regret today that we have no way of taking back. Tread this ground carefully.
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It's just rather hard to get that kind of support going...
Damn right, especially these days, where the lack of the fear of communism has made driving these massive projects impossible. The problem is that the West requires consensus (or at least something resembling it) to do anything of that scale. China just has to have one guy snap his fingers.
Absolute power, when wielded by someone who knows how to use it, is very, very dangerous for his neighbours.
One thing that really hit me was how quickly they were able to expand their airport to accommodate for the Olympics. They now have the world's largest airport terminal, built up in almost no time at all. My home town (Vancouver, Canada) took nearly 20 years to build a single runway, between budget cutbacks, protests by residents, regulatory red tape, etc etc. Meanwhile here's a country that can completely rebuild an airport, make it into the world's largest, and still have time to make it an architectural masterpiece, all in 6 years. It's breathtaking and scary.
who regards the west as...savages.
Not really, they regard the West as hypocrites. The state media likes to play up images like Abu Ghraib and the various things going on at Gitmo. It's not entirely baseless, and that's the sad part.
This is more than a bunch of athletes my friend. Go back and watch the opening ceremonies, and tell me that country does not scare the fuck out of you. The level of discipline demonstrated by the performers, the sheer precision of it all... it all far exceeds anything the West could possibly pull off. And that's DAMNED scary.
China is living proof that, if not bound by troublesome concepts like fairness, freedom, and morality, you can achieve great things. That scares the bejesus out of me. The entire Olympic exercise, for China at least, is one of intimidation. Here's them flexing their muscle, showing the world that, at a moment's notice, they can throw away billions, not feel the pinch, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people without any messy bureaucracy, and completely transform the entire city nearly overnight (well, 6 years, that's damned short).
If you want to measure the value of an idea in terms of money, then yes, ideas are cheap.
True, though in the case of the OP he wants to sell his idea, not an implementation of it. The value of that is rather low.
Another problem is that those who can execute are generally also blessed with being idea-men. Why would they spend oodles of money buying your idea, when they have plenty of their own? Hell, they have so many they'll never have time to get to them all!
You're right about the idea stealing. An idea is valuable and ought to be protected, especially in an environment of skilled implementers. That being said, it still doesn't increase its monetary value. What you're afraid of here isn't the stealing of the idea per se, but rather someone beating you to the implementation - which, again, demonstrates that the the majority of the value in such things is in the execution.
AFAIK some company stole the idea of GUI from some other company who in turn had stolen the idea from someone else.
Absolutely, but that goes to further my point. The university professor who allegedly invented the "Windows" paradigm didn't go anywhere with it. If his idea wasn't stolen, it's doubtful it would have ever been anything more than an intriguing research project. His idea was great, but his execution obviously failed to inspire the world... until a better implementation came along (i.e. Apple and/or Microsoft).
However dealing with what we collect is a problem we need to figure out.
Well, nuclear waste problem is not entirely problem-free. If it were I'd consider it a completely clean power source. After all, who cares about dangerous radioactive waste if you can guarantee safe disposal at all times?
Still. Having your nuclear waste in a truck is a lot better than having it spewed out into the atmosphere. One is a lot easier to control, the other is impossible. So while neither power sources are perfect, one is leaps and bounds beyond the other. Not to mention that coal is not nearly as clean in most countries as it is in the West, and the generated soot is often radioactive. And lemme tell ya, I'd deal with a gamma source any day of the week before swallowing an alpha source.
And which one would that be?
The one that has trouble asserting its northern sovereignty because all it's got is literally a bunch of natives armed with WW2-era rifles up there. The one that's also spread itself thin in Afghanistan while recruitment numbers plummet.
While the rest of the world runs out of resources, us Canadians are sitting on a veritable goldmine of oil, precious metals, and uranium. This is suicide without a large military to assert your control over said resources.
And given that the Americans have given their economy AND military the royal shaft over these past few years, they'd be hard pressed to come to ANYONE's aid at this point. If Russia is to reassert itself as a power its prime time is coming soon.
And that, boys and girls, is why the next world war will be fought between Russia and China.
What? China has no stake in the Arctic at *all*. I'm more worried about the Russkies making moves on Canada and Denmark, one of whom has a pathetically small military, the other is really too far away to do any good.
Risk: the Arctic Edition.
Except you have to roll every turn to see how many units freeze to death in each territory...
Yes, really. The blog post you linked doesn't claim that good ideas are worth money, just that great execution can't fix a terrible idea. But that's really just common sense.
Execution is IMHO worth more than a good idea, but only because fewer people can pull off great execution than people who can come up with great ideas. We've all had that "OMG GENIUS!" idea hit us at some point. Some of us get more of them than others, but in the end anyone who's reasonably observant and has good judgment can come up with good ideas.
Being able to pull it off is another story altogether. People who can do it are few and far between. Goes doubly if the idea requires a team. Good *team leaders* who can pull together the right people and execute the idea are truly one in ten thousand.
But the consoles sold in English-speaking countries have a lockout chip and historically anti-indie policies.
Am I missing something? Aren't the consoles sold in Asia (PS3, DS, Wii, etc.) all anti-indie as well?
Oh, and XNA would be perfect for your purposes, just FYI.
Here is a little process us whipper-snappers have come up with since you retired
Note that I'm a 20-something with zero experience with COBOL... but what you're talking about is ridiculous.
1. Make a copy
Simple enough... Unless your system is operating on such antiquated equipment that you'd have trouble cloning even the file system.
2. Work on that
Ok, sure, and...
3. Test it thoroughly
On what hardware? You think the state of California has a few spare 70s-era mainframes to run your production testing? There is absolutely no identical testing environment for you to do anything in. This is the cost of working on large legacy systems.
4. Put it into production.
And watch it go up in flames. Let's say you were able to create an emulated environment to run your stuff. What kind of data set are you testing with? You're not allowed to hit any live systems like printing the actual paychecks, or actually depositing any money. So basically the only stuff you can really put through the wringer is your core logic. Hmm.
Developing and debugging on large, antiquated mainframes is NOT like hitting make on a modern Linux distro. A system of that scale, even running on modern hardware and languages, is nearly impossible to fully debug before it hits production. I would know, I work with very large scale business computing every day.
Who modded the parent troll? Seriously, I'm a regular Apple developer. I write apps for both OS X and iPhone, and what the guy is saying is generally true.
Apple has piss poor support for their programmers. The quality of their documentation (or lack thereof) is perfect reflection on their philosophy: you will code for us whether you like it or not, because people use our hardware
Compare with MSDN, that has *superb* documentation, great developer support, and a never-ending flow of sample code, dev guides, and every resource imaginable to make a dev's life easy.
The way MS has treated 3rd party devs in the past has always been a symbiotic relationship. You make great apps for us, we'll support you in your task, and more people are locked into our platform. Everyone goes home happy.
Apple on the other hand has always done what they want, and forced developers to commit huge resources into keeping up, just because they feel like it. This has afforded them the luxury of being technologically up-to-date, at a heavy cost to their 3rd party developers, who get no love at all.
I am sure many programmers would be willing to work on their COBOL systems, but without the required "10 years of experience with COBOL" on their resume, they would never be hired.
And what happens when your amateur COBOL hackers bork a live, production system upon which tens of thousands of people rely on for their paychecks?
This isn't some lame Java app that's allowed to crash 5 times a day...
You can only raise salaries, not lower them. Ingenious!
Note that it takes 6 months to lower wages, but 9 months to restore them :) Clearly this means the most profitable move is to pay everyone nothing!
Right. That's step 1, "Embrace". I'm interested to see what "Extend" is in this context. Possibly a new open source license? They've made steps down that road, but not seriously.
As a college student nearing graduation (and thus target to a barrage of recruitment efforts), I don't really think MS is specifically after the classic "3E" method here.
What MS realizes right now is that their company is staffed by a lot of career types - people who want to clock their hours, get their paychecks, and spend time with their family. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they've also seen the effect of Google - a company full of people who would be willing to throw in insane hours and effort to get a cool, hip product out the door. Given MS's current obsession with *being like Google*, I suspect they want their share of the hip, dedicated, insanely motivated developer base... aka open source devs.
My school is very pro-open-source (what college isn't?), and recently MS has been sending more and more "open source evangelist" types to recruitment talks. The whole point is to convince people to join MS, because they're no longer evil, and are now doing cool open source, innovative projects!
Yeah, I've been guilty of hardcoding these things as well. The lack of a real layout manager is a pain point that will TOTALLY ASPLODE the moment Apple starts changing the UI...
The varying hardware feature set (camera, microphone, etc.) between the iPhone and iPod Touch are already diverse enough to make software marketing a bit dicey
If you poke around the API you will find that Apple has included ways to check the existence of various hardware capabilities (as well as network connectivity). Presumably they've already thought about devices that support different hardware profiles. For example, it is ill-advised to try and initialize the camera without first checking if it is available.
but I can't see Apple introducing a major new variation to the UI for smaller screens along with a whole new set of targeting constraints for developers.
Doubtful they will, but the same UI will work at different resolutions and screen sizes. I suspect the people who have hard-coded the screen width into their apps will be screwed at SOME point.
Not to self: Never let financial market speculators design a phone. Clearly they are retarded in this respect.
I dunno, the whole thing has always been somewhat goofy to me. I mean, they knew that the whole "big suit space marine" thing was cliche, and they poked fun at themselves for it. Nearly all of the unit voices were parodies of classic sci-fi. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think that Starcraft was always intended a game that's not to be taken TOO seriously.
They've also been able to shove SLI video cards into laptops, doesn't make them common. The heat and power issues with quad cores still make it completely impossible to put into a laptop and retain a reasonable level of mobility and battery life.
Wha? Last I checked Starcraft and Warcraft 2 were both plenty cartoony. Even the original Diablo games had *glowing red monsters*... Blizzard has *never* been known for gritty, realistic rendering...
Correct me if I'm wrong... but aren't contracts breakable without termination charges if the service provider changes the contract? There's a time limit on this, but it's fairly generous. I know people who got out of their Bell/Telus contracts recently precisely BECAUSE of the SMS fee.
Now, the fact that all the wireless providers in Canada are dirty crooks is another story altogether. Quitting your contract won't help much, you'll just get gouged somewhere else.
I think Canadian telecom (and to a lesser extent in the US) is proof solid that a laissez-faire approach to regulation and the institution of "free market" principles in an industry where the government GUARANTEES monopoly (via last mile, etc.) simply doesn't work.
Jim Prentice is a corporate crony who should be kicked out of office, preferably thrown in jail for so blatantly selling out the Canadian people's interests. His broken-record touting of "free market will be best" on the telecom issue is laughably absurd for anyone who's had to pay a phone bill in the last 10 years. What a change the Conservative government has brought us. Now instead of the Liberals selling out the Canadian people little bits at a time under the table, the Conservatives are having a firesale blowout with no regard for public opinion.
Who even comes up with this stuff?
People going short on the stock? You can generate a pretty penny doing this stuff.
spread out across the second largest country in the world and frozen solid for at least two or three months in the warmest areas
Correction. The west coast of Canada is rarely frozen, and in fact snows very little.
To listen to your post one would think that there is some sort of master plan that all Muslims are aware of to sneak into the West and subvert us from the inside out.
Don't worry. In 40 years his family will be saying "we shouldn't judge grandpa, he was born in a different time..."
We've been down this path before, the irrational hatred of an ethnic/religious group because they're supposedly "taking over" and destroying our way of life. Do I need to remind anyone what happened last time we tread this path?
Even if we don't invoke Godwin's Law, we've had many shameful period in our lifetime, when other minorities were being massacred and brutalized for supposed transgressions - incidents that we regret today that we have no way of taking back. Tread this ground carefully.