| last updated:02 Aug 2004 10:27 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 01 Aug 2004) | View Other Weeks |
| Geeks and cars | Sun 01 Aug | Ramu Karyat |
| Recently I have noticed a topic called what cars geeks drive ?". What according to you is the definition of geek ? Are you a geek ? |
| Sun 01 Aug | ...but ozzy osbourne is. | A geek is someone who bites the heads off of chickens. I have never done this, so I am not a geek. |
| Software Quality | Sun 01 Aug | Afficianado of Quality Goods |
| I always take the pro-america stance in these debates about offshoring: Those overseas guys dont know what they are doing! But today I realized that almost all of my favorite pieces of software that I use regularly were made outside the US by foreigners. The software is more stable, has a better UI, has more of the features I want. Cost is affordable too. Examples - all the music software and softsynths I use. I have a couple music programs made in the US and they are of poor stability and not very efficient so I never use them. This is about $10,000 worth of software altogether. My web browser is made overseas. My email client is made overseas. My cell phone is made overseas. All the good software seems to be made overseas! Stuff I have made in the US is unstable, bloated and difficult to use. What if what happened to Detroit were to happen to Silicon Valley? Eh, better think fast because my friends, it has already happened. Oh and just as a point of interest, none of this software I like is made in India or China. But I do think the fact that american software is of such terribly poor quality gives India a chance to come in and compete in quality. Unfortunately, they are competing on price instead. Note that Japan was no threat to the US automotive industry until they stopped competing on price and started competing on quality. Most americans will pay good money for software that does what it says it does, is stable and fast and easy to use. There is a real opportunity here. The US software industry is a basket case of incompetant prima donnas, braggarts, low quality and overpriced goods. This is a great chance for people to jump in and take over the market. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Mr.Analogy | Read : The innovator's Solution Making an 'almost good enough' product leaves a company room to improve. Making a good enough product risks 'overserving the customer'. The customer loves it, but the company has no room to improve. They either get disrupted by someone offering a 'just good enough' but cheaper product or thier product gets commoditized (competition). So... a 'great product' that completely satisfiest the customer is great for the customer, but sucks for the company. Look at Ecco Pro. they delivered a superior product back in the 90s. It's still better than most PIMs. But the company is out of business. In the end, that hurts the customer it just takes longer. However, if, as you say, the offshore folks are making better stuff then MORE POWER TO THEM. I'd love to hire ecoomical offshore talent. Or I'd like them to make a good PIM. I'll buy it in a second. |
| How do you know when you can trust someone? | Sun 01 Aug | The Cream in the Pie |
| I have a basic question. This is a dog eat dog world. Your friends will be your friends until someone pays them better. Is the world so mechanic that people will only trust you while their interests are aligned with yours? Dont people keep their promises any longer? How can you find out if someone is trustworthy? |
| Sun 01 Aug | www.marktaw.com | In watching the Democratic National Convention, one commentor was asked about whether or not John Kerry's past, particularly his military service, should come in to play, and the answer was - the best way to tell what someone will be like, is by their past behaviour. |
| Sun 01 Aug | AnonAnonAnon | If you have to ask, the probably are not. Or... MORE likely is you are not. Today, a man is bound by his lawyer not his word. I see examples here at least a couple of times a month 'I signed a bad contract.' 'I agreed to do this and now want out...' etc. If you want to trust someone you must first be trustworthy. We all experience the dog-eat-dog mentality and if honest with ourselves feel slighted when someone takes advantage and gets ahead. While it 'will all work out in the end' is a good philosophy, it is hard to swallow. Make your word, your bond and you can expect the same of others. Make yourself a trustworthy person and you can expect it of others. |
| Sun 01 Aug | . | There's an old saying: "You can't cheat an honest man". If you go in with your eyes open and never kid yourself, it's hard to be conned by someone else. |
| Sun 01 Aug | anony coward | In the book "I heard You Paint Houses" (about the guy who claims he shot Jimmy Hoffa) there's an interesting comment. The hitman was a good friend of Hoffa's; when asked why he had agreed to kill his friend, he said "If I didn't do it, Jimmy would still be just as dead, and I'd be dead too". |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tom H | 'best way to tell what someone will be like, is by their past behaviour' He signed up for the Navy and went to Vietnam, then came home and became and anti-war protester with Jane Fonda. I'm not sure what I can tell about him as a presidential candidate from that. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Helpful hinter | 'I'm not sure what I can tell about him as a presidential candidate from that. ' Um, maybe that you're guaranteed that Kerry won't be a president who avoided military service himself yet adopts a doctrine of 'preemptive' war. |
| Handling client contract negotiations | Sun 01 Aug | Bored Bystander |
| This is directed to anyone here who works as an independent contractor. How do you handle the situation where the client wants you to sign some ponderous pile of rubbish that is utterly one-sided? I have in hand possible contract work: a short term remote project amounting to $5K or less. One one hand I could just sign whatever crap they present me with, under the assumption that they are a small niche player with limited funds located a long distance away, and not worry about it. However, stuff happens, and I dont like leaving bread crumbs of careless dealings around. Among the many pleasantries in this companys contract: --- Indemnification. Contractor shall defend and/or indemnify and hold harmless the Corporation from and against any claim and damage resulting from any such act or failure to act by Contractor in excess of or contrary to the Corporations instruction or normal and ordinary business practices of similarly situated individuals. In addition, Contractor shall indemnify and hold the Corporation harmless against any liability for damages or other claims, including reasonable legal expenses and costs incurred by the Corporation, with respect to any alleged violations of Contractors duties to the Corporation as outlined in this Agreement. All costs incurred by the Corporation with respect to any such claims shall be promptly reimbursed by Contractor within fifteen (15) days after receipt of an invoice from the Corporation. --- I have *NEVER* been asked to assume liabilities for a client!! Do any of you indys even bother with clients that push off language like this? Ive already had two go rounds with them and they are clinging to this repulsive clause like a Rottweiler... |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | Not worth the risk. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Inside Job | Bored, definitely dodgy. It should be the other way around. The corporation (employer) is normally the one that indemnifies the employee. Sometimes this type of language is a carry-over where corporations are used to dealing with BIG 'contractors,' such as where they pay $5 million to get something done. This is particularly prevalent when dealing with government, but of course that's also where the danger comes, because citizens are forever complaining about the way a government department exercised its responsibilities, and in many cases demanding compensation. Increase the contract fee to $500,000 or walk. |
| Sun 01 Aug | www.marktaw.com | Signing something like this is basically inviting a lawsuit. It may not hold up in court, but there will be legal fees if they sue you. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tom Vu | Black out that stuff and sign it. It's better to cover your bases in case something happens. |
| Sun 01 Aug | TheGeezer | Sounds risky. How well do you know the client? If it's a remote development job then I suspect not particularly well. That being the case, politely pass on their contract. Something better will come along. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Mark Wilson | I received a contract with that type of language in it last year. I replaced it with the following and they accepted my changes:
Anything herein to the contrary notwithstanding, Contractor’s aggregate liability from any and all causes related to the subject matter of this Agreement shall be limited to money damages directly and proximately caused by Contractor in an amount not to exceed, as applicable, the amount paid by |
| Sun 01 Aug | Scot | Perhaps overly simplistic but... since it's a negotiation simply put a price on it and let them take it out if the price is unacceptable :-) |
| Sun 01 Aug | anony coward | This isn't a good place to ask legal advice. If the work isn't worth having the contract reviewed by a lawyer then walk away. That said (and the obligatory IMNAL), as I read it all they want you to sign is that they are not responsible for something you do without their direction, nor are they responsible for you not doing something they directed you to. It sounds reasonable to me, they're not responsible for your screw-ups; just make sure you get the requirements in writing and only do what's written. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Mr.Analogy | Seems to me that you should NEVER be responsible for more damages $$ than they paid you. That limits your risk. And why take a job for $x if you could be on the hook for $100x |
| Sun 01 Aug | Bored Bystander | Guys, thanks for the *OPINIONS* which I take as such! I wasn't asking legal advice, merely making sure that my eyes weren't deceiving me and that I was not amplifying the meaning of this paragraph. It appears that I wasn't. It goes. |
| Free Online Project Plannning | Sun 01 Aug | No BS |
| Ive taken on a database development project (outside of my day-job) and will probably take on a couple more consultants during the lifetime of the project. Ive realised the need for a good project planning/management system and have seen several good ones on the web (e.g. www.project.net). Just wondering if there are any good free ones out there that you guys may have come across? |
| Sun 01 Aug | anon | Basecamp ( http://www.basecamphq.com/ ) by 37Signals. |
| Sun 01 Aug | kc | dotproject! That's what I use and contribute to. |
| A form with lots of controls | Sun 01 Aug | Jim |
| I have a paper form that needs to be reproduced on screen. This is for a client with low end PCs and they dont seem to want to upgrade the hardware. About 300MHZ and lower with Win95 and some Win98. Anyway the form will have about 400 label and edit controls on it. In my tests when I place even 100 edit controls on a VB form it is "jerky" when it scrolls. That is the whole window scrolls in the MDI app. So I need a way to fix the jerkiness of the form. I am using VB and might be able to use C++. Any ideas would be appreciated. |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | Why don't you use multiple forms in a 'wizard' style? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jim | That is what I suggested to the client but they want to see the "entire 'official' form" on the screen so I have to do my best to give 'em what they want. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Li-fan Chen | I think what they want is something they can use, and you have to educate them. However, do it exactly as they prescribed, and get them to sign their decisions. So when the head rolls and they come back asking for a different design (that wizard idea) you'll look like a winner. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Li-fan Chen | Another thing you can do: do both (wizard and wizard less)... allow users to switch between the two using an undocumented F key. Then log who likes what best. Let's you build a case to help convince them to actually let the designing to the designer. |
| Sun 01 Aug | John Ridout | I don't know if it will make a difference but have you tried using the lightweight controls? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jim | I'm not arguing with you on the wizard thing but I am still looking for ways to get a form with a ton of controls to scroll smoothly. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Matt Conrad | IIRC, you are limited to 255 controls on a VB 6 form. A quick check online sees several references to this, so it's probably for real. Perhaps you can get around that with control arrays, but I wouldn't do it unless the arrays made sense in their own right. Well, maybe you could array all your labels if they never change. Anyway, your problem may be worse than you think. I'd look at setting up some paging, or something like that. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jim | What do you mean by "lightweight controls" John? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Ankur | Embed a WebControl in your VB app and use an HTML form? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jim | That's interesting Ankur but I'm not familiar with getting data off of HTML forms on embedded webcontrol's. Any ideas? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard | >> Any ideas? Dump this client because they are obviously too obtuse to benefit from the superior intellect that you espouse to embue upon them. Some people (most) just cannot be helped. The sooner you accept this hard learned fact, the sooner you can become at peace with the world--and yourself. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Chris Tavares | You're going to need to reduce the number of controls; there's no way around it. The HTML control is an option, but with that number of inputs I wouldn't be surpised if the webbrowser control also starts to creak. How far from a table is the form? Could you use a single grid control with the right set of styles & read-only settings? You could put a lot of fields on the screen in only one control that way. -Chris |
| Sun 01 Aug | HTH | Just an idea to play around with ... What about grouping your widgets in an ActiveX control? This the form itself isn't rendering 100 controls ... just 4 or 5 ActiveX controls ... which in turn render ~ 20 widgets each. Like I said, just an idea to possibly play around with ... |
| Sun 01 Aug | Patrik | Jim, I feel your pain. Instead of a wizard, have you tried just different tabs, with each section of the official form on one tab each, and then bring them a function that allows them you view the entire form that looks the way God intended. Once they use it they will hopefully understand that the data entry form is a matter of workflow in the appliation, and the form viewer can then present the data in a way they are used to view it - regardless of them not entering the data in the actual form. Make it easy to switch between the two, Edit/View forms so they can switch back and forth to their hearts content. Good luck. |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | Anon-y-mous Cow-ard, Wow, what an insightful thought! I hope there are more software developers like you in the world. It will bring more business to me :) |
| Sun 01 Aug | Wayne | It's easy to get data to/from the HTML control. Just reference add a reference to the MS HTML Object Model and do it like this: Dim oEl as HTMLInputTextElement Dim sText as String Set oEl = WebBrowserControl.document.getElementByID('txtBoxID') sText = oEl.value Personally, I think you'll have an easier time doing a form like this in HTML since there are many more layout options such as using Tables and Div tags to organize the page. At least test it out by making a page with 100 controls on it (just do a bunch of text boxes) and open it right in IE on a machine with the target specs to see how it reacts. |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=88178&ixReplies=22 |
| Sun 01 Aug | Chris Altmann | Does it have to scroll continuously? You could do it wizard style using a vertical scrollbar to move from page to page and have keyboard focus at the ends of each page switch pages automagically. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tom H | Here's a trick that sometimes works. Implement it the way you suggested (as multiple tabs or pages). Tell the client it's just a prototype you put together to test out the various controls and that they'll get the 'official' form as soon as you get everything working smoothly (make sure you have a Print option that prints the entire form the way they want to see it). Let them play with it for a while to get used to it. If they still insist on having it all on one page at least you'll have bought some time. But usually once they see it they understand that tabs or multiple pages is fine. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Bored Bystander | I designed applications for one client that fit this description. (think: government/bureaucratic forms.) The performance issue was even more severe with Windows 3.x which was the original platform for the app. What I did was to develop a way to use one edit control that I repositioned on every chance of focus. The problem then turned into one of making the window and the edit control emulate a more conventional 'many-control' approach. This included: - Maintaining an 'edit buffer' data structure that contained the data under edit. When the edit is repositioned, the data in the edit needs to be written to the corresponding buffer location; and the data corresponding to the new edit location needs to be loaded into the edit control. - Capturing all keystrokes that a user would reasonably expect to be able to change focus of the control. - Triggering on mouse down events and mapping mouse clicks on edit locations to data entry locations. It was non trivial but straightforward programming. I recommend using C++ to develop a window class that implements this behavior in a generic way. |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | i don't know how the form looks but if it's very simple you may be able to recreate in excel, and add some macro, etc. or you can try access? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Kyralessa | If they really want an on-screen form that looks just like a paper form, have you considered using Acrobat Forms? |
| Sun 01 Aug | yet another anon | I've used Excel for a form that had about 75 controls and it worked pretty well. Here's what I did: - Set the column width to 4 for all columns and merge cells as needed for input a label fields. - Define names for all entry field ranges. - Shade the cells for the label fields. - Apply worksheet protection and unlock only the cells for entry fields. - Hide the row and columns headers. - Hide the grid lines. - Set the move after enter direction to across. - Hide the standard toolbars and create a custom toolbar. - Code all database access, validation, and view customization in VBA. The biggest drawback is the max length for cell contents. I think it's 255 characters. I used the Excel form controls in several places to overcome this. Going into it I thought it was going to turn out kludgy, but it actually didn't look half bad. Moreover, the users liked it. |
| Sun 01 Aug | TheGeezer | Just on the subject of hideous looking forms, has anyone ever been to a hotel/dentist/auto-electrician and noticed them still (to this day) using a hacked-together MS Access 2.0 application with garish green forms and zillions of UI controls on Windows 95 for running their core reservation/billing system? Seriously, what monkeys can earn a living off writing that sort of stuff and peddling it to (gullible?!) customers? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Ankur | Probably the hotel/dentist/auto-electrician's kid. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jonny Boy | Tab control ? Frames ? Containers ? I don't see this as difficult at all... I have a client where we have a lot more than 100 controls. Some are control arrays but to serve a specific purpose, others are just plain old controls. I make use of tabs, frames, and various functions to make it look like its all one screen. Give it a shot!!! |
| best days of your life? | Sun 01 Aug | Modern Cowboy |
| I saw a weird Wal-Mart ad today. In it, a mother says to her college daughter, These are the best days of your life. The daughter replies, I hope so. Im not sure what I hope so is supposed to mean. She hopes her life doesnt get any better? Anyway, do you feel your days as an undergraduate were the best days of your life? Ive been out of school for three years and I miss it. Miss being relatively carefree, miss learning all the time, miss all the women and parties. Do you feel your life keeps getting better as you get older or did it peak somewhere? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Eric Debois | While I had a great deal of fun in college, I dont miss it. Life keeps changing, I keep changing with it. And, it keeps getting better in many, if not most ways. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Brad | I miss the academic environment, so much so that I've contemplated going back for a PhD, although everyone I know who is in or has been through a PhD program has advised against it. Still, my undergrad days certainly weren't carefree. Sure, a lot of fun was had, but the stress levels were consistently higher then than they have been since. One feeling I do not miss is that I could never truly relax because there was *always* something I should have been working on or studying. [I remember at my first job, fresh out of college, I mentioned to my manager that I found school to be very stressful, and she said that work was more so. I scoffed at this, and 11 years later I stick with my scoff.] Anyway, the attraction of being in an academic environment, at least for me was two-fold: constant learning and being surrounded by bright people. There is one other environment I've been in (a couple times now) that is similar: a startup. I think some of my best times have been while I've been involved in startups (at least, in the early days...the second startup started becoming much less fun after we grew past 30 or 40 people...but that's a whole 'nother topic). So the short answer is: it doesn't have to be. For me, it's just a matter of being in a challenging environment, solving interesting problems with bright/cool people, and I'm happy. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Flasher T | As a current undergraduate (starting my third and final year of BA studies), let me tell you, these days are anything but carefree. First of all, you're doing tons of work and not earning any money with it. Getting payed makes your attitude to a lot of things *way* better. More importantly, I both know that I am significantly better than my classmates (I try to convince myself otherwise and fail regularly) and know that I can get a good job any given, uh, week if I don't have the temporal and geographical commitments of college setting me back - the university is in a small town and most of the jobs are in a big town. Also, if I screw up here, that's going to impact my life in a very bad way, whereas if I get fired or quit a job, I'll find another one - if all else fails I can always become a trucker and earn tons of cash sitting next to my bed and looking out the window all day. Of course, I'm not typical - I was already good when I went to college and I'm only here for the diploma. |
| Sun 01 Aug | You stupid kid ... | 'I both know that I am significantly better than my classmates' At CS and not English, correct? |
| Sun 01 Aug | No BS | Best days of my life? maybe....This was the pattern of my college life for all 4.5 years of it. First few weeks of semester, worry about how i'm going to pay for school, meet new chicks, get textbooks after i've happened on the money some how. catch up to the rest of the class 'cos I always missed the first week of school for all 9 semesters to sort out admin. / tuition issues Midway through the semester - i know who my friends are, which chicks are worth the effort, who's the smart kid in class who'll help me with my coding/calculus/numerical analysis etc. which classes are going to be 'Easy A's ' so I can skip them and do homework for the not so easy ones. where to get free food and free entertainment. Drawing to the end of the semester - sucking up to proffessors for whom I've done sub-standard/no work so I can make it out of the class with a 'C' for completion. wrapping up my easy A classes so I don't have to take the final and use the precious last couple of weeks to finish that killer project that should have taken all semester and a team of 4 but for some reason it's been left to the last week and you're the only team member left. And yes finals and my famous phrase just before an exam while other students are paging through their 400 page text books and i'm holding my can of mountain dew and putting formulas in my TI-85...'If I don't know it by now, there's no way I'll learn it in the next five minutes so screw the text book!' And then there was summer. interning at startups, doing research for profs who thought they were the next nobel prize winners, road trips, hot chicks in the latest abercrombie crap. yep, those were good days... |
| Sun 01 Aug | www.marktaw.com | About a year ago here there were a couple of threads on work & regrets & the vast majority of people said they simply stopped having fun after college. I wish I could dig them up. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tom | Mr T's English seems acceptable, even if his spelling is a bit off and he happens to go to university with apparent thickies. What mistake are you thinking of? (Mind you I would probably use 'I know both that... and that...' ('that' needs higher precendce in English 2.0 :) rather than the somewhat-tortured-to-these-ears 'I both know that... and know that...'.) |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tom | The reader should use their skill and judgement to work out what common English word I have mangled into "precendce". |
| Sun 01 Aug | Flasher T | As a matter of fact I'm not a programmer, hence my long-standing status as a lurker - I am in fact an English major, so mr. Kid can piss off. :P At this point I'm doing some online grunt work that pays fairly well for the time I put in, and freelance for http://www.baltictimes.com. People I go to uni with are fairly smart - these are the top 20 out of 400 applicants for the major of English language and literature, it's just that I seem to be naturally insanely good at English. Got the top grade on the entrance exam, 85.5% on a test they said was designed to put the best people at 80%. I've also been a semi-pro journalist (not living off it but writing for proper media) since I was 11. I have worked at a software vendor though, and I enjoy Joel's writings for the general common sense value rather than just its relevance to the programming world. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Rob | Yes, even though at the end of college I was getting really sick of it, and wanted to move out into the real world, now that I am in the real world, I want to go back. Of course, the grass is always greener... I moved across the country for a programming job. I have been crunching on projects for the last 2 years. During the crunchtime you lose any sort of social life. And during the downtime you are too tired to resume it. I just sit at home in front of my computer in my spare time. I don't even know anybody in this town really. In college I had tons of friends. I would go out every weekend. I was depressed then too, for sure... but now it seems like a cakewalk. I definitely miss the women. Just being around dudes all the time really wears on you. When you're a programmer you don't much chance to work with women on anything. In college I lived with women like every year in apartments, so they would always have their friends over and stuff... I keep having this plan to just go back to college and party and redo it all... it would be so easy. : ) |
| Sun 01 Aug | Christopher Wells | > Anyway, do you feel your days as an undergraduate were the best days of your life? No: working on problems that had already been solved by generations of undergraduates before me seemed like a waste of time. > Do you feel your life keeps getting better as you get older or did it peak somewhere? It has highs and lows. I like learning new things, having new (pleasant) experiences as well as repeating already-known (pleasant) experiences. Because I keep learning new things, in that way it keeps getting better. |
| Sun 01 Aug | . | People who are insanely good at English generally spell paid correctly. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Mr.Analogy | Optimist: 'This is the worst day of my life' Pessimist: 'No. It isn't'. |
| Sun 01 Aug | AnonAnonAnon | I always hope tomorrow improves on today. Better? What does 'better' mean? In university I had a girlfriend and family support. It was great not having the responsibility of life while learning. However, it was also great to get that first job, then improvements, promotions, go out on my own. Add to that a wife, home, children. I am with the OP, I hope this is not the best day of my life and short of it ending, or something equally tragic, it will not be. |
| Sun 01 Aug | karthik | I dont miss anything. Everything has sucked so far. |
| Longhorn Visual Basic compatibility | Sun 01 Aug | karthik |
| I assume that Microsoft will release a version of Visual Basic once Longhorn releases. Will it also allow you to build executables for the old operating systems -> Windows 95,98, 2000,XP etc.? If it does not, then there is a huge market potential here. Maybe Delphi/Gupta/Powerbuilder can step in. Even if 20-30 million refuse to upgrade to Longhorn, there is a lot of money waiting to be made. |
| Sun 01 Aug | karthik | When i say executables, i mean 'Can Visual Basic Longhorn run on old OS's?'. Its all right if its .NET |
| Sun 01 Aug | Almost Anonymous | 'I assume that Microsoft will release a version of Visual Basic once Longhorn releases. ' Why would they do that? Old Visual Basic applications will run on Longhorn just fine. And VB as been EOL'd in favour of .NET. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Craig | VB6 is dead, there will be no updates. VB.NET will definitely be updated but software developed with it wont run on Win95 and probably 98/ME soon. Your best option is to use Delphi which is still releasing Win32 versions as well as .NET versions of the compiler. That would provide the easiest upgrade path. |
| Sun 01 Aug | bui van hai | hi you can find for me job web and visual basic online . i can a few money ,about 10$ a mouth thank! |
| Sun 01 Aug | Iago | The real question is, will Visual Basic.NET Longhorn Edition (or whatever they choose to call it) make it easy to write 'fat GUIs' that can run natively in Avalon *and* the old S.W.F. or GDI? As far as the things VB is mostly used for are concerned, Longhorn is about the GUI. And I seriously doubt we're going to see Avalon backported to XP... |
| Sun 01 Aug | Please stay informed more than you currently do. Thank you for your support. | >> 'VB6 is dead, there will be no updates.' Oh really... Is that why Microsoft released Service Pack 6 for it this March... |
| Sun 01 Aug | I'd like to buy a clue, Pat. | == 'VB6 is dead, there will be no updates.' == What kind of ignorant person thinks this? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Almost Anonymous | Well there will not be a VB 7.0.. which I believe it was the person meant by "no significant updates". |
| Sun 01 Aug | Kyralessa | 'VB6 is dead' <> 'there will be no updates' I've heard the same about DAO: 'DAO is dead.' Funny, my Access DBs that use DAO still work just fine. I guess that we help the market, though, if as soon as a tool is mature and stable we declare it 'dead' and move on to the Next Big Thing. (For the record, though, I prefer VB .NET to VB6.) |
| Sun 01 Aug | AllanL5 | I thought there was going to be an update to VB6 in VB 2005 -- that they were going to support the 'older' VB6-ish object model. Not so? |
| Sun 01 Aug | TheGeezer | Either way, I just wish someone would take that tired old dog of a language- VB6 - to the knackers yard and put it out of it's misery! |
| How can a progammer make some $$$ on the side? | Sun 01 Aug | CaptainNeedSomeExtraDough |
| Im a .NET programmer who has done some side work in the past to pick up extra cash as needed. Im looking to do the same again, but Im hoping to find something else to do besides the usual hourly contract coding gigs on evenings and nights. Any ideas ??? Heres some things Ive thought of , not sure if there is a market for any of the following: Creating light/medium weight technical documentation that requires a programmers knowledge? Teaching a class at the local community college or distance learning college Reviewing code/technical documentation or book manuscripts. Any other ideas besides these? |
| Sun 01 Aug | CaptainNeedSomeExtraDough | Oh, here is another one: Writing articles for magazines that pay. |
| Sun 01 Aug | PopCulture | i like how you casually throw in 'teach a college course'. theres all sorts of certs you need to get just to teach preschool... its just not that easy. If you want instant gratification, you can tutor undergrad (or grad) students for $25 an hour; get a small group at a lower rate and divide the costs between 2-5 kids and your looking at $50-100/hour for teaching people your hobby... VERY easy to do if you have a laptop and live near a WiFi enabled college town or a hotspot enabled starbucks take out an ad in the college newspaper or put up fliers. |
| Sun 01 Aug | one programmer's opinion | Teaching - check with your local state run schools. Many states now require their part-time instructors to have an appropriate Masters degree. Documentation - ask this question at the technical writing website (techwhirl.com?). Reviewing books - ask this question where book authors post such as Apress' (a book publisher) forum. I suppose you could try and compete with the low bidders at online freelance sites such as rentacoder or create a shareware program. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Stephen Jones | Sell your body. It's no different from what you are doing in your day job, good exercise, and means that you will have to shower and change clothes every now and again. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Craig | I think teaching would be the easiest to pick up and make money on the side. Writing a book of sorts is very time consuming and risky, and very few authors, especially in IT circles, make any money from it. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Philo | 'Teaching - check with your local state run schools. Many states now require their part-time instructors to have an appropriate Masters degree.' [sigh] Because, of course, you can't teach loops and variables until you've had two more years of school and written a dissertation on neural nets. (and it would be best if those two years were taken at a state run school, filling their coffers) Philo |
| Sun 01 Aug | Anonx | On the teaching... I knew an office admin who taught MS office products on the weekend. I think she taught to groups. I believe she said she would net around 400 a day for it. Can't remember if she put the course together or if she bought a package to teach from. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Flasher T | The thing about technical writing is, any sort of serious vendor will want their writer to have an in-depth knowledge of the product, and that is inconsistent with a part-time gig. I did tech writing for nine months alongside college, and when I decided to quit, it was a serious problem for the company. |
| Sun 01 Aug | dot who has tutored | In California, community college teachers, even part-timers, have to have a master's degree or else bachelor's and significant industry experience. Tutoring is not bad. If you can hook up with a commercial tutoring company, you can get decent money that way also. Not as good as running your own groups of course. Tutoring would get you $25 to $50 at college level. $25/hour is not unheard of even tutoring for high school classes. It helps if you can get your hands on the books that the tutorees will be using. Math also is in demand. Maybe more demand than CS but it is an uphill battle sometimes. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Tim Sullivan | There are a few things. Here are some that I did: 1) Develop a component (.NET, COM, VCL, whatever) or library of code, and sell it online. I made some /great/ supplimental income over a number of years before I got tired of it. 2) Develop a small application that does one thing really well, and sell it online. 3) Do some light computer consulting for friends and their friends. 4) Forget teaching college - look to corporate training. A /lot/ of these companies have high trainer turnovers. Getting a day or two a week might be easy, though they don't pay a lot. I did this full time for /years/, and it helped immensely with user interface design, finding out what users like and hate, as well as using every horizontal software product out there from MS Office to Lotus Notes. 5) Find all your old crap, the stuff that you'll never really use no matter how much you think otherwise, and put it all on EBay. |
| Sun 01 Aug | AllanL5 | Check your employment agreement. Certain employers write them such that any 'side' work you get must not compete with your day job. |
| Regression Analysis | Sun 01 Aug | bankstrong |
| Im looking to incorporate a fancy type of regression analysis (stepwise) in a new software package (implemented in VB). Im investigating 3rd party components from SPSS, SAS, and fmsinc.com. Id rather buy than create. Does anyone have other suggestions for good places to purchase statistical components? Mike |
| Sun 01 Aug | Someone Else | I use SPlus, and they even have an opensource clone named R (by Gnu). R is great for software components. |
| Sun 01 Aug | anony coward | Here's one package, the page has a bunch of links to others as well: http://salstat.sourceforge.net/index.php?features |
| Sun 01 Aug | bankstrong | If I understand the links properly (I'm not at the same programming level as most people here), they are focused on web development and are open-source. I need to integrate the code into my license-protected, standalone PC software. Thanks, Mike |
| Parser generators--does anyone use them? | Sat 31 Jul | Jesus to Kimo: Take Steroids |
| If you had to write some general-purpose parsing code, code to, say, parse some MIME fields or an *.ini file into memory, would you go ahead and use a parser generator like Bison, or would you do it all by hand? Does the language matter? I.e., would you use a parser generator with C or C++ but not with Perl? |
| Sat 31 Jul | Kalani | Use them? I make them! :) Yes they're still important even if you use Perl. Look on CPAN and you'll find plenty of LL(k), LALR, and General LR parser generator projects. Perl makes it easy for the programmer to define regular grammars (ie: in regular expressions), but as anybody will tell you, the set of languages defined by regular grammars is a proper subset of the languages defined by the context-free grammars. For very simple text formats (like Lisp S-expressions), I typically implement a parser in a compact finite-state automaton (or push-down automaton) -- and I've got a simple framework for making those too. For parsing programming languages or set constraints (e.g.: SQL), a CFG-based parser is invaluable. If you're using C++, you might try boost's LL(k) parser generator library ('Spirit'). If the grammar you have in mind is inseparably left-recursive or ambiguous, you'll need to look at other types of parser generators. The General LR parsers (e.g.: Earley, Tomita) will parse any CFG but they can be less efficient than necessary. I've written a version of Earley's parser as my 'catch-all' parser and am working on some grammar analysis stuff to conditionally return LL(k) or LALR parsers if possible. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Michael Moser | For a think like INI files, i wouldn't bother with YACC; i guess it is harder to debug YACC rules (shift reduct conflicts; insert proper errror handling; bother with C languager bindings etc..) than to write some simple parsing code. For more complex grammars there is Visual Parse++ - an IDE that makes debugging of rewriting/production rules easy. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Craig | We have used boost "spirit" extensivly, it's a great tool. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Katie Lucas | All the time. Simple files -- throw it through a suitable Lexer. More complex stuff I use YACC for. I've got all the fixes sorted out for putting multiple parsers into the same object code and so on... Have a whole bundle of C++ classes for supporting the parser so the action parts of the statements are minimal. Once you've got a good toolkit to work with, it's all superb. Oh -- the YACC errors get a lot easier to fix with experience, BTW. You end up with a sort of mental model of what sets it off whinging and you can build the grammar to avoid them. |
| Sun 01 Aug | anony coward | Make sure you aren't reinventing the wheel, things like ini and MIME parsers are commonly available: http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-ConfigParser.html http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-email.html |
| Sun 01 Aug | dot who has tutored | Antlr (which can generate Java and C++ parsers) comes with grammers for Java, XML, HTML, etc. And for lex/yacc (or flex/bison), grammers are available for just about anything. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Chris Tavares | I used YACC to parse email addresses. Worked out very well, it translated almost directly from the RFC, and the resulting code handled ALL possible internet email addresses, which is impossible with regexes. Would have been a lot harder without the tool. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Pakter | Is it easy to generate a "clean" C++ parser ? I am generally not very enthusiastic about Yacc-generated code. Should I have a look at spirit then ? |
| Joel and Eric on Paul Graham's latest? | Sat 31 Jul | Crimson |
| What do you guys think about it? I know the situation is such that you may not be willing to give a true opinion. ;) |
| Sat 31 Jul | Matthew Lock | Have they commented on Paul Graham's article? I didn't notice/ |
| Sat 31 Jul | Eric Sink | The piece is very well written. I could write a whole essay in response to it. Instead, I think I'll just write a few offhand remarks and then go watch a Law and Order rerun: It seems clear that a goal of this piece is to pick a fight. It accomplishes that goal. His characterization of great hackers is a perfect fit for some of the great hackers I know. He seems to make the assumption that great hackers make the best hires. That assumption clearly has some truth in it, but it still wants to be challenged and debated. He broadly says great hackers don't use Windows or Java. Like I said, that description fits a few people I know. Still, I'm not sure I think the characterization is perfect. Quite frankly, on a personal level, Graham's piece made me wonder if I am a great hacker or not. I've always been faster than most of my peers. I love python, Linux, emacs and have a general preference for open source. But apparently I cared more about money than those things. Today I use all kinds of technologies which Graham says great hackers don't use. Furthermore, I've learned the secret that the most profitable products are the ones the great hackers think are beneath their skills. This raises three possibilities: 1. I never was a great hacker. This could be true, but I've worked a few miracles of code in my day, so I can't shake the belief that I might have once been a great hacker. 2. I used to be a great hacker, but I changed. If this is true, I lost something. But it seems I also gained something. 3. Graham is wrong. Like I said, his piece is very well written. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Crimson | I agree. He's certainly hinted at his disdain for all things Java (and Windows) in the past, but in this article, the gauntlet is firmly thrown down. As you said, it's his usual well written essay. However, there are a few premises that he asks us to swallow that I'm choking on. In general there include: - The supposed incompetence of all things Windows and Java - Virtually ignoring C/C++ and Perl during his brief synopsis of major language use - Statements like 'Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java' begs the question of whether or not he automatically excludes people as being 'great programmers' if they prefer Java - His following statements concerning his friend and Windows development begs exactly the same question, only with Windows in place of Java - His baffling belief that Apple exists because of the quality of their product rather than the fact that MS allows them to exist so that federal anti-trust lawyers don't come pounding on their door However, he makes a lot of excellent points, and many of his observations are *often* true, if not absolutely so. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Management Material | For me, this piece revealed Graham's weaknesses and lack of insight. In reading a few of his earlier pieces I had suspected they were probably sparked by discussion on JOS, but without any acknowledgement. The latest one certainly has that feel. Unlike his earlier pieces, it displays no additional insight. I'm sorry. I think this latest piece from Graham is cheap. He is essentially using it to promote his own approach to the world rather than it being a genuinely objective or insightful commentary. |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=168339&ixReplies=45 |
| Sun 01 Aug | Jordan Lev | Hi. I actually saw Paul Graham give this speech at the OSCON this week, and it was great (he's as good a speaker as a writer). I think you should keep in mind who his intended audience was for this -- people who were attending the Open Source Conference. So while it may seem like he's trying to 'pick a fight', he was probably espousing the least-controversial opinion he could, given the crowd. But of course this attitude, which is largely unquestioned in that community, is almost intentionally meant to 'pick a fight' within the larger world of developers. Refer to the second-last paragraph of his piece:
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| Sun 01 Aug | Simon Lucy | I haven't bothered to read the piece, why should actual information be used to colour my own predjudices? The word hacker is one of those terms of adolescence that I abominate it almost as much as 'techie'. I think much of Paul Graham's opinions are formulated, like many, upon his original experience. Those that Lisped in the beginning can rarely twist their tongue into new shapes. Its not surprising that he doesn't value Win32, Java and the rest since he's done most everything his own way and, if what I've heard is marginally true, in ways which are difficult to maintain and frequently replaced. I have nothing against Lisp, or any other means of shuffling stuff through transistors, I've not found a language or grammar so far that I haven't been able to understand, though I prefer one that doesn't use recursion and a gazillion brackets to emit a string. |
| Sun 01 Aug | John Rusk | Perhaps Paul Graham looked at Windows in the early 90's and concluded, probably correctly, that it was inferior to its competition. Having made that conclusion, it sounds to me like he never really looked at it again, and so hasn't really seen how much ground Windows has made up. I guess another reason for is anti-Windows stance is his belief that most software should be server-based. While I don't agree with his anti-Windows view, I think the article is thought provoking and well written. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Rick Thunderbolt | Graham is correct. All the best programmers work using Python and Perl on Linux. Programmers who use Java or work on Windows are not very intelligent. These facts are unassilable, sisnce they come from the man who wrote the world's FIRST web application EVER. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Code Seeker | Does any one have a pointer to substantial open source code written by Paul Graham? He says that all great hackers work in open source and that he himself is a great hacker. Therefore it would follow that there must be considerable examples out there of his writing style in the form of working examples of finely coded, maintainable and robust applications. |
| Sun 01 Aug | ronk! | I don't remember him calling himself a great hacker. Where does say that? |
| Sun 01 Aug | Eric Sink | Agreed -- I don't remember Graham claiming that he himself is a great hacker. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Kalani | No he doesn't say that he's a great hacker in that article. But if you listen to Doug Kaye's recent interview with him (http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail164.html) you'll find this quote: 'I wrote this spam filter in order to make sure this language was actually good for writing programs and the spam filter turned out to be really good. I wrote something about it and a lot of other people wrote spam filters like it. But also simultaneously I’m working on a new axiomatic core of the language. I’m trying to do what McCarthy did in building up a language from axioms the same way Euclid did with geometry ... [but] it could be years [before Arc is completed] because Lisp itself was invented in 1958, so I feel like people have waited over 40 years for a really good Lisp implementation and I don’t mind if they have to wait for another two in order to make sure that it is actually really good.' I think it's fairly clear that he considers himself a 'good hacker' (to the extent that his greatest work has been needed for 40 years). He describes his new language as being designed for good programmers (and simultaneously says that he's designed his language to make it easy for him to implement his spam filtering program). In fact, I think that he probably is a 'good hacker,' but he's also clearly got a myopic attitude about quality in the world at large. Some of this is just pandering to a particular audience (he's previously described Python as the result of Guido van Rossum 'bending over backwards' not to reimplement Lisp so that he can claim to have created a new language), but I wonder how much he's mixing up tools (even intellectual tools) with the exploration of new domains. It's like the question of whether Newton or Leibniz made a more important contribution (Newton's tools might have been less elegant, but his discovery of classical physics was significant). |
| BSxx on campus recruitment | Sat 31 Jul | hoser |
| If there are any students on the JoS forum, Im curious as to how things are going for kids graduating with Bachelors of Science degrees in CS, EE, Math or other fertile software fields are going? Is it hard to get interviews? Are there lots of companies interviewing on campuse these days? Does that degree guarantee your employment? There was a time when it almost did guarantee a good career (back in my youth), but how are things now? Thanks, |
| Sat 31 Jul | Bored Bystander | When I graduated from engineering school in 1980 the more aggressive kids in my class had 5-7 offers in hand. I was pretty laid back (typical engineering nerd type) and I had four offers in hand at graduation with almost no effort. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Philo | [Philo checks watch, shakes it] Is it 1980 again already? Damn... Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | Tj | I've got a BSCS from a state college. There were 0 companies interviewing on campus last semester of school. There were 2 internship positions posted and they were fought over by students from other schools also I'm sure. I don't know who got the positions. The school has already employed students from previous years some are doing research on grants while others are teaching but they can only employ so many. The guys (At the school) who maintain the network etc... won't give up their jobs heh, who can blame em. At the job fairs that I attended there were usually two or three companies interested in taking my resume but they didn't seem to go much further than that. Does it guarantee a job or a career? I don't think a degree ever really guaranteed you anything. The demand for the service you can provide at the time you get your degree is what counts and right now the demand for entry level CS degree does not seem to be that high. I currently work at a hardware store and hopefully I can run across a position in my home state or a position with the school. I think it matters what part of the country you are in and what school you went to. (e.g. Had I attended MIT and been on the east coast instead of the midwest the opportunities may have been greater, but thats just speculation. /shrug). I guess I could also try for the help desk/support jobs or start my own company. Most of the jobs advertised seem to want 3 - 5 years of experience and then there are the reportedly 'fake' positions advertised by a lot of recruiters and companies collecting resumes which the schools employment office helps us sort through. So is it good? No. Is it hopeless? I hope not. |
| Sat 31 Jul | hoser | BSCS from a state school and no on-site interviews? Well, that sucks. Damn. If I had any guts at all, I could rule the world with 10 new grads and a decent product idea. I am gutless. BoredB, we are the same generation. There were no guarantees then, (I did not mean to say that there were), but there apparently are a hell of a lot fewer possibilities now. |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | The school has a lot to do with it. The top grads at the top schools still get offers from a lot of places & have recruting fairs filled with great places. Even the medium grads at the top schools get lots of offers. The top grads at lesser known schools.... Well, you can't get what isn't there for you to take. |
| Sat 31 Jul | hoser | 'The top grads at the top schools still get offers from a lot of places & have recruting fairs filled with great places. ' Well, yeah, I mean an MIT or CMU CS degree may actually mean an autmatic job. But what about CS degrees from: Illinois Michigan Purdue U. of Washington (U-Dub) Arizona Penn State These are good (top?) state schools with good reputations and are affordable (speaking in relative terms). I mean I can see how a degree from Idaho might net you a goose egg - because no recruiter can even book air fare into your town. I recall a friend of mine struggling with the MSEE material at Purdue, and someone dissing the state school said something like 'yeah, well maybe your undergrad degree was lame, where'd you go?' His answer: MIT. I went to a private school (Rose-Hulman) and tuition back then had risen to $7K/year by the time I graduated. Today, its $40K/yr. Its questionable as to whether I can send my kids there. Just pondering the landscape... |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | My friend recently graduated from Cooper Union & most of the graduating class got jobs or offers or at least a serious look from places like Lucent and some other places she mentioned that I don't remember. I know Citi, when I worked there, recruited from Columbia mostly, and maybe NYU. In fact, the Columbia medical school is named after the CEO. Unfortunately, these are things you really don't know until you get out of school. When you're checking out a school, it would make sense to go to their job fairs and see who's represented, and talk to some of the students about their prosepects. |
| Sat 31 Jul | . | Let's not forget that companies, universities and all the media 'experts' were screaming about how there was a desperate shortage of programmers just four years ago, and how it was an unbeatable career option. Someone should sue those bastards. |
| Sun 01 Aug | kc | HOSER! I went to Rose too. EE back a few years, but now I do software development. And my EE degree was more rigorous than the EE's which I knew at UIUC and Purdue... When I graduated, most people managed to get 2-5 offers. I believe I had 4 with *not* super grades. From what I've heard from back in the pipeline (Jan Ford), things are warming up there again, they expect the next Career Fair to be much better. |
| Sun 01 Aug | kc | Oh, and when I started, tuition was $20k, but I managed to have enough credits and earn more fast enough to move up a class and get a significant discount. |
| Sun 01 Aug | no name | Rose-Hulman is regarded m/l as the MIT of the corn belt, is it not? Just not well known outside the midwest... |
| Sun 01 Aug | kc | It's on the leading edge of a lot of things and ranked pretty well in US News & World Report, but unless you're in the Midwest or working with some serious engineers, you're unlikely to have any clue what it is. It's the exception when you actually meet someone who has heard of it... |
| Sun 01 Aug | www.marktaw.com | Universities need to spend as much PR on raising the awareness of their school to companies that may be interested in hiring the best & brightest as they do convincing high school students theirs is the best school for them. |
| The Village (no spoilers) | Sat 31 Jul | Philo |
| See, Im not even going to read the The Village topic, cause I dont want to know a jot of Shyalamans movies until I see them - if its good, there is no way I want an inkling of whats going to happen, and its too easy for a single accidental remark to ruin it. I love the wonder of being hit upside the head with a well-crafted twist. :-) Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | dir at badblue com | Then you must have loved _The Usual Suspects_. One of my favorite endings of all time. |
| Sat 31 Jul | eclectic_echidna | If I put a spoiler {here}, then the subject is misleading. If only this topic was marked 'sealed'. -- ee |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Not only that, but by following this thread, Philo is really opening himeslf up to reading something he doesn't want to. |
| Sat 31 Jul | jokey smurf | 'The Village' has a neat twist when we find out that Bruce Willis has been dead for the last 90 minutes of the film! Oh, and we find out that OJ is guilty of murder, and that Saddam was hiding WMD's...in my PANTS. Which movie are we talking about, again? |
| Sat 31 Jul | PopCulture | business class 6th sence: Cole Sear: I work with dumb people. Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams? [Cole shakes his head no] Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake? [Cole nods] ... Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dumb. Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them? Cole Sear: All the time. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Justin Johnson | I just saw it, and really liked it, because I'd been forewarned by all the bad reviews that it wasn't a scary movie in the sense that most people mean 'scary movie'--lots of edge-of-your-seat, clawing-your-date's-arm moments. Really, Shyamalan's movies require sinking into the psychological atmosphere of the movie the way you'd ease into a hot tub. If you can dot that, then you'll probably like it a lot. If you can't, you'll probably hate it. There are traditional scary moments, but his movies are much more about the ebb and flow of fear and tension in the atmosphere he creates. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Wayne Earl | The problem is, each of his movies is essentially a rewrite of the last one. He only works with one script. A very over-rated director. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Stephen Jones | Who the hell is this guy? Pop Cultiure is post of the month! |
| Sun 01 Aug | robert | 'I love the wonder of being hit upside the head with a well-crafted twist. :-)' I don't think you'll find it here. The 'twist' is so transparent I was really hoping it was only a setup twist, leading the 'real' twist. On the 'real' twist never came. Then it ended. Honestly, I think anyone who has seen a Shyamalan film and the trailer can figure out the twist before setting foot in the theater. I did. |
| Sun 01 Aug | www.marktaw.com | Robert, do you assume that the people here aren't reading BOTH threads? |
| Sun 01 Aug | AllanL5 | It is MUCH better than its previews might lead you to believe. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Clutch Cargo | Man, that crop circle movie the guy made was terrible. His first one was OK though. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Clutch Cargo | Oh, and if you really love a well-crafted twist, you should skip the movies and read books. Movies are aimed at the low, low, lowest denominator. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Wayne | Robert, you're a pretentious biotch aren't you? |
| IS PRIVATIZATION answer to...... | Sat 31 Jul | A young learner |
| Is PRIVATIZATION answer to most of the problems.... I am living in India. Many people here advocate privatization as solution of many of our, if not all, problems. Are these people right when they say so? Are there any long-term harm and drawbacks of Privatization? In which scenario, sectors does privatization delivers best? Any thoughts... |
| Sat 31 Jul | anon | This is a hot topic in Pakistan too. Just to make it a bit more clear to others on the board - many organizations, etc. here are under the governments control. For most of the markets, there is only one state- owned organization, company or corporation. So, the original poster probably wanted your opinion on what if these state-owned monopolistic organizations were privatized (i.e. sold to private sector). I personally feel it wouldn't help much. The government can and does make money by selling out these organizations. But before they sell them, they make an authoritative entity above it - this new authoritative entity assumes all the power which was once attributed to the *now* privatized organization. This still doesn't promise competition. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Flasher T | Like many great concepts, success depends on implementation. At the very core, socialism and government-controlled economy only work well in a very particular set of circumstances. Norway is the socialist poster child, but they have oil, an aluminium processing industry and not a lot of mouths to feed - so they have money to spend. Countries which do not have objective natural resources which can sustain a social experiment for a long enough time will not succeed. At the end of the day, a country needs to find an edge that its economy has over its competitors. In India, it's apparently quality labor on offer to American corporations. This edge cannot be successfully utilized in a government-controlled economy, it's just not going to happen. So while privatization is likely to lead to a lot of bad things in the near term (look at Russia in the early-mid 90s), it is the only way for the country to develop. IMHO. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Been there | Young learner, in India's case the answer is probably no. Privatization is often a code word for making greedy bastards richer. They do this by sacking lots of people, creaming the profits, compromising safety standards, letting workers get killed, etc. They claim to have made the enterprise 'more efficient,' but what they really do is shift the costs to other parts of society, including the workers without jobs, the villagers who have no water, the customers with cancer. India has a lot of learning to do and is on the way. But tell the privatization pricks to go back to America. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Been there | By "go back to America", I am referring to the fact that most privatization fans are NRI's. (Overseas Indians - the rich ones.) |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Thanks!, Anon :-) |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Flasher; 'So while privatization is likely to lead to a lot of bad things in the near term (look at Russia in the early-mid 90s)' 'Lot of bad things' like? And will India be able to afford it !? |
| Sat 31 Jul | kc | One of the *nice* things about Privatization is that you actually have a group/organization responsible for things. When the government is in charge of somethnig, everyone is in CYA-mode. I've worked at numerous government agencies in the US and *few* employees ever risk their own asses to do the right thing. They don't want to risk their jobs/career and what are you going to do, sue the government? |
| Sat 31 Jul | Flasher T | More or less what Been There said. Privatization introduced to a country with a long-standing tradition of planned economy leads to the few smart, lucky and ruthless people getting most of the wealth and disregarding consequences. When wealth becomes available to people who previously did not have the chance to acquire it, these people tend to kill the cow for the hide instead of starting up a dairy. In the early days of Russian independence, the industry and the natural resources were taken over by a handful of people who sold off anything they could find a buyer for and leave the rest to rot. As a result, the average person's main concern was finding their next meal. It also lead to the national default of '98. Still, over a decade later things look like they're becoming more civilized, although I am extremely suspicious of what Putin's actions are leading up to. The main reason why markets work and planned economy doesn't is because the former is self-regulating and, more importantly, natural. If the Indian government truly embraces free markets and eliminates all but the absolutely necessary government control, there will certainly be a period of turmoil, but it will level off eventually. In fact I'd go as far as to say the transition will be easier than it was for Russia. One, Russians are extremely aggressive people by nature (although I do not know enough about Indian society to really compare), two, India has a history of fairly good times under fairly civilized rule in the Empire, and three, Western free-market-based companies have an enormous stake in India's economy at this point. As for whether India can afford it or not, I don't think that's even relevant - it has to do it, otherwise it will never develop into a First World country. Globalization means every single economy needs an edge, and since India's is tied into the free market economy of the US and Europe, it needs to have the same base to protrude the edge from - planned economy is too inefficient for free markets to bother with, however glorious the talent pool may be. |
| Sat 31 Jul | z | Young learner, I hope you take that name seriously and take some time to learn about economics. A free market economy would improve any country's situation, but privatization by itself won't do much to get you there. Too many people believe you can just get rid of some specific problem with a country, say send in an army to overthrow a dictator, and the future will be wonderful. It doesn't happen that easily. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Philo | Low standards of living Poor education Safety problems High crime rates etc, etc, etc All these things can be solved via social engineering. The problem is that it takes a strong visionary at the top steering the way, and it takes TIME. I'm talking about generations. You need an entire generation of children raised to make each transitional phase to enable the next phase. One of our big problems in the US is this pervasive belief that anything can be fixed within four years if the federal government just throws money at it; but nobody is willing to do the real work where it's necessary. It takes time, effort, and commitment to make change. This is a very hard problem. Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | Stephen Jones | -----'India has a history of fairly good times under fairly civilized rule in the Empire, '------- Ah, yes, the good old British Empire where the sun never set and the blood never dried. The problem with Russian privatization was that the process was introduced by a load of theorists funded by the USA and they just blindly rushed into it. They also botched the process, and the result was that the workers found themselves cheated out of their shares; one trick was for the company bosses to withold salaries so that the workers were forced to sell their shares for a cash advance. Going back to your question it all depends on the individual country and the individual industry. To give you one example fo privatization working Sri Lankan Airlines flights have the prefix UL. This was generally considered to stand for 'Usually Late'. I read this at Kuwait airport and five minutes later an announcement came over the tannoy that the plane had been delayed. We eventually left 24 hours later, since they couldn't be bothered to send over a reserve crew, and the incoming crew had exceeded their flight hours. You have to reconfirm a flight; I did this by fax, and they evidentally just threw the fax in the trash. When I got to the airport they simply claimed I couldn't have sent the fax because I wasn't on the flight list. A few years back, around 1999, I think, they sold around 50% of the shares to Emirates and gave them the right to manage the airline. Since that time I have caught Sri Lankan Airlines ten times and the flight has never been more than a few minutes late. The service is also excellent (it was voted the best airline in Asia for onflight service some time ago) and you can reconfirm directly at the airport or by means of a simple phone call. On the other hand lets take the question of the Sri Lankan bus companies. They had a central bus company in Colombo in the 50's and 60's called the CBT. Buses were clean, normally used London double-deckers, and people old enough to remember tell you they were a pleasure to travel on. Now, as being an Indian you will well be aware, there is such a thing as 'goonda' politics, and the CBT became the dumping ground where politicians would give jobs to their bodyguards cum henchmen. The result was that it became bloated and unmangeable. In 1977 the UNP government came in and decided to set up private bus companies in competition. This was part of a policy that got the name of 'crony capitalism' and the result was that private bus routes were given to the friends of those in power, and the drivers chosen from among the henchmen/bodyguards of those 'businessmen' or their political sponsors. The result is that travelling in a private bus in Colombo unless it's late at night or first thing in the morning is the kind of thing you would not wish to repeat, whether by private or state-owned transport. To go back to the Indian situation I would say that privatisation is no panacea. But there are certain inefficient, bloated sectors, where it really would do some good. If you have ever had the misfortune to travel on the domestic carrier, Indian Airlines, which manages to have the worst inflight food in the world, you will know what I mean. And of course it is well-known that when you go to a State Bank in India you will wait the first forty-five minutes after opening while staff arrrive, or not as the case may be, and then proceed to chat and read the newspaper. Of course, privatising these behemoths will mean that the newspaper reading staff and kickback taking procurement officers will lose their jobs and so will a lot of less innocent people, but in the long run it does not help an economy to have a bloated workforce that does nothing. In general I would say that there are one or two general rules. 1. Monopolies should not be privatised; there is unlikely to be an efficiency gain 2. Sometimes it does not matter too much. Peugot-Citroen is a gevernment company; Volkswagen is a private company owned mainly by the Unions and the State governments; General Motors is entirely private. It really makes little difference. 3. Privatization is not a panacea. It will not cure corruption, extortion, greed, or rampant commercial dishonesty, which are some of the major ills of South Asia, and until they are cured spectacular, just and sustainable development will not be possible. 4. Most importantly, economies do not like abrupt changes. 'Shock therapy' normally only causes trauma. The collapse of the Iron Curtain caused severe problems for Eastern Europe because the old economic system was destroyed at a stroke, but nothing was in place to substitute it. So the policy in India of 'softly, softly, catchee monkey' is to be applauded. 5. If you see somebody complaining about selling the country's soul off to foreigners automatically support the thing he's attacking. Firstly in most First World countries few know or really care what is the nationality of the owners of their core industries, or even much of thier real estate, and secondly, the Indian poor would probably be no worse off exploited by foreiogners than they are by their fellow countrymen as happens at present. Just a few thoughts anyway |
| Sat 31 Jul | daddywarbux | Once you strip away political rhetoric you see all nations run mixed economies, providing government sequestered funds for their voting constituents on one hand while attempting to trade advantageously with the outside world on the other. That's if they are functioning nations. Not all national populations are allowed to vote effectively and outside worlds may not run along national boundaries. Planned economies don't work unless they win. Look at Russia, China, Europe, India, USA, Australia, Israel, Brasil, Iran -- and Hungary. Which of these is going to be left standing in 20, 50, 100 years? All run planned economies to some degree for different reasons. The arguments start about what constitutes planning. here's the list; Russia: busted, population KO'd lots loot, some v. rich individuals China : booming, not much room for Gwailo. Europe: cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Nice cheese. Good national servicies. India: biggest disparity between rich and poor outside the USA - quote from Boolywood starlet 'it's nice seeing 700 years of human development at once' Sheesh. USA LLL. Lockheed. Smith+Kline. Enron. The VP ... Australia Australian Wheat Board. National Health. CSIRO. Israel your pick Brasil slavery. Mardi Gras. Iran who cares? ... they've got buckets of oil. Hungary? Coincidentally has the median world income and least internal income disparity. No idea how. If you see a personal benefit from proposed change then go for it otherwise question proffered flannel before providing support. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Philo | 'India: biggest disparity between rich and poor outside the USA' ? Is there some qualifier here you use to discount nations where the leadership has gold-plated toilets but 3/4 of the population are starving to death? Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | Stephen Jones | No country has 3/4 of its population starving to death. There probably are a few hundred deaths a year in India related to starvation out of a population of a billion. There are also a much larger number of deaths related to weakened immune systems as a result of malnutrition. The only times India is known to have suffered widespread famine was under the British in 1879 and 1943 when there were tens of millions of deaths as a result of deliberate government policy. |
| Sat 31 Jul | hoser | It almost does not matter, as Stephen Jones points out, who owns the industry, so long as competition is allowed to thrive. Its fine to have large stake holders be government entities, just so long as no favors are given to the government industry. The problem, is that in practice, its hard for a government not to legeslate in favor of its state industry. Perhaps impossible. Until you see governments abandon farm subsidies, which is arguable the most decentralized, commoditized, competetive industry in the world, then you know they are not serious about free markets. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Fred | >>Peugot-Citroen is a gevernment company; Nope, it's Renault. Peugeot has always been a private (er... its traded at the stock exchange, so it's technically public :-)) company, and the original family still owns a good chunck of it. As for Renault, I think the government still owns 50% or something, and intends to sell those shares when the market picks up. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Flasher T | 'The collapse of the Iron Curtain caused severe problems for Eastern Europe because the old economic system was destroyed at a stroke, but nothing was in place to substitute it.' Funnily enough, most of Eastern Europe is now at a level where Western Europe feels cautiously optimistic about letting them play in their sandbox. Also, as part ethnically Russian (I live in New Europe), I resent the implication that Russians need America to f* up their country. I assure you, they are totally capable of doing it themselves. I also fully expect America, Russia, Europe, China and India to be around a hundred years from tomorrow, somewhat changed but fundamentally similar. |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Problem is, here the politicians and bureaucrats first kills and distroys the public sector company/organisation. And then they are the first to advocate privatisation. |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Thanks Stephens, 'This was part of a policy that got the name of 'crony capitalism' and the result was that private bus routes were given to the friends of those in power, and the drivers chosen from among the henchmen/bodyguards of those 'businessmen' or their political sponsors. The result is that travelling in a private bus in Colombo unless it's late at night or first thing in the morning is the kind of thing you would not wish to repeat, whether by private or state-owned transport.' Same is the case here in Delhi. We are having private blue-line, white-line buses and DTC buses ( Delhi-Transport-Corp.) running on roads. Believe me, they have created a mess. We had to wait till the DTC bus arrives because travelling in any other private bus was very un-safe. You are absolutely right when you say, for airlines, privatisation may work out good but not as much, for Buses. Often these things are not taken into consideration. Here the lower, lower-middle and some what middle class population have a fear of lossing jobs. They feel that this is a planned move to further crush them. Apart from this the reservation factor plays an important role as it is only restricted to the public sector. |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Philo: 'The problem is that it takes a strong visionary at the top steering the way, and it takes TIME. ' And this is almost impossible, atleast in a democracy like our's! And even if a visionary get's at the top, he/she would be having just 5 years at his/her disposal. Sometimes even less. Isn't it! |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | At the same time, we are having law enforcement agencies, just not working properly as would have been expected. You have agreements with governments which are just not been taken care of by the private sector. Ex. Few years back, government gave acres of land at very cheap prices near Delhi for constructing a hospital to a private sector company. They promised to provide good health care facility. Indeed! They are providing it. But they also had an agreement that the hospital will have saperate 100 beds for patients from poor background and that they would be treated for free. But this is not just the case. Instead no one from a middle class family can go there for check-up as it is too costly. So we are just having AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) for poor section of our society because it is a government institute which provides reasonably good health care facility at a very cheap rates. What I fear is, if implementation of rules and regulations, agreements are not being met then will it not be a total Disaster! It is not as simple. Isn't it! So for health-care sector, privatisation may not be a good option here in India. Isn't it. |
| Sat 31 Jul | A young learner | Taking the present country scenario into consideration, Can we say privatisation is a good option for, say service industry...like Airlines, Hospitality, Tourism, or for that matter Banks which basically caters to upper class population. Whereas, for say Health-care which caters to wider cross section ( from poorest of the poor to richest) of the society, the privatisation may/may-not be a good option. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Aussie bloke | In Australia all our banks are privately owned, and they've closed hundreds of branches in country towns, sometimes leaving towns without any bank at all. They've also slashed staff so that customers who go into a branch usually have to wait some time to be served. Queues of up to half an hour occur in some city branches. The banks don't care about those queues because they know the customers don't have much choice. One of those banks used to be government owned, but it was privatized to 'improve service.' That means it also sacked 1000's of people and closed hundreds of branches. When it was in government hands, that bank could provide competition to the private banks, and keep them honest. When our half-private telco Telstra sent hundreds of jobs offfshore, it claimed it has a right to do this because it's a private business. Well, it was a business created with taxpayer money, and it still enjoys a lot of government monopolies. |
| Sat 31 Jul | . | The key to privatisation is to avoid simply transferring ownership of a monopoly. Opening the market to competition is critical and has to happen in tandem with the privatisation effort. It's also important to do these things in phases, to prevent the dislocation that can occur with any major economic change. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Michael Moser | ---'The problem with Russian privatization was that the process was introduced by a load of theorists funded by the USA and they just blindly rushed into it. They also botched the process, and the result was that the workers found themselves cheated out of their shares; one trick was for the company bosses to withold salaries so that the workers were forced to sell their shares for a cash advance.'--- You forgot to mention that industry before privatization was very centralized; there were some very large scale enterprises. So _after_ privatization the same stuff had to end up as a centralized entity; only this time they had to find new owners. also, i think that Russia isn't really doing _that_ bad; when the Soviet Union collapsed it was a bancrupt country, now it isn't. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Stephen Jones | -----' also, i think that Russia isn't really doing _that_ bad; when the Soviet Union collapsed it was a bancrupt country, now it isn't. '---- The average life expectancy in Russia declined by some eight or nine years, and this is before AIDS really starts to hit in. The government is bankrupt. This is why it has forced the bankruptcy of Yukos, so that it can be sold back to Gazprom for the government to get the oil revenues. |
| Sun 01 Aug | A young learner | Flasher, 'As for whether India can afford it or not, I don't think that's even relevant - it has to do it, otherwise it will never develop into a First World country. ' Every 'Third World Country' would like itself to be called as ' First World Country'. No doubt about it! And it will take lot of time before a significant change is visible on the surface. But what I meant by 'Can India afford it ' is if this process costs millions of lives and if it makes the life of weaker section of the society even more miserable and unbearable, then ofcourse I would prefer being called a citizen of 'Third World Country'. And not to go for privatization and improve the present system slowly and gradually. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Been there | Young learner, thank God that Congress got back in. |
| Sun 01 Aug | z | >>>And not to go for privatization and improve the present system slowly and gradually. <<< Young learner, I reread Flasher T's post and I think he is referring to establishing a free market or a freer one then they have now, not privatization. You need to be a learner and try to figure out the difference. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Flasher T | 'also, i think that Russia isn't really doing _that_ bad; when the Soviet Union collapsed it was a bancrupt country, now it isn't.' Russia officially declared itself bankrupt in August 1998, defaulting on all foreign debt. The national currency lost 9/10ths of its worth, a lot of foreign investment vanished. The only reason why the country made it through was because most Russians already had a custom of keeping their money in foreign currency. Some people say that at the height of it all, there was more cash dollars in Russia than in the US. Even today most prices for expensive goods in Russia are marked in 'arbitrary units' - the day's rouble equivalent of the sum in USD or Euros. 'The government is bankrupt. This is why it has forced the bankruptcy of Yukos, so that it can be sold back to Gazprom for the government to get the oil revenues.' The government forced the bankrupcy of Yukos for the same reason that the government issued an international Wanted order for Boris Berezovsky: Putin will not allow anyone to get enough power to challenge him. That is why Roman Abramovich, who is the governor of one federal district in Russia, is taking his money abroad. He knows that he can only continue doing business as long as he makes it plainly clear that he has no intentions of going into politics on a serious level. (The district he runs is basically a poor version of Alaska, he apparently spends a lot of his own money on social programs there.) |
| Sun 01 Aug | Monsanto Alert | 'farm subsidies, which is arguable the most decentralized' Does this explain how in the US most subsidies go to the corn and sugar industries. The sugar industry is represented by two multinational corporations, the corn industry is represented by two multinational corporations. These corporations, all Fortune 500, are the largest recipients of US government welfare in the world. So I would say that the farm industry that recieves subsidies is not decentralized, nor is it commodity -- markups on sugar are ten thousand times higher than production costs. |
| Sun 01 Aug | A young learner | Z; >>>Young learner, I hope you take that name seriously<<< >>>You need to be a learner and try to figure out the difference.<<< I am Z!. I am!. If I don't take your advice, then who else! You seem to be a great learner and well-wisher of all since childhood..... Carry-On your service for whole humanity! May God Bless You! Amen! ( I hope this is spoken and written after every prayer). Flasher; Sorry, Flasher...I probably misunderstood your post and took it in different context. But in India also many people give the same argument in favour of 'Privatisation'. Sorry! |
| Sun 01 Aug | Michael Moser | ---''also, i think that Russia isn't really doing _that_ bad; when the Soviet Union collapsed it was a bancrupt country, now it isn't.' Russia officially declared itself bankrupt in August 1998, defaulting on all foreign debt. The national currency lost 9/10ths of its worth, a lot of foreign investment vanished. '--- The point is that there has been a recovery since (oil prices have gone up, you see). Also the default/bancrupcy of 1998 fueled demand for domestic goods - which put some people to work. Anyway, my point was that Russia wasn't doing that bad; given that in Soviet Union about _half_ of all industry was producing useless military output; heavy stuff that cannot be put to civilian use. Closing down half of industry puts any economy into chaos; it was direct result of the decision to get Russia out of the cold war. Given this legacy, i find it is a great achievment that they are still afloat. |
| The Village (don't see it!) | Sat 31 Jul | Wayne |
| What a lame movie. I bet everyone in the theater was expecting a scary movie, since thats what was advertised. The ending was lame, but I couldnt wait for the ending since the rest of the movie was boring and uneventful. |
| Sat 31 Jul | GiorgioG | I don't know - it wasn't an action packed thriller, but I thought the ending was at least, different. We're too used to films that keep moving from 1 action scene to the next. I've seen alot of worse movies..and I didn't particularly mind bucking up $8 to see this one. Then again, I'm also reading Atlas Shrugged, so maybe I'm a glutton for slow-moving punishment ;-) |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | I don't know if it's any good, but that huge Loews theather in Times Square is closing down, and you can see it for half price (buy one ticket, get one) & get free concessions to boot. http://www.backstage.com/backstage/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000589958 'The 1,440-seat Astor Plaza at 44th and Broadway, which opened in 1974 with Barbra Streisand's 'For Pete's Sake,' will shutter and be converted into a live rock concert hall.' |
| Sat 31 Jul | Wayne | Well, they sure advertised it as a scary movie and I can count only two times in the movie where I was somewhat scared. I feel ripped off, I wonder what the budget for this movie was? |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Isn't it about the same with all of his movies? I don't know why they call this guy a "master" of horror. Signs sucked, whatever that movie where the guy was indestructible was boring as hell. Only the "I see dead people" movie was any good. |
| Sat 31 Jul | karthik | Signs was a hit i think. There are a lot of stupid movies made which go on to become hits |
| Sun 01 Aug | Justin Johnson | I just saw it, and loved it, because I was forewarned by all the bad reviews not to expect a really scary movie. Once that misconception was out of the way, it was a good drama, though you kind of have to consciously buy into it at the beginning. |
| Sun 01 Aug | phil jones | Signs was the only one I saw, and I couldn't believe how bad the deus ex machina was. Aaargh! Can't Hollywood afford science consultants? |
| Sun 01 Aug | robert | The problem with The Village is that the 'twist' is so transparent, it's almost laughable. If you don't figure it out in the first ten minutes, your bulb is a little dim. However, the movie still has a little merit as a germane sociological commentary. I think 3/4 of the theater thought it was supposed to be a scary movie, and I heard lots of grumbling and 'dude, this sucks' as it became clear that it was not a 'scary movie,' but something that tried to have a little more depth. I'm still not sure if the twist was meant to be so obvious, or whether the director thought he would have us going. |
| What does google do? | Fri 30 Jul | Berlin Brown |
| Seriously, everyone is talking google and the search engine, the IPO, the MS competitor, the company that hires the smartest people in the world. I visit, www.google.com, and I see an input box. So the question, how does google make their money, maybe I should google on it, I am going have to assume ad revenue AdSense? and also they have such a web presence. From a technical standpoint, why should people use google over the other search engines, higher relevant searches?.... Speed? |
| Fri 30 Jul | Li-fan Chen | Wait, were you hiding under a rock the last 10 years or are you asking us to do your homework? |
| Fri 30 Jul | Li-fan Chen | I mean you know where JOS is, but you don't know where Google is or what it is for? Is this an obvious troll? Maybe I am the only one. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Berlin Brown | I answered my own question, but how does a website become worth 36 billion dollars, what will they have to do from a technical standpoint to generate more revenue in the future. What does google do.... that makes them so competitive? Is it their smart people, hitting the market first? Are they so far advanced from a technical standpoint that others cant catch up? Are they the most secure, search-engine that they have a 24-7 operation? |
| Fri 30 Jul | Berlin Brown | Another point, I think others 'Apple' mentioned that they are taking google concept and bringing it to your machine. Steve Jobs, and I quote, 'it is easier to get on google and find something on the internet than it is to find a file on your own machine.' With the Apple's 'Tiger' release, you will see Spotlight. |
| Fri 30 Jul | JWA | 'hitting the market first?' Umm, the search engine market seemed pretty well served well before Google got started. Their success all comes down to execution. What they do, they do well and they do it the way they see best, not by copying the status quo. As to financial worth, revenues, and profit - you'll have to look to someone else for that evaluation. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Philo | Somehow, the question 'How can I find out what Google does?' has a certain recursive zen quality about it... Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | no name | They consolidate the eyeball monetizing infrastructure for new virtual economy paradigm b2c providers. |
| Sat 31 Jul | http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html | 'They consolidate the eyeball monetizing infrastructure for new virtual economy paradigm b2c providers. ' Yea, but while also unleashing visionary architectures as they aggregate vertical e-tailers to facilitate global convergence. Facilitating proactive niches? More like monetize next-generation deliverables! |
| Sat 31 Jul | T. Norman | In addition to the ad revenue, they also sell search engine technology to corporations that need searching within their intranet. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Alex | >> They consolidate the eyeball monetizing infrastructure for new virtual economy paradigm b2c providers. You know, I think that makes sense. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Simon Lucy | There is not enough tequila in your diet. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Berlin Brown | This is what I was looking for http://www.webweavertech.com/ovidiu/weblog/archives/000160.html It's for the first time I see such a large engineering group developing exclusively on Linux. Development happens in C, Python and Java using (X)Emacs and/or vi. Everybody seems to be a Linux hacker, with their own desktop and emacs customizations. I was originally planning to do development on my MacOS X laptop, but I've quickly decided to go back to my roots and use XEmacs on Linux. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Tom H | When Google came on the scene there were several search engines, but it seemed like they were all on the take. You'd search for something and all you would get is pop-ups and lame sites trying to sell stuff. The dot bombers never seemed to understand that luring people to their site and counting page hits wouldn't make money. Searching on Google brought you to sites with relevant content, and Google kept the sponsored links clearly separated from the search hits. So when you are looking to shop you know where to look, and the sponsored links only get traffic from people who were interested in shopping, not people who are mad. So I think the answer to the OP question is that unlike it's competition, Google provided a service it's customers wanted and it's customers kept coming back. Whether that makes it worth $30B with a PE over 300 I kind of doubt; but keep in mind that only about half of those shares will actually be sold. The rest will be paper wealth. |
| Sat 31 Jul | AMS | Berlin, Mac OS X comes with an X Windows implementation, and you can run [X]Emacs and many other X apps in that, or you can run Emacs in text mode in a terminal. There is also a port of Emacs that runs w/out the X layer. Python, Java, etc. is all there. Unless you just like tinkering with the OS and compiling the kernel, etc. or don't want to pay the premium for Apple hardware, Mac OS X is IMO a much easier to manage unix environment than Linux. Updates are automatic and painless, and everything pretty much just works without a lot of tweaking. |
| Sun 01 Aug | bankstrong | It all goes back to the dot-com boom days: network economics. They created a great tool that people love to use and attracted a ton of customers. Then, they converted these customers into one central place for very useful web advertising. There is certainly large value to advertisers in having a simple way to reach out to many customers. However, these customers will only stay in one place if Google's technology forever stays ahead of the competition (doubtful) or if the ads themselves are useful to customers (and by extension, the number of advertisers) (possible). Mike |
| Odd Codes of Conduct | Fri 30 Jul | F. Drebin |
| On my desk is an offer that includes codes of conduct strictly fobidding the use or sale of drugs or alcohol, or unauthorized possession of firearms (authorized by whom then?). That seems peculiar to me--IS it peculiar? Im hesitant to ask if having a beer with a client (or moonlighting as a bartender?) is a firing offense. Its a basic full-time-employee IT consultant arrangement, etc. Beyond that, there is the dilemma of trying to pick interesting work with an unfavorable overtime structure (the offer) over often dull but higher-paying, straight-hourly stuff. -FD |
| Fri 30 Jul | Philo | IMHO, if that doesn't say 'during working hours' then run - no company should try to regulate your life outside the office (especially if it's something legal, like drinking alcohol) I suspect that's just one sign of the weirdness you may encounter in the office, like 'only one photo per desk, must be a tasteful portrait of a spouse or significant other. If you have no spouse or significant other, then you are not to have any photos on your desk. [Note: Photo must be of a member of the opposite sex]' Philo |
| Fri 30 Jul | Data Miner | Have you ever actually encountered such a "photo rule" anywhere? It wouldn't surprise me. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Stan Billingbody | I would ask them what they mean by no alchohol since you are a heavy drinker and the booze is the only thing that keeps you from getitng so pissed off that you bring your guns in and just shoot the place up. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Baaah! | I'm married to my ewe. She is of the opposite gender. Can I keep a photo of her on my desk? |
| Fri 30 Jul | F. Drebin | Stan, thank you for the phrasing. I'll use that. I did, for a period of two months, previously work for another very small consulting shop, and found other employment when they decided to hassle me about getting in at 9:00 sharp--despite having no meetings or anything else to attend to--in the face of a highly variable commute. And I was making them quite a bit of money too. So I can't discount the possibility of personality conflict and unanticipated fiefdom... making myself a strong case here to stay put. -FD |
| Fri 30 Jul | anony coward | I'd expect pretty much everyplace would have a 'no drugs/alcohol/weapons at work' policy so they don't get cleaned out by lawyers like John Edwards the first time someone sprains an ankle. As far as having to choose between interesting work vs better pay, quit whining. |
| Fri 30 Jul | trollop | Baaah! is not a kiwi fruit, then. Generally you have to pay to have fun, and I if were in the happy position of having to choose between higher paid, dull, fixed hour work and entertaining, freewheeling openended fun stuff, I'd plump for having both the time and the money to make my choices out of office hours. And don't take anything with a free pager or cellphone, it gets in the way of drunken gunfights during the commute. There's plenty of dull work around with openended unpaid overtime. Wanna swap? |
| Fri 30 Jul | Philo | Trollop, have you ever lived in an area with heavy, unpredictable traffic? In DC, if you live any distance from the office, it can take between 45 minutes and three hours to get to work. Just one fender-bender, late road construction cleanup, or rain shower can triple your drive time. In the face of that, flex time is a reasonable request. Philo |
| Fri 30 Jul | . | 'I would ask them what they mean by no alchohol since you are a heavy drinker and the booze is the only thing that keeps you from getitng so pissed off that you bring your guns in and just shoot the place up.' Funny you mention this - I was visiting a remote office today and overhead an individual at the elevator voice to his coworker 'I am going to go f***ing postal! I mean it, I'm getting a shotgun!' I was the only one around, and obviously I was game to the wink-wink ha ha statement, but I couldn't help but thinking 'Man, I could so fuck you over with one phone call. Heavy police involvement, almost certain firing, maybe some media'. People are bloody morons. I did nothing, but if I were more fearful that guy would be rethinking his loud mouth. |
| Sat 31 Jul | trollop | Philo, er, no. Unless you count Sydney on a motorbike which had its moments but predated both modern Sydney traffic and flexitime. Who's ever used, or even seen, a timeclock? Or worked in that culture? That's freedom Formerly used to punish the unpunctual, it enabled working around flexitime 'core hours' in a reasonable give-and-take arrangement. Now the performance measured have the luxury of travelling when they want to so long as they hit their targets and get the opportunity to contribute at any point in the day or night or weekend or holiday ... there is no upper limit on the working week. That's progress? I'd suggest buying a motorcycle. Can you buy a gun in DC? Nowadays resident in a city with convenient and reliable public transport.... |
| Sat 31 Jul | Cube Farmer Ed | We have a 'no excessive personal photos' rule, which is subjectively enforced by two old Cubicle Nazi biddies who come around periodically and tell you what needs changing. There's also a 'no item can penetrate of the horizontal plane formed by the top of the cubical walls' rule, so no books or coffee mugs on the top shelves. |
| Sat 31 Jul | trollop | Are you allowed to stand up and scratch? |
| Sat 31 Jul | Stephen Jones | Strange, though the States is strange. If you're a consultant then any non-workplace rules don't apply. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Brent | Rules tell you what people do: I'd put a cool $100 on there being a pistol or hipflask in at least one of your co-workers' desks. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Philo | 'We have a 'no excessive personal photos' rule, which is subjectively enforced by two old Cubicle Nazi biddies who come around periodically and tell you what needs changing.' See, now if I were a superstar there, I'd go overboard. I generally only have one photo on my desk, but I'd make a special effort to have a dozen or more. Obey every single rule to the T except that one. When they tell me to take the photos down, I'd just say 'no, thank you' But then, I'm generally difficult that way. :-) Philo |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Of course, there are often competing codes & even if you follow one set to the T, they can screw you on another one. I'm sure some people who are 'in favor' can get away with breaking the rules, like having a photo of his wife, and one of each of his 3 kids and 1 extra family portrait for a total of 5, but a guy with 1 photo of himself drinking a Budweiser and shooting a gun just outside the office, with the corporate logo visible in the photo would get in trouble. Go figure. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Eric V. | Each time our VP comes by with a customer to visit our building, we have a 'no paper' rule. He wants to show that all our processes are computerized since we're an IT company or whatnot. So, we have to hide all our pens, design sheets, phone numbers sheets, procedure binders, class diagrams, family photos in our drawers. Of course, the days where customers visit our place, productivity is probably near zero. But boy, do we look 'professional' in our IT work. |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | Get one of those digital displays that can change photos, and have a screensaver of something like architectural drawings, complete with T square & protractor. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Philo | 'So, we have to hide all our pens, design sheets, phone numbers sheets, procedure binders, class diagrams, family photos in our drawers.' I've always advised anyone who would listen that if they are 'inspecting' or 'reviewing' a workplace and it looks too clean, call the responsible manager on it: 'This place looks too clean; did you really waste dozens of manhours cleaning for my visit? You're an idiot.' Philo |
| Sun 01 Aug | Katie Lucas | At the current role we don't have an office. We used to have an office we'd turn up to once a week, but the main factory building burned down and the office got claimed by 'homeless' staff who needed the space more. The other site doesn't have enough spare space. So we drift from temp home to temp home. And the result is that we really do run almost paper free!! Everything's in LaTeX docs in the subversion repository or in the Wiki or in class diagram files... It's possible. It's not necessarily easy unless you're willing to make compromises (I had to write a decent class diagramming tool in the end) but it CAN be done... |
| Another Linux win is Sun loss | Fri 30 Jul | Formerly someone else |
| Although Lockheed is showing Solaris the door, Microsoft is still welcome. Every engineer has a Microsoft PC sitting next to their Sun Blade, said our source. Thats for business applications, and Linux is no threat there. Its Sun who has to worry. http://neurocrat.com/2004/07/26/lockheed.shtml |
| Sat 31 Jul | karthik | SUN will soon be opening a Barnum circus. I heard the main attraction is McNealy with a Penguin suit. |
| Sat 31 Jul | Wayne | Why do they have two separate PCs? Haven't they heard of emulation? |
| Sat 31 Jul | Tom H | 'Why do they have two separate PCs? Haven't they heard of emulation?' Going to linux workstations sure sounds like a migration strategy to me. |
| Sat 31 Jul | hoser | Outlook. I swear its what keeps Microsoft on the desktop. More specifically, Schedule+, or whatever its called. It is the corporate killer app, and its the baby bottle from which executives suckle. They will not live with their bottle. Until there is an open source solution, there will always be a Windows box nearby. Someone will say 'Evolution'. Been there, tried that. Yuck. There was a script 'killev' which came with earlier versions for a reason. As far as I can tell, killev still needs to be part of the Evolution softwaer suite. |
| Sat 31 Jul | www.marktaw.com | I agree, there is nothing as good as Outlook for calender/todo. Why is that? I've looked high & low for something that matches Outlook here, and nothing does. Well, except paper. But nothing on the computer. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Michael Moser | once upon a time there was Netscape Calendar; somehow that was adequate until ... the moment that Netscape Navigator started to sink. |
| Sun 01 Aug | Philo | 'Until there is an open source solution, there will always be a Windows box nearby.' Interesting wording. So you're saying if there was an open source Windows solution that would somehow obviate the need for Windows? I think you meant to say 'Until there is a *linux* solution...' HTH, Philo |
| Storing long-term histograms | Fri 30 Jul | Justin Johnson |
| I have a project where a computer is collecting the cycle count of an injection molding machine via a data acquisition card: the molding machine has a sensor wired to the DAQ that pulses each time the mold closes. This will be repeated for 70 machines here, and more at our other factories. The data collected will be a series of timestamped pulses, and Im having trouble deciding how to store it. The data will be held for a long time in order to generate reports on machine performance. I was thinking of a database table with two fields: machine # and a timestamp, with one record for each. It has the virtue of simplicity, but it seems a little heavy at 12 bytes a pulse. On the other hand, it makes the data easily munge-able with SQL. Is there some normal way of doing this that Im missing? How are analog histograms normally stored? |
| Fri 30 Jul | Justin Johnson | "with one record for each" should read "with one record for each pulse". |
| Fri 30 Jul | schmoe | Not sure what the generally-accepted way of doing this is, but here's what I've done. Create a table of histogram buckets, with the following columns: bucket_id, min_value, max_value, bucket_name. Create a separate table with these columns: bucket_id, count [, other data you might need to filter by, like machine_id, date, etc.]. Straightforward to implement, although you may find it annoying that you can't really tell whether to update or insert when you get a new data point. One problem here is that you can't reliably change the bucket bounds later on. One approach is to define a large number of very finely-spaced buckets, but give several buckets the same name and group by the bucket name when pulling data out. So you could have separate buckets for 0-1 second, 1-2 seconds, 2-3, etc., but have them all named '0-5 seconds'. When you query, just group by bucket_name and sum the counts. If you need more 'big buckets' later on, but they're still oriented on 'little bucket' boundaries, you can do it by changing the association of little buckets to big buckets. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Brent | This is the kind of thing that's traditionally been handled with a flat file. A relational database is overkill, even more so if you don't need transactions and rollback. Is your storage space unduly limited in some way? If not, store your data as tab-delimited ascii and use unix shell tools or perl to munge it. grep, cut, awk! |
| Fri 30 Jul | christopher (baus.net) | Not that I have any experience in data collection, but my personal feeling is that there is no reason not to store data in a structured form anymore. Flat files aren't even less complicated that SQL databases, as everything supports SQL these days. In fact the current generation of programmers seems more comfortable working with 'SELECT FROM' than open(); fseek(). |
| Fri 30 Jul | Rich | If space is really at a premium, you could choose a start timestamp and store the difference between the a machine press and the time stamp. You should be able to store 20 years of hundreths of a second in four bytes + machine id size. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Code Monkey | Simple. If the database supports word use one word field to store seconds since a specific constant time (should give you around 136 years) and use the other word to keep machine id. If your db does not support word type just use 4 bit integer with the high word being machine id and low word being number of seconds since a constant time. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Dennis Forbes | If you mean a word as 16-bits (as it traditionally is) that's only 65535 seconds, which is about only about 18 hours (60*60*18). In any case there's a crucial requirement missing, which is how frequently the mold presses, and what the required timing accuracy must be. |
| Fri 30 Jul | Philo | The problem is that you want to index the machine #, and possibly the time stamp. That means you've got a HUGE overhead on an itty-bitty insert, which affects your scalability. So the other option is to write to a delimited text file, then BCP the data into SQL every so often (if the machines are offline at night - voila!) This distributes your processing power, minimizing your hardware requirements. Philo |
| Fri 30 Jul | Dennis Forbes | This is against every database design norm (and I cringe even writing it), but if you really want |