junklight

I just do not get Microsoft. The place is full of smart people so how come the company acts so dumb.

The ipad love it or loathe it works because it's not trying to be all things to all people. It has limitations, sure, but within those it does some things very well indeed (and in fact I would be utterly lost without mine - or rather I would be unhappy to take the step back into the past that not having it would represent).

Microsoft seem to be interested in the world of work (although judging by my recent (enforced) use of Word, making more work seems to be their goal with that product) so why not take the same approach - a new device , a new niche and come up with something? it might just be a slicker netbook with a trimmed down OS or it might be something else. A physical interface for the Office suite perhaps - Spreadsheets are not great on the ipad, for example, so there must be a way of making them nice to physically interact with that is not the tablet/slate kind of way. (or actually why not do cheap research by porting things like office to the ipad and seeing if you can make them really work in that form factor or if something else is needed?)

They say that people want something like this - work oriented - and then they give them an "everything but the kitchen sink" style monstrosity that is not one thing or the other.

This works for Google because android has other selling points but Microsoft can't just throw everything at it and hope something sticks. They need to pick something and think about it.

The word hacker does mean "people who break into computers" because that is what the vast majority of the people who use the word mean when they say it.

It has two archaic uses - the older one is well known to this community and the second one, also falling by the way side, is someone who has a good understanding of computer security and uses it to break into computers.

This boat has sailed. And what is more it sailed a long time ago.

While I have no problem with the OP down voting tl;dr I do think as a comment its an important pointed stick:

First off to remind you that most people hardly read anything - either through lack of time, lack of attention span or just that they only read stuff they agree with. If you want to get a message across you need to meet the needs of these people too. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago in the work place.

Secondly - for those who do read - sometimes you start reading something and your eyes/brain glaze over. Rambling, unpolished prose etc. all do this to me. By the same token there are texts that you start reading - just to see what it is about and are compelled by the authors carefully constructed prose to read to the end.

And of course sometimes as a comment tl;dr is just funny....

I'm afraid all this seems like pedantic nit-picking to me - attacking the letter of what I said rather than what I was trying to say.

However I did want to comment on my favourite line in this: " if you properly learn C++, Haskell and Lisp "

Yes. If you properly learn them I would fully agree.

I have in my time made my living as both a C++ programmer and a Lisp programmer and was pretty good at both - but not even close to having properly learned either.

Learning them properly would be a life times experience and I suspect you would be a pretty decent programmer at the end of it.

I suspect this is becoming a bit fruitless because it seems like your tack is - "I can't imagine anything other than the way I want to use the web"

But let me just mention one other view:

The browser, despite the inconsistencies between different brands, is very accessible. Anyone with the ability to peck away at a keyboard and read some basic instructions can make a web page - and with only a little more effort add some quite rich functionality even if only by cutting and pasting some javascript.

Now imagine if instead you needed a compiler and an SDK (see footnote), if you couldn't just shove a bit of code in the page but instead it needed to be compiled and included separately.

Would the web be what it is today?

Look at Java and Flash - why aren't they the dominant forces on the web because they are taking very much the approach you advocate.

footnote: and who would make these? Would you have one for every browser, for every language. Who would maintain them? In fact the more thought I give to it the more impressed I am that there is anything like one single common language available in all browsers

That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

I don't think its the one true language for anyone to be honest - but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes in but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.

Oh dear.

First of all - shipping binary code to browsers. Please. No. Flash is bad enough. Say good bye to all the grease monkey style hacks and remixes and lots of other interesting things about the web.

Secondly - either you are a programmer or not. I can't actually tell from your article if you want to be or not. However if you want to be a good programmer then you need to learn other languages - you might not be an expert in those other languages but being able to navigate your way round them - it is good for your programmers brain. Eric Raymonds famous article actually recommends you should try and learn a new language every year http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

And thirdly - Javascript is actually a real cool language masquerading as a very dull mainstream one. I resisted doing too much in it for years but as I needed to do more and more I found out that its very powerful and flexible. Also if you use something like jquery you get a lot of Ruby style bits and pieces.

And lastly - it might be a cliche but that doesn't mean its not true (to use another cliche in defence of the one I am about to use) - If all you have is a hammer then every thing looks like a nail. Ruby might be a pretty good language - but there is a reason there are so many other languages and its not because all the other people are idiots who weren't smart enough to come up with Ruby.

I watched that yesterday (after reading the David Byrne article last week).

Good documentary (apart from all the "show and tell" cut and paste video and one or two of the soundtrack choices - Schools out for a burned out school! ugh)

Loved the optimism at the end and how a bunch of people living there see it as a really exciting place to live full of possibility.

(it also occurred to me that if anyone was going to film Samuel R. Delanys Dhalgren - Detroit would be the place to film it)

http://www.sfsite.com/02b/dh122.htm

Indeed.

If you can't even get it into an investible entity then i'd just walk away. Sure there is a slight risk what sounds like a miracle will happen but it doesn't sound like the others have the enegy to do this. You don't get to make a successful company without comitment.

Chalk it up to experience.

Well I didn't find it annoying.

So basically the cap table is a spreadsheet of who has what percentages of equity (and numbers of shares) in the company and then for any given dilution event (typically investment) shows how your percentages will change - and being a spreadsheet obviously you can play with the values to understand how things change.

So it lets you model how investment alters your share holding. It lets incoming investors understand the share structure of the company (and who holds power etc) and ours has a couple of columns of what we might earn at given exit values - this is kind of incentivising but its also useful once you start talking about preference shares and multipliers. It is also a useful tool when negotiating on an investment because you can see what the implications are - for example say an investor was asking for 2% more - you might be able to see that it hardly makes any difference and isn't worth arguing about - or it might be absolutely critical.

Investors seem to want to see this as well.

Perhaps the moral of that cartoon should be "why Entrepreneurs should reconsider having partners and children that can't tell the difference between play and work"

My 4 year old daughter woke me up the other day saying "Wake up you've got to work. That's what grown ups do".

Yes. Sorry was assuming all that.

You do need to become an investible entity which involves a valuation , cap tables and all that nonsense.

We needed to do this early on as well - because we had some early people who we paid in stock and not all of which worked out for one reason or another. Its a pain at first but to be honest it also brings a bit of rigor and discipline to the company as well.

So first of all - you kind of want it all ways. You think its going to fail but you want a piece of the action "just in case".

First step - pick one.

If you think its going to fail and your partners are just wasting their time. Sign it all over them. Assign them the IP and walk away.

If on the other hand you think that while your involvement has come to an end - that they still have a chance then sit down with them. Get it setup in a form where you can have equity and agree what share of that equity you will have - but it sounds from the agreement you already have you have 25%. Sign over the IP to this entity (they won't be able to sell it or do anything if you don't do this - and you want to give them a fighting chance). If you still want to be an advisor or they do - then that is your choice. The net result of all this is that you will be a shareholder with your investment being the work that you did.

A Note on amount of equity: You have put two years work in at the riskiest part of the game (at the very start when everything is unknown). They might want to argue you down a bit because it's still very high risk - and that would probably be fair - but I would say that's their call if they want to go down that road. Ask yourself if they would have any chance going forward without those 2 years work.

The thing I find most disturbing about this is the lack of cultural awareness that people have been searching for sounds that act on the body for years.

From Hawkwind trying to get the audience to crap themselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRw_rvrXQiQ&feature=playe...

To Coil and their Time machines:

http://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/eskaton10.php?si...

The Hafler trios experiments (Andrew Mackenzie seems determined to erase himself from history so can't find a relevant link)

and many many more - there is probably at least one book in mankinds search for music that alters the mind - that I can't be bothered researching for this comment.

And of course - if any of this actually worked don't you think it would have been around and available for a very long time?

( and its not just sound either - Gysin was playing wih light - perhaps a more promising line of investigation given epilepsy can be triggered with light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine)

The world sure needs more "analysis free" "light" news items provided largely by the PR industry.

I wonder how those other organisations, like the Economist and the Wall street journal, manage to charge money. Oh yes that's it - they add value with insight and research and stuff you can't get elsewhere.

I guess Murdoch has been reading his own papers and thinks that young people are just all idiots (see endless stories on how the internet/television/mobile phones/video games make you dumber)

So start by crossing anything with windows 7 off of the list.

The most interesting to my mind is the Cisco one. They seem to be targeting the enterprise - I can imagine office's full of people carrying these. RIM did awfully well in this niche. Could Cisco do the same?

I am really really hoping that HP don't mess up their purchase of Palm and deliver something fantastic with WebOS too.

heh heh - that was what I was trying to say. I think I need more coffee this morning....

What I don't get is why a company like Microsoft - rich and no longer in the lead doesn't setup a couple of well funded skunk works companies. Drop the baggage (ie don't force them to use windows and allow a new culture to emerge) and give each one a target - touch computing or something else and let 'em go.

Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc. but it's not working. They have the financial space to do something radical and disruptive to themselves and jump on that if it pans out.

Either that or just get some strong with real vision at the helm who is capable of turning it around.

Perhaps its much the same thing

First of all you mentioned two "unrelated" examples - one of which sounds like exactly the same thing in a different environment. Being a film maker is not a job either - I assume its like most creative industries and that 90% of the people who do it don't actually make a living wage. That's not to say don't do it but do think about what you are up to.

All of this suggests that its the moving on and not where you are moving too you are focused on.

Secondly - you don't sound like you have any dependants or responsibilities. So - best time in your life ever to make a move. (plus you can live for a year without income! Luxury!)

Thirdly there is never a best time to do anything. If you wait for all the conditions to be right you will still be working at the same job when you are 60 still hating every minute.

and lastly in general you get to pick one of a) safe or b) interesting in a job - it is very rare to get both immediately.

You are young and free - and if you can't pick (b) now you never will be able to. If you pick (b) now you can always go for (a) later or you will find a niche where your type (b) job acquires some safety

and ps. Corporate programming is totally rubbish for the most part in my experience and your feelings about the job are not the same as your feelings about software development.

The current cuts are providing some incentive but I think you are right but there is another part of the picture:

the lack of incentive to cut is one thing.

The ability to see things that can be cut is the other piece of the jigsaw - and I guess this stems from exactly what you are talking about - its not been a necessary skill or a part of the process before.

In order to constrain costs both motive and ability to do so are essential.

Ha ha ha ha.

I can see you've never worked in the civil service. Promotion, possibly "sideways", is by far the more likely outcome for gross negligence. Sacking people for gross negligence is hard enough even in the private sector under uk law.

HR in the civil service is sh*t scared of the unions and strikes are an option of last resort. Virtually nothing gets that far.

Again as I've commented above it would require such a sea change both in law and process - all of which the unions would fight every last step of the way - that there are undoubtedly other lines of attack.

So the first thing to understand is that value for money is only one of the check boxes in a procurement and the biggest one by far is accountability (which ironically just kills value for money even though I presume the accountability is to prevent money disappearing)

Secondly you can not do agile things or indeed anything other than mainstream IT projects under the current procurement rules. I've tried (from both sides)

So reform will have to come from the top down. The good news is that this government does seem interested in root and branch reform so keep pushing. However it is going to require dramatic new thinking in an organisation (the civil service) that is fundamentally built to resist such a thing as part of its very foundations.

Given I sometimes work on these kinds of projects I could not possibly comment.

To be fair though I think that the "its only taxpayers money" attitude is disappearing. But there are still so many other inefficiencies.

As for your fix. You try firing a civil servant and making it cost less than their salary plus pension.....

ranges between £400 to over a grand in my experience depending on what kind of skill sets.

Remember that scaling this kind of business is hard because you are selling peoples time - so for each salary you pay you can only sell it one time over. Compare and contrast with being a product company - I might spend a few weeks working on a product and then those few weeks of my salary can be sold over and over again.

The scaling of so many employees also brings massive overheads.

So yes - the day rates seem high but the margins can be pretty rubbish.

The kind of company that can cope with doing business with the government is rarely the kind of company that attracts and retains decent programmers.

In my experience most of the programmers in these kind of companies are people who just do it for a job (as opposed to those of us who do it because we can't help it and are pleasantly surprised to discover people will pay us to do it :-) )

So for a government project in the UK:

You first of all need to go into the procurement process. This pretty much starts with the principle that you need to know whose fault it is when it all goes wrong which kind of sets the tone for everything.

To be able to cope with the procurement you need quite a large and bureaucracy heavy setup to start with - the emphasis is on accountability not performance. Also the government moves very slowly - it is a very large organisation with few of the commercial pressures we in the private sector are used to - this leads to delays - which in turn lead to costs. The type of company that can cope with doing business with the government has a lot of overheads.

Secondly the government side is quite hampered with rules and regulations to prevent what you might characterise as corruption. This means a lot of stuff has to be done formally and that often brings delays (and expense). (I don't want to portray this as a bad thing - corruption is bad - but it does prevent a lot of agility IMO)

Thirdly the people on the government side often don't know what a successful IT project looks like and the people doing the procuring frequently won't be people who know anything about what they are buying (and the actual end users of the system will likely not be consulted until long after the procurement). To be fair to the procurers they really do try and get value for money - but way things are setup normally means that this can't be done in sensible ways.

It's one of those "well you wouldn't start from here" type things - and whats worse they do keep starting from here and it keeps going wrong.

Depends on how many files you have. In my line of work (web archiving) I frequently have more files than '*' can cope with - so need to use find even for mundane tasks

That isn't quite what I am saying. I am saying that buying something - or in this case having children - and expecting instant happiness is shallow and consumeristic.

Proper happiness comes from deeper things and while this probably isn't the place to go into it I would argue that its not quite what you should be aiming for - depth of experience and quality of experience are better things to be aiming for to my mind.

I so agree with this.

The whole "does it make my life happier" is such a shallow consumer thing.

When I was younger I led an interesting life in many ways but I have never had the intensity of experience I have with and about my children. Another really surprising thing was finding out how much I connect back with society - I want to be part of society and change it and make it better - I get what it is for.

Children are not a lifestyle accessory and as the poster above says they push you into all sorts of aspects of your self in all sorts of interesting ways.

The mixture of a startup and three small children has certainly been entertaining and there have been times when I am so exhausted I have nothing else to give but then to go and do something simple - like bathing the children or doing something in the garden with them and it makes it all worth while.

As I frequently find myself telling my children: Things in life that aren't challenging aren't worth while (possibly hyperbole but you get my point)

I have a concept that I call "feeding my head" (guess what I was up to in the nineties) - which is reading, listening to and playing music, films , tv and not least spending time with the family.

I know from direct experience that if I neglect this side of things then my creativity - for development and tech and for business solutions to challenges and opportunities - drops off dramatically.

You need to find a balance and do what works - don't be guilt tripped into doing something that does not make sense to you. There are always vocal extremists - people who can get by on 4 hours of sleep, people who eat 1 yogurt a day and work standing up at their desk... you get the idea. And this may well work for them but its not for everyone. Find out what works for you and don't think you are worse for not being able to keep up with the outliers - its about running a business, not about being hard or cool or showing off.

What is NOT good for your business is you burning out and not being able to go the distance. And if there is one other thing I've learned - its going to be much further and much harder work than you think and you need to be able to keep on going.