Great talk from the lady who cowrote several programming books for o'reilly I think, like head first Java

Topic is cognitive resources and how to learn things faster and with less effort, sort of

I see.

I guess it depends a lot on the end-clients as well. There is much to be said about many hours of support from the company, onboarding, a 3 hour PowerPoint and live demo sales pitch, and having someone they can always call, etc. Many companies want to be babysat and don't employ technical-minded people, either because they don't want to or can't afford it.

For warehousing type companies, there are several non-technical sales-types that you would end up working with:

sales - they always send 2 to 3 people for the initial demo. They are also there to look at the warehouse, make baseline suggestions, etc. (I've seen wide variations on this theme). The point of this is to say "look how knowledgeable our sales are, just think of what you are buying into!"

Warehouse consultant - someone who is a warehouse expert who teaches you how to run a warehouse properly, suggests layout and process changes, suggest what you need to get everything up to some standard of sanity, etc.

Training - Someone has to teach logistics, data management, forklift drivers, pickers, QC, packers, etc, how to use the software effectively.

Products - scan guns, labels, conveyor belts, hand trucks, etc.

Ongoing support - Of course things will go wrong with the system, someone is going to accidentally delete all the inventory data, Excel Plugins fail, etc.

There is an argument to be had for employing your own developers, but there is a strong argument for not employing your own developers as well. You can pay $150k to $200k / year for 2 devs and some front-line decision-maker, or you can pay 3 companies for yearly fees that for less than that. With the companies, tou get support and some invisible but tangible notion of several vetted a professional developers and support staff from the various services.

With in-house developers, you still need someone to do all the footwork, training, decision-making, product management, etc. A developer or non-tech leaves the remote company, or if the remote company employs a bad developer or support person, it isn't a disaster. With and in-house crew, these things are, which causes issues with the idea of training people in-house to take over all operations.

In any case, I think it is really neat that companies have policies and research concepts in place to protect themselves. I like the angle and it is some good food for thought.

Interesting talk. I wonder how one would go about splitting up learning a programming language into 200 example chunks though.
Do you want 200 examples of high quality loops or is that too fine grained? It makes total sense for stuff like patterns but I'm not sure about more basic concepts.

cb,

It seems there is just a semantic issue here. I am not interested in discussing the use of marketing terminology to compare identical business strategies.

Also, I think because of this semantic issue you seem to think that general productivity tool aren't the largest chunk of SaaS. (CRM alone is like 30% of all SaaS revenue.)

http://www.statista.com/statistics/2...st-by-segment/

Here is a pretty good rundown of SaaS/PaaS from a business perspective as well: http://www.***************/heavybit/...vice-companies

Regardless, you corrected some of my inaccurate speech and made some interesting points about the issues of moats/competition/etc.

The marketing/business stuff should really be moved to a separate forum.
Its giving m hot flashbacks to the idiocity that i've experienced from seeing management in corporate life. So much power, little actual work compared to the actual developers and everyone has to just keep quiet about it. The move office space resembles is clearly in a sense.

CRM is not a generic productivity tool anymore than DBMS is a generic productivity tool. Remember the context here for genericity is whether a given tool is generic enough to be offered to consumers first, then cross over to enterprise. This is not going to happen for CRM and it's not going to happen for ERP. Also, the generic portion of this type of software is not what people pay a lot of money for - generic CRM is really not much more than PaaS for enterprise developers.

You are just totally off the reservation now.

Best of luck.

Got contacted by digital ocean last night. Apparently my server is part of a botnet... lol

Just had a stupid little made for adsense site up using wordpress with a weak password and no updates in over a year. Guess that'll do it.

i thought home routers were all the botnet rage

So 2015 now adhoc p2p cellphone networks. Damn tethering.

Then it will be Internet enabled home devices. Probably already in cars.

Yet da tethering is what can make big difference for china people and like those adhoc p2p networks can fight the great wall!!!!

Do you have any experience building or working with enterprise software, SaaS or on-premise? Do you have experience with sales or marketing? It seems to me that you've constructed some kind of elaborate world view mostly based on reading and talking to people without having any kind of hands-on experience. There's a lot of inaccurate information out there, in part because most of the writing on this topic is done by people with no actual experience, but just an abstract view of the world based on numbers they manage to gather without context and there's a huge amount of agenda-pushing done by companies who stand to gain from the market being classified in a certain way to push products across unrelated industries. They are also able to use the fact that IT people have careers to manage and want transferable skills that translate across companies and industries.

For example, CRM and ERP are very loose categories and in some sense, most of what's common between CRM needs of, say, a major bank and those of a large software company, is already captured in mostly commoditized technology platforms - databases, operating systems, reporting platforms, language implementations, basic platform libraries, generic services etc. Existing CRM products mostly serve as an integration point for custom development, with the major value proposition being that less technical and more businessy people can do the development.

CRM is mostly a marketing term for database-driven software that helps you build custom applications and can integrate with anything, and to distinguish from pure technical frameworks, comes out of the box with a few built-in fields and workflows that have something to do with sales processes to confuse management into paying more than they would otherwise pay for a purely technical platform, regardless of whether built-in fields and workflows actually work for them or not. But from an actual technical standpoint, categories as diverse as programming language implementations, web frameworks, CMS, ECM and CRM serve as imperfect substitutes for one another. Enterprise buyers often have no understanding of any of this, which is why marketing is so effective.

For smaller, industry-specific players, part of the promise of SaaS is that they can stop this kind of marketing push by sidestepping the IT department. Part of the reason why this kind of generic marketing works is that IT departments don't understand business and they want platform uniformity to ease management, for their own careers and also because generic solutions necessarily create tons of custom work that eventually enlarges IT budgets. This arrangement favors large corporations who understand exactly how to sell to corporate IT or at the executive level, who don't understand the specific needs of business units. SaaS allows industry-specific companies to reach individual business units that don't care about generic IT marketing terms or corporate-level initiatives and need software built for their actual business needs instead of imagined needs of generic business people.

So one place I applied to and did an initial interview with wrote me back. They said since I'm so close to getting my degree (2 year degree in a few months), the hiring folks want to consider me for a full time position instead of an internship.

Good, bad, or brush-off?

How is dat bad?

You applying everywhere for the lawls or like thinking they won't pay you to intern.
They obviously want you but if its not on your list of places to actually work, then think of it as practice i guess huh...

Don't know how it could be bad or a brush off since ft paid > intership. Congratulations!

It's somewhere I'd like to work. I only did a phone interview for background info, no technical questions yet so still no clue what if anything I'm qualified for.

They do have some work available in Java and ruby tho, so if I could pick or move between them that'd be nice.

The intern position is paid, more than my base at least. Obvs the ft job pays a lot more though.

I'd say it's certainly a good thing. Whether or not you prefer to pursue the full time position depends on how set you are on continuing on to a 4 year degree

Longshot, but anyone know anything about epubs and specifically the Nook Glowlight Plus? It auto-splits and hyphenates words in order to justify text, which I hate - I'd rather it just spaced the words. Google turned up adding adobe-hyphenate: none; to the body CSS using Calibre for older editions of Nook, but this doesn't seem to be respected. Anyone know anything about this?

ereaders use the dom and css for layout? That's news to me.

epub is XHTML yeah. Compressed or something so not directly readable.

Something I don't understand:

Sites that offer downloads as executables or binaries that you compile yourself.

Are there really people who sift through the source code of every program before they install it? Or is there some other benefit, like being able to see how they handled some particular problem (or being able to tweak things yourself)?

A lot of non tech people really like those Amazon ereaders.
I've never really gotten the appeal of them because dimming the brightness of an iPad for me does the trick.

I did purchase one of the first gen versions from Amazon for my mom. It made the ink style look and it was nice with battery life but still you could pull that look off with an iPad.

Didn't like how they couldn't take a pdf and resize the pages.
Apple's iBooks app can't even do that and its 2016!!!

The Nook ones do layout generally better than Kindle, in fact auto-hyphenation is one of the selling points, I just don't like it.

The benefits over an iPad are better readability in direct sunlight, hugely better battery life, and my Nook is waterproof so I can read in a pool or w/e if I want to.

I never really understood this. Presumably, the attacker wuold need to be able to run code on the router itself, right? Do routers provide execution environments? Seems like a pretty dangerous feature to allow arbitrary code to be executed on the router.

Wait...am I misunderstanding or are you basically asking what the buzz about this Open Source stuff is?