Enterprisey IT Journal

SAP Business One Singed by user reaction to its plans to up the price of its support contracts, SAP Tuesday postponed any move until early next year. Meanwhile, it’s set up a task force charged with talking to enterprise customers to reinforce the perceived value of their support agreements and justify the proposed price increases. SAP wants to raise the price from ~17% of the license fee a year to 22%. Given the economic temper of the times, SAP is expected to get a lot of pushback. ... (more)

Dealing with Open Source Software

In the first article of this series (see http://java.sys-con.com/read/108260.htm), I "bought" a gas station with a convenience store and a repair shop and started to think about automating this small business using various Java technologies. This time, I'm getting a crash course on open source software. Mentality Shift The most surprising thing is how quickly my programming preferences have changed after I left the corporate world and started working at my gas station. I used to easily recommend expensive software tools, application servers, RAID devices, grid servers, and fiber... (more)

Yakov Fain's Java Blog: "Cultural Differences in Outsourcing"

Cultural Differences in Outsourcing This is not about which country has better programmers. What cultural issues did you experience with the offshore country you've dealt with? I'm not trying to generalize, or present any natioinality in a negative way, but this what I've heard so far: India:  programmers do not say no, which does not mean that they've correctly understood the assignment and will deliver what you expect. Russia: money does not motivate them that much. Threats like "I won't pay you unless you'll code this in 5 days" may not help. But if you tell them that so-and-so ... (more)

Is it the Time to Follow Twitter and Learn Scala?

The Register has published an article about Twitter considering moving the mission critical portion of its code from Ruby on Rails to Scala. This sounded logical to me, even though the article has been dated by April first. But then Artima has confirmed the news a couple of days later. As usual, the bad part of me goes, "Told, ya!" as people who read my posts knows that I was never a fan of RoR. I really respect DHH and his followers for doing exceptional job in exciting so many software developers with Ruby and RoR. But when these boring men with cash (BMW$) come into play, things... (more)

Game Theory and Non Zero Solutions

Game theory is applied mathematics enabling an evaluation of strategic decisions.  Win loose or Win Win: its a choice based on our beliefs and the  perceived nature of our relationships.  As the networks of interdependence within and beyond communities and nations get more complex, the more enlightened people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions. In leadership the measure of success is not so much whether you won at anothers expense, but whether you got what you wanted because you enabled othe... (more)