sutton036

As a technology company, we like to apply technical solutions to problems at all levels. Our board of directors even apply technical solutions to the problem of company direction. Business can be thought of as an optimization algorithm: tweaking stuff and things in order to maximize company profits. Interestingly, we use a number of different kinds of optimization algorithm when dictating the direction of the company. We begin new product lines based on experience but continue to optimize our products based on customer feedback, trying to solve the problems that are most important to our customers. For example, our F# for Numerics library started life as our second attempt at selling libraries to F# users (our first attempt was F# for Visualization ) and we provided the features we thought would be most useful. Customers inevitably requested more features including both technical features like parallel matrix inversion with arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic but also non-technica...

Mike Hendrickson has been busy updating O'Reilly's analysis of the state of the computer book market by programming language. That means it is time for us to reiterate how authors of decent books can earn far more for their work by cutting out the middlemen including trade publishers like O'Reilly. Traditional book publishers are a dying breed. Aside from e-books, they have been driven out by an increasing number of so-called "self-published" books. In the context of software development, this is particularly common around non-mainstream subjects and includes titles such as OCaml for Scientists and Programming in Scala . O'Reilly's analysis excluded all such books even though they are far more profitable for authors. In order to make a case for self-publishing it is necessary to present some information about a variety of existing books: OCaml for Scientists was written and self-published in 2005 and is sold for £85 through the publisher's website....