With git I keep hearing that you need to have everyone merge their local repositories into a central repository. To me, it sounds like you "solve" the P2P nature of git by manually reimplementing a central server in your development process.
This is exactly what always occurs to me when people talk about distributed source control systems. What's the point of proclaiming how superior git is for not having a central repository if you have to choose a primary (central) repository anyway?
The problem with TortoiseGit is that it requires msysgit to be installed, whereas TortoiseSVN doesn't require anything extra to be installed in the background. Some people don't like msysgit for one reason or another (primarily the fact that it's extremely slow compared to the Linux version in some cases).
I've spent countless hours convincing my employer to switch to Subversion from Visual SourceSafe. Over the last year or so, the best I have been able to do is get our peripheral libraries moved over...
I held a training meeting for Subversion, and supposedly one guy is working on some sort of repository layout, but I have no idea how long it will take to get the actual move put through the red tape.
And we're just a small 20-developer software company. I feel bad for anyone trying to get larger companies to switch.
Unlike, say, SVN, which really is for the i'm-too-dumb/lazy-to-use/learn-something-better crowd.
It's also for the I-develop-in-Windows-and-git-isn't-ready-for-Windows-yet crowd. Not everyone wants to use cygwin or msysgit, especially when the developers you're working with have a hard time with anything not GUI-fied. There's a reason TortoiseSVN is so popular.
Don't act like Subversion is only for lazy idiots. Subversion has its place, as does Git.
To be fair, it's less than twice as much, depending on how insanely obsessed you are with performance. For example, mwave has the Kingston DDR2 1066MHz 2GB kit for $30, and the Corsair DDR3 1066MHz 2GB kit for $52 (looking only in their "High Performance" RAM categories). More expensive, yes, but not quite twice as much (for an arguably better brand, at that).
It's trivially easy to spend more on DDR2 than on DDR3.
There is, of course, another method to get around this. If you implement the basic idea beforehand, sometimes you can add improvements to that idea as your school project - the school can't take ownership from you.
As an example, a friend of mine started ActiveTrails a long while back. For his Masters' thesis he did some funky algorithms for combining various different GPS coordinate logs in one way or another for his website, yet he has no fear of the school owning his ideas or trying to take his website from him.
Then again, he wasn't getting paid like some graduate students, so maybe that changes things.... IANAL, of course.
While I agree with you for the most part, I do think it's somewhat important to know what to do when you do come up with The Next Big Idea. Even undergraduates have them once in a while, you know.
Now, I have a few ideas that I think are fairly good. I doubt they're original, but as far as I can tell there isn't anything on the market that matches any of these ideas precisely. What I'm worried about is not that other people get them, but that my future employer claims the ideas for themselves; you see, I signed a contract stating that whatever I come up with once I'm employed belongs to them if it's related to their business.
One of my ideas is almost perfectly aligned with their business - so I have to take steps now, before I begin employment, to document that the idea is mine, and that I came up with it before I started work there.
It's not that I don't want anyone to know about it, it's that I don't want them to prevent me from using the idea myself. Our friendly SUU student could have the same concerns.
I hate to be one of those people who shout "[citation needed]", but correlation does not show causation. Find some real evidence, and get back to us.
Personally I have difficulty believing the economic downturn has anything at all to do with intellectual property laws, because they appear to be largely unrelated. I'd be happy to look at evidence if you have some, but don't point out "oh look, these happened at about the same time" and call that evidence.
On whose dime? Unless he's on a scholarship, he's at the university on his own dime. Why should the university get to keep his ideas on top of his tuition?
Do you think high schools should keep their students' ideas as well? I know people who had good ideas in high school, used them for school projects, then went on to make money off of them. It's exactly the same situtation, except that universities have smarter teachers (and, as a consequence, they charge more).
My argument will reverse if he's a graduate student getting paid to do research for the university; at that point it's more like a job than schooling.
One could argue that, as the owner of the website's copyright, by making a website available to the public on a web server, you are granting viewers permission to download and view the website, and therefore it's not a copyright violation.
The difference (legally) is that the music copyright holder is not personally distributing the mp3, however the website copyright holder is personally distributing the website.
Please disconnect the customer attached to said IP address immediately.
Love, Your friendly neighborhood *AA
The "repeat infringer" clause adds no additional restrictions over a first-time infringer. After all, who determines what "repeat" means? Does it mean multiple notices? Does it mean multiple files? 92A certainly doesn't define it.
The problem is that they're not happy to do it, they just feel that they have no choice. Who likes spending money to do someone else's job under threat of lawsuits?
A friend of mine (who lives in Canada) said the following just now when I asked him about it:
Yes, there's like a 40c per blank disk tax we pay. Some stores get [around] it by calling them "data" discs and not "music" discs, some just ignore it completely. Also, I think in the past 20 years, not any of the collected taxes have been shown to make it back to any artist.
If the law wasn't a publicized issue during the election, then there wasn't any attention to be paid. From what I can tell, most of the candidates in question don't even know about it, and most (all?) of their parties don't have a stance on this act.
At what point were the people not paying attention? Perhaps they could have made a fuss about it when it became a problem - OH WAIT! That's what's happening right now.
Non-answers? "I don't know anything about that" isn't a non-answer, it's an admission of ignorance, and two of the three who knew nothing about it said they'd look into it. A non-answer would be something that implies the candidate has a stance on the issue but remains ambiguous about what that stance actually is.
The response from the Family Party representative said:
I too have grave concerns about this section of the Act... I will certainly be interested in changing this should I be in parliament after the election. I have been following the debate on this issue on the internet on and off for the past year, and it does appear that Labour has ignored the genuine concerns of the IT industry and most thinking people.
That's about as far from a non-answer as can be - not only does he say he's been following the issue on his own, he specifically says he's in favor of changing the Act!
I don't think that's a reason not to try. Plenty of ideas that failed the first time around have become successful businesses the second (or third, or seventh) time around.
Just a quick note... some third-party distributors of nVidia chipsets make slight modifications such that the stock nVidia drivers don't work. For example, in my experience, nVidia's stock drivers don't recognize eVGA's GeForce cards; I have always had to download eVGA's special driver package.
Glancing back at your post shows me you're on a laptop. Dell and HP and friends don't give you stock nVidia drivers (or stock nVidia chipsets) for the nVidia graphics in their laptops. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with an nVidia GeForce Go 7300; it was customized by Dell (slightly), and as such the only stock installer that works is Dell's (ignoring any funny installer tricks).
In any case, I've been using newer drivers using a modified.ini file from LaptopVideo2Go, so nVidia's stock drivers actually work (and they work well). Dell's "latest" driver is ancient, while laptopvideo2go's.ini lets me use the latest stock nVidia driver.
I didn't imply that language X is inherently boring, like the OP did; I simply stated that I prefer some languages over others (without giving reasons). That is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the statement "good engineers find language X boring" is ridiculous. I only mentioned that last bit to show that I'm not being biased:P
If your contracts don't specifically say you fire people for that sort of thing, then you have no business even caring about it (unless, of course, it is visibly affecting their performance of their job with your company). Similarly, if your contract doesn't say you own everything they create while employed by you, you have no business even asking if they've been moonlighting.
For example, let's say John Smith has been moonlighting (and let's say there's not a "no moonlighting" clause in his contract) and it makes him somewhat tired during the 9-5 workday you're paying him for. You claim you'd fire him for that, but how is his situation any different from mine, where I'll be extremely tired all day, every day once my child is born? Would you fire me for being tired at work? If not, why is my tiredness excusable but his is not?
My contract with my new employer (where I will begin work in May) is quite extensive, and contains various non-compete and IP clauses - however, they're intelligent enough to realize that they don't need IP completely unrelated to their business, and they only care that your moonlighting doesn't compete with their business. In fact, they even specify that they don't care if you use their computers and network for personal e-mails, whether or not those e-mails are for outside work, so long as said work does not compete with them.
I think that's extremely reasonable - there is no reason my future employer should be concerned that I sell a small shareware application to an even smaller target market. Similarly, they shouldn't care that I charge my friend's business partner ~$40/month for web hosting and tech support, because that has no bearing on their business.
On a side note, do you discipline employees if you find them on Slashdot during the work day? If not, that's something of a double-standard. Or better - were you at work when you posted?
Slashdot Mirror
With git I keep hearing that you need to have everyone merge their local repositories into a central repository. To me, it sounds like you "solve" the P2P nature of git by manually reimplementing a central server in your development process.
This is exactly what always occurs to me when people talk about distributed source control systems. What's the point of proclaiming how superior git is for not having a central repository if you have to choose a primary (central) repository anyway?
The problem with TortoiseGit is that it requires msysgit to be installed, whereas TortoiseSVN doesn't require anything extra to be installed in the background. Some people don't like msysgit for one reason or another (primarily the fact that it's extremely slow compared to the Linux version in some cases).
According to the TV interviews and such I've seen, Linus didn't pick the name "Linux" himself.
Can't be as bad as Visual SourceSafe, can it? ;)
I've spent countless hours convincing my employer to switch to Subversion from Visual SourceSafe. Over the last year or so, the best I have been able to do is get our peripheral libraries moved over...
I held a training meeting for Subversion, and supposedly one guy is working on some sort of repository layout, but I have no idea how long it will take to get the actual move put through the red tape.
And we're just a small 20-developer software company. I feel bad for anyone trying to get larger companies to switch.
Unlike, say, SVN, which really is for the i'm-too-dumb/lazy-to-use/learn-something-better crowd.
It's also for the I-develop-in-Windows-and-git-isn't-ready-for-Windows-yet crowd. Not everyone wants to use cygwin or msysgit, especially when the developers you're working with have a hard time with anything not GUI-fied. There's a reason TortoiseSVN is so popular.
Don't act like Subversion is only for lazy idiots. Subversion has its place, as does Git.
You forgot the "YMMV" at the end of your statements ;)
Maybe you should shop elsewhere?
To be fair, it's less than twice as much, depending on how insanely obsessed you are with performance. For example, mwave has the Kingston DDR2 1066MHz 2GB kit for $30, and the Corsair DDR3 1066MHz 2GB kit for $52 (looking only in their "High Performance" RAM categories). More expensive, yes, but not quite twice as much (for an arguably better brand, at that).
It's trivially easy to spend more on DDR2 than on DDR3.
There is, of course, another method to get around this. If you implement the basic idea beforehand, sometimes you can add improvements to that idea as your school project - the school can't take ownership from you.
As an example, a friend of mine started ActiveTrails a long while back. For his Masters' thesis he did some funky algorithms for combining various different GPS coordinate logs in one way or another for his website, yet he has no fear of the school owning his ideas or trying to take his website from him.
Then again, he wasn't getting paid like some graduate students, so maybe that changes things.... IANAL, of course.
While I agree with you for the most part, I do think it's somewhat important to know what to do when you do come up with The Next Big Idea. Even undergraduates have them once in a while, you know.
Now, I have a few ideas that I think are fairly good. I doubt they're original, but as far as I can tell there isn't anything on the market that matches any of these ideas precisely. What I'm worried about is not that other people get them, but that my future employer claims the ideas for themselves; you see, I signed a contract stating that whatever I come up with once I'm employed belongs to them if it's related to their business.
One of my ideas is almost perfectly aligned with their business - so I have to take steps now, before I begin employment, to document that the idea is mine, and that I came up with it before I started work there.
It's not that I don't want anyone to know about it, it's that I don't want them to prevent me from using the idea myself. Our friendly SUU student could have the same concerns.
I hate to be one of those people who shout "[citation needed]", but correlation does not show causation. Find some real evidence, and get back to us.
Personally I have difficulty believing the economic downturn has anything at all to do with intellectual property laws, because they appear to be largely unrelated. I'd be happy to look at evidence if you have some, but don't point out "oh look, these happened at about the same time" and call that evidence.
On whose dime? Unless he's on a scholarship, he's at the university on his own dime. Why should the university get to keep his ideas on top of his tuition?
Do you think high schools should keep their students' ideas as well? I know people who had good ideas in high school, used them for school projects, then went on to make money off of them. It's exactly the same situtation, except that universities have smarter teachers (and, as a consequence, they charge more).
My argument will reverse if he's a graduate student getting paid to do research for the university; at that point it's more like a job than schooling.
I don't actually ROFL in real life much, but this did it for me :) I'd mod you up, but I've already replied elsewhere...
They don't get jailed for infringement accusations, they just get their internet disconnected.
One could argue that, as the owner of the website's copyright, by making a website available to the public on a web server, you are granting viewers permission to download and view the website, and therefore it's not a copyright violation.
The difference (legally) is that the music copyright holder is not personally distributing the mp3, however the website copyright holder is personally distributing the website.
Actually you're being an idiot for no reason. Assume *AA sends this notice:
Dear ISP,
Your subscriber on IP 123.456.789.1 repeatedly infringed on our copyrights at 4:23PM local time by downloading the following files:
- BarneyTheDinosaur.mpeg
- BritneySpearsInConcert.zip
- ILikePieYesIDo.mp3
Please disconnect the customer attached to said IP address immediately.
Love,
Your friendly neighborhood *AA
The "repeat infringer" clause adds no additional restrictions over a first-time infringer. After all, who determines what "repeat" means? Does it mean multiple notices? Does it mean multiple files? 92A certainly doesn't define it.
The problem is that they're not happy to do it, they just feel that they have no choice. Who likes spending money to do someone else's job under threat of lawsuits?
A friend of mine (who lives in Canada) said the following just now when I asked him about it:
Yes, there's like a 40c per blank disk tax we pay. Some stores get [around] it by calling them "data" discs and not "music" discs, some just ignore it completely. Also, I think in the past 20 years, not any of the collected taxes have been shown to make it back to any artist.
Just some food for thought.
If the law wasn't a publicized issue during the election, then there wasn't any attention to be paid. From what I can tell, most of the candidates in question don't even know about it, and most (all?) of their parties don't have a stance on this act.
At what point were the people not paying attention? Perhaps they could have made a fuss about it when it became a problem - OH WAIT! That's what's happening right now.
Non-answers? "I don't know anything about that" isn't a non-answer, it's an admission of ignorance, and two of the three who knew nothing about it said they'd look into it. A non-answer would be something that implies the candidate has a stance on the issue but remains ambiguous about what that stance actually is.
The response from the Family Party representative said:
I too have grave concerns about this section of the Act... I will certainly be interested in changing this should I be in parliament after the election. I have been following the debate on this issue on the internet on and off for the past year, and it does appear that Labour has ignored the genuine concerns of the IT industry and most thinking people.
That's about as far from a non-answer as can be - not only does he say he's been following the issue on his own, he specifically says he's in favor of changing the Act!
I don't think that's a reason not to try. Plenty of ideas that failed the first time around have become successful businesses the second (or third, or seventh) time around.
Just a quick note... some third-party distributors of nVidia chipsets make slight modifications such that the stock nVidia drivers don't work. For example, in my experience, nVidia's stock drivers don't recognize eVGA's GeForce cards; I have always had to download eVGA's special driver package.
Glancing back at your post shows me you're on a laptop. Dell and HP and friends don't give you stock nVidia drivers (or stock nVidia chipsets) for the nVidia graphics in their laptops. I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 with an nVidia GeForce Go 7300; it was customized by Dell (slightly), and as such the only stock installer that works is Dell's (ignoring any funny installer tricks).
In any case, I've been using newer drivers using a modified .ini file from LaptopVideo2Go, so nVidia's stock drivers actually work (and they work well). Dell's "latest" driver is ancient, while laptopvideo2go's .ini lets me use the latest stock nVidia driver.
I didn't imply that language X is inherently boring, like the OP did; I simply stated that I prefer some languages over others (without giving reasons). That is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the statement "good engineers find language X boring" is ridiculous. I only mentioned that last bit to show that I'm not being biased :P
If your contracts don't specifically say you fire people for that sort of thing, then you have no business even caring about it (unless, of course, it is visibly affecting their performance of their job with your company). Similarly, if your contract doesn't say you own everything they create while employed by you, you have no business even asking if they've been moonlighting.
For example, let's say John Smith has been moonlighting (and let's say there's not a "no moonlighting" clause in his contract) and it makes him somewhat tired during the 9-5 workday you're paying him for. You claim you'd fire him for that, but how is his situation any different from mine, where I'll be extremely tired all day, every day once my child is born? Would you fire me for being tired at work? If not, why is my tiredness excusable but his is not?
My contract with my new employer (where I will begin work in May) is quite extensive, and contains various non-compete and IP clauses - however, they're intelligent enough to realize that they don't need IP completely unrelated to their business, and they only care that your moonlighting doesn't compete with their business. In fact, they even specify that they don't care if you use their computers and network for personal e-mails, whether or not those e-mails are for outside work, so long as said work does not compete with them.
I think that's extremely reasonable - there is no reason my future employer should be concerned that I sell a small shareware application to an even smaller target market. Similarly, they shouldn't care that I charge my friend's business partner ~$40/month for web hosting and tech support, because that has no bearing on their business.
On a side note, do you discipline employees if you find them on Slashdot during the work day? If not, that's something of a double-standard. Or better - were you at work when you posted?
Just some food for thought.