I agree. We seem to be in this damned scary world were all the devs rav about the UI in slashdot. What happened? Where is the command line school of thought?:-) A GUI is an abstraction that presents a well designed and implemented system to the user, not the other way around. Yeah so what Unity gave Ubuntu a slightly different shiny button than it had before, etc etc. To me we need to focus more on the systems and support for systems development (I use that kind of loosely as we are still talking up in the app layer) and not the shinny buttons in user land. At some level you need to be able to present things like print dialogs in a browser, or at least it would be nice to be able to, however the back end still has to be logically structured and written in a language that allows that to be expressed in a concise and clean mapping between concept and code. Java,.Net, python etc are the ways that is done. Javascript and HTML will never take the place of.Net because.Net is mainly a below UI language with some functionality for UI built on top. I think you can see that from XAML designers in the latest Visual Studio's. GUI is going to be more in the realm of graphics designers with a back end that is some sort of mark up. But the functionality will call into something more powerful like ASP, VB, C#, Java etc. Over on the desktop app land I don't think you'll see any change..Net does what it needs to do to keep those developers happy with the GUI they can build and it is nice to have easy access to call into whatever objects are on the screen from the code that is used for the system logic.
I agree. If you know that your customers are windows users WPF/.Net is a huge advantage. At my work everyone uses windows. I'm pretty much the only guy that can code and can do a good job in C++ vb.net etc. I hacked something together that was about 3k loc, 10 reasonably complex objects, several "windows"/pages whatever of UI, connecting to 4 different databases etc as a web app. Guess how much effort it took to go from a web app to a desktop app? About 20 minutes. That is the power of.Net. You can change your mind pretty much whenever you want to and for the most part it will just be a matter of compiling your code as a WPF browser app versus Windows app.
I'm not saying platform independence isn't a great thing but for about half of the companies I worked for they were completely windows shops. I don't want to handcuff myself to javascript and HTML 5 if someone might want a desktop widget, or a full blown desktop app out of the thing sometime (or huge parts of the program would be reusable to make said systems). Additionally I find things like LINQ and lambda functions in.Net a very clean way of expressing my intent in my code versus having for loop spaghetti every time I want to iterate over an object to find every order where the customer was Bob in a set that I've already loaded into a local variable.
Billions and billions of anti-HEROS are going through you at this very moment. But not nearly as many as HEROS, modern science still doesn't fully understand this asymmetry but given a few more strings multi-billion dollar labs we'll figure it out in time for your great grand children's 6th grade term paper.
Mac's can run Windows right? The opposite would more insulting I think in that OS X doesn't (at least not legally) run on non-Mac hardware. Perhaps find a vendor that has abandoned linux as a factory install option and rub it in that there is yet another OS that they are denying you:-)
BTW, even though you misspelled "Buttfuzz", I still like the name...;-) And are you telling me you can get a decent lawyer in Buttfuzz for only $200 an hour? You must have some connections!
Actually the cost of living is pretty low in Buttfuzz so prices are lower:-). How does first sale work for the movie industry? I seem to recall they charge movie rental places significantly (~4X) more to purchase a movie than Joe public. Presumably that is because they intend to rent it out. What stops the video company from going to a discount store and picking up their copies there? Is it copyright?
But it isn't just giving your device away. It is using the device for your own advertising/profit. As several other posts mention it is against copyright law to devalue someone else's copyright.
Good point I never really thought of the AV side of the problem of apps phoning home routinely. Perhaps a solution would be rather than let apps phone home make their messages be batched and then periodically (say once a week) ask people "Do you want to let: Office Beta, Visual Studio, Skype whatever "phone home"?". Really how urgent is usage statistics for Office or VS? This week or next week shouldn't matter in a reasonable time MS will find out that I never use dialog X to do Y but am constantly searching for the damned paste button on the edit dialog.
If it would help unclutter the "is it a virus or is it supposed to do that?" determination of the AV that is what they should do. For a lot of users I think something as simple (though probably hard to implement) as requiring there to have to have been an explicit user GUI interaction triggering the network connection could help. Ie start a torrent app you implicitly agreed to allow that app to connect to the network, some random service running in the background has to explicitly ask for permission the first time since reboot and periodically there after. Things could be bundled a bit, say after 30min a list of things pending network connection could be displayed with a simple allow/allow all/deny/deny all choice.
Go head try. Apple owns the trademarks to their product names. If you try to profit of those trademarks even if you aren't reselling the products themselves they have a legal say in the matter. Just like I can't slap a NBA stars name all over some carwash I own just because it will help me sell. People have a right to their names and so do company's who own the trademarks.
Exactly. It is the perceived value that gets someone to pay a premium for a iPhone 4 over iPhone 3 even if they aren't going to use the new features. It is better because it is newer, but it is better also because that is what Apple wants to push now. A tech company often wants to skim the market. You get an insanely high price when the tech is brand new from the people most willing to pay for it, than you drop the price a bit and get more of the market, eventually the tech ends up in a discount bin for $10. Regardless at the high point of the products price you don't want anyone to imply to those lucrative early adopters that the device could be free or cheap soon if they only play a game or try some more. You want the product to seem rare and so cool virgins will rain from the sky begging for a date because you have the new iGadget.
Additionally: copyright and patents will win the day. First off if I own the patent or copyright I can make it a rule that you do whatever I tell you to do with my product. For example Apple could explicitly forbid you to give away an iOS device in the EULA of the application. If you do so you violate their copyright and are liable for ~150k of damages in the US at least per offense.
Lastly: Apple doesn't even have to have a case. Apple sends a couple nasty letters, you refuse and go to court. Apple sends a half dozen Harvard Law Review lawyers and you, owner of PDIDLYFM send the local lawyer from your home town of Butfuzz, AK. Apple laughs and pays there lawyers gladly to bring motion after motion dragging things on as a "lesson to others", you nearly go bankrupt trying to pay your $200 a hour bill. Usually company's realize they can't win and settle out of court. It doesn't matter who's right, it matters who's right AND can afford the legal bills to have their rights enforced.
Hmm I don't know. They could make it a violation of their copyright to distribute the item as part of a "give-away" ie. promotion. You could still be free to give it away as an individual to a friend or whatever but when you are using the device to help YOUR business not be a nice guy you are making a commercial use of the product which the patent/copyright holder probably has some claim to control. Even if you've already paid for the device patents/copyright gives you the right to control how your invention is used.
I disagree he is indispensable, at least if he still wants to work with professional integrity. He accepted the work at the rate he was paid. Going forward he can try to negotiate a raise but to hold the company's operations hostage to get his way would be hugely unprofessional. At the very least he should help in the transition to a new IT guy if the negotiations go south. I for one don't want to be known as that guy that left everything in confusion when he left because he was sulky he didn't get his way.
I say focus on the positive. Tell them you think things are going well. That you want to move from a more casual contractor position to a true partnership. Then offer to take some salary as stock or if you can to put up some of your own money. I would suggest if you are bringing in money come up with an idea where that money can be used profitably (if you have the purse strings then you should have that more incentive to see it put to a profitable use).
would stop with the stupid comparisons. The miners had enough puss in their blisters to fill a 1998 Toyota Tercel. There was enough media their to impeach a president. God when can we trust people to understand units of measurements without comparing it to something that would never happen (like filling a sports stadium with rock (unless it is AC/DC in the 80's then it could happen).
Good points. There is a third option though: you seed some stuff a lot and than leech from others. Thus it is peer to peer in that everyone is sharing with everyone else but isn't that you share everything that you have. That way I'd think if they catch you they can only prove that you infringed some of the things you downloaded not all of it. For example personally if I download a tv show that is a week old and there are 3k seeds and 200 leechers I don't feel guilty not sharing after I got the file. But if I'm one of the first to complete a download I'll keep it on for a while to get the torrent to a good speed for everyone else.
I personally find private torrent sites that encourage 1.00 ratios silly. It is impossible. By definition someone is going to be the last to download so they are not going to seed the file to 1.00. Also bad files deserve to die. Things lose relavence with time etc. On the opposite sideI think a big part of the copyright problem is it lasts too long. Labels shouldn't still be leeching off of songs performed in the 50's, but they are. At some point a song has to become part of "the collective" and not part of the individual. At some point it becomes an essential part of culture and IMHO a member of society shouldn't owe fees to a company to participate in culture. Sure if you have to have the latest and greatest you should pay for it. But if you want to study the evolution of the guitar in rock from the 50's till 80's why should you have to spend hundreds of dollars in copyright? At some point stuff just becomes essential for culture to progress and to train the next generation of artists or even to just preserve the good parts of days gone by.
Quite right. If it is legal in Sweden to distribute copies than why are they levying fees on it? It isn't a sales tax no music/movies were sold (at least in the sense that the disks didn't come with data already on them or the requirement that they only be used for copyrighted works), it isn't a import duty (it didn't necessarily cross borders etc. In short why should media be receiving money for sales of items when there is no proof that the items are being used to distribute their products? Go after the infringement if you wish, DRM to your hearts content, but a blank disk shouldn't be taxed in case you use it for something that a group of private companies doesn't like (and a rather minor piece of the economy ~ 1/2 of a Microsoft for the north american market and ~1 Mircosoft for the entire world music industry). It is up to the copyright holder to bring claims against the supposed enfringers not the government to assume (with a huge amount of lobbying help) that the copyright holder would take offense (or even be allowed to, there is after all fair use clauses in the copyright laws of most if not all nations) to every possible use of the recording media.
Hmm I seem to recall, not sure if this is true, that Napster let you set your upload rate to anything including 0. There is no technical reason why the copyrighted content has to be shared by everyone in P2P just that someone out there is sharing it so you can download it. It doesn't mean you "have" to upload back into the swarm as most torrent sites would have you believe. IMHO it is only smart to be greedy, copyright infringement happens when you distribute the work getting a copy from someone else isn't infringement on your part just theirs. So why share if you don't have too?
It was also a means to balance the trade deficit. The old world was importing huge amounts of resources from the colonies but didn't have a lot that the colonies wanted back. England was funneling boat loads of money to the colonies and getting tobacco, furs etc back. The taxes were a way to subsidize british citizens purchases of foreign goods.
Blank tapes and CDs have this already I think. My thinking: if you tax me assuming I'm going to copy stuff than you shouldn't try to sue me if I actually do. I paid for that copy:-) Or are we supposed to pay in case we might copy and then again when we actually do? Kind of like a first date, you pay in case of sex and then you pay for the rest of your life if you actually get it:-)
Well it is probably the same as in offices. The manager and the coders get the newer machines because they "need" it. Everyone else inherits the 2 year old dev machine AFTER the dev gets their new shiny machine. In this case it is quite possible the husband has a clearer need for the new machine where as an older one might be fine for what his wife needs. Whether that reasoning translates into martial bliss is another story.
No they are great with their own systems depending on what you mean. They often chose what level of performance a piece of software should have for the OS X platform and than just don't allow the newer version of the OS on older platforms. Of course the other way of looking at it is it is a scam to try to encourage people to upgrade more.I think it is somewhere in between. It is a closed platform it doesn't do them any good to have people griping about how slow the new software is and they don't have to let you install it on anything that they don't want you too.
A good example would be (Tiger?) I think it was was a universal binary so should have run on the PPC computers but Apple just made it so it wouldn't install on the older systems. I'm sure it might have been some think where it wouldn't have worked because the drivers weren't part of the new OS but still it should have been little work to support both platforms but they chose not to as the older systems would have struggled to run it (at least in theory).
And the desire to maintain the program indefinitely as your fixes might get broken in new versions of the main branch. Seriously find a random person on the street and hand them source code. Maybe 5% would be able to do anything with it. Of those with any given program maybe 1% of people would care enough too. Open source for open source sake works for people that are willing to volunteer time, or organizations either cheap enough (eg. start up) or big enough (Sun, for example) that they can skim some people off to work on making the program meet their needs.
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To drop bombs on the US. It isn't hostile so don't worry about it. Have a nice day.
I agree. We seem to be in this damned scary world were all the devs rav about the UI in slashdot. What happened? Where is the command line school of thought? :-) A GUI is an abstraction that presents a well designed and implemented system to the user, not the other way around. Yeah so what Unity gave Ubuntu a slightly different shiny button than it had before, etc etc. To me we need to focus more on the systems and support for systems development (I use that kind of loosely as we are still talking up in the app layer) and not the shinny buttons in user land. At some level you need to be able to present things like print dialogs in a browser, or at least it would be nice to be able to, however the back end still has to be logically structured and written in a language that allows that to be expressed in a concise and clean mapping between concept and code. Java, .Net, python etc are the ways that is done. Javascript and HTML will never take the place of .Net because .Net is mainly a below UI language with some functionality for UI built on top. I think you can see that from XAML designers in the latest Visual Studio's. GUI is going to be more in the realm of graphics designers with a back end that is some sort of mark up. But the functionality will call into something more powerful like ASP, VB, C#, Java etc. Over on the desktop app land I don't think you'll see any change. .Net does what it needs to do to keep those developers happy with the GUI they can build and it is nice to have easy access to call into whatever objects are on the screen from the code that is used for the system logic.
I'm not saying platform independence isn't a great thing but for about half of the companies I worked for they were completely windows shops. I don't want to handcuff myself to javascript and HTML 5 if someone might want a desktop widget, or a full blown desktop app out of the thing sometime (or huge parts of the program would be reusable to make said systems). Additionally I find things like LINQ and lambda functions in .Net a very clean way of expressing my intent in my code versus having for loop spaghetti every time I want to iterate over an object to find every order where the customer was Bob in a set that I've already loaded into a local variable.
Billions and billions of anti-HEROS are going through you at this very moment. But not nearly as many as HEROS, modern science still doesn't fully understand this asymmetry but given a few more strings multi-billion dollar labs we'll figure it out in time for your great grand children's 6th grade term paper.
Photon torpedos.
Mac's can run Windows right? The opposite would more insulting I think in that OS X doesn't (at least not legally) run on non-Mac hardware. Perhaps find a vendor that has abandoned linux as a factory install option and rub it in that there is yet another OS that they are denying you :-)
BTW, even though you misspelled "Buttfuzz", I still like the name... ;-) And are you telling me you can get a decent lawyer in Buttfuzz for only $200 an hour? You must have some connections!
Actually the cost of living is pretty low in Buttfuzz so prices are lower :-). How does first sale work for the movie industry? I seem to recall they charge movie rental places significantly (~4X) more to purchase a movie than Joe public. Presumably that is because they intend to rent it out. What stops the video company from going to a discount store and picking up their copies there? Is it copyright?
But it isn't just giving your device away. It is using the device for your own advertising/profit. As several other posts mention it is against copyright law to devalue someone else's copyright.
If it would help unclutter the "is it a virus or is it supposed to do that?" determination of the AV that is what they should do. For a lot of users I think something as simple (though probably hard to implement) as requiring there to have to have been an explicit user GUI interaction triggering the network connection could help. Ie start a torrent app you implicitly agreed to allow that app to connect to the network, some random service running in the background has to explicitly ask for permission the first time since reboot and periodically there after. Things could be bundled a bit, say after 30min a list of things pending network connection could be displayed with a simple allow/allow all/deny/deny all choice.
Go head try. Apple owns the trademarks to their product names. If you try to profit of those trademarks even if you aren't reselling the products themselves they have a legal say in the matter. Just like I can't slap a NBA stars name all over some carwash I own just because it will help me sell. People have a right to their names and so do company's who own the trademarks.
Additionally: copyright and patents will win the day. First off if I own the patent or copyright I can make it a rule that you do whatever I tell you to do with my product. For example Apple could explicitly forbid you to give away an iOS device in the EULA of the application. If you do so you violate their copyright and are liable for ~150k of damages in the US at least per offense.
Lastly: Apple doesn't even have to have a case. Apple sends a couple nasty letters, you refuse and go to court. Apple sends a half dozen Harvard Law Review lawyers and you, owner of PDIDLYFM send the local lawyer from your home town of Butfuzz, AK. Apple laughs and pays there lawyers gladly to bring motion after motion dragging things on as a "lesson to others", you nearly go bankrupt trying to pay your $200 a hour bill. Usually company's realize they can't win and settle out of court. It doesn't matter who's right, it matters who's right AND can afford the legal bills to have their rights enforced.
Hmm I don't know. They could make it a violation of their copyright to distribute the item as part of a "give-away" ie. promotion. You could still be free to give it away as an individual to a friend or whatever but when you are using the device to help YOUR business not be a nice guy you are making a commercial use of the product which the patent/copyright holder probably has some claim to control. Even if you've already paid for the device patents/copyright gives you the right to control how your invention is used.
Some more work for Seal Team 6. Confirmed black hat or spammer? In your left eye.
I disagree he is indispensable, at least if he still wants to work with professional integrity. He accepted the work at the rate he was paid. Going forward he can try to negotiate a raise but to hold the company's operations hostage to get his way would be hugely unprofessional. At the very least he should help in the transition to a new IT guy if the negotiations go south. I for one don't want to be known as that guy that left everything in confusion when he left because he was sulky he didn't get his way.
I say focus on the positive. Tell them you think things are going well. That you want to move from a more casual contractor position to a true partnership. Then offer to take some salary as stock or if you can to put up some of your own money. I would suggest if you are bringing in money come up with an idea where that money can be used profitably (if you have the purse strings then you should have that more incentive to see it put to a profitable use).
would stop with the stupid comparisons. The miners had enough puss in their blisters to fill a 1998 Toyota Tercel. There was enough media their to impeach a president. God when can we trust people to understand units of measurements without comparing it to something that would never happen (like filling a sports stadium with rock (unless it is AC/DC in the 80's then it could happen).
I personally find private torrent sites that encourage 1.00 ratios silly. It is impossible. By definition someone is going to be the last to download so they are not going to seed the file to 1.00. Also bad files deserve to die. Things lose relavence with time etc. On the opposite sideI think a big part of the copyright problem is it lasts too long. Labels shouldn't still be leeching off of songs performed in the 50's, but they are. At some point a song has to become part of "the collective" and not part of the individual. At some point it becomes an essential part of culture and IMHO a member of society shouldn't owe fees to a company to participate in culture. Sure if you have to have the latest and greatest you should pay for it. But if you want to study the evolution of the guitar in rock from the 50's till 80's why should you have to spend hundreds of dollars in copyright? At some point stuff just becomes essential for culture to progress and to train the next generation of artists or even to just preserve the good parts of days gone by.
Quite right. If it is legal in Sweden to distribute copies than why are they levying fees on it? It isn't a sales tax no music/movies were sold (at least in the sense that the disks didn't come with data already on them or the requirement that they only be used for copyrighted works), it isn't a import duty (it didn't necessarily cross borders etc. In short why should media be receiving money for sales of items when there is no proof that the items are being used to distribute their products? Go after the infringement if you wish, DRM to your hearts content, but a blank disk shouldn't be taxed in case you use it for something that a group of private companies doesn't like (and a rather minor piece of the economy ~ 1/2 of a Microsoft for the north american market and ~1 Mircosoft for the entire world music industry). It is up to the copyright holder to bring claims against the supposed enfringers not the government to assume (with a huge amount of lobbying help) that the copyright holder would take offense (or even be allowed to, there is after all fair use clauses in the copyright laws of most if not all nations) to every possible use of the recording media.
Hmm I seem to recall, not sure if this is true, that Napster let you set your upload rate to anything including 0. There is no technical reason why the copyrighted content has to be shared by everyone in P2P just that someone out there is sharing it so you can download it. It doesn't mean you "have" to upload back into the swarm as most torrent sites would have you believe. IMHO it is only smart to be greedy, copyright infringement happens when you distribute the work getting a copy from someone else isn't infringement on your part just theirs. So why share if you don't have too?
It was also a means to balance the trade deficit. The old world was importing huge amounts of resources from the colonies but didn't have a lot that the colonies wanted back. England was funneling boat loads of money to the colonies and getting tobacco, furs etc back. The taxes were a way to subsidize british citizens purchases of foreign goods.
Blank tapes and CDs have this already I think. My thinking: if you tax me assuming I'm going to copy stuff than you shouldn't try to sue me if I actually do. I paid for that copy :-) Or are we supposed to pay in case we might copy and then again when we actually do? Kind of like a first date, you pay in case of sex and then you pay for the rest of your life if you actually get it :-)
Well it is probably the same as in offices. The manager and the coders get the newer machines because they "need" it. Everyone else inherits the 2 year old dev machine AFTER the dev gets their new shiny machine. In this case it is quite possible the husband has a clearer need for the new machine where as an older one might be fine for what his wife needs. Whether that reasoning translates into martial bliss is another story.
No they are great with their own systems depending on what you mean. They often chose what level of performance a piece of software should have for the OS X platform and than just don't allow the newer version of the OS on older platforms. Of course the other way of looking at it is it is a scam to try to encourage people to upgrade more.I think it is somewhere in between. It is a closed platform it doesn't do them any good to have people griping about how slow the new software is and they don't have to let you install it on anything that they don't want you too. A good example would be (Tiger?) I think it was was a universal binary so should have run on the PPC computers but Apple just made it so it wouldn't install on the older systems. I'm sure it might have been some think where it wouldn't have worked because the drivers weren't part of the new OS but still it should have been little work to support both platforms but they chose not to as the older systems would have struggled to run it (at least in theory).
And the desire to maintain the program indefinitely as your fixes might get broken in new versions of the main branch. Seriously find a random person on the street and hand them source code. Maybe 5% would be able to do anything with it. Of those with any given program maybe 1% of people would care enough too. Open source for open source sake works for people that are willing to volunteer time, or organizations either cheap enough (eg. start up) or big enough (Sun, for example) that they can skim some people off to work on making the program meet their needs.
I think you'll probably still get the job even if you don't fill it out completely. Just don't forget to include your phone number.