It means that a 5 person team of entrepreneurs building a cool custom software suite, or a group of system integrators, would face a 10% tax on their services
Maybe they could move their sales office to Nevada too?
First, remind the managers that there's a real legal liability issue at stake. This company that you're working for is literally 1 disgruntled employee away from a BSA audit, a lawsuit, and all sorts of court-imposed damages. If your managers still don't realize that they're sitting on a powder keg, then that's their business and you have to decided whether you want to be a part of this.
I'd keep working there and keep steering the company toward free alternatives. Why are you using Winzip, for example, when 7zip is not only free, but so much better? But by staying there and knowing about this, you're complicit it all of this.
I'm in the gaming industry, and I've interviewed and worked with plenty of people who started out writing gambling software. I wouldn't have any problem hiring someone out of that field, and neither would my colleagues and coworkers.
Now, outside of gaming in general, in the world or grown-up software? Not sure about that...
The number of people who use Windows but loath it could be twice the number of total number Linux users combined, and it would still be less than 5% of number of people who use Windows. There are not that many people who hate Windows, the vast majority of windows users love it, especially XP and even Vista now that they've got most of the bugs ironed out.
Sorry, I just don't think that this is at all true. In my circle of friends, acquaintances, and co-workers I know of maybe a couple of people who could say that they love Windows with a straight face. Most people I know tolerate it or kind of like it but admit that using it makes them feel kind of stupid because they think that Windows' brittleness and unpredictable behavior is somehow their fault. And I don't know anyone who loves Vista. A couple of people (the same couple) don't mind it. But 'love it'?
There will never be an open source replacement for Windows, if anything replaces it it will be a closed-source OS like OSX, because programming the bits that make Windows easy to use and acceptable to a large user base are the very bits that nobody likes to write. They are, in fact, a pain in the ass to write and there is no real sense of accomplishment. That is why GUIs in Linux are horrible. Not just bad, but horrible. The rare GUI that is easy to use is a pleasant surprise.
I agree 100%, and it gets even worse for open-source, because there's a high cost associated with losing access to Windows software and Windows-specific hardware drivers, and in most peoples' minds there are no costs associated with staying with Windows.
...I'm not bothered at all by the existence of a used games market - I buy used games myself, otherwise I'll typically wait for the 'greatest hits' version to come out at $30. I'm married with kids now and I just can't afford to play the latest and the greatest games at full $60 retail.
What I DO have a problem with is that the market for used games is so grossly inefficient that the *ssholes at GameStop and EB are raking in so much money on it! Buy a used game from a kid at $5, resell it to his friend for $55 - WTF?! That's a damn good racket if you can find it. While I'm ambivalent about digital game distribution in general, thinking about putting sleazy retailers like GameStop would be nice...
I disagree. I think Symbian development is a nightmare, and I think that this is evidence that Nokia really doesn't "get it" when it comes to software.
1) How many of those owners of those 300m+ devices have ever paid Handago et. al. for an app? I'm guessing probably something comparable to the number of people using Android right now. That's called 'attachment rate' and it's very low on Symbian, especially compared to iPhone.
2) Symbian Signed. Come on, does it really have to be this hard/expensive? No, it doesn't.
3) Android and IPhone both do web development a lot better than Symbian.
4) Adobe Flash Lite is irrelevant. The only thing Flash is good for is playing back Flash video and Flash Lite can't do that. The rest is "Punch the Monkey" and other banner ads.
5) Symbian Signed.
6) AIKON/UIKON is a f*ing freak-show, and is worse than even Winmo development. I can't count how many stupid ways there are to lose track of resources and system-allocated memory in that mess.
Visual Studio has supported regex substitution for quite a while, including in Express. Under the Find and Replace dialog, expand the "Find Options" and tick "Use" (with regular expressions selected in the combo box). It works in a similar way for Replace in Files.
...except that the guys who implemented the regex engine for the Visual Studio search and replace never quite figured out the whole DFA/NFA thing, and every third or fourth time you use it it gets stuck on a recursive match and hangs all of Visual Studio.
I've never had that happen with the one in Eclipse.
Yes. Look inside an ipod. The battery sits right on a PCB and flush up against the plastic case. If it were removable, they'd have to have another section of plastic separating the battery and the PCB. 2mm easy.
Actually, it is anti-competitive
No one said that it wasn't. But there are also good technical reasons why you might not want a user replaceable battery. Why the false dichotomy?
Besides, the 2 year cost of an iphone with service is around ~$1600. There are plenty of documented and widely publicized cases of badly-made off-brand lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries exploding during use, sometimes with tragic, even fatal, results. You can gamble with your health and your life if you like. I'll pay for a genuine Apple battery that increases my TCO by about 5%, and I'll live without worrying about my iphone exploding in my pocket.
OK Microsoft-faithful and Apple-haters - listen up. This is why everyone says that Microsoft is 'uncool'.
In spite of a few missteps as of late, Microsoft is still the biggest, richest, most powerful company in tech today. And yet, they have their tongues so far up the record and movie industry's *ss that it isn't even funny anymore. No one respects an obsequious brown-noser. If they had any spine at all, they would tell the record and movie execs the Truth (that they're living on borrowed time) and that the only way to continue to make any money at all is to trust their customers.
Apple was upbraiding the record industry execs for a good three years during and through the Napster debacle. Apple was telling them that customer-hostile DRM that took away obvious and visible consumer rights wouldn't work, they were telling them that the bottom would fall out of the CD business, and they were offering Apple's services as a customer-friendly alternative to some of the loser businesses the record industry was trying at the time (like PressPlay). It's not like the folks at Apple were geniuses for recognizing all of these things - it's just that they have their own protected platform and they're in the software business so they know full-well how futile copy-protection really is.
When the record execs finally realized that everything Apple had been saying was right, they had lost a good fraction of their business and they were desperate to try something new.
The guys who run Microsoft will never have the balls to tell a potential business partner that. They have enough money in the bank to BUY any one of the record companies that they're sucking up to, and yet they behave like the record companies' servile bitch. And that's why they'll never be considered 'cool'.
No - it's just that this is exactly why cell phones in the US suck. You've handed a government monopoly on radio spectrum to a few big companies, and then they play you like a fiddle whenever regulation is discussed. This market couldn't exist without a bit of regulation guaranteeing their exclusive access to the spectrum, but when people here discuss telecom regulation that would protect consumers or help new competitors, the established telecoms go on about how the free market shouldn't be hindered with regulation. They want only the minimum regulation that lets them rake you, and nothing else.
It took an act of Congress in the US to get our phone numbers portable.
What did you think it would take? That's the ONLY thing that would ever have made numbers portable, in the US and anywhere else. Are you surprised?
I love the US, but you Americans are, bless your hearts, a bit naive. You pursue 'free' markets as an ideal without understanding that free markets as an abstract concept are self-defeating (no contract law? no central authority guaranteeing money supply?) and as an ideal, on it's own, a free market only helps the very rich who own things. What you should really be looking for is a competitive market, and when those involve shared resources like radio spectrum or huge and unrecoverable investments like duplicating the US cable system in rural areas, a creating a competitive market and creating a free market aren't the same things.
The next step is to ask what minimum regulation can achieve a competitive market? With cellular, I think ownership limits on spectrum and strong consumer protection laws like outlawing 3 year contracts would be the most sensible thing to do.
The best thing to do now is to make DTrace as useless as possible until Apple removes this limitation.
Every developer reading this who cares about DTrace and wants to be able to use it for system-wide metrics should set the P_LNOATTACH flag in the next point release for their app. Apple won't like it, but if enough developers do it as a form of protest, it would effectively make DTrace/Instruments ineffective, eliminating a bullet-point feature from Leopard.
1. No link to the article
2. No explanation of the term "sommelier"
3. Obscure reference to wine snobbery
4. Wine-flavour metaphor that the author no doubt thought was awfully clever but is actually trite
They've done this in some cities here in Canada, but it's mostly to black-list trouble-makers. The bars got together and built a database to record, check, and block entry to bar customers who've started fights, carried guns, or got in trouble with the bouncers before.
How about the legality of searching your laptop and breaking it? That's exactly what the DHS inspectors did to my brother-in-law's laptop at the airport when he went on a trip. They left a nice note saying that they broke it during the inspection and that there was no legal recourse.
The latest couple of generations of iPods do not use the PortalPlayer hardware.
I don't know whether or not the Samsung stuff that the newer iPods use supports WMA (DRM or audio codec), though.
They're tracking hacked iPhones to figure out where to roll out the iPhone next. That is, if a ton of them are being used in Lithuania, expect the iPhone to be rolled out in Lithuania next.
This is just one of the disadvantages of living in the sticks. You don't get broadband choice. You don't live near as many stores. You don't get exposed to the culture and the excitement of a big city. You also don't get as much crime, traffic, or pollution, so cheer-up.
Deal with it. But don't think us city-dwellers are going to line-up to subsidize your broadband the way we subsidize your telephone service (public utility commissions insist on single-rate service across a state) and your highways and roads (again, state-funding).
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It means that a 5 person team of entrepreneurs building a cool custom software suite, or a group of system integrators, would face a 10% tax on their services
Maybe they could move their sales office to Nevada too?
... how badly do you need this job?
First, remind the managers that there's a real legal liability issue at stake. This company that you're working for is literally 1 disgruntled employee away from a BSA audit, a lawsuit, and all sorts of court-imposed damages. If your managers still don't realize that they're sitting on a powder keg, then that's their business and you have to decided whether you want to be a part of this.
I'd keep working there and keep steering the company toward free alternatives. Why are you using Winzip, for example, when 7zip is not only free, but so much better? But by staying there and knowing about this, you're complicit it all of this.
I'm in the gaming industry, and I've interviewed and worked with plenty of people who started out writing gambling software. I wouldn't have any problem hiring someone out of that field, and neither would my colleagues and coworkers. Now, outside of gaming in general, in the world or grown-up software? Not sure about that...
Sorry, I just don't think that this is at all true. In my circle of friends, acquaintances, and co-workers I know of maybe a couple of people who could say that they love Windows with a straight face. Most people I know tolerate it or kind of like it but admit that using it makes them feel kind of stupid because they think that Windows' brittleness and unpredictable behavior is somehow their fault. And I don't know anyone who loves Vista. A couple of people (the same couple) don't mind it. But 'love it'?
I agree 100%, and it gets even worse for open-source, because there's a high cost associated with losing access to Windows software and Windows-specific hardware drivers, and in most peoples' minds there are no costs associated with staying with Windows.
That's actually an excellent idea...
...I'm not bothered at all by the existence of a used games market - I buy used games myself, otherwise I'll typically wait for the 'greatest hits' version to come out at $30. I'm married with kids now and I just can't afford to play the latest and the greatest games at full $60 retail.
What I DO have a problem with is that the market for used games is so grossly inefficient that the *ssholes at GameStop and EB are raking in so much money on it! Buy a used game from a kid at $5, resell it to his friend for $55 - WTF?! That's a damn good racket if you can find it. While I'm ambivalent about digital game distribution in general, thinking about putting sleazy retailers like GameStop would be nice...
I disagree. I think Symbian development is a nightmare, and I think that this is evidence that Nokia really doesn't "get it" when it comes to software.
1) How many of those owners of those 300m+ devices have ever paid Handago et. al. for an app? I'm guessing probably something comparable to the number of people using Android right now. That's called 'attachment rate' and it's very low on Symbian, especially compared to iPhone.
2) Symbian Signed. Come on, does it really have to be this hard/expensive? No, it doesn't.
3) Android and IPhone both do web development a lot better than Symbian.
4) Adobe Flash Lite is irrelevant. The only thing Flash is good for is playing back Flash video and Flash Lite can't do that. The rest is "Punch the Monkey" and other banner ads.
5) Symbian Signed.
6) AIKON/UIKON is a f*ing freak-show, and is worse than even Winmo development. I can't count how many stupid ways there are to lose track of resources and system-allocated memory in that mess.
7) Did I mention Symbian Signed?
Yes. Look inside an ipod. The battery sits right on a PCB and flush up against the plastic case. If it were removable, they'd have to have another section of plastic separating the battery and the PCB. 2mm easy.
No one said that it wasn't. But there are also good technical reasons why you might not want a user replaceable battery. Why the false dichotomy?
Besides, the 2 year cost of an iphone with service is around ~$1600. There are plenty of documented and widely publicized cases of badly-made off-brand lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries exploding during use, sometimes with tragic, even fatal, results. You can gamble with your health and your life if you like. I'll pay for a genuine Apple battery that increases my TCO by about 5%, and I'll live without worrying about my iphone exploding in my pocket.
OK Microsoft-faithful and Apple-haters - listen up. This is why everyone says that Microsoft is 'uncool'.
In spite of a few missteps as of late, Microsoft is still the biggest, richest, most powerful company in tech today. And yet, they have their tongues so far up the record and movie industry's *ss that it isn't even funny anymore. No one respects an obsequious brown-noser. If they had any spine at all, they would tell the record and movie execs the Truth (that they're living on borrowed time) and that the only way to continue to make any money at all is to trust their customers.
Apple was upbraiding the record industry execs for a good three years during and through the Napster debacle. Apple was telling them that customer-hostile DRM that took away obvious and visible consumer rights wouldn't work, they were telling them that the bottom would fall out of the CD business, and they were offering Apple's services as a customer-friendly alternative to some of the loser businesses the record industry was trying at the time (like PressPlay). It's not like the folks at Apple were geniuses for recognizing all of these things - it's just that they have their own protected platform and they're in the software business so they know full-well how futile copy-protection really is.
When the record execs finally realized that everything Apple had been saying was right, they had lost a good fraction of their business and they were desperate to try something new.
The guys who run Microsoft will never have the balls to tell a potential business partner that. They have enough money in the bank to BUY any one of the record companies that they're sucking up to, and yet they behave like the record companies' servile bitch. And that's why they'll never be considered 'cool'.
No - it's just that this is exactly why cell phones in the US suck. You've handed a government monopoly on radio spectrum to a few big companies, and then they play you like a fiddle whenever regulation is discussed. This market couldn't exist without a bit of regulation guaranteeing their exclusive access to the spectrum, but when people here discuss telecom regulation that would protect consumers or help new competitors, the established telecoms go on about how the free market shouldn't be hindered with regulation. They want only the minimum regulation that lets them rake you, and nothing else.
It took an act of Congress in the US to get our phone numbers portable.
What did you think it would take? That's the ONLY thing that would ever have made numbers portable, in the US and anywhere else. Are you surprised?
I love the US, but you Americans are, bless your hearts, a bit naive. You pursue 'free' markets as an ideal without understanding that free markets as an abstract concept are self-defeating (no contract law? no central authority guaranteeing money supply?) and as an ideal, on it's own, a free market only helps the very rich who own things. What you should really be looking for is a competitive market, and when those involve shared resources like radio spectrum or huge and unrecoverable investments like duplicating the US cable system in rural areas, a creating a competitive market and creating a free market aren't the same things.
The next step is to ask what minimum regulation can achieve a competitive market? With cellular, I think ownership limits on spectrum and strong consumer protection laws like outlawing 3 year contracts would be the most sensible thing to do.
The best thing to do now is to make DTrace as useless as possible until Apple removes this limitation.
Every developer reading this who cares about DTrace and wants to be able to use it for system-wide metrics should set the P_LNOATTACH flag in the next point release for their app. Apple won't like it, but if enough developers do it as a form of protest, it would effectively make DTrace/Instruments ineffective, eliminating a bullet-point feature from Leopard.
1. No link to the article 2. No explanation of the term "sommelier" 3. Obscure reference to wine snobbery 4. Wine-flavour metaphor that the author no doubt thought was awfully clever but is actually trite
They've done this in some cities here in Canada, but it's mostly to black-list trouble-makers. The bars got together and built a database to record, check, and block entry to bar customers who've started fights, carried guns, or got in trouble with the bouncers before.
How about the legality of searching your laptop and breaking it? That's exactly what the DHS inspectors did to my brother-in-law's laptop at the airport when he went on a trip. They left a nice note saying that they broke it during the inspection and that there was no legal recourse.
The latest couple of generations of iPods do not use the PortalPlayer hardware. I don't know whether or not the Samsung stuff that the newer iPods use supports WMA (DRM or audio codec), though.
They're tracking hacked iPhones to figure out where to roll out the iPhone next. That is, if a ton of them are being used in Lithuania, expect the iPhone to be rolled out in Lithuania next.
Sounds like EVD, only with VC1 rather than VP6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Versatile_Di sc
This is just one of the disadvantages of living in the sticks. You don't get broadband choice. You don't live near as many stores. You don't get exposed to the culture and the excitement of a big city. You also don't get as much crime, traffic, or pollution, so cheer-up. Deal with it. But don't think us city-dwellers are going to line-up to subsidize your broadband the way we subsidize your telephone service (public utility commissions insist on single-rate service across a state) and your highways and roads (again, state-funding).