I built a business with unpaid open source programming. I say unpaid, because even though I was working as a consultant, the paid hours were very few and far between. I worked thousand upon thousands of hours over a period of years building a software package that sustains me to this day, almost thirteen years later.
At the time I did it though, there was a dearth of open source software. The space I chose, the electronic shopping cart, was wide open, and people were crying for anything that worked and was supported.
That is the key -- support. Decent programming and software is a must, but it doesn't need to be knock-your-socks-off great. If you can demonstrate you will be reliably there, month after month, year after year, I believe you be able to do what I did.
However, I don't think it has much to do with "50,000 IT jobs lost". What I described takes hard work and initiative, as does any substantive contribution to an open source software package. The people demonstrating that type of ability are not the ones who are marginalized.
As an ISP, I look at anything and everything that I think may be related to the problem. Absolutely I look at databases.
The expectation of privacy is that I won't repeat this information to anyone else. If you have a doctor, it is the same thing. You have no privacy as to the contents of an X-ray, or as to your medical condition. You have expectations of privacy as to disclosure. And if you were damaged, even due to negligence like en clair data streams used by the ISP for their inspection, then you would have a basis for court action.
If you want privacy from the vendor, seek encryption and take all the upside and downside that it entails. Don't expect support that requires your constant attendance to grant permission. "May I look at this file? At this one? And how about this one?" If you hosted with me and wanted calls like this every ten minutes, I would charge you $200.00 per hour from the moment my hand reached for the phone dial (or IM key, or whatever.)
I absolutely disagree with this. You may have a vision of the function of a server in the beginning, but those functions morph. You can make DNS aliases that go with the function, but don't name the *machine* those functions.
When you do that you end up, as I have seen people do, with a web server named mail and a mail server named db1. And don't tell me you should just rename the server, either.....
You don't need to defend your home in America either, you dufus. Most parts are very safe. How many people do you know who have visited and been stolen from?
And with regard to not having to defend their homes, then how come my friend in Germany had his laptop stolen? Along with a friend from the Netherlands, and one from Slovenia? I don't know anyone from around here, in rural America, who has had that happen. And no one in the city, either, for that matter.
Doubly not surprising since there are no more gutless, ethically-challenged, repugnant organisms than companies derived from Verisign. These are the people who hijacked the internet. They place you on a marketing email list when you contact their technical support. They make changing away from them as registrar deliberately confusing. They bombard you with spam after spam begging for renewal of domain names you have let lapse.
Verisign first, and then the Network Solutions that bought their domain registrar, make my stomach turn when I think about them.
Now they become arbiters against free speech. Not surprising at all to me -- just the kind of cowardly move I would suspect.
I am afraid your anecdotal evidence does not impress me. You said "almost exclusively light duty cars/trucks". But almost exclusively doesn't mean "all". And what do you call light duty?
Highway departments and experts state that 98% of road damage is caused by trucks. I believe them. And when you think about it, your case makes it even more clear. The road survived quite nicely when it had no truck traffic. When you got truck traffic, it disintegrated.
You completely misunderstand if you think an outside entity building schools is going to help. Since the local government, in most cases, is not honest enough to run them properly, they will not be self-sustaining.
What are needed are seeds for self-sustaining entities. Alas, they are difficult to find in Africa. The government is not stable enough or honest enough to get normal people to commit time and resources to them. They spend their money and effort on things which people 1) can't take away from them, or 2) are not interested in taking away from them. (That, by the way, is the great hope for OLPC.)
Same with investment -- when there is a strong chance of any success being nationalized, who is going to invest?
Sad to say, for most African countries I see no hope unless government is imposed on them, dispossessing all the local strongmen. Since the liberals -- including most of Europe -- run around in circles and scream at anything smacking of colonialism, that won't happen. So Africa is hopeless as it stands now. The only other thing that can help is complete removal of aid, causing mass starvation and some possibility of change. But the bleeding hearts won't allow that either, so they are sentencing most of Africa to a subsistence existence indefinitely.
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
What commuter cars do has very, very, little to do with how the surface streets wear. Almost no road damage comes from cars -- it all comes from trucks.
I believe congestion-based pricing will do three things:
1. Cause more people to use public transit and carpools.
2. Cause more companies to offer telecommuting and non-traditional shifts.
3. Generate more money to build out roads and transit.
Egypt doesn't much enforce US copyrights anyway, with a software "piracy" rate of 65%, above the average for their region of the world.
Of course since the 300 million Arabs translate fewer books than the 45 million people of Spain, they won't be doing much copyright violation in the printed area.
"Europe has had the hyper-patriotic societies that led the world to war."
Why do you think that looking at the US concerns us so?
Apparently you can't see the difference. Italy and Germany of the mid-20th century were hyper-patriotic. France of the post-war period was very much so. All Arab countries are now.
"you don't even know what the words "hyper" and "patriotic" mean."
Hmmm, lets look at some definitions. "Hyper" - prefix meaning excessive, above, or beyond, eg, hyperactive. "Patriotic" - Inspired by love for you country.
So, hyper-patriotic would be "excessively inspired by love for your country", which is exactly what I meant. The flag worship, the daily pledge recitations, the "GAWD BLESS AMERICA!", the reverence for the military. All very prominent parts of US culture.
Hyper is a gradation above "overly" or "excessively". It's connotation is "to the Nth degree". There is a great deal of debate in the US over these issues, and has been for decades. And yes, as with any country almost since time immemorial, there is love for it.
What do you suggest, self-loathing nihilism?
"If a nation were hyper-patriotic, it would not tolerate dissent."
That would depend exactly _how_ excessive the patriotism was.
What is more excessive than hyper, pray tell?
As it is now there seems to be a large proportion of US society that refuses to question the government and a large portion that, as long as they're told there's a crisis on, will go along with any sort of behaviour (internment, torture) simply because it's the good ol' US of A doing it. And doing it to "bad" people who want to hurt america.
You are again showing your colors. "Any sort of behaviour" implies no limits, and lumps the U.S. in with entities that show no regard for human rights at all. Which is not the case.
It's excessive enough that the phrase "anti-american" exists and is slung around. Maybe it just doesn't have the same asonance, but nobody says "anti-British" or "anti-French" as far as I know.
Back in the day, when they were superpowers, you can bet the equivalent was bandied about.
That is more than enough to qualify as excessively patriotic to many people.
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people IN THE USA look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
The US has a weird, hyper-patriotic society that a lot of Europeans find bizarre, brainwashing and militaristic.
Thereby showing that you have zero understanding of history. Europe has had the hyper-patriotic societies that led the world to war.
And not only do you have zero understanding of history, you don't even know what the words "hyper" and "patriotic" mean. If a nation were hyper-patriotic, it would not tolerate dissent. Oh yes, I forgot. You are European and lump everyone in the U.S. together as one amorphous blob. You probably believe the U.S. is a police state that represses free speech or something.
Europeans are so often tiresome. So many believe they are superior, but in trying to demonstrate it show how lacking they are.
But I still think she's going to lose. That just seems to be how it's going with copyright law and the RIAA. The little person doesn't matter.
<sarcasm> Well reasoned logic. </sarcasm>
The little person does matter when they get a big voice. And this lady has one. And the big guys can't do whatever they want for fear of exactly something like this.
Universal and Prince can't win this suit; if they win they lose. If they lose they lose. So they will do everything in their power to settle. With the EFF being the adversary, it may not be possible, and this could cost them big time.
I did this in 1999 as a part of software I wrote. I created a facility to map actions to URL strings (and yes, this includes the empty string), and one of the examples I gave was taking a freeform string and searching for it.
I am sure there are many, many, other cases where people mapped 404 to a search, which is the same thing.
In short, not only is this obvious, it is defeated by prior art.
Samsung only announced a prototype. Seagate is shipping, aren't they? I believe someone else is shipping as well, but the Seagate announcement is still significant.
Here is an alternate article for the slashdotted original:
This whole analysis is flawed because spamming by definition is done without permission. Since you don't seek permission, anyone can decide their spam offers a net benefit, even if it does not. Since the cases where it is beneficial are so few -- I point to the VA Research Open Source stock offer as one that was, even though it wasn't really spam -- the net result is a cost and not a benefit.
Fair? Redefining words and history to serve your purposes? Not fair at all. You could call any brutal regime "terrorists" under that type of definition.
No, war and genocide the Nazis might have committed, but no one except desperate debaters like yourself calls them terrorists. By the way, it is very low-class to pull the Nazi card out. I probably shouldn't have replied to you...
"The majority of The majority of terrorist acts in the 20th century were either by Jews against the British (which led to the creation of Israel - look up the Stern Gang and Lehi. Hey, they got away with it easily.) and the IRA."
What a crock. You can't come up with 5 things done by the Jews you can even begin to call "terrorist". There were 5 done yesterday by Muslims. They *never* attacked civilians. No, don't bring up the King David, which had been commandeered as a military headquarters and where people were given hours of warning.
As for the IRA, while they certainly could qualify as terrorists, the number of times they targeted random innocent civilians was extremely few.
Muslims have committed thousands of civilian attacks in the past 6 years, and have a total targeted civilians body count that dwarfs that of all other groups combined, over all of recorded history.
Programmer burnout is a well-known, if not well understood, phenomenon.
As far as older, I don't think age has much to do with burnout. I started a major open-source project after the age of 40, my first big programming project after a career change. (I am one of the few managers that then became a coder.)
I am now pretty burned out. It isn't that I can't write code -- in fact, I am better than ever. I just don't *want* to write code any more.
First ATM I used was 50% chance
on
ATM Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
The first ATM I used was with Rainier Bank in 1978 in Bremerton, WA. It was so unreliable that I had to have a backup plan if I really needed money -- it was no better than a 50/50 shot of getting cash.
There was only the one machine, of course, and that was long before they were networked so that you could go to another bank's machine. So if you got lucky late at night, you could get the green stuff. Otherwise, it was borrow from a friend.
I also seem to recall a little plastic cash holder that the money came in. That seems ridiculous nowadays, of course, but still that is what sticks in my mind.
And if you have ever done enterprise IT, you know that we don't allow media streamers, p2p clients, or heavy downloaders of non-work-related material. Heck, we don't even allow use of Hotmail by most people.
Slashdot Mirror
I built a business with unpaid open source programming. I say unpaid, because even though I was working as a consultant, the paid hours were very few and far between. I worked thousand upon thousands of hours over a period of years building a software package that sustains me to this day, almost thirteen years later.
At the time I did it though, there was a dearth of open source software. The space I chose, the electronic shopping cart, was wide open, and people were crying for anything that worked and was supported.
That is the key -- support. Decent programming and software is a must, but it doesn't need to be knock-your-socks-off great. If you can demonstrate you will be reliably there, month after month, year after year, I believe you be able to do what I did.
However, I don't think it has much to do with "50,000 IT jobs lost". What I described takes hard work and initiative, as does any substantive contribution to an open source software package. The people demonstrating that type of ability are not the ones who are marginalized.
You are way overreacting here.
As an ISP, I look at anything and everything that I think may be related to the problem. Absolutely I look at databases.
The expectation of privacy is that I won't repeat this information to anyone else. If you have a doctor, it is the same thing. You have no privacy as to the contents of an X-ray, or as to your medical condition. You have expectations of privacy as to disclosure. And if you were damaged, even due to negligence like en clair data streams used by the ISP for their inspection, then you would have a basis for court action.
If you want privacy from the vendor, seek encryption and take all the upside and downside that it entails. Don't expect support that requires your constant attendance to grant permission. "May I look at this file? At this one? And how about this one?" If you hosted with me and wanted calls like this every ten minutes, I would charge you $200.00 per hour from the moment my hand reached for the phone dial (or IM key, or whatever.)
I absolutely disagree with this. You may have a vision of the function of a server in the beginning, but those functions morph. You can make DNS aliases that go with the function, but don't name the *machine* those functions.
When you do that you end up, as I have seen people do, with a web server named mail and a mail server named db1. And don't tell me you should just rename the server, either.....
It may be legal, but it is unethical.
And when you are a registrar, by far your most important asset is trust. GoDaddy no longer has mine, and I will no longer recommend them.
You don't need to defend your home in America either, you dufus. Most parts are very safe. How many people do you know who have visited and been stolen from?
And with regard to not having to defend their homes, then how come my friend in Germany had his laptop stolen? Along with a friend from the Netherlands, and one from Slovenia? I don't know anyone from around here, in rural America, who has had that happen. And no one in the city, either, for that matter.
Doubly not surprising since there are no more gutless, ethically-challenged, repugnant organisms than companies derived from Verisign. These are the people who hijacked the internet. They place you on a marketing email list when you contact their technical support. They make changing away from them as registrar deliberately confusing. They bombard you with spam after spam begging for renewal of domain names you have let lapse.
Verisign first, and then the Network Solutions that bought their domain registrar, make my stomach turn when I think about them.
Now they become arbiters against free speech. Not surprising at all to me -- just the kind of cowardly move I would suspect.
I am afraid your anecdotal evidence does not impress me. You said "almost exclusively light duty cars/trucks". But almost exclusively doesn't mean "all". And what do you call light duty?
Highway departments and experts state that 98% of road damage is caused by trucks. I believe them. And when you think about it, your case makes it even more clear. The road survived quite nicely when it had no truck traffic. When you got truck traffic, it disintegrated.
You completely misunderstand if you think an outside entity building schools is going to help. Since the local government, in most cases, is not honest enough to run them properly, they will not be self-sustaining.
What are needed are seeds for self-sustaining entities. Alas, they are difficult to find in Africa. The government is not stable enough or honest enough to get normal people to commit time and resources to them. They spend their money and effort on things which people 1) can't take away from them, or 2) are not interested in taking away from them. (That, by the way, is the great hope for OLPC.)
Same with investment -- when there is a strong chance of any success being nationalized, who is going to invest?
Sad to say, for most African countries I see no hope unless government is imposed on them, dispossessing all the local strongmen. Since the liberals -- including most of Europe -- run around in circles and scream at anything smacking of colonialism, that won't happen. So Africa is hopeless as it stands now. The only other thing that can help is complete removal of aid, causing mass starvation and some possibility of change. But the bleeding hearts won't allow that either, so they are sentencing most of Africa to a subsistence existence indefinitely.
As congestion increases, tolls increase, so more people, instead of traveling on toll roads designed to take the kind of abuse that volume and congestions provide, begin taking surface streets which are not designed for these kinds of volume.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
So people with money get to work faster, and people with out will get taxed more. Sounds like a great idea.
What commuter cars do has very, very, little to do with how the surface
streets wear. Almost no road damage comes from cars -- it all comes from
trucks.
I believe congestion-based pricing will do three things:
1. Cause more people to use public transit and carpools.
2. Cause more companies to offer telecommuting and non-traditional shifts.
3. Generate more money to build out roads and transit.
Sounds like a major winner to me.
Egypt doesn't much enforce US copyrights anyway, with a software "piracy" rate of 65%, above the average for their region of the world.
Of course since the 300 million Arabs translate fewer books than the 45 million people of Spain, they won't be doing much copyright violation in the printed area.
"Europe has had the hyper-patriotic societies that led the world to war."
Why do you think that looking at the US concerns us so?
Apparently you can't see the difference. Italy and Germany of the mid-20th century
were hyper-patriotic. France of the post-war period was very much so. All Arab
countries are now.
"you don't even know what the words "hyper" and "patriotic" mean."
Hmmm, lets look at some definitions. "Hyper" - prefix meaning excessive, above, or beyond, eg, hyperactive.
"Patriotic" - Inspired by love for you country.
So, hyper-patriotic would be "excessively inspired by love for your country", which is exactly what I meant. The flag worship, the daily pledge recitations, the "GAWD BLESS AMERICA!", the reverence for the military. All very prominent parts of US culture.
Hyper is a gradation above "overly" or "excessively". It's connotation is "to
the Nth degree". There is a great deal of debate in the US over
these issues, and has been for decades. And yes, as with any country almost
since time immemorial, there is love for it.
What do you suggest, self-loathing nihilism?
"If a nation were hyper-patriotic, it would not tolerate dissent."
That would depend exactly _how_ excessive the patriotism was.
What is more excessive than hyper, pray tell?
As it is now there seems to be a large proportion of US society that refuses to question the government and a large portion that, as long as they're told there's a crisis on, will go along with any sort of behaviour (internment, torture) simply because it's the good ol' US of A doing it. And doing it to "bad" people who want to hurt america.
You are again showing your colors. "Any sort of behaviour" implies no limits,
and lumps the U.S. in with entities that show no regard for human rights at
all. Which is not the case.
It's excessive enough that the phrase "anti-american" exists and is slung around. Maybe it just doesn't have the same asonance, but nobody says "anti-British" or "anti-French" as far as I know.
Back in the day, when they were superpowers, you can bet the equivalent was
bandied about.
That is more than enough to qualify as excessively patriotic to many people.
I will consider the source.
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people IN THE USA look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
The US has a weird, hyper-patriotic society that a lot of Europeans find bizarre, brainwashing and militaristic.
Thereby showing that you have zero understanding of history. Europe has had the hyper-patriotic societies that led the world to war.
And not only do you have zero understanding of history, you don't even know what the words "hyper" and "patriotic" mean. If a nation were hyper-patriotic, it would not tolerate dissent. Oh yes, I forgot. You are European and lump everyone in the U.S. together as one amorphous blob. You probably believe the U.S. is a police state that represses free speech or something.
Europeans are so often tiresome. So many believe they are superior, but in trying to demonstrate it show how lacking they are.
But the reasons were all "why upgrade", not "I upgraded and everything began defecating."
But I still think she's going to lose. That just seems to be how it's going with copyright law and the RIAA. The little
person doesn't matter.
<sarcasm>
Well reasoned logic.
</sarcasm>
The little person does matter when they get a big voice. And this lady has one. And the big guys can't do whatever they want for fear of exactly something like this.
Universal and Prince can't win this suit; if they win they lose. If they lose they lose. So they will do everything in their power to settle. With the EFF being the adversary, it may not be possible, and this could cost them big time.
I did this in 1999 as a part of software I wrote. I created a facility to map actions to URL strings (and yes, this includes the empty string), and one of the examples I gave was taking a freeform string and searching for it.
I am sure there are many, many, other cases where people mapped 404 to a search, which is the same thing.
In short, not only is this obvious, it is defeated by prior art.
Here is an alternate article for the slashdotted original:
This whole analysis is flawed because spamming by definition is done without permission. Since you don't seek permission, anyone can decide their spam offers a net benefit, even if it does not. Since the cases where it is beneficial are so few -- I point to the VA Research Open Source stock offer as one that was, even though it wasn't really spam -- the net result is a cost and not a benefit.
No, war and genocide the Nazis might have committed, but no one except desperate debaters like yourself calls them terrorists. By the way, it is very low-class to pull the Nazi card out. I probably shouldn't have replied to you...
"The majority of The majority of terrorist acts in the 20th century were either by Jews against the British (which led to the creation of Israel - look up the Stern Gang and Lehi. Hey, they got away with it easily.) and the IRA."
What a crock. You can't come up with 5 things done by the Jews you can even begin to call "terrorist". There were 5 done yesterday by Muslims. They *never* attacked civilians. No, don't bring up the King David, which had been commandeered as a military headquarters and where people were given hours of warning.
As for the IRA, while they certainly could qualify as terrorists, the number of times they targeted random innocent civilians was extremely few.
Muslims have committed thousands of civilian attacks in the past 6 years, and have a total targeted civilians body count that dwarfs that of all other groups combined, over all of recorded history.
>> Considering that most terrorists are Muslim,
> Not true.
Absolutely true. The number of Muslim terrorist acts in the last 30 years dwarf all other such acts through all recorded history.
You are, of course, applying the usual "massage the data" approach -- arbitrarily picking "greatest death toll in a single incident" as a yardstick.
And, oh by the way, trying to use the same tactic Muslims always use -- point fingers at others to distract from the issue at hand.
You are, sir, full of shit.
I want to play music. 8-)
Luckily, my coding gave me enough money that I can afford to spend a lot of time on that. I still work, but about half-time.
Programmer burnout is a well-known, if not well understood, phenomenon.
As far as older, I don't think age has much to do with burnout. I started a major open-source project after the age of 40, my first big programming project after a career change. (I am one of the few managers that then became a coder.)
I am now pretty burned out. It isn't that I can't write code -- in fact, I am better than ever. I just don't *want* to write code any more.
The first ATM I used was with Rainier Bank in 1978 in Bremerton, WA. It was so unreliable that I had to have a backup plan if I really needed money -- it was no better than a 50/50 shot of getting cash.
There was only the one machine, of course, and that was long before they were networked so that you could go to another bank's machine. So if you got lucky late at night, you could get the green stuff. Otherwise, it was borrow from a friend.
I also seem to recall a little plastic cash holder that the money came in. That seems ridiculous nowadays, of course, but still that is what sticks in my mind.
Sure, the elections may be dodgy, but it's democratic.
Did you listen to yourself?
If an election is dodgy, it is not democratic. Particularly when opposition members are routinely imprisoned or threatened with same.
(Cue people claiming 2000 or 2004 election in US was dodgy.)
And if you have ever done enterprise IT, you know that we don't allow media streamers, p2p clients, or heavy downloaders of non-work-related material. Heck, we don't even allow use of Hotmail by most people.
Yes, my name is big brother. And I *am* watching.