Being Canadian the ice over my head 12k years ago was only a kilometer thick. To me the whole global warming thing is simply a case of follow the money. There are a huge number of people talking about Carbon taxes and others like Gore making a fortune out of global warming. Whereas the lesser number of vocal skeptics are for the most part going to take financial damage from voicing their views.
So quite simply on the surface who should be listened to: respectable people who loose money and careers saying that global warming is bunk or lesser known people in science (and mostly politics and the arts) who are making money, (and Nobel prizes), and getting to tax some of the biggest businesses in the world?
The main problem I personally have with the probably false global warming hysteria is that there are many genuine pollution and environmental problems that will find the same tide that eventually turns against global warming nuttery turning against them as well. This will be sad and a genuine threat to humanity.
I find that this argument tends to also be used by loser programmers against the brilliant people who try to simplify as much as those psudo-geniuses who make things more complex. I had this happen years ago when I pointed out that we didn't need to reprogram the Linux Kernel to filter packets and could build a plug-in for a firewall to do the same thing. I have also seen this happen to people who wanted to implement complex ideas like source control, backups, modern OSs. "He's out of control and had no respect for process."
I made a tiny fortune shorting the parent of BB when they eliminated late fees. I could look back at my rentals and see that late fees made up a sizable portion of my total payments to BB and I doubted that I was different from the vast majority of people. I suspected that they would not clearly internally account for the massive profits of late fees due to the risk that this number could become public. So once they eliminated late fees they basically eliminated profits. After that when they started to reintroduce late fees they just ticked people off. So if one wants to point to a specific day that BB began to die from the wounds that Netflix were inflicting you could point to the day they eliminated late fees.
Now the last hope they might have had was games, but things like Steam will just be Netflix version 2. AKA the other barrel of the shotgun.
I once quit one company to join a competitor for double the salary and much better group of people. The owner of the company I was leaving called the owner of the new company to ask him not to hire me. This freaked out my new boss and puzzled me. At the time I never figured out how I should have reacted to this. I happily moved to the new company but what did my old boss expect; That I would have stayed. If somehow his tactic had worked I would have quit on the spot. My only regret is that I gave the old company 2 weeks notice. Looking back I should have packed my desk and left immediately when they pulled this stunt.
So my advice is that you collect as much evidence that your old company is screwing you and leave immediately. Your new employer will be happier to get you early, your old employer is going to screw you anyway and with any good evidence you can always defend yourself. Otherwise you will feel violated and your new employer will know that you are a wimp which is not something that most good employers are looking for. Don't be an ass about it just state that what they did was unethical and made you feel uncomfortable about your staying then leave. Just make sure that this statement is made at least one level above the people strong arming you (this is what CC is for). Otherwise they will be able to blame everything on you.
Commonly employees leave trying to score all kinds of petty hits but often they are a source of pure gold information about troubles in your company and higher ups will listen to what is usually rare and refreshing honesty.
Good luck
Obviously not an emergency, but what is going to be the next big DB? Obviously SUN is going to screw up MySQL sooner or later (if not a bit already).
I really don't want to develop for the next few years without knowing what DB I am going to end up switching to. Will PG reemerge from its slumber? Will someone fork or branch MySQL? Will SUN go under and MySQL break free (1 billion $ later)? Firebird looks vaguely interesting.
So my question would be: If your boss was allergic to MySQL what would your next choice be?
My next question is: How will SUN screw up MySQL?
Java based trigger language,
Build up of annoying bugs,
Proprietary high cost "Enterprise" version with critical features,
A "rebuild" that completely ruins the whole thing,
A tacky marketing program that makes people embarrassed to say MySQL,
A new name that costs 3 million or more.
Pointless features that support some other SUN marketing effort,... and my favorite... Neglect.
This is something that software makers tend to assume and that is that the main reason I bought my machine was to run their software. But in most cases that is no true. One of the reasons I switched to Mac was that I found that applications installed on a Mac tended to stick with their own little set of directories; Not muddling with a registry or adding services and whatnot. My HP printer drivers are real bastards and I can't wait to toss my printer because of them. What I would love is an OS that would have a selective commit for installations. It would advise you of all the changes that some stupid application is planning on making with checkboxes beside each change. Then when the app installed the OS would politely ignore the unchecked changes.
But ideally all applications that don't absolutely need it would just install themselves into a single set of directories, one set for each application. Then with a single rm -f any given application would vanish like it was never there.
In Halifax some years ago a larger University took over a smaller but much better Engineering school called TUNS. The takeover was quite hostile with Dalhousie doing a "My way or the Highway" routine in all areas. The computer system set up by Dalhousie for TUNS was called borg. Never has a better name been given to a server.
Make sure that your shares are not dilutable. That is if you get say 100 out of 1000 shares, don't sign a contract that would allow them to issue another 5000 shares.
Also make sure that they can't fire you in 4.9 years.
Make sure that you don't have any restrictions as to who you can sell them to.
Lastly make sure that the shares instantly are yours if there is any significant change in the company such as it selling, merging, or whatever.
Oh and is this company profitable? If not, I doubt it will be around in 5 years.
QT vs iPhone SDK vs Android SDK
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This all boils down to Nokia having to compete with the other key smartphone SDKs basically being free and popular. If lots of people learn to love QT for the various computer OSs then they will then have the skills ready for Nokia development. But corporate development just doesn't sit well with GPL so the LGPL is the only real option.
If anything this might be a huge win. The iPhone makes you use at least some Objective C and Android gets all Java on your ass. But for really cool killer apps you might want to use C++ to do something really cool on the tiny processors found in most handsets.
What would be really cool and daring for Nokia would be to make QT for iPhone. Then people might port their apps to both iPhone and Nokia.
Urban Terror is basically counter strike. It is based on the Quake III engine. I was surprised that it was both free and very well done. Available for windows, mac, and Linux. Lots of servers hosting games with lots of players.
Free download http://www.urbanterror.net/news.php
Please let this happen in Canada! We have a few cell companies that simply refuse to compete. We need them barred from the next few bandwidth auctions. It was recently calculated that sending text messages in Canada costs more per byte than data sent from the Hubble telescope. Another comparison showed that what costs $1 to send via a normal high-speed connection would cost $16 Million via a cell phone in Canada. (no exaggeration)
One other issue is that say a Canadian develops the next funny-or-die; yet most of the users are American and thus the content is mostly American. Now we might have these organizations yelling that the Americans (10-1 population) are drowning us out or some such nonsense. How is a Canadian going to get investors who might worry that these organizations are going to come knocking? Talk about an innovation killer.
Actra is a performers union and socan is basically an artists union. Socan actually got a law passed that taxes blank media that supposedly gives money to the artists that lose money from IP theft. So don't underestimate these bozos. The key is that the internet allows us to do an end run around the stupid laws that keep forcing crap content onto Canadian TV and radio.
What the hell would be Canadian content on the Internet? The whole idea of these stupid can con laws was to put Canadian artists on a "level" playing field with the US. But with the Internet a level playing field would basically be a combination of bandwidth and a lack of stupid laws. So if they create a bunch of stupid laws then Canadian web sites would be disadvantaged not helped.
The only winners would be these organizations that collect these fees. I wonder how much of the present money collected from the media tax goes to artists when calculated as a simple percentage of monies collected and not a number generated by some convoluted accounting.
If you are Canadian, write your MP and tell them that this will hurt Canadian IT badly.
Don't stop with the soft drugs but actually go so far as to set up clinics that would give out moderate doses of even the hardest of addictive drugs like meth. The idea would be to clean out the drug pushing business. Then you eliminate a huge source of organized crime's revenue while having a huge opportunity to offer councling services to addicts. Who in their right mind would ever walk into a clinic and say "Hey I would love to start taking meth"?
This would be way cheaper than all the police, jails, and break-ins that we presently pay for.
My argument is backed up by the evidence of a former crack-head I saw interviewed. He broke into around 1000 cars a year(~3 a day) to pay for his habit. Wouldn't it have been better to just give him the damn stuff?
But it is all moot. Vista is just not capable; so a lump of dirt is just as capable as the most well suited desktop imaginable. If I worked for Microsoft I would have been willing to issue employees' dead pets Vista capable certifications.
I just decompile every application and examine the assembler code line by line. Only problem is that I still haven't finished looking over Windows ME before I dare install it.
The only question I would ask is: Where is the money right now? So who out there is making money with phone apps? In the future the Android might be a game changer but for now, if you are making money which platform did you develop for?
I changed my name legally to a combination of the peace symbol and the symbol for radiation. Thus I have no upper case version and thus cannot be enslaved. Ha hahahahaha.
The emails may or may not be all that interesting (probably are a bit) but that all the Wikileaks sites have been taken out shows that the US government is able and willing to take out websites at will. Stupid 1st amendment. Even better is that a government agency took out websites for a political purpose.
I fully agree. There is a union type seniority mentality where experience far outweighs talent.
I have found that many organizations have IT managers who came on at the same time as the IT department was created. Typically there are two problems with these people. Either they came from another department to manage this new IT thing and thus don't really grasp what they manage; or far worse in most cases they came in long ago with a now dead technology and never kept up. So here we are potentially decades later with IT managers who might not yet be in the 90's techwise let alone up-to-date.
I have seen companies where they resist giving even management access to the internet or email. When the reasons are explored it turns out that the network is so old that TCPIP is not really an option. I have seen these people going to heroic levels to persist with the madness of these old dead systems.
I was a fly on the wall when the local phone company was first offering DSL in the late 90's. They nearly cut the internet option as they saw the DSL business model as renting applications such as MS word via some complicated Novell system. Let me repeat: they nearly left internet out of their DSL product in the late 90's.
Keep in mind that this woman was drunk and the ISP had told her repeatedly that it was her computer that was at fault. The connection was working perfectly. This is just another case of a person knowing so little about computers that they don't even know who is to blame. The person to blame is the woman trying to operate a device beyond her comprehension. She broke her computer and was unwilling to hire the proper company to come fix it. If my washing machine was broken I wouldn't blame the power company who provides my electricity when they would refuse to fix it.
If you read the story where they do tell the ISPs side they tell you that she called 20 times and they told her 20 times that her connection was fine. Then they sent a tech who plugged in his computer and it was again working fine. He told her that her computer was at fault and that he was not going to fix that. This is when she lost it.
The police kept her in jail overnight. In Canada the police are not so gung ho to arrest people so if they arrested her she had to be out of control.
This issue is not a two sided issue.
Woo hoo!!! But I think that some patents should stand if they are truly innovative. If someone comes up with a killer compression technique that can compress a rar to 10% of it's size then they would deserve a patent. It is these "use a hyperlink to start a video" patents that need to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Being Canadian the ice over my head 12k years ago was only a kilometer thick. To me the whole global warming thing is simply a case of follow the money. There are a huge number of people talking about Carbon taxes and others like Gore making a fortune out of global warming. Whereas the lesser number of vocal skeptics are for the most part going to take financial damage from voicing their views. So quite simply on the surface who should be listened to: respectable people who loose money and careers saying that global warming is bunk or lesser known people in science (and mostly politics and the arts) who are making money, (and Nobel prizes), and getting to tax some of the biggest businesses in the world? The main problem I personally have with the probably false global warming hysteria is that there are many genuine pollution and environmental problems that will find the same tide that eventually turns against global warming nuttery turning against them as well. This will be sad and a genuine threat to humanity.
I find that this argument tends to also be used by loser programmers against the brilliant people who try to simplify as much as those psudo-geniuses who make things more complex. I had this happen years ago when I pointed out that we didn't need to reprogram the Linux Kernel to filter packets and could build a plug-in for a firewall to do the same thing. I have also seen this happen to people who wanted to implement complex ideas like source control, backups, modern OSs. "He's out of control and had no respect for process."
I made a tiny fortune shorting the parent of BB when they eliminated late fees. I could look back at my rentals and see that late fees made up a sizable portion of my total payments to BB and I doubted that I was different from the vast majority of people. I suspected that they would not clearly internally account for the massive profits of late fees due to the risk that this number could become public. So once they eliminated late fees they basically eliminated profits. After that when they started to reintroduce late fees they just ticked people off. So if one wants to point to a specific day that BB began to die from the wounds that Netflix were inflicting you could point to the day they eliminated late fees. Now the last hope they might have had was games, but things like Steam will just be Netflix version 2. AKA the other barrel of the shotgun.
if(PowerBuilder==obsolete){return true;}
I once quit one company to join a competitor for double the salary and much better group of people. The owner of the company I was leaving called the owner of the new company to ask him not to hire me. This freaked out my new boss and puzzled me. At the time I never figured out how I should have reacted to this. I happily moved to the new company but what did my old boss expect; That I would have stayed. If somehow his tactic had worked I would have quit on the spot. My only regret is that I gave the old company 2 weeks notice. Looking back I should have packed my desk and left immediately when they pulled this stunt. So my advice is that you collect as much evidence that your old company is screwing you and leave immediately. Your new employer will be happier to get you early, your old employer is going to screw you anyway and with any good evidence you can always defend yourself. Otherwise you will feel violated and your new employer will know that you are a wimp which is not something that most good employers are looking for. Don't be an ass about it just state that what they did was unethical and made you feel uncomfortable about your staying then leave. Just make sure that this statement is made at least one level above the people strong arming you (this is what CC is for). Otherwise they will be able to blame everything on you. Commonly employees leave trying to score all kinds of petty hits but often they are a source of pure gold information about troubles in your company and higher ups will listen to what is usually rare and refreshing honesty. Good luck
Obviously not an emergency, but what is going to be the next big DB? Obviously SUN is going to screw up MySQL sooner or later (if not a bit already). I really don't want to develop for the next few years without knowing what DB I am going to end up switching to. Will PG reemerge from its slumber? Will someone fork or branch MySQL? Will SUN go under and MySQL break free (1 billion $ later)? Firebird looks vaguely interesting. So my question would be: If your boss was allergic to MySQL what would your next choice be? My next question is: How will SUN screw up MySQL? Java based trigger language, Build up of annoying bugs, Proprietary high cost "Enterprise" version with critical features, A "rebuild" that completely ruins the whole thing, A tacky marketing program that makes people embarrassed to say MySQL, A new name that costs 3 million or more. Pointless features that support some other SUN marketing effort, ... and my favorite ... Neglect.
This is something that software makers tend to assume and that is that the main reason I bought my machine was to run their software. But in most cases that is no true. One of the reasons I switched to Mac was that I found that applications installed on a Mac tended to stick with their own little set of directories; Not muddling with a registry or adding services and whatnot. My HP printer drivers are real bastards and I can't wait to toss my printer because of them. What I would love is an OS that would have a selective commit for installations. It would advise you of all the changes that some stupid application is planning on making with checkboxes beside each change. Then when the app installed the OS would politely ignore the unchecked changes. But ideally all applications that don't absolutely need it would just install themselves into a single set of directories, one set for each application. Then with a single rm -f any given application would vanish like it was never there.
In Halifax some years ago a larger University took over a smaller but much better Engineering school called TUNS. The takeover was quite hostile with Dalhousie doing a "My way or the Highway" routine in all areas. The computer system set up by Dalhousie for TUNS was called borg. Never has a better name been given to a server.
Make sure that your shares are not dilutable. That is if you get say 100 out of 1000 shares, don't sign a contract that would allow them to issue another 5000 shares. Also make sure that they can't fire you in 4.9 years. Make sure that you don't have any restrictions as to who you can sell them to. Lastly make sure that the shares instantly are yours if there is any significant change in the company such as it selling, merging, or whatever. Oh and is this company profitable? If not, I doubt it will be around in 5 years.
This all boils down to Nokia having to compete with the other key smartphone SDKs basically being free and popular. If lots of people learn to love QT for the various computer OSs then they will then have the skills ready for Nokia development. But corporate development just doesn't sit well with GPL so the LGPL is the only real option. If anything this might be a huge win. The iPhone makes you use at least some Objective C and Android gets all Java on your ass. But for really cool killer apps you might want to use C++ to do something really cool on the tiny processors found in most handsets. What would be really cool and daring for Nokia would be to make QT for iPhone. Then people might port their apps to both iPhone and Nokia.
Urban Terror is basically counter strike. It is based on the Quake III engine. I was surprised that it was both free and very well done. Available for windows, mac, and Linux. Lots of servers hosting games with lots of players. Free download http://www.urbanterror.net/news.php
Please let this happen in Canada! We have a few cell companies that simply refuse to compete. We need them barred from the next few bandwidth auctions. It was recently calculated that sending text messages in Canada costs more per byte than data sent from the Hubble telescope. Another comparison showed that what costs $1 to send via a normal high-speed connection would cost $16 Million via a cell phone in Canada. (no exaggeration)
One other issue is that say a Canadian develops the next funny-or-die; yet most of the users are American and thus the content is mostly American. Now we might have these organizations yelling that the Americans (10-1 population) are drowning us out or some such nonsense. How is a Canadian going to get investors who might worry that these organizations are going to come knocking? Talk about an innovation killer.
Actra is a performers union and socan is basically an artists union. Socan actually got a law passed that taxes blank media that supposedly gives money to the artists that lose money from IP theft. So don't underestimate these bozos. The key is that the internet allows us to do an end run around the stupid laws that keep forcing crap content onto Canadian TV and radio. What the hell would be Canadian content on the Internet? The whole idea of these stupid can con laws was to put Canadian artists on a "level" playing field with the US. But with the Internet a level playing field would basically be a combination of bandwidth and a lack of stupid laws. So if they create a bunch of stupid laws then Canadian web sites would be disadvantaged not helped. The only winners would be these organizations that collect these fees. I wonder how much of the present money collected from the media tax goes to artists when calculated as a simple percentage of monies collected and not a number generated by some convoluted accounting. If you are Canadian, write your MP and tell them that this will hurt Canadian IT badly.
Don't stop with the soft drugs but actually go so far as to set up clinics that would give out moderate doses of even the hardest of addictive drugs like meth. The idea would be to clean out the drug pushing business. Then you eliminate a huge source of organized crime's revenue while having a huge opportunity to offer councling services to addicts. Who in their right mind would ever walk into a clinic and say "Hey I would love to start taking meth"? This would be way cheaper than all the police, jails, and break-ins that we presently pay for. My argument is backed up by the evidence of a former crack-head I saw interviewed. He broke into around 1000 cars a year(~3 a day) to pay for his habit. Wouldn't it have been better to just give him the damn stuff?
But it is all moot. Vista is just not capable; so a lump of dirt is just as capable as the most well suited desktop imaginable. If I worked for Microsoft I would have been willing to issue employees' dead pets Vista capable certifications.
I just decompile every application and examine the assembler code line by line. Only problem is that I still haven't finished looking over Windows ME before I dare install it.
The only question I would ask is: Where is the money right now? So who out there is making money with phone apps? In the future the Android might be a game changer but for now, if you are making money which platform did you develop for?
Here is another level of paranoia. What if they install a keylogger to snag your password after you refuse to give it?
Next time I go to my bank I am going to shuffle my feet on the carpet and see if I can get 1500 extra bucks!
I changed my name legally to a combination of the peace symbol and the symbol for radiation. Thus I have no upper case version and thus cannot be enslaved. Ha hahahahaha.
The emails may or may not be all that interesting (probably are a bit) but that all the Wikileaks sites have been taken out shows that the US government is able and willing to take out websites at will. Stupid 1st amendment. Even better is that a government agency took out websites for a political purpose.
I fully agree. There is a union type seniority mentality where experience far outweighs talent. I have found that many organizations have IT managers who came on at the same time as the IT department was created. Typically there are two problems with these people. Either they came from another department to manage this new IT thing and thus don't really grasp what they manage; or far worse in most cases they came in long ago with a now dead technology and never kept up. So here we are potentially decades later with IT managers who might not yet be in the 90's techwise let alone up-to-date. I have seen companies where they resist giving even management access to the internet or email. When the reasons are explored it turns out that the network is so old that TCPIP is not really an option. I have seen these people going to heroic levels to persist with the madness of these old dead systems. I was a fly on the wall when the local phone company was first offering DSL in the late 90's. They nearly cut the internet option as they saw the DSL business model as renting applications such as MS word via some complicated Novell system. Let me repeat: they nearly left internet out of their DSL product in the late 90's.
Keep in mind that this woman was drunk and the ISP had told her repeatedly that it was her computer that was at fault. The connection was working perfectly. This is just another case of a person knowing so little about computers that they don't even know who is to blame. The person to blame is the woman trying to operate a device beyond her comprehension. She broke her computer and was unwilling to hire the proper company to come fix it. If my washing machine was broken I wouldn't blame the power company who provides my electricity when they would refuse to fix it. If you read the story where they do tell the ISPs side they tell you that she called 20 times and they told her 20 times that her connection was fine. Then they sent a tech who plugged in his computer and it was again working fine. He told her that her computer was at fault and that he was not going to fix that. This is when she lost it. The police kept her in jail overnight. In Canada the police are not so gung ho to arrest people so if they arrested her she had to be out of control. This issue is not a two sided issue.
Woo hoo!!! But I think that some patents should stand if they are truly innovative. If someone comes up with a killer compression technique that can compress a rar to 10% of it's size then they would deserve a patent. It is these "use a hyperlink to start a video" patents that need to go.