Is there a kosher way to ask at the interview to see what sort of things you would be asked to sign if you got an offer and accepted?
It's a meaty question, so if you want to keep it kosher, you have to hang it up and let it drain for a while, and don't mix it with anything cheesy. But seriously, why not say it in a way that makes you seem *more* dazzling and brilliant by virtue of needing to ask (the meaty part) -- and then be very upfront about asking it (hanging it up and letting it drain)?
For example, I tell people going in, "I'm involved with a number of personal and/or side projects, and a number of projects involved with the free software community, and I'm not going to sign any intellectual property waiver which impinges my right to do so in my off hours." This makes several points right off:
You're savvy enough not to be taken advantage of. This is generally impressive, unless the hiring manager is an idiot.
You're not the sort of person who puts down the keyboard the minute he leaves the office. This is generally VERY impressive, even if the hiring manager IS an idiot.
Most importantly, that you have talents whose product YOU feel important enough to be worth protecting. This is generally the clincher: it says that something about you ADDS VALUE.
And the thing to remember about offers is this: it's a seller's market for IT labor. Employers are aware of this; more importantly, they're generally afraid of it... so the prospect of losing good candidates over extraordinarily strict IP clauses is something that they (at a high enough and wise enough level in the organization) would like to avoid strategically. It never hurts to write a letter to someone in a company's senior management AFTER you've rejected their offer because of a nasty IP clause, telling them politely why... I personally haven't done it (because I've generally screened such companies out early on in my searches), but the outcome could be good for the industry as a whole if enough people did; you're basically telling said VP, "You're a smart guy, how much sense does this make to you? You're losing the best people you're making offers to because they want to do projects in their spare time capitalizing on their expertise you've already recognized."
I'm pretty sure that is actually what they are TRYING to say, even if they aren't saying it. Look at it this way: the end user's desktop PC is the consummate "production system" -- so why haven't SCM techniques for other production environments trickled down to them? In particular, "Think Diffident!" -- be afraid, be very afraid, of making changes on production systems where you haven't verified compatibility.
If they can build a system that can determine: "We can't upgrade gFunkyLib on User X933101's PC from version 3.0.14 to 3.1.99, because User X933101 has SmarmySoft's SmarmyMediaPlayer 2.14 installed, and the gFunkyLib upgrade breaks SmarmyMediaPlayer," then they will have achieved the Holy Grail of remote administration for end users -- namely, remote SCM. User X933101 is happy (his SmarmyMediaPlayer still works), or at the very least has the choice: upgrade gFunkyLib as required by LinKongPhooey, the hot new game you were trying to install, or don't and keep SmarmyMediaPlayer running -- and we'll notify you when SmarmyMediaPlayer is supported by the new version of gFunkyLib.
It's not an easy problem -- but it is a key problem in trying to build better systems for people who aren't "the rest of us" (where "the rest of us" are people who dream in awk). It has the added side effect of helping "the rest of us" because newbies with well-configured systems AREN'T going to be the ones getting exploited by script kiddies hell-bent on DDoSing "the rest of us". Again, it's a matter of proper SCM -- "This change is a necessary security fix, and won't break compatibility with anything, so we're installing it for you...."
I'm really fond of eazel. I wish them the best. I wish they weren't in "The Valley that Cost Controls Forgot" -- it would be a very interesting project to work on... but that's another discussion topic entirely.
Alright, so you won't mind at all if someone uses another racial epithet (possibly starting with a letter between M and O) to describe certain pharmaceutical dealers? Or is something only offensive if it offends you personally?
I've never been a fan of political correctness. Period. Why someone would take more offense to a six-letter word starting with "n" deriding them for the color of their skin than they would to a twelve-letter word starting with "m" deriding them for the quality of their family relationships escapes me... name-calling is just name-calling, plain and simple. And to think that the "n" word is more offensive than the "m" word (you know the one, as in "Up against the wall, m...") in our society is mortifying: PC has become a more valuable commodity in our speech than good taste.
When has Vandal meant anything different from "one who vandalizes", before your school chose to use it as their mascot?
Long before it was a verb, the Vandals were a marauding tribe of nomads from Northern Europe. In fact, U of I's fight song opens, "Came a tribe from the North...."
Actually, to take your political analogy a bit farther though, English isn't a "democracy" at all... if anything, it resembles one of the anarcho-oligarchies of modern Latin America. You have a few families (dictionary publishers) laying down their version of "central authority", but at a lower level, no real governance exists beyond the local constabulary (local usage).
Case in point: "Sacratomato" -- you certainly won't find California's capitol spelled/pronounced that way in any dictionary, but there are literally millions of people (anyone who listened to Bay Area radio in the '70s) for whom that word both denotes AND connotes meaning.
Conversely: "Bubbler" -- the Merriam-Webster has adopted the Wisconsin-specific definition of the word (drinking fountain), but I'm quite confident the vast majority of the world's English speakers are completely unaware of that usage.
So there you have it -- a thin veil of central authority over what is really anarchy at any scale larger than the provincial. Which, not surprisingly, is much the same way that Mark Twain characterized our language a century ago....
Some people have suggested vandal, which is fine since they're all dead and won't write any e-mail complaints to the CBC.
Umm... what about those of us who are University of Idaho Vandals?? Hmmm?? I would think that among people currently at my graduate alma mater, the people at the CSDS might have just as many (valid) issues with "vandal" being used as we in the obsessive-compulsive programmer community do with "hacker".
Personally, I don't see any good reason not to use "cracker". Applying a term that is basically a racial epithet for "poor white trash" to a different class of trash entirely seems ironically appropriate; perhaps it's actually not-so ironic -- has anyone done a study to determine how many system intruders grow up in environments conducive to being bereft of both values and motivation?
My opinion only, IANAL.
Re:Hmm.. how does PHP work with Postgres?
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
PHP has a beautiful interface for connecting with Postgres:)
On php.net, go to the quick ref and start looking at all the functions that start with the prefix "pg_":)
It's the same basic idea as mySQL connections: use pg_connect to open a connection, pg_exec to do a query, and pg_result (and its many cousins) to get back the results.
See the landmark trademark dilution suit that has Washington on its heels!
See a team of Lucasfilm lawyers impersonate Wookies!
See a President beholden to Hollywood interests utter "Let the Wookie win!"
A long time ago on a West Portico far away... a B-movie actor escaped the evil clutches of Hollywood and became President of the Galactic Republic, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ever since that time, the Department of Defense has been obsessed with stealing Lucasfilm's trademarks, from "Star Wars" to "Jedi". So, hiding in their outpost off the sixth exit of the Marin system, a team of Lucasfilm lawyers are preparing a counterattack....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Only because one of my lingering memories on the 'net is a flame war six or seven years ago I was involved in on soc.college.grad regarding tenure tracks and female faculty members who take maternity leave (a particularly hot topic in Universities in the early 90s). There were A LOT of women online then, in the pre-commercial 'net; so if a lot of the "early adopters" of the 'net among the general public happened to be male, that may have thrown things out of whack four or five years ago, but nevertheless women made up a sizeable portion of the early Internet that I remember.
Incidentally, anyone have an archive of old soc.college.grad messages? It would be fun to go back and reread that discussion:)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
At least someone now has the technology to do offsite-backups of people... granted, there'll be a certain amount of data loss since the backup fileset was created (birth), but now, at least, there is the beginnings of real disaster recovery technology.
Imagine: Our friends at Legato could license Celera's technology and produce "WetWorker" -- with the ability to put your genetic data on CD-Rom for easy transport to offsite storage. Then, when your friendly, egocentric ocean liner captain decides to go "All Ahead Full" on a foggy night in the North Atlantic AFTER receiving an iceberg warning, you can rest confident that your family can always recover you from archival backup.
I'm aware that there are shortcomings (especially the part about "loss of all data accumulated since birth"), but after all, the centerpiece of any backup software isn't ease of recovery, it's ease of deployment. The data can always be reconstructed from "incrementals" (it pays to take good notes...).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I have serious doubts about that Register article, if only because they couldn't do some rudimentary fact-checking: They referred to Bush as "George W. Bush III" -- there's no IIIrd about him (his grandfather was Prescott Bush, US politician from Connecticut, and his father was George H.W. Bush).
They also seemed to commit a fallacy of anachronism -- talking about the IBM suit, which at the time it was dropped, was probably dropped correctly: IBM had yet to establish dominance in PCs (that would take a few years) and had been beaten in large institutions (it was DEC's heyday).
So, just as I had to question Katz' agenda, I have to ask, what was the agenda of the Register?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Bill Gates, it was clear, had given up on this judge, first patronizing, then brazenly lying to him, finally going for the end run, perhaps in the hope that a Republican would shortly take up residence in the White House.
All right Katz, stop trying to grind your own political axe here. Antitrust enforcement has been a bastion of Republican administrations from Roosevelt to Reagan; it's hard to put faith in "free markets" without allowing the system that guarantees them to work to do so unfettered. So I hardly think that trying to push otherwise-conservative computer professionals away from Bush in the fear his administration might deliberately bury the MS case constitutes "journalistic integrity". Especially since a certain other pers^H^H^H^HVic^H^H^Hcandidate made overtures to Redmond as well, that might be perceived as even "friendlier".
Perhaps a subtle reminder is in order. When John Perry Barlow was Wyoming's congressman, what side of the aisle did he sit on? Or, more telling, that same Sherman Act that was applied in the case is named for Sen. John Sherman from Ohio, a Republican who sought his party's Presidential nomination three times (1880-88).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
If you are computing salable INVENTORY, which is what we have been discussing, you figure it at full list -- before you include discounts, freebies, trade, etc. But I agree -- if you're producing $540,000 worth of ad inventory, you're probably going to make somewhere around $350,000 (or less, depending on how you sell it) off of it.
That said, there are a number of value-adds you can give advertisers as throw-ins INSTEAD of cutting rates... reward people who make BIG ad buys with an 88x31 (I didn't make up the size, it's a CASIE standard) button on every page. Create affinity pages on your site, where the ad clicks to the affinity page rather than directly to their site. Run promotions -- drawings and the like, to encourage click-throughs (these are also a great way for the advertiser to collect information [read as "leads"] on the people who are clicking through in the first place). All of these are tools you can use to help close ad sales WITHOUT having to "give away" inventory.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Check out Altavista's rate card (provided by DoubleClick) here. For banners with section-specific but not viewer-specific advertizing, $30 sounds like about an average rate.
Just because you have fewer visitors than Altavista doesn't mean your rates should be any lower -- it's simply that you have less inventory to sell. $30 CPM for banner ads has been about a market average for the last three-to-four years.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
How much greater is a matter of debate... depends on the site, what it is, how unique the model is, how much the content is driven by you generating it, etc.
A lot of internet companies have market caps on the order of 20-something-times-revenues (not EARNINGS, but REVENUES). Which would value your site at between $400-$600K. Your upside potential is higher than that, because at one ad per page (more is possible... MSNBC for example) and $30 CPM, your 18MM impressions a year represents $540K a year in inventory.
I wouldn't sell out for $250K, just because the first person to approach you about it has no idea what it's really worth, unless you have an overwhelming desire to "unload" it. Those 18 million page views a year are worth substantially more than that in-and-of-themselves. As far as cost justification, you figure you've had $60K in expenses, and put in "thousands" of hours... five people working on a site half-time for five years represents 12,500 hours: at a conservative labor rate of $100/hr. (remember, this is a "charge out" rate you're figuring, not payroll) that represents $1.25 million by itself. Or put another way -- for every thousand hours you figure were put into it, your site has added $100K to its cost base.
As a final thought: if you were doing production web development for a customer whose site received that much traffic, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be billing the customer $300K per year to maintain it -- they should be spending AT LEAST that much on upkeep for a site that busy.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
...a non-exclusive license granted without charge may be revocable even if the license states that it isn't.
Sounds like what our friendly, neighborhood Free-as-in-Speech licenses need is a strong shot of "Not-Free-as-in-Beer": more like "Cheap-as-in-Bad-Beer"?:) Seriously, suppose that our favorite licenses contained a clause similar to the following:
Consideration
In return for the rights assigned hereunder, licensee agrees to remit one of the following considerations to licensor:
Payment of the sum of one ($1) dollar US.
Past consideration in the form of similar licensure of a previous software product written by licensee.
Past consideration in the form of labor, providing software testing performed for licensor by licensee.
Future consideration in the form of similar licensure of a forthcoming software product written by licensee.
Future consideration in the form of labor, wherein licensee will provide software testing for licensor.
Future consideration in the form of documentation, wherein licensee will make publicly available materials describing the use of the product.
Future consideration in the form of publicity, wherein licensee will make public statements regarding his use of the product.
I realize that this puts a dollar premium on "lurking" in the community -- but it also explicitly states in the license ways non-programmers can become involved... which in the long run is advantageous in-and-of-itself.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Nonsense. How is "Compaq Certified System Engineer" any different of a usage than "Clorox Certified Domestic Engineer"? Domestic Engineer has been a euphemism for housewife for decades. Just like Sanitation Engineer is a euphemism for garbageman.
NSPE has the actual "Engineer" titles that they regulate, but IIRC, the most traditional usage (the guy who drives a train) isn't one of them either. Just because somebody starts certifying pastry chefs as "Dessert Architects" doesn't make them anything more than a "certified" pastry chef... so what's the problem? At some point in the future, it wouldn't surprise me if the psychiatric profession, in a fit of marketroid-inspired frenzy, goes out and rebrands themselves as "Attitude Engineers". *g*
Now, that isn't to say that improper usage CAN'T create confusion, just that it generally doesn't (especially in the case of "Domestic Engineer", which may trace its etymology back to 1950s sitcoms). The counterexample that comes to mind is that someone colossally stupid, who has never heard of the company with the world's largest market cap, might mistake someone who shows up with a piece of paper saying "_blank_ Certified _blank_ Engineer" and a logo that looks like the Golden Gate Bridge for a real Civil Engineer, but that's even pushing it....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I saw the LinuxPPC address in Hales Corners (I used to live in Franklin myself) and presumed it was Jason's; only after I read further in the recovery diary did I see the Savannah address for the hospital:(
So, putting this in context, what is the status of the following in Savannah:
1. Public Transit Service After Hours. 2. Overnight Parking Bans. 3. License Revocations with Teeth.
And what's the word on where the other driver was coming from? Was it a bar, or was he somewhere where he could drink with some underage friends?
If we work constructively on solutions, we can beat the drunk driving problem. Unfortunately, all-too-often, MADD comes across as a latter-day WCTU; even their name suggests that they aren't necessarily inclined to act rationally:)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Drunk driving is preventable, but... there's only a finite-amount of stick-sharpening we can do as a society. Remember, for most drunk drivers, the "criminal intent" involved is simply trying to get home and making bad decisions about how to do it when their judgement is impaired already. This isn't to say it's at all acceptible, just that repeatedly trying to stiffen penalties for a crime with no fundamental underlying criminal intent is not the only way to go about preventing drunk driving. A number of other remedies can and need to be practised as well:
Many cities, including Milwaukee, have overnight parking bans. While these serve a variety of lesser purposes (facilitating snow removal, requiring residential parking permits), they also unintentionally contribute to the drunk driving problem: any offer of a "ride home" is always encapsulated in the subtext of "what do I do with my car?" While the people in question SHOULD have planned ahead, many do not -- and oftentimes wind up gambling when their judgement is impaired already (why do casinos serve free drinks again?).
Public transportation can also make-or-break the DUI problem. I can recall several occasions partying with friends in Chicago, where we'd ride the L back to their apartments, so drunk we could barely stand up, and late enough at night that it wasn't unusual (in a bar context) to be going home. To be effective in this battle, public transportation has to meet three criteria: (1) it has to exist -- many places have nothing. (2) it has to actually run to places where people live, and where they hang out after hours -- again, many places assume "commute only, and only within the city limits". And (3) it has to run the correct hours... again, not just "commute only", but up until after the bars close. How do taxi companies make money on the "free ride home" New Years' Eve promotions? Because the people still have to get to the bars in the first place, without taking their cars with them:) In the Milwaukee context we're describing, for example (1) a pretty efficient bus system does exist, but (2) Milwaukee and surrounding communities (Waukesha and Racine counties, for example) have separate bus systems, and (3) "after hours" bus service is all-but-nonexistent, at least in many areas.
I'm going to also add in the drinking age issue, because I believe that MADD's efforts to raise drinking ages to 21 were counterproductive. Why? Because they moved drinking among 18-20-year-olds (In WI, again going back to the example, the drinking age used to be 18. In ID, where I grew up, it was 19.) "underground." Instead of drinking in "public", and often in the presence of older, more experienced and mature individuals, this group of people was forced into situations like rural keg parties that all-but-invite drunk driving. Assuming they won't drink just because it's illegal is tantamount to assuming college students won't pirate mp3's because... well, you get the idea. Better to get these drinkers back into the bars where the rest of us can keep an eye on them:)
Now, in the interest of fairness, I will say that one of Wisconsin's DUI laws does need some stick-sharpening: even if you lose your driver's license in Wisconsin because of repeat DUIs, you can still apply for (and are all-but-guaranteed to get) an occupational license, which will allow you to drive to-and-from work, and in the context of your job. So you've lost your license, but you can still drive in the context "most important" for most people to drive in? If that's the case, what's the point of taking their licenses away to begin with? Talk about a license revocation with no teeth: let's see Wisconsin abandon the occupational licenses and require habitual DUI offenders to actually secure ALTERNATE transportation when their licenses are revoked!
Disclaimer: I am no longer a Wisconsin resident. I moved to Connecticut 10 months ago.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Whatever happened to a little depth in journalism? You would think that before someone would undertake writing an article like this, they might actually do a little research...!
It seems patently obvious to me that the writer has neither heard one of Eric Raymond's recent talks, nor read the essay Homesteading the Noosphere -- or at least if he did, he completely missed the part about "cultural taboos in the hacker community." As a writer myself, I'm completely put off by this shoddy, "let's get a few sound bites" type of work trying to pass itself off as print journalism: if you want to write news that way, get a job in television, where depth and research quality always play second fiddle to the terse and pithy.
Oh, and a little technical competence is probably in order too: Linux is a kernel. Library layouts are a feature of a particular distribution (although the LSB is trying to fix that) -- different distributions can do whatever they want with them without forking "Linux". If the article was supposed to be about incompatibilities among distributions, write about that... but a little checking among sysadmins would reveal how easy many of those issues are to overcome; and if there really is a compatibility problem running Legato on Debian, how about actually talking to someone from, say, either Legato or Debian about it instead of a third-party admin having a problem using it?
I'm really surprised actually; Charlie Babcock has some of the best print credentials of anyone writing for ZDNet, yet this article read like something written by a fresh journalism school graduate writing TV news in Missoula. <CONSPIRACY>It almost makes me wonder if there is an agenda of some sort in play here.</CONSPIRACY>
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
In most cases, anything a college student knocks up in their spare time isn't going to be worth making a fuss over.
From what I've seen, the number one thing college students "knock up" in their spare time is other college students. On that side of the Pond it may mean "put together" but on this side it means "get pregnant".
But in principle, I agree with you: the most interesting piece of code I wrote as an undergrad was a widget (in TurboPascal, this probably dates me...) to automate the administration of Purity Tests. However, it's still a bad policy with a lot of really unpleasant ramifications (for example, IIRC Simon Marsh wrote the popular talker daemon ewToo while a student at a British Univ.).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
If everyone did as you suggested, not only would the execs not understand what was going on, they would just hire new people who know less at a lower salary. Then they would pat themselves on the back for a good cost cutting measure.
That's all well and good -- right up until the point where something breaks...! When you're the world's largest ISP, and one of your key systems goes down, you trust that you have a sysadmin who can "take care of it." When the most skilled sysadmin you have left is the kid you hired away from a tech support gig at Brent's Internet Service and Tree-Trimming of Dothan, Alabama, then all of a sudden that $50,000 a year less you were paying him than his predecessor begins to look like chump change, and he'll be as overwhelmed as a Radio Flyer on the receiving end of a front-end loader.
Personally, I wouldn't work in any situation where my free-time-dev rights were restricted either -- and because of that, I slammed the door in the face of one of the nation's largest consulting firms last summer when they tried to get me to sign one. Anyone who doesn't understand why needs to visit Evan Brown's website. But in this case, I suspect that in return for the 10^7 or so dollars they paid him, Justin probably did sign away a lot of his rights; assuming a large chunk of it was in stock, he has a strong interest in "protecting" Time-Warner's IP as well -- in fact if he is in fact a "corporate officer" of AOL/TW, then he has a fiduciary responsibility to AOL/TW's shareholders which he is already theoretically in breach of for having released gnutella in the first place! Ouch!
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
As a student at a university, I have had to sign away my rights to any software I might develop, whether using my own equipment at home, or the computers in uni.
You shoulda picked a different university. You're the customer of the University as a student, not an employee or a subcontractor or a product or anything else that could vaguely be construed in a work-for-hire context. Any university that dares to try to put restrictions like that on its students deserves to be deserted en masse.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
After almost a year of being owned by Andover, Slashdot finally links to a story on Andover News, one of the most underrated tech news sites on the web. I've read fascinating articles (and some duds along the way, too, of course) there for the last several years, yet few (if any) of them have been linked here. Granted, there's the apprehension associated with giving the appearance of being "taken over by Andover" or "pandering to your own ad sales department" with putting too many links up, but really -- most of the columns written by Andover's "three Bs" (Bryar, Bresnick, and Blankenhorn) are substantially better than what usually runs in the "Features" section here otherwise:) Yet they typically get seen by a much, much smaller audience....
In a more "on-topic" light, I'm glad that Bryar had the guts to point out that the number one thing wrong with the patent system today is that the inmates have effectively taken over the asylum; it makes you long for the days when the nation's entire body of patent examiners were three members of the Cabinet who met a couple times a year. If I were to propose a fix for what's broken with the patent system, it would go something like: (1) Only legitimate innovation is patentable. Patent inspectors have to either deny a patent, or produce (and attach to the patent) a written description of why the patent is valid. and (2) Patents are valid for exactly TWO product lifecycles within a particular industry. Thus, software patents might last three years, while the term for pharmaceutical patents might be extended out to seventy. Yes, I know this second part is basically what Jeff Bezos said in his reply to Tim O'Reilly -- he was right. You can't abolish software patents entirely, there really is legitimate innovation (new techniques in wavelet compression, anyone?) in software that is and should remain patentable.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I know all about relay rape, thank you very much, one of the strategies I mentioned in my original post was "closing open relays." And I'm well aware of the cost of spooling the messages -- hence my discussion of applying spam filters if you're an ISP. You almost make it sound like I LIKE spam, or underestimate it's impact. Neither could be further from the truth: I'm in the trenches fighting the battle you describe on a daily basis. I'm asserting, however, that the solutions to the problem must be technical (ways to not listen) rather than legal (attempting to silence the speaker). And like I said, the ultimate technical solution is to simply spread awareness: if the response rate to spam tends much closer to zero than it is already, spammers will (theoretically, at least) finally shut up because they can't support themselves doing it any longer.
And incidentally, since time IS money, it does technically cost you labor to listen to the guy on the street offer you a fake Rolex:) Oh, FYI the last news report I saw also said Alabama had abandoned its attempt to outlaw marital aids... of course, I currently live in Connecticut, which required a court decision just to force to legalize birth control pills.
One parting thought: In my original post, I also mentioned the potential health risks associated with "telling [the street hustler] to perform impossible acts of self-copulation with aforementioned watches." -- I've found that people in that particular profession tend to be quick to anger, and oftentimes armed. Again, why I said I'd rather receive the "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" via spam than in person;)
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a kosher way to ask at the interview to see what sort of things you would be asked to sign if you got an offer and accepted?
It's a meaty question, so if you want to keep it kosher, you have to hang it up and let it drain for a while, and don't mix it with anything cheesy. But seriously, why not say it in a way that makes you seem *more* dazzling and brilliant by virtue of needing to ask (the meaty part) -- and then be very upfront about asking it (hanging it up and letting it drain)?
For example, I tell people going in, "I'm involved with a number of personal and/or side projects, and a number of projects involved with the free software community, and I'm not going to sign any intellectual property waiver which impinges my right to do so in my off hours." This makes several points right off:
And the thing to remember about offers is this: it's a seller's market for IT labor. Employers are aware of this; more importantly, they're generally afraid of it... so the prospect of losing good candidates over extraordinarily strict IP clauses is something that they (at a high enough and wise enough level in the organization) would like to avoid strategically. It never hurts to write a letter to someone in a company's senior management AFTER you've rejected their offer because of a nasty IP clause, telling them politely why... I personally haven't done it (because I've generally screened such companies out early on in my searches), but the outcome could be good for the industry as a whole if enough people did; you're basically telling said VP, "You're a smart guy, how much sense does this make to you? You're losing the best people you're making offers to because they want to do projects in their spare time capitalizing on their expertise you've already recognized."
My opinion only, IANAL.
I'm pretty sure that is actually what they are TRYING to say, even if they aren't saying it. Look at it this way: the end user's desktop PC is the consummate "production system" -- so why haven't SCM techniques for other production environments trickled down to them? In particular, "Think Diffident!" -- be afraid, be very afraid, of making changes on production systems where you haven't verified compatibility.
If they can build a system that can determine: "We can't upgrade gFunkyLib on User X933101's PC from version 3.0.14 to 3.1.99, because User X933101 has SmarmySoft's SmarmyMediaPlayer 2.14 installed, and the gFunkyLib upgrade breaks SmarmyMediaPlayer," then they will have achieved the Holy Grail of remote administration for end users -- namely, remote SCM. User X933101 is happy (his SmarmyMediaPlayer still works), or at the very least has the choice: upgrade gFunkyLib as required by LinKongPhooey, the hot new game you were trying to install, or don't and keep SmarmyMediaPlayer running -- and we'll notify you when SmarmyMediaPlayer is supported by the new version of gFunkyLib.
It's not an easy problem -- but it is a key problem in trying to build better systems for people who aren't "the rest of us" (where "the rest of us" are people who dream in awk). It has the added side effect of helping "the rest of us" because newbies with well-configured systems AREN'T going to be the ones getting exploited by script kiddies hell-bent on DDoSing "the rest of us". Again, it's a matter of proper SCM -- "This change is a necessary security fix, and won't break compatibility with anything, so we're installing it for you...."
I'm really fond of eazel. I wish them the best. I wish they weren't in "The Valley that Cost Controls Forgot" -- it would be a very interesting project to work on... but that's another discussion topic entirely.
My opinion only, IANAL.
Alright, so you won't mind at all if someone uses another racial epithet (possibly starting with a letter between M and O) to describe certain pharmaceutical dealers? Or is something only offensive if it offends you personally?
I've never been a fan of political correctness. Period. Why someone would take more offense to a six-letter word starting with "n" deriding them for the color of their skin than they would to a twelve-letter word starting with "m" deriding them for the quality of their family relationships escapes me... name-calling is just name-calling, plain and simple. And to think that the "n" word is more offensive than the "m" word (you know the one, as in "Up against the wall, m...") in our society is mortifying: PC has become a more valuable commodity in our speech than good taste.
When has Vandal meant anything different from "one who vandalizes", before your school chose to use it as their mascot?
Long before it was a verb, the Vandals were a marauding tribe of nomads from Northern Europe. In fact, U of I's fight song opens, "Came a tribe from the North...."
My opinion only, IANAL.
Actually, to take your political analogy a bit farther though, English isn't a "democracy" at all... if anything, it resembles one of the anarcho-oligarchies of modern Latin America. You have a few families (dictionary publishers) laying down their version of "central authority", but at a lower level, no real governance exists beyond the local constabulary (local usage).
Case in point: "Sacratomato" -- you certainly won't find California's capitol spelled/pronounced that way in any dictionary, but there are literally millions of people (anyone who listened to Bay Area radio in the '70s) for whom that word both denotes AND connotes meaning.
Conversely: "Bubbler" -- the Merriam-Webster has adopted the Wisconsin-specific definition of the word (drinking fountain), but I'm quite confident the vast majority of the world's English speakers are completely unaware of that usage.
So there you have it -- a thin veil of central authority over what is really anarchy at any scale larger than the provincial. Which, not surprisingly, is much the same way that Mark Twain characterized our language a century ago....
My opinion only, IANAL.
Some people have suggested vandal, which is fine since they're all dead and won't write any e-mail complaints to the CBC.
Umm... what about those of us who are University of Idaho Vandals?? Hmmm?? I would think that among people currently at my graduate alma mater, the people at the CSDS might have just as many (valid) issues with "vandal" being used as we in the obsessive-compulsive programmer community do with "hacker".
Personally, I don't see any good reason not to use "cracker". Applying a term that is basically a racial epithet for "poor white trash" to a different class of trash entirely seems ironically appropriate; perhaps it's actually not-so ironic -- has anyone done a study to determine how many system intruders grow up in environments conducive to being bereft of both values and motivation?
My opinion only, IANAL.
PHP has a beautiful interface for connecting with Postgres :)
:)
On php.net, go to the quick ref and start looking at all the functions that start with the prefix "pg_"
It's the same basic idea as mySQL connections: use pg_connect to open a connection, pg_exec to do a query, and pg_result (and its many cousins) to get back the results.
My opinion only, IANAL.
Lucasfilm, Ltd. vs. US Department of Defense...
See the landmark trademark dilution suit that has Washington on its heels!
See a team of Lucasfilm lawyers impersonate Wookies!
See a President beholden to Hollywood interests utter "Let the Wookie win!"
A long time ago on a West Portico far away... a B-movie actor escaped the evil clutches of Hollywood and became President of the Galactic Republic, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Ever since that time, the Department of Defense has been obsessed with stealing Lucasfilm's trademarks, from "Star Wars" to "Jedi". So, hiding in their outpost off the sixth exit of the Marin system, a team of Lucasfilm lawyers are preparing a counterattack....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Only because one of my lingering memories on the 'net is a flame war six or seven years ago I was involved in on soc.college.grad regarding tenure tracks and female faculty members who take maternity leave (a particularly hot topic in Universities in the early 90s). There were A LOT of women online then, in the pre-commercial 'net; so if a lot of the "early adopters" of the 'net among the general public happened to be male, that may have thrown things out of whack four or five years ago, but nevertheless women made up a sizeable portion of the early Internet that I remember.
:)
Incidentally, anyone have an archive of old soc.college.grad messages? It would be fun to go back and reread that discussion
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
At least someone now has the technology to do offsite-backups of people... granted, there'll be a certain amount of data loss since the backup fileset was created (birth), but now, at least, there is the beginnings of real disaster recovery technology.
Imagine: Our friends at Legato could license Celera's technology and produce "WetWorker" -- with the ability to put your genetic data on CD-Rom for easy transport to offsite storage. Then, when your friendly, egocentric ocean liner captain decides to go "All Ahead Full" on a foggy night in the North Atlantic AFTER receiving an iceberg warning, you can rest confident that your family can always recover you from archival backup.
I'm aware that there are shortcomings (especially the part about "loss of all data accumulated since birth"), but after all, the centerpiece of any backup software isn't ease of recovery, it's ease of deployment. The data can always be reconstructed from "incrementals" (it pays to take good notes...).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I have serious doubts about that Register article, if only because they couldn't do some rudimentary fact-checking: They referred to Bush as "George W. Bush III" -- there's no IIIrd about him (his grandfather was Prescott Bush, US politician from Connecticut, and his father was George H.W. Bush).
They also seemed to commit a fallacy of anachronism -- talking about the IBM suit, which at the time it was dropped, was probably dropped correctly: IBM had yet to establish dominance in PCs (that would take a few years) and had been beaten in large institutions (it was DEC's heyday).
So, just as I had to question Katz' agenda, I have to ask, what was the agenda of the Register?
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Bill Gates, it was clear, had given up on this judge, first patronizing, then brazenly lying to him, finally going for the end run, perhaps in the hope that a Republican would shortly take up residence in the White House.
All right Katz, stop trying to grind your own political axe here. Antitrust enforcement has been a bastion of Republican administrations from Roosevelt to Reagan; it's hard to put faith in "free markets" without allowing the system that guarantees them to work to do so unfettered. So I hardly think that trying to push otherwise-conservative computer professionals away from Bush in the fear his administration might deliberately bury the MS case constitutes "journalistic integrity". Especially since a certain other pers^H^H^H^HVic^H^H^Hcandidate made overtures to Redmond as well, that might be perceived as even "friendlier".
Perhaps a subtle reminder is in order. When John Perry Barlow was Wyoming's congressman, what side of the aisle did he sit on? Or, more telling, that same Sherman Act that was applied in the case is named for Sen. John Sherman from Ohio, a Republican who sought his party's Presidential nomination three times (1880-88).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
If you are computing salable INVENTORY, which is what we have been discussing, you figure it at full list -- before you include discounts, freebies, trade, etc. But I agree -- if you're producing $540,000 worth of ad inventory, you're probably going to make somewhere around $350,000 (or less, depending on how you sell it) off of it.
That said, there are a number of value-adds you can give advertisers as throw-ins INSTEAD of cutting rates... reward people who make BIG ad buys with an 88x31 (I didn't make up the size, it's a CASIE standard) button on every page. Create affinity pages on your site, where the ad clicks to the affinity page rather than directly to their site. Run promotions -- drawings and the like, to encourage click-throughs (these are also a great way for the advertiser to collect information [read as "leads"] on the people who are clicking through in the first place). All of these are tools you can use to help close ad sales WITHOUT having to "give away" inventory.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Check out Altavista's rate card (provided by DoubleClick) here. For banners with section-specific but not viewer-specific advertizing, $30 sounds like about an average rate.
Just because you have fewer visitors than Altavista doesn't mean your rates should be any lower -- it's simply that you have less inventory to sell. $30 CPM for banner ads has been about a market average for the last three-to-four years.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
How much greater is a matter of debate... depends on the site, what it is, how unique the model is, how much the content is driven by you generating it, etc.
A lot of internet companies have market caps on the order of 20-something-times-revenues (not EARNINGS, but REVENUES). Which would value your site at between $400-$600K. Your upside potential is higher than that, because at one ad per page (more is possible... MSNBC for example) and $30 CPM, your 18MM impressions a year represents $540K a year in inventory.
I wouldn't sell out for $250K, just because the first person to approach you about it has no idea what it's really worth, unless you have an overwhelming desire to "unload" it. Those 18 million page views a year are worth substantially more than that in-and-of-themselves. As far as cost justification, you figure you've had $60K in expenses, and put in "thousands" of hours... five people working on a site half-time for five years represents 12,500 hours: at a conservative labor rate of $100/hr. (remember, this is a "charge out" rate you're figuring, not payroll) that represents $1.25 million by itself. Or put another way -- for every thousand hours you figure were put into it, your site has added $100K to its cost base.
As a final thought: if you were doing production web development for a customer whose site received that much traffic, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be billing the customer $300K per year to maintain it -- they should be spending AT LEAST that much on upkeep for a site that busy.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Sounds like what our friendly, neighborhood Free-as-in-Speech licenses need is a strong shot of "Not-Free-as-in-Beer": more like "Cheap-as-in-Bad-Beer"? :) Seriously, suppose that our favorite licenses contained a clause similar to the following:
Consideration
In return for the rights assigned hereunder, licensee agrees to remit one of the following considerations to licensor:
I realize that this puts a dollar premium on "lurking" in the community -- but it also explicitly states in the license ways non-programmers can become involved... which in the long run is advantageous in-and-of-itself.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Nonsense. How is "Compaq Certified System Engineer" any different of a usage than "Clorox Certified Domestic Engineer"? Domestic Engineer has been a euphemism for housewife for decades. Just like Sanitation Engineer is a euphemism for garbageman.
NSPE has the actual "Engineer" titles that they regulate, but IIRC, the most traditional usage (the guy who drives a train) isn't one of them either. Just because somebody starts certifying pastry chefs as "Dessert Architects" doesn't make them anything more than a "certified" pastry chef... so what's the problem? At some point in the future, it wouldn't surprise me if the psychiatric profession, in a fit of marketroid-inspired frenzy, goes out and rebrands themselves as "Attitude Engineers". *g*
Now, that isn't to say that improper usage CAN'T create confusion, just that it generally doesn't (especially in the case of "Domestic Engineer", which may trace its etymology back to 1950s sitcoms). The counterexample that comes to mind is that someone colossally stupid, who has never heard of the company with the world's largest market cap, might mistake someone who shows up with a piece of paper saying "_blank_ Certified _blank_ Engineer" and a logo that looks like the Golden Gate Bridge for a real Civil Engineer, but that's even pushing it....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I saw the LinuxPPC address in Hales Corners (I used to live in Franklin myself) and presumed it was Jason's; only after I read further in the recovery diary did I see the Savannah address for the hospital :(
:)
So, putting this in context, what is the status of the following in Savannah:
1. Public Transit Service After Hours.
2. Overnight Parking Bans.
3. License Revocations with Teeth.
And what's the word on where the other driver was coming from? Was it a bar, or was he somewhere where he could drink with some underage friends?
If we work constructively on solutions, we can beat the drunk driving problem. Unfortunately, all-too-often, MADD comes across as a latter-day WCTU; even their name suggests that they aren't necessarily inclined to act rationally
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Drunk driving is preventable, but... there's only a finite-amount of stick-sharpening we can do as a society. Remember, for most drunk drivers, the "criminal intent" involved is simply trying to get home and making bad decisions about how to do it when their judgement is impaired already. This isn't to say it's at all acceptible, just that repeatedly trying to stiffen penalties for a crime with no fundamental underlying criminal intent is not the only way to go about preventing drunk driving. A number of other remedies can and need to be practised as well:
:) In the Milwaukee context we're describing, for example (1) a pretty efficient bus system does exist, but (2) Milwaukee and surrounding communities (Waukesha and Racine counties, for example) have separate bus systems, and (3) "after hours" bus service is all-but-nonexistent, at least in many areas.
:)
Many cities, including Milwaukee, have overnight parking bans. While these serve a variety of lesser purposes (facilitating snow removal, requiring residential parking permits), they also unintentionally contribute to the drunk driving problem: any offer of a "ride home" is always encapsulated in the subtext of "what do I do with my car?" While the people in question SHOULD have planned ahead, many do not -- and oftentimes wind up gambling when their judgement is impaired already (why do casinos serve free drinks again?).
Public transportation can also make-or-break the DUI problem. I can recall several occasions partying with friends in Chicago, where we'd ride the L back to their apartments, so drunk we could barely stand up, and late enough at night that it wasn't unusual (in a bar context) to be going home. To be effective in this battle, public transportation has to meet three criteria: (1) it has to exist -- many places have nothing. (2) it has to actually run to places where people live, and where they hang out after hours -- again, many places assume "commute only, and only within the city limits". And (3) it has to run the correct hours... again, not just "commute only", but up until after the bars close. How do taxi companies make money on the "free ride home" New Years' Eve promotions? Because the people still have to get to the bars in the first place, without taking their cars with them
I'm going to also add in the drinking age issue, because I believe that MADD's efforts to raise drinking ages to 21 were counterproductive. Why? Because they moved drinking among 18-20-year-olds (In WI, again going back to the example, the drinking age used to be 18. In ID, where I grew up, it was 19.) "underground." Instead of drinking in "public", and often in the presence of older, more experienced and mature individuals, this group of people was forced into situations like rural keg parties that all-but-invite drunk driving. Assuming they won't drink just because it's illegal is tantamount to assuming college students won't pirate mp3's because... well, you get the idea. Better to get these drinkers back into the bars where the rest of us can keep an eye on them
Now, in the interest of fairness, I will say that one of Wisconsin's DUI laws does need some stick-sharpening: even if you lose your driver's license in Wisconsin because of repeat DUIs, you can still apply for (and are all-but-guaranteed to get) an occupational license, which will allow you to drive to-and-from work, and in the context of your job. So you've lost your license, but you can still drive in the context "most important" for most people to drive in? If that's the case, what's the point of taking their licenses away to begin with? Talk about a license revocation with no teeth: let's see Wisconsin abandon the occupational licenses and require habitual DUI offenders to actually secure ALTERNATE transportation when their licenses are revoked!
Disclaimer: I am no longer a Wisconsin resident. I moved to Connecticut 10 months ago.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
Whatever happened to a little depth in journalism? You would think that before someone would undertake writing an article like this, they might actually do a little research...!
It seems patently obvious to me that the writer has neither heard one of Eric Raymond's recent talks, nor read the essay Homesteading the Noosphere -- or at least if he did, he completely missed the part about "cultural taboos in the hacker community." As a writer myself, I'm completely put off by this shoddy, "let's get a few sound bites" type of work trying to pass itself off as print journalism: if you want to write news that way, get a job in television, where depth and research quality always play second fiddle to the terse and pithy.
Oh, and a little technical competence is probably in order too: Linux is a kernel. Library layouts are a feature of a particular distribution (although the LSB is trying to fix that) -- different distributions can do whatever they want with them without forking "Linux". If the article was supposed to be about incompatibilities among distributions, write about that... but a little checking among sysadmins would reveal how easy many of those issues are to overcome; and if there really is a compatibility problem running Legato on Debian, how about actually talking to someone from, say, either Legato or Debian about it instead of a third-party admin having a problem using it?
I'm really surprised actually; Charlie Babcock has some of the best print credentials of anyone writing for ZDNet, yet this article read like something written by a fresh journalism school graduate writing TV news in Missoula. <CONSPIRACY>It almost makes me wonder if there is an agenda of some sort in play here.</CONSPIRACY>
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
When you consider how many of the world's largest copyright-dependent companies are German:
Deutsch Grammophon
Polygram
BMG
Bertlesmann
etc.
I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if the entertainment industry comprised a larger percentage of Germany's GDP than it does our own...
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
In most cases, anything a college student knocks up in their spare time isn't going to be worth making a fuss over.
From what I've seen, the number one thing college students "knock up" in their spare time is other college students. On that side of the Pond it may mean "put together" but on this side it means "get pregnant".
But in principle, I agree with you: the most interesting piece of code I wrote as an undergrad was a widget (in TurboPascal, this probably dates me...) to automate the administration of Purity Tests. However, it's still a bad policy with a lot of really unpleasant ramifications (for example, IIRC Simon Marsh wrote the popular talker daemon ewToo while a student at a British Univ.).
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
If everyone did as you suggested, not only would the execs not understand what was going on, they would just hire new people who know less at a lower salary. Then they would pat themselves on the back for a good cost cutting measure.
That's all well and good -- right up until the point where something breaks...! When you're the world's largest ISP, and one of your key systems goes down, you trust that you have a sysadmin who can "take care of it." When the most skilled sysadmin you have left is the kid you hired away from a tech support gig at Brent's Internet Service and Tree-Trimming of Dothan, Alabama, then all of a sudden that $50,000 a year less you were paying him than his predecessor begins to look like chump change, and he'll be as overwhelmed as a Radio Flyer on the receiving end of a front-end loader.
Personally, I wouldn't work in any situation where my free-time-dev rights were restricted either -- and because of that, I slammed the door in the face of one of the nation's largest consulting firms last summer when they tried to get me to sign one. Anyone who doesn't understand why needs to visit Evan Brown's website. But in this case, I suspect that in return for the 10^7 or so dollars they paid him, Justin probably did sign away a lot of his rights; assuming a large chunk of it was in stock, he has a strong interest in "protecting" Time-Warner's IP as well -- in fact if he is in fact a "corporate officer" of AOL/TW, then he has a fiduciary responsibility to AOL/TW's shareholders which he is already theoretically in breach of for having released gnutella in the first place! Ouch!
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
As a student at a university, I have had to sign away my rights to any software I might develop, whether using my own equipment at home, or the computers in uni.
You shoulda picked a different university. You're the customer of the University as a student, not an employee or a subcontractor or a product or anything else that could vaguely be construed in a work-for-hire context. Any university that dares to try to put restrictions like that on its students deserves to be deserted en masse.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
After almost a year of being owned by Andover, Slashdot finally links to a story on Andover News, one of the most underrated tech news sites on the web. I've read fascinating articles (and some duds along the way, too, of course) there for the last several years, yet few (if any) of them have been linked here. Granted, there's the apprehension associated with giving the appearance of being "taken over by Andover" or "pandering to your own ad sales department" with putting too many links up, but really -- most of the columns written by Andover's "three Bs" (Bryar, Bresnick, and Blankenhorn) are substantially better than what usually runs in the "Features" section here otherwise :) Yet they typically get seen by a much, much smaller audience....
In a more "on-topic" light, I'm glad that Bryar had the guts to point out that the number one thing wrong with the patent system today is that the inmates have effectively taken over the asylum; it makes you long for the days when the nation's entire body of patent examiners were three members of the Cabinet who met a couple times a year. If I were to propose a fix for what's broken with the patent system, it would go something like: (1) Only legitimate innovation is patentable. Patent inspectors have to either deny a patent, or produce (and attach to the patent) a written description of why the patent is valid. and (2) Patents are valid for exactly TWO product lifecycles within a particular industry. Thus, software patents might last three years, while the term for pharmaceutical patents might be extended out to seventy. Yes, I know this second part is basically what Jeff Bezos said in his reply to Tim O'Reilly -- he was right. You can't abolish software patents entirely, there really is legitimate innovation (new techniques in wavelet compression, anyone?) in software that is and should remain patentable.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
I know all about relay rape, thank you very much, one of the strategies I mentioned in my original post was "closing open relays." And I'm well aware of the cost of spooling the messages -- hence my discussion of applying spam filters if you're an ISP. You almost make it sound like I LIKE spam, or underestimate it's impact. Neither could be further from the truth: I'm in the trenches fighting the battle you describe on a daily basis. I'm asserting, however, that the solutions to the problem must be technical (ways to not listen) rather than legal (attempting to silence the speaker). And like I said, the ultimate technical solution is to simply spread awareness: if the response rate to spam tends much closer to zero than it is already, spammers will (theoretically, at least) finally shut up because they can't support themselves doing it any longer.
:) Oh, FYI the last news report I saw also said Alabama had abandoned its attempt to outlaw marital aids... of course, I currently live in Connecticut, which required a court decision just to force to legalize birth control pills.
;)
And incidentally, since time IS money, it does technically cost you labor to listen to the guy on the street offer you a fake Rolex
One parting thought: In my original post, I also mentioned the potential health risks associated with "telling [the street hustler] to perform impossible acts of self-copulation with aforementioned watches." -- I've found that people in that particular profession tend to be quick to anger, and oftentimes armed. Again, why I said I'd rather receive the "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" via spam than in person
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.