When I was working in an MS technology shop I found many cases of our programmers cutting and pasting code from other sources on the internet. Quite a lot of it came from MS itself and explicitly said that it could not be used. What do you do now? Rip the code out? But we've already shipped the code. Should we demand that the customers give it back until we can rip the code out? What if we still want to use the code? Should we approach MS and try to negotiate a different license? What if they say no?
There's no difference here. The GPL is quite easy to understand as licensing documents go. I think we can all agree that if code licensed only under the GPL was in the application, it would be a breach of the licensing terms; just like when various people in my company appropriated MS code. The resolution is exactly the same.
The moral of the story is: don't use code whose licensing terms are unacceptable to you. It doesn't matter what the license is. It doesn't matter what political forces caused the terms of the license to be created. If you don't agree to it, don't use it. This is the one thing that is the same for all licenses.
The body is quite complicated. It's not like it burns just one thing at a time. The proportion of fat/protein/carbs burned depends on a lot of factors. If you look at starving people, you will also note that they are not over muscled. Experienced body builders *will* reduce their calorie intake to get down to 1 or 2 percent body fat, but they have a lot of tricks to avoid burning too much protein (thereby cutting down their hard won muscle).
A lot of people want to lose weight in order to look good. I would hazard to say that they are less worried about health issues than looking good (thus the crazy diets people go on). Muscle is *really* difficult to put on. Fat is relatively easy to lose. Putting on a pound of muscle means going to the gym and lifting weights for a good 10-30 hours (depending on a lot of factors). Losing a pound of fat is as easy is avoiding drinking that can of coke every day for 25 days. You should be careful of crash diets that will end up burning muscle.
Without going into details, aerobic exercise is a good way to protect your muscle mass when losing weight (the body shifts to burning a larger percentage of fat directly when doing aerobic exercise). Running 3 miles a day will burn about 400 calories each day. If you run 6 days a week that will be about 3/4 of a pound a week. But you have to be careful of diet since you will be more hungry.
Unless you are crazy into running (which is unlikely if you are overweight), anything more will have to be done with diet. But you really do have to be careful of losing muscle. Especially people who can't exercise very much (due to lack of fitness, or ill health) really need to be realistic about what they can accomplish in a short time.
Lately I let myself get a bit overweight. But I lost about 30 lbs in 3 months. Unfortunately I now realize that nearly 5 lbs of that was muscle. I was too aggressive in shedding the weight. Now I'll have a fun time trying to get it back (especially since I'm over 40 now... sigh...)
Having just written a bunch about finding your own path to learning a language, I'm hesitant to respond;-). However, my experience has been that practicing production increases the speed at which I learn dramatically. If I only try to understand, I constantly forget small details. But if I actually have to produce grammar the details stick in my brain.
It's a bit like studying kanji. A lot of people avoid it, thinking that it's something they won't need. But memorizing kanji dramatically increases the speed at which I can learn vocabulary. In fact, I think I can learn both the kanji for a word and the word itself in less time that it takes to learn the word phonetically only. But that might just be me.
Anyway, I encourage you to try out a variety of different techniques. You may find some things that work a lot more than you'd expect.
No I don't. Everyone tells me my accent is very easy to understand. My biggest problem is getting the tones right. I often learn vocabulary from reading so I'll guess at the tones. Often I'm wrong;-). But my friends correct me immediately, so it's not a problem.
I forgot to mention a few things that I do as well. I *talk* to people. Right from the very beginning I went to Japanese meet ups in order to practice speaking. Now I live in Japan, so I talk to people in Japanese every day.
The other thing I do is karaoke. This is *excellent* pronunciation practice. But it's important to be really anal about imitating the original. It's also helped me learn about and hear different accents in Japanese.
I agree that Genki is an excellent resource. I actually bought it when I was first starting. However, that kind of study just doesn't work for me. I couldn't get any traction until someone suggested I started reading kids books. At that point my Japanese exploded. My biggest problem with Genki is that it isn't based around plain form. Japanese grammar seems arbitrary and strange if you think masu/desu is normal grammar. Learning polite speech is easy after you get some fluency in plain form. But the other way around is not (at least for me).
In the end, learning a language is a very personal thing. Classes work for some people, but not for others. It is incorrect to say that you can only learn a language through an intensive academic course. Certainly some people find it extremely helpful. But there are other ways to get to the same place.
Manga is excellent at teaching spoken Japanese. Almost without exception the language you see is the same language that people are using to communicate in every day situations. Of course you have to avoid using extremely rude or bizarre expressions. But it isn't actually difficult to determine what those are. People who don't read manga have this strange idea that manga readers walk around talking like Naruto. The one drawback is that you aren't going to be exposed to a large amount of very polite language. But, personally, I think you shouldn't concentrate on that until you have a decent fluency with plain forms (YMMV)
For anyone who wants to read manga to learn Japanese I have two pieces of advice. If your vocabulary isn't that good, you'll be looking up every second word and it will go too slowly for you to remember anything. Memorize vocabulary as you go until you can read about 95% without looking up the words. After that point, you may not have to memorize words explicitly if you are reading enough. You might just learn them as you're reading (again, YMMV). But using a computer or electronic dictionary dramatically speeds up searching, so don't bother with paper.
The second piece of advice is to read Tae Kim's Grammar guide http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar There is almost nothing in a manga that isn't covered in this guide. I also believe that Tae Kim's presentation is vastly superior to any other Japanese grammar book. Personally, I memorize all the example sentences from the guide (English --> Japanese) using a spaced repetition program.
Using primarily manga and Tae Kim's guide I've become relatively functional in Japanese. I can hang out with people who only speak Japanese and have a good time. I've even been on a couple of dates where the girl didn't speak any English. I've never taken a Japanese class.
The amusement park ride, and the airplane, are privately owned and they can deny you access for whatever reason, even if you don't like it.
So they can deny me access because I'm black? (actually, I'm not, but pretend I am) I'm pretty sure there are some things they can't use as a reason for denying me my business. Whether or not searches is one of them, I don't know.
Yes it has. Everything is working really well now as far as I can tell. Even pulse-audio seems to work fine (the very first time that has happened on my computer). Been running it all week and I have no issues with 9.10. FWIW I have a Toshiba Satellite with Intel 945GM graphics card and intel sound. I'm running compiz with all sorts of effects turned on.
Personally, I would pay the normal license fee for access to all of BBC's content. Unfortunately, I don't think that will ever happen. For some things they simply don't have the rights for redistribution outside of the UK. A good example is football. On the odd occasion that they broadcast a football match, there's just no way they will be able to negotiate rights outside of the UK.
Still, if I could find a legal way to watch Dr. Who that would be a tremendous step forward for me. Living in the country side of Japan next to a mountain, I'm left very few alternatives (no cable or satellite...) Hmmm... I just noticed that NHK released the first 3 seasons of the new series here finally. I suppose it's time to exercise my credit card...
Cygnus published its financials when it was bought by Red Hat. If I remember correctly they were making about 30 million a quarter in revenue. But unfortunately I can't remember if they were turning a profit. Probably the data is still out on the internet, but it's 1am here and I don't feel like looking it up. I do remember watching Red Hat's statements the quarter after acquiring Cygnus and noting that the numbers matched up pretty well (i.e., the consulting side of Red Hat magically pulled in about 30 million)
Tiemann claims in his article that they never had money problems. IIRC he said they pulled in $700K in projects in the first year. Their biggest problem was finding people to do the work. Of course he is trying to make a point in his article. And at the time he was also trying to make his company look good (they were just starting to look for VC). So certainly there could be exaggeration.
Personally, I'm not against dual licensing. But I see it as a potentially limiting move. It's difficult to participate in a dual licensed project since you will probably have to sign over your copyright to have your work included in the main distribution. I remember the author of Ghostscript complaining about the lack of contribution due to this problem.
I would rather companies focus on other business models. Possibly dual licensing is a reasonable stopgap measure, but relying on it for your bread an butter means relying on the "proprietary software" industry. I think this is something we should ideally avoid, if only for the practical reason that success in free software will diminish our revenue source.
This is a bit disingenuous. Small companies don't publish financial information because they usually aren't public. They don't have to do it, and there is no real reason to do it.
I don't know if you were thinking about Cygnus software in your examples since it was bought by Red Hat. However, I believe it is a much better example of how to make money with open source. Michael Tiemann's explanation of how they started the company on a few thousand dollars and built it without the use of dual licensing is instructive (I realize they eventually opted for dual licensing after they received VC, but I understand that was at the insistence of the VC company. After being bought out by Red Hat they immediately reverted back to single licensing). If anyone is interested they can read the description in his contribution to the book Open Sources: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html
I am personally aware of many companies that offer services on Open Source software without dual licensing. Many of these are individual people selling customized installations to large organizations like governments. They often operate similarly to consultants. While I can't guarantee that they all make a profit, the ones I know certainly don't look like they are starving to death.
Those names should be private, unless needed for verification in the case of fraud.
And therein lies the problem. Who should get to verify the petition? Shouldn't *everyone* be able to view the list and verify that it is real? If only the government can see the results of a petition, how will we verify that the government is doing their job properly? How do we know someone in the government isn't just astroturfing?
Fundamentally this information *must* be public. If you feel strongly that you will not sign a petition if it is made known that you signed it, then I personally think that you shouldn't sign it. Otherwise people would sign any old crap whether they believed strongly in it or not.
Make a portfolio of open source work you've done. Go in and extract code that you've written. Annotate it explaining what problem you were solving and why you chose the design you did, etc. Keep each section fairly short (a few hundred lines of code) and write an overall document linking up the various code excerpts, creating a narrative for them to follow. If you have planning/design documentation, etc feel free to show excerpts of that too. Even emails from mailing lists where you defused a potentially difficult situation is good. Finally, provide links to all the original projects that you've contributed to so they can see your contribution first hand.
After you have organized all that, put it up on a web page somewhere and put a link on your resume. Burn a few business card sized CDs and hand them out at interviews. Make sure to bring a few to each interview. I've found they are popular.
This has gotten me more than one job. I used to maintain my portfolio continuously on my web page, but I'm teaching now and have let it lapse. However, it's sometimes useful even outside the job searching venue.
Great post. I personally think that Debian,Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc is the best way to discuss our systems. Linux is a small part. I understand and sympathize with the GNU/Linux issue, but let's face it, there's still a lot more to my computer. My computer would not be very useful without X, Firefox, Mysql, Open Office, Gimp, etc, etc, etc. Unless I've missed a memo, none of these are GNU projects. The list would get even bigger if I were running KDE.
The only sensible way to refer to these large distributions of software is by their distribution name. One might want to say I have a "Linux" system to indicate the types of software I can run, but actually the Mac can run all of it as well. Windows can even run most of it. Free software is flexible. It's flexible *because it is free* and hasn't been locked down by a vendor. This is the point. Championing a free software distribution is a better lead into why free software is important than saying "GNU" IMHO.
Even better is that I can then discuss the relative merits of choosing gNewSense over Ubuntu or vice versa (Are you willing to give up functionality for freedom?)
Minidiscs are still extremely popular here in Japan. I don't really understand why, but virtually everybody I know has a minidisc system. I sometimes think Sony lives in a Japan-centric bubble. They make decisions based on what they can get away with in Japan (quite a lot) and figure it will work for the rest of the world. It really doesn't. Slowly, though, I see things changing. The high school students I teach here are moving away from Sony as far as I can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years Sony collapses based on their inability to see reality.
The bullet trains in Japan are quite convenient, like you say. They run exactly on schedule almost all the time. About the only thing that stops them is earthquakes. I show up at the plat form 5 minutes before the train comes, put my large luggage in the storage area near the door, and sit down and relax. It is certainly a lot nicer than air travel.
The real problem is cost. I don't know how much the train would cost in California, but it is expensive here in Japan. A ticket to Tokyo from Shizuoka city (where I live -- a distance of 180km) is about $60 if I recall correctly. That's one way. I'm not sure Americans are willing to abandon their cars for something this expensive.
IANAS (I am not a statistician), but according to Wikipedia, Benford's law applies to the distribution of the first digit. It has a logarithmic distribution. This makes complete sense since the probability for certain numbers will be higher than others (i.e., in telephone bills, the 1 is probably much more likely since there are a lot of people with $100+ phone bills). But they are discussing the *2nd* digit. This should be uniform unless it's a very strange dataset.
I quit my 100 hour a week job and picked something a little bit less stressful. Now I'm only working 35 hours a week and don't program for a living. I live 5 minutes from work. I have plenty of time to do whatever I want including coding. I hate this attitude that you need to have more money that many small countries in order to do what you want. There are many routes to happiness. Programmers are supposed to be good problem solvers -- find a solution that works for you!
It is important to realize that this is *not* damages!!!! The levy is part of the copyright act. Under this deal, copying musical performances *is not an act of copyright infringement*!!!!
Let me repeat that: Copying musical performances in Canada for personal use is not copyright infringement.
That is what the levy gives. It's a stupid deal for the artists, but a great one for most of the public. The money collected for the levy is dispersed according to Canadian music sales: i.e., the artist with the most sales gets the most; everyone else gets less until some threshold where they get nothing. It is NOT compensation for infringement. It is a deal that specifically allows copying for personal use.
Every Canadian who listens to music should understand this point.
This is not true. Most of the money collected in the music levy goes directly to the artists. None of it goes (directly) to the recording industry. Some of it does go to the organization that collects and distributes the money for the levy. I can't find the web site with all the stats right now, but it's there if you look hard enough.
The question of whether or not it is for the greater good... Personally, I appreciated being able to legally copy music when I lived in Canada. I felt that the cost of the levy on blank media was insignificant compared to the benefit I got from being able to copy any and all of the music that my friends listened to. Very few people buy enough media for it really to be a bad deal.
However, there are some people who don't listen to music at all. They can't opt out. There are businesses that need to buy media in large quantities for data purposes and they can't opt out (except in some very rare circumstances). I personally don't feel that the amount of compensation given to musicians is adequate if the vast majority of the media is being used to store music that was copied under the deal, so the musicians lose out.
For those reasons I feel that the levy should be removed. Despite that, for the average Canadian this levy is a ridiculously good deal. I really don't know why people reject it out of hand (other than not spending 2 seconds to think about it).
Reminds me of a time I was working in London. When I first started one of the guys asked me, "Are you American". I replied, "No Canadian". He just said, "Same thing."
So, I asked him: "Are you English" and he said, "No I'm Irish." I said, "Same thing".
I still marvel at the fact that I'm still alive...;-)
A test isn't the _only_ way to do this. Any sort of nice, concrete technical grilling will do. But for a programmer, it _must_ involve actually writing code of a non-trivial nature.
I don't believe writing code is necessary in an interview. When trying to hire experienced C++ programmers I asked one or two questions which were always sufficient to determine their level of experience. Here are some examples:
Despite having virtual functions C++ is a statically bound language. Please explain why this is.
Many C++ frameworks have extensive inheritance hierarchies. However many design patterns actively avoid inheritance. Please explain the thinking behind both situations and describe your feelings about the appropriate use of inheritance.
Depending on the answers I will get an understanding of where the person is, technically. People who can answer these questions to my satisfaction have always been top notch, technically. However, for entry level positions I don't care if they really understand the answers or not. I'm more interested in if they can take direction. So when I explain my views on these subjects I look to see whether the person understands and would be able to adopt those ideas (Yes, I expect junior people on my team to take technical direction from senior people, regardless of how smart they think they are). I've hired a lot of people in my time and I've never found it necessary (nor desirable) to get them to write code in front of me.
One exception to this would be the XP teams I've worked on. Actually, I've never had to hire into these teams. They were already set up before I arrived. But if I wanted to hire someone into such a team I would dispense with the entire interview and just do an hour or two of pair programming (for which I would pay the person). That would be ideal.
Right now I'm paying 28 yen (very close to 28 cents) per KWh in Japan. I pretty much guarantee that's a lot more than you are paying. People here are already used to paying a lot more for electricity costs.
All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all.
No, they do not. They attempt to do so [...]
I don't think they even attempt to do so. The rationale of the patent is persuade an inventor to divulge what would otherwise be a trade secret. The limited monopoly on the invention is the incentive to explain how it works. The intent is that people can build on top of the idea and everyone will benefit.
Software patents are fundamentally broken for many reasons. But one of the biggest reasons in my mind is that nobody cares if these things are trade secrets. Society is getting absolutely nothing in exchange for granting a limited monopoly. It's not like everybody is going to stop writing software if they can't patent it.
It is true that the best programmers are at least an order of magnitude better than the worst. I've had programmers on my team who couldn't write more than 100 lines of code in a year (and you'd have to throw away those 100 lines). I've had programmers on my team that are so beligerant and incompetant that their net contribution is negative (they steal time from others). Clearly we want to avoid those people.
But a team of the best people does not make the best team. The best team is composed of a few veterans with good communication skills, a few superstars, a few dependable work horses and a few rookies. The best team isn't assembled, it is developed over time. The individuals on the team are trained individually to exceed what they can do now. And the team itself is developed to improve its chemistry.
There are many methods that helpful. There are more that are unhelpful. You are correct to say that any given set of methods, indeed any methodology that chooses those methods doesn't create success. The team creates success. But to imply that creating a successful team is composed strictly of picking talented personnel is simply wrong.
Helping individuals improve their skills, helping them pick or modify methods to work better with each other, moving people in and out of the team based on their chemistry with others rather than just their skill level -- this will create successful teams.
In sports this role is called a coach, and it's different from a manager. We need coaches -- good coaches that are specifically trained to build successful teams. The original complaint talks about making senior developers Scrum masters. I agree that this is a good way to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
No
When I was working in an MS technology shop I found many cases of our programmers cutting and pasting code from other sources on the internet. Quite a lot of it came from MS itself and explicitly said that it could not be used. What do you do now? Rip the code out? But we've already shipped the code. Should we demand that the customers give it back until we can rip the code out? What if we still want to use the code? Should we approach MS and try to negotiate a different license? What if they say no?
There's no difference here. The GPL is quite easy to understand as licensing documents go. I think we can all agree that if code licensed only under the GPL was in the application, it would be a breach of the licensing terms; just like when various people in my company appropriated MS code. The resolution is exactly the same.
The moral of the story is: don't use code whose licensing terms are unacceptable to you. It doesn't matter what the license is. It doesn't matter what political forces caused the terms of the license to be created. If you don't agree to it, don't use it. This is the one thing that is the same for all licenses.
The body is quite complicated. It's not like it burns just one thing at a time. The proportion of fat/protein/carbs burned depends on a lot of factors. If you look at starving people, you will also note that they are not over muscled. Experienced body builders *will* reduce their calorie intake to get down to 1 or 2 percent body fat, but they have a lot of tricks to avoid burning too much protein (thereby cutting down their hard won muscle).
A lot of people want to lose weight in order to look good. I would hazard to say that they are less worried about health issues than looking good (thus the crazy diets people go on). Muscle is *really* difficult to put on. Fat is relatively easy to lose. Putting on a pound of muscle means going to the gym and lifting weights for a good 10-30 hours (depending on a lot of factors). Losing a pound of fat is as easy is avoiding drinking that can of coke every day for 25 days. You should be careful of crash diets that will end up burning muscle.
Without going into details, aerobic exercise is a good way to protect your muscle mass when losing weight (the body shifts to burning a larger percentage of fat directly when doing aerobic exercise). Running 3 miles a day will burn about 400 calories each day. If you run 6 days a week that will be about 3/4 of a pound a week. But you have to be
careful of diet since you will be more hungry.
Unless you are crazy into running (which is unlikely if you are overweight), anything more will have to be done with diet. But you really do have to be careful of losing muscle. Especially people who can't exercise very much (due to lack of fitness, or ill health) really need to be realistic about what they can accomplish in a short time.
Lately I let myself get a bit overweight. But I lost about 30 lbs in 3 months. Unfortunately I now realize that nearly 5 lbs of that was muscle. I was too aggressive in shedding the weight. Now I'll have a fun time trying to get it back (especially since I'm over 40 now... sigh...)
Having just written a bunch about finding your own path to learning a language, I'm hesitant to respond ;-). However, my experience has been that practicing production increases the speed at which I learn dramatically. If I only try to understand, I constantly forget small details. But if I actually have to produce grammar the details stick in my brain.
It's a bit like studying kanji. A lot of people avoid it, thinking that it's something they won't need. But memorizing kanji dramatically increases the speed at which I can learn vocabulary. In fact, I think I can learn both the kanji for a word and the word itself in less time that it takes to learn the word phonetically only. But that might just be me.
Anyway, I encourage you to try out a variety of different techniques. You may find some things that work a lot more than you'd expect.
No I don't. Everyone tells me my accent is very easy to understand. My biggest problem is getting the tones right. I often learn vocabulary from reading so I'll guess at the tones. Often I'm wrong ;-). But my friends correct me immediately, so it's not a problem.
I forgot to mention a few things that I do as well. I *talk* to people. Right from the very beginning I went to Japanese meet ups in order to practice speaking. Now I live in Japan, so I talk to people in Japanese every day.
The other thing I do is karaoke. This is *excellent* pronunciation practice. But it's important to be really anal about imitating the original. It's also helped me learn about and hear different accents in Japanese.
I agree that Genki is an excellent resource. I actually bought it when I was first starting. However, that kind of study just doesn't work for me. I couldn't get any traction until someone suggested I started reading kids books. At that point my Japanese exploded. My biggest problem with Genki is that it isn't based around plain form. Japanese grammar seems arbitrary and strange if you think masu/desu is normal grammar. Learning polite speech is easy after you get some fluency in plain form. But the other way around is not (at least for me).
In the end, learning a language is a very personal thing. Classes work for some people, but not for others. It is incorrect to say that you can only learn a language through an intensive academic course. Certainly some people find it extremely helpful. But there are other ways to get to the same place.
Manga is excellent at teaching spoken Japanese. Almost without exception the language you see is the same language that people are using to communicate in every day situations. Of course you have to avoid using extremely rude or bizarre expressions. But it isn't actually difficult to determine what those are. People who don't read manga have this strange idea that manga readers walk around talking like Naruto. The one drawback is that you aren't going to be exposed to a large amount of very polite language. But, personally, I think you shouldn't concentrate on that until you have a decent fluency with plain forms (YMMV)
For anyone who wants to read manga to learn Japanese I have two pieces of advice. If your vocabulary isn't that good, you'll be looking up every second word and it will go too slowly for you to remember anything. Memorize vocabulary as you go until you can read about 95% without looking up the words. After that point, you may not have to memorize words explicitly if you are reading enough. You might just learn them as you're reading (again, YMMV). But using a computer or electronic dictionary dramatically speeds up searching, so don't bother with paper.
The second piece of advice is to read Tae Kim's Grammar guide http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar There is almost nothing in a manga that isn't covered in this guide. I also believe that Tae Kim's presentation is vastly superior to any other Japanese grammar book. Personally, I memorize all the example sentences from the guide (English --> Japanese) using a spaced repetition program.
Using primarily manga and Tae Kim's guide I've become relatively functional in Japanese. I can hang out with people who only speak Japanese and have a good time. I've even been on a couple of dates where the girl didn't speak any English. I've never taken a Japanese class.
The amusement park ride, and the airplane, are privately owned and they can deny you access for whatever reason, even if you don't like it.
So they can deny me access because I'm black? (actually, I'm not, but pretend I am) I'm pretty sure there are some things they can't use as a reason for denying me my business. Whether or not searches is one of them, I don't know.
Yes it has. Everything is working really well now as far as I can tell. Even pulse-audio seems to work fine (the very first time that has happened on my computer). Been running it all week and I have no issues with 9.10. FWIW I have a Toshiba Satellite with Intel 945GM graphics card and intel sound. I'm running compiz with all sorts of effects turned on.
Personally, I would pay the normal license fee for access to all of BBC's content. Unfortunately, I don't think that will ever happen. For some things they simply don't have the rights for redistribution outside of the UK. A good example is football. On the odd occasion that they broadcast a football match, there's just no way they will be able to negotiate rights outside of the UK.
Still, if I could find a legal way to watch Dr. Who that would be a tremendous step forward for me. Living in the country side of Japan next to a mountain, I'm left very few alternatives (no cable or satellite...) Hmmm... I just noticed that NHK released the first 3 seasons of the new series here finally. I suppose it's time to exercise my credit card...
Cygnus published its financials when it was bought by Red Hat. If I remember correctly they were making about 30 million a quarter in revenue. But unfortunately I can't remember if they were turning a profit. Probably the data is still out on the internet, but it's 1am here and I don't feel like looking it up. I do remember watching Red Hat's statements the quarter after acquiring Cygnus and noting that the numbers matched up pretty well (i.e., the consulting side of Red Hat magically pulled in about 30 million)
Tiemann claims in his article that they never had money problems. IIRC he said they pulled in $700K in projects in the first year. Their biggest problem was finding people to do the work. Of course he is trying to make a point in his article. And at the time he was also trying to make his company look good (they were just starting to look for VC). So certainly there could be exaggeration.
Personally, I'm not against dual licensing. But I see it as a potentially limiting move. It's difficult to participate in a dual licensed project since you will probably have to sign over your copyright to have your work included in the main distribution. I remember the author of Ghostscript complaining about the lack of contribution due to this problem.
I would rather companies focus on other business models. Possibly dual licensing is a reasonable stopgap measure, but relying on it for your bread an butter means relying on the "proprietary software" industry. I think this is something we should ideally avoid, if only for the practical reason that success in free software will diminish our revenue source.
This is a bit disingenuous. Small companies don't publish financial information because they usually aren't public. They don't have to do it, and there is no real reason to do it.
I don't know if you were thinking about Cygnus software in your examples since it was bought by Red Hat. However, I believe it is a much better example of how to make money with open source. Michael Tiemann's explanation of how they started the company on a few thousand dollars and built it without the use of dual licensing is instructive (I realize they eventually opted for dual licensing after they received VC, but I understand that was at the insistence of the VC company. After being bought out by Red Hat they immediately reverted back to single licensing). If anyone is interested they can read the description in his contribution to the book Open Sources: http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/tiemans.html
I am personally aware of many companies that offer services on Open Source software without dual licensing. Many of these are individual people selling customized installations to large organizations like governments. They often operate similarly to consultants. While I can't guarantee that they all make a profit, the ones I know certainly don't look like they are starving to death.
Those names should be private, unless needed for verification in the case of fraud.
And therein lies the problem. Who should get to verify the petition? Shouldn't *everyone* be able to view the list and verify that it is real? If only the government can see the results of a petition, how will we verify that the government is doing their job properly? How do we know someone in the government isn't just astroturfing?
Fundamentally this information *must* be public. If you feel strongly that you will not sign a petition if it is made known that you signed it, then I personally think that you shouldn't sign it. Otherwise people would sign any old crap whether they believed strongly in it or not.
Make a portfolio of open source work you've done. Go in and extract code that you've written. Annotate it explaining what problem you were solving and why you chose the design you did, etc. Keep each section fairly short (a few hundred lines of code) and write an overall document linking up the various code excerpts, creating a narrative for them to follow. If you have planning/design documentation, etc feel free to show excerpts of that too. Even emails from mailing lists where you defused a potentially difficult situation is good. Finally, provide links to all the original projects that you've contributed to so they can see your contribution first hand.
After you have organized all that, put it up on a web page somewhere and put a link on your resume. Burn a few business card sized CDs and hand them out at interviews. Make sure to bring a few to each interview. I've found they are popular.
This has gotten me more than one job. I used to maintain my portfolio continuously on my web page, but I'm teaching now and have let it lapse. However, it's sometimes useful even outside the job searching venue.
Great post. I personally think that Debian,Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc is the best way to discuss our systems. Linux is a small part. I understand and sympathize with the GNU/Linux issue, but let's face it, there's still a lot more to my computer. My computer would not be very useful without X, Firefox, Mysql, Open Office, Gimp, etc, etc, etc. Unless I've missed a memo, none of these are GNU projects. The list would get even bigger if I were running KDE.
The only sensible way to refer to these large distributions of software is by their distribution name. One might want to say I have a "Linux" system to indicate the types of software I can run, but actually the Mac can run all of it as well. Windows can even run most of it. Free software is flexible. It's flexible *because it is free* and hasn't been locked down by a vendor. This is the point. Championing a free software distribution is a better lead into why free software is important than saying "GNU" IMHO.
Even better is that I can then discuss the relative merits of choosing gNewSense over Ubuntu or vice versa (Are you willing to give up functionality for freedom?)
Minidiscs are still extremely popular here in Japan. I don't really understand why, but virtually everybody I know has a minidisc system. I sometimes think Sony lives in a Japan-centric bubble. They make decisions based on what they can get away with in Japan (quite a lot) and figure it will work for the rest of the world. It really doesn't. Slowly, though, I see things changing. The high school students I teach here are moving away from Sony as far as I can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years Sony collapses based on their inability to see reality.
The bullet trains in Japan are quite convenient, like you say. They run exactly on schedule almost all the time. About the only thing that stops them is earthquakes. I show up at the plat form 5 minutes before the train comes, put my large luggage in the storage area near the door, and sit down and relax. It is certainly a lot nicer than air travel.
The real problem is cost. I don't know how much the train would cost in California, but it is expensive here in Japan. A ticket to Tokyo from Shizuoka city (where I live -- a distance of 180km) is about $60 if I recall correctly. That's one way. I'm not sure Americans are willing to abandon their cars for something this expensive.
IANAS (I am not a statistician), but according to Wikipedia, Benford's law applies to the distribution of the first digit. It has a logarithmic distribution. This makes complete sense since the probability for certain numbers will be higher than others (i.e., in telephone bills, the 1 is probably much more likely since there are a lot of people with $100+ phone bills). But they are discussing the *2nd* digit. This should be uniform unless it's a very strange dataset.
I quit my 100 hour a week job and picked something a little bit less stressful. Now I'm only working 35 hours a week and don't program for a living. I live 5 minutes from work. I have plenty of time to do whatever I want including coding. I hate this attitude that you need to have more money that many small countries in order to do what you want. There are many routes to happiness. Programmers are supposed to be good problem solvers -- find a solution that works for you!
It is important to realize that this is *not* damages!!!! The levy is part of the copyright act. Under this deal, copying musical performances *is not an act of copyright infringement*!!!!
Let me repeat that: Copying musical performances in Canada for personal use is not copyright infringement.
That is what the levy gives. It's a stupid deal for the artists, but a great one for most of the public. The money collected for the levy is dispersed according to Canadian music sales: i.e., the artist with the most sales gets the most; everyone else gets less until some threshold where they get nothing. It is NOT compensation for infringement. It is a deal that specifically allows copying for personal use.
Every Canadian who listens to music should understand this point.
This is not true. Most of the money collected in the music levy goes directly to the artists. None of it goes (directly) to the recording industry. Some of it does go to the organization that collects and distributes the money for the levy. I can't find the web site with all the stats right now, but it's there if you look hard enough.
The question of whether or not it is for the greater good... Personally, I appreciated being able to legally copy music when I lived in Canada. I felt that the cost of the levy on blank media was insignificant compared to the benefit I got from being able to copy any and all of the music that my friends listened to. Very few people buy enough media for it really to be a bad deal.
However, there are some people who don't listen to music at all. They can't opt out. There are businesses that need to buy media in large quantities for data purposes and they can't opt out (except in some very rare circumstances). I personally don't feel that the amount of compensation given to musicians is adequate if the vast majority of the media is being used to store music that was copied under the deal, so the musicians lose out.
For those reasons I feel that the levy should be removed. Despite that, for the average Canadian this levy is a ridiculously good deal. I really don't know why people reject it out of hand (other than not spending 2 seconds to think about it).
Reminds me of a time I was working in London. When I first started one of the guys asked me, "Are you American". I replied, "No Canadian". He just said, "Same thing."
So, I asked him: "Are you English" and he said, "No I'm Irish." I said, "Same thing".
I still marvel at the fact that I'm still alive... ;-)
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A test isn't the _only_ way to do this. Any sort of nice, concrete technical grilling will do. But for a programmer, it _must_ involve actually writing code of a non-trivial nature.
I don't believe writing code is necessary in an interview. When trying to hire experienced C++ programmers I asked one or two questions which were always sufficient to determine their level of experience. Here are some examples:
Despite having virtual functions C++ is a statically bound language. Please explain why this is.
Many C++ frameworks have extensive inheritance hierarchies. However many design patterns actively avoid inheritance. Please explain the thinking behind both situations and describe your feelings about the appropriate use of inheritance.
Depending on the answers I will get an understanding of where the person is, technically. People who can answer these questions to my satisfaction have always been top notch, technically. However, for entry level positions I don't care if they really understand the answers or not. I'm more interested in if they can take direction. So when I explain my views on these subjects I look to see whether the person understands and would be able to adopt those ideas (Yes, I expect junior people on my team to take technical direction from senior people, regardless of how smart they think they are). I've hired a lot of people in my time and I've never found it necessary (nor desirable) to get them to write code in front of me.
One exception to this would be the XP teams I've worked on. Actually, I've never had to hire into these teams. They were already set up before I arrived. But if I wanted to hire someone into such a team I would dispense with the entire interview and just do an hour or two of pair programming (for which I would pay the person). That would be ideal.
Right now I'm paying 28 yen (very close to 28 cents) per KWh in Japan. I pretty much guarantee that's a lot more than you are paying. People here are already used to paying a lot more for electricity costs.
All patents do is ensure the inventor, the person giving the benefits, is adequately compensated for his work, that's all.
No, they do not. They attempt to do so [...]
I don't think they even attempt to do so. The rationale of the patent is persuade an inventor to divulge what would otherwise be a trade secret. The limited monopoly on the invention is the incentive to explain how it works. The intent is that people can build on top of the idea and everyone will benefit.
Software patents are fundamentally broken for many reasons. But one of the biggest reasons in my mind is that nobody cares if these things are trade secrets. Society is getting absolutely nothing in exchange for granting a limited monopoly. It's not like everybody is going to stop writing software if they can't patent it.
It is true that the best programmers are at least an order of magnitude better than the worst. I've had programmers on my team who couldn't write more than 100 lines of code in a year (and you'd have to throw away those 100 lines). I've had programmers on my team that are so beligerant and incompetant that their net contribution is negative (they steal time from others). Clearly we want to avoid those people.
But a team of the best people does not make the best team. The best team is composed of a few veterans with good communication skills, a few superstars, a few dependable work horses and a few rookies. The best team isn't assembled, it is developed over time. The individuals on the team are trained individually to exceed what they can do now. And the team itself is developed to improve its chemistry.
There are many methods that helpful. There are more that are unhelpful. You are correct to say that any given set of methods, indeed any methodology that chooses those methods doesn't create success. The team creates success. But to imply that creating a successful team is composed strictly of picking talented personnel is simply wrong.
Helping individuals improve their skills, helping them pick or modify methods to work better with each other, moving people in and out of the team based on their chemistry with others rather than just their skill level -- this will create successful teams.
In sports this role is called a coach, and it's different from a manager. We need coaches -- good coaches that are specifically trained to build successful teams. The original complaint talks about making senior developers Scrum masters. I agree that this is a good way to fail.