Actually that's a very good question. The ratio of PMs to Devs should be at least 1-to-5 at the lowest level (i.e. 1 team leader per 5 developers) and as one goes up the management chain the ratio between a level and the one below should remain similar.
For a company to have as many devs as managers the ratio would need to be at least 1-to-2 .
So, how come the top looked-for professionals in almost all cities are Project Managers?
The only explanation I can think of is that Developers are listed in a more specific way (i.e. Oracle devs, C Devs, Java Devs,.NET Devs) while Project Managers are all under one category. So if you aggregate all Dev entries into a coarse "Developer" category, then it does add up to a PM-to-Dev ratio which is closer to 5-to-1.
Having worked in multiple countries in Europe, first as an employee and, for the last 7 years, as a contractor, here's a couple of points from my experience:
A contractor is what a good and really senior developer becomes if he/she wants to continue going up in his/her career without moving into management (since contractors make about 2-3 times as much as permanent employees). The way most companies have their rewards setup, a good software developer that quickly gains experience will also quickly hit a salary ceiling which can only be crossed by either becoming a technical architect (of which there are very few), a manager or a contractor.
Often contractors are brought in simple because technical people with enough seniority are not available as permanent employees
Contractors trade the illusory job security of permanent employment for the concrete security of being able to save in 3 months enough money to last a whole year
If you stay too long as an employee in the same company your salary will quickly go back versus people that just move around more. This is because most companies nowadays are managed by and reward short-term-thinking people who care much more about visible and easy to measure quantities (like a salary amount) than invisible and/or hard to measure ones (like that value you bring to the company through, say, mentoring new developers or preventing costly problems or the cost of training a replacement if you leave). At the same time at certain levels of experience of a softaware developer (for example, at the transition from mid-level designer to senior designer) being exposed to multiple ways of doing the software development process is required to gain enough wisdom and insight to go to the next level, so those who stay in the same place for too also slow down their own evolution as professionals. When contracting, jumping around becomes part of the way you work so the upwards transition in rates is faster and there is a lot more exposure to a lot more environments.
As a contractor you often have 1 or 2 contracts per-year, so you get to see a lot of different places, work with a lot of different people which do things in many different ways. You see and you do a lot of mistakes so learn a lot really fast and are much more likelly to get exposed to industry good practices. This has the unfortunate side effect that, given the breath and depth of your experience (a contractor will likelly have seen 3x more places that a typical permanent employee) in most places you work in seem to be populated by a bunch of amateurs (often gifted but ignorant amateurs). If you try and change things, you find out that it takes years before you start making a difference (after all, why should they change the way they've always done things just because the new-guy tells them it's wrong?). As a result, you soon grow a thick "i'm-just-here-for-the-money" hide or risk turning sour if you keep caring
Copyright rules designed to create/protect monopolies and cartels in intellectual property business areas and more in general give them a huge first mover advantage only make sense for countries which already have large and well-established "creative" (not just media but also product design) multinational corporations.
If a country's companies have already been out staking claims in the "ideas territory" and charging for access to it for a long time, it makes all sense for that country to try and protect those claims and revenue sources.
(It's not by chance that countries such as the UK and the US that have the biggest and oldest media industries are the ones pushing hardest for international rules that create artificial scarcity and establish/protect monopolies in the ideas space).
If however you are a country without big creative companies and/or whose companies are late entrants, the kind of copyright protections pushed by first-mover nations serves only to hinder your own company's progression and increase their costs in that space, something that the companies that went there first did not have to face.
Pretty much all BRICs are in the position of being tol-payers rather than tol-owners in the ideas space, thus it makes all sense for them to be against copyright as pushed by the likes of the US and the UK.
Many banks (at least in the UK) still use a variant of username+password authentication to access online banking (susceptible to things like keyloggers in the user's machine and phishing, not to mention cryptographical attacks against SSL in old browsers) instead of the much safer challenge-response method using an external pin-device (like this) + banking-card where no kind of password ever gets typed into an unsafe device (a general use, personal PC, used by somebody with little or no IT security training qualifies as an unsafe device).
This for me is the biggest sign that they're perfectly willing to seriously sacrifice security for the sake of saving a couple of pounds per customer on the pin-device.
Cloud computing makes sense when an organisation is not big enough to justify having it's own datacenter(s) with dedicate personel and procurement and/or has wildly variable computer processing needs.
In that situation, by using cloud computing the organisation will save some money because it shares in the benefits that the cloud computing provider has from economies of scale.
However, if an organisation has big enough, reasonably stable computing power needs, it should already benefit from economies of scale (by having their own datacenters), in which case going for cloud computing would be more expensive (since it would then be sharing the savings from economies of scale with the cloud computing provider instead of capturing all of those savings)
So, for example, while it might make sense for the UK Census (which happens every 10 years) to rent computing power for number-crunching, it makes no sense for the HMRC (tax department) to do so.
This doesn't even go into the issues of vendor lock-in, data protection and increased reliance on external networking links.
And here, my friends, is a good example of the human behavioral pattern that underpins any Tragedy of the Commons situation.
That said, we did manage to reverse river polution and get back (mostly) smogg-free cities in Western nations, so there is still some hope that once things get bad enough in the right places then people will do something about it.
On the other hand, as long as the floods and the ever-increasing dry seasons are something that only happens to brown people in faraway places, soccer moms will continue to drive their SUVs 1/4 of a mile around the block to take the kids to school.
First a big fat disclaimer to avoid ad-hominem attacks: I fully support the transition for a Democracy in Egypt and only wish it happened in more places.
That said, at some points your post reads like propaganda: - "instead of supporting the people" - "complied with and acted upon the requests of a tyrannical leader" - "in an attempt to silence the people" (emphasis mine)
It reminds me of the kind of words that could be heard in a number of "revolutionary" cleanups like those in Mao-Tse Tung's China and Stalin's Russia were people were killed for "sidding with a tyrannical leader", "attempting to silence the people" and other such accusations of lack of "revolutionary zeal".
No matter how much you believe the righteousness of your cause, beware of falling into emotion-appealing cliches.
As for Vodafone:
Until Mubarak fell, from the point of view of any company working in Egypt, Mubarak was the leader of that nation and what he said was what they had to do.
It's not up to foreigners to take political sides in a revolution in a country, more so with companies. If they operate in a country, as long as the law of the land says they must "do X", then they have to "do X".
The best you can expect is that the local employees of the company (who were likelly Egiptions, lived and worked in Egypt and actually might had an opinion on this) might be exceptionally slow in doing what Mubarak ordered from them while headquarters studiously ignored their unusual slowness in complying with Mubarak's orders.
This is most likelly meant to improve automated processing of intercepted messages.
People trying to communicate over a non-encrypted channel which have secrets they want to keep from well funded state agents KNOW that pretty much any and all conversations on an insecure channel are monitored and automatically processed (in fact, thanks to government mandated secret backdoors and weaknesses in cryptographic implementations, probably many "secure" channels are monitored).
I suspect that, outside the cases were the sender and the recipient have pre-exchanged a dictionary of "secret words" by a secure channel, the only half-decent way of avoiding that an "open-air" conversation is detected as important by the automated systems and flagged for human processing is using analogies.
If you build a database of analogies in all languages you can make your automated systems be able to detect "keywords" which were said by way of analogy.
I myself have been looking into this for my own project and came to the conclusion that, as things stand now, Cloud computing is more expensive, more limiting in terms of development freedom (you're often restricted in things like how you can store data) AND has a huge amount of vendor lock-in (you have to adjust the design of your sofware to use the paradigm of a vendor and actually code with the vendor's libraries, so moving over requires a rewrite of your software) versus VPSs. On the other hand, you do your own admin with a VPS (though, at least for Unix, you can get pre-setup and pre-hardenned images to deploy in your virtual machines - have a look at Turnkey Linux)
That said, I also second the opinion of most posters that the OP does not seem to have the necessary expertise to pull this off on his own: - I have an usual mix of know-how, currently doing Java server side for mission critical, high performance corporate systems, have past experience with web-based user and machine interfaces plus a bit of everything else all the way back to C coding, know quite a lot about Windows/Unix systems admin and database admin for several major DBs AND have about 16 years of professional experience as a designer/developer.
Yet, although I think I could pull it off on my own, as I look deeper into this I find there is a lot I don't know and I expect to end up doing some really dumb mistakes.
How will somebody who thinks just Windows and SQL Server is an appropriate mission-critical and highly scalable solution for the Internet manage to do this on his own is beyond me.
I remember when AOL joined the Net: - Before it was a community of mostly well behaved university students and teachers. Anybody coming into an existing online community (which at the time where mostly Usenet groups and mailing lists) quickly learned to be polite and RTFM/RTFF before asking stupid questions. - Afterwards such was the influx of noobs, asshats and generally ignorant people that wouldn't be bothered to RTFM that most online communities ended up swamped and eventually destroyed by the suddenly much worse SnR due too many lazy people asking questings before reading the FAQ, spamming, misbehaviour and overall asshatery.
While the Net nowadays is way beyond our wildest dreams back then, the "Polite community" spirit was gone when AOL openned the floodgates.
In my days, all we had was Usenet and Listserve mailing lists and the closest equivalent we had to changing our AIM status to available was to send an instance of Xeyes to a friend's X-terminal (or an Xkill if you felt particularly jocular).
Huge number of commits. The actual value of those commits is negative since you made it much harder for others to see the real changes when they diff between versions.
In fact, the sequence of events will likelly be: - Re-indent all the code "your way" - Commit all - Huge flame-war follows. The discussion boards and mailing lists go into meltdown. Your real e-mail is added to a number of goatse mailing lists. People are about to kick you out of the project. - You undo all your changes, thus making another huge number of commits, thus crossing the magic 10k number. - You continue receiving goatse e-mails.
All you need to maintain a proper conspiracy is that the number of those in it is small, that most participants know who the other participants are (and thus can enact reprisals for blowing the whistle) and that it's in the best interest of all participants to keep quiet about it (maybe because of the intensity of possible reprisals).
This is why government conspiracies are such a popular theory (and probably also popular in practice), since governments do have the strongest power to silence and punish whistleblowers.
In addition to this, it also helps if the nature of what is being hidden by the conspiracy is so outrageous that if somebody does blow the whistle on it, they can be made to look like nut-cases, creating the interesting paradigm that it should be easier to maintain a conspiracy around a set of events that looks highly unlikelly than it is to do so around a set of events that looks like just a variant of common occurrence.
1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?
We have centuries of experience with paying BEFORE for people to produce something and that seems to have worked out ok (Michelangelo didn't exactly paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for free and sold tickets AFTER)
2) There are in fact successful comercial models that include free distribution of the copyrighted product. For example, Redhat makes is money from support. Similarly, some game makers distribute the game for free and make their money solely from paid subscription to access a managed online environment for that game.
3) In computer systems DRM is more than just a means of protecting copyright. It is essentially an automated digital Agent for the seller which is present in the sold product and imposes arbitrary after-sale limitations on the use of it. With online authorization and updating, the seller can even easilly and at no cost change the allowed use of the product AFTER the buyer has paid for it and the only recourse for the buyer is (costly) legal action to recover access to those features they already paid for.
A good real-life example of how DRM is used by the seller to change after-sale features of a product is the "Removal of Linux access on the PS3" situation.
To use a car analogy, it's like buying a car and discovering that you have a representative of the brand on board always with you when you drive. He can stop you doing certain things (say, turning the radio on, opening the windows or having passengers on the back-seats) and will, once in a while, phone home office and get a new list of limitations he will impose. He works for free and if he suddenly adds a new limit on your use of the car you bought (say, by only allowing the aircon to be off or full-blast on) you have to go to court with it and show that the contract you signed when you bought the car actually included the right to use that function of the car which you've just been denied the use of (i.e. that the contract actually stated you could regulate the level of the aircon).
With Physical Property like a car, the law is in your side in that you can just kick the seller's agent out of your car.
However, with Intellectual Property laws in places like the US you actually have no easy way to do that since: - AFTER the sale you have to accept the EULA to use the product you just bought, which in some States as per-law means you just signed a contract that pretty much gives the Seller any arbitrary rights they want. - Laws like DCMA restrict your access to tools that would allow removing of seller's digital Agent(s) from a product you bought.
Current Intellectual Property laws de facto support the right of the seller to arbitrarilly enforce and change at will limitations on a product that the buyer has already bought, something which, with products which are purelly physical, is not allowed.
This is why Intellectual Property when it comes to products which can contain digital Agents is flawed.
Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave.
In other words, now, instead of having a bunch of friends harass you because they want to build a bigger farm, your friends will actually get monetary recompense for harassing you. Looks like I'll have to unfriend even more 'friends'
Actually it sounds more like: "People that enjoy helping out or socializing pay less, those that enjoy griefing pay more"
It basically makes the subscription price reflect the externalities of one's behaviour in a Multiplayer environment - if your in-game behaviour makes others feel bad (and more likelly to leave) then you pay more, if on the other hand it makes others feel good (and want to stay) then you pay less.
That said, I can see a couple of problems with this: - It makes it socially acceptable to behave badly (i.e. "I'm paying for it, so I can do whatever I want"). It would be the equivalent of, say, in real-life being allowed to pay to opt-out of obeying certain laws. - I don't really trust the companies that manage Online games to actually behave in a fair and balanced way and not to use this as a way to sneakilly boost profits: more specifically, I expect that the "Good Behaviour discount" would total less than the "Bad Behaviour penalty".
Developers don't need two monitors, they don't even need a proper monitor: a 7'' display at 640x400 is enough... as long as their man-hour costs are low enough that their reduced productivity is worth less than the cost of a monitor
Now, it's easy enough to justify the cost of a single monitor instead of the above mentioned 7'' display since the productivity difference is huge.
However, the productivity difference between one and two monitors depends a lot on the work the Developer does so it might not be worth it for a lowly paid dev doing, say, shell script development on Unix while it would likely be worth it for a Senior Developer doing GUI development.
It all about profiting or not from somebody else's work.
While a lot of/.ers think nothing of pirating music for personal use, you'll be hard-pressed to find one that condones breaking other people's copyright for profit.
It is thus perfectly possible to hold a position on copyright where one defends the right of people to freely copy ANY data for personal, non-profit used while being against people or companies using copyrighted material for profit without the authorisation of the copyright owners.
And then there's also the issue of how long should copyright last: I for one see not problem with republishing 10 year old (or older) pictures, wether for profit or not, without having go through the overhead of copyright compliance.
That's basically the crux of the question now, isn't it?
What's a "better adult"?
The whole think just sounds like a big circular reference kind of thing: - Geeks make "better adults" as per the definition of "better adult" that's most commonly held by geeks.
Somehow I suspect that in the eyes of, say, born again christians, geeks do not make better adults.
There are no real "Evil" people outside fiction - the typical vilain that purposefully hurts other for no reason other than making them hurt does not exit in real life.
Nobody believes themselves to be "Evil" and even those responsible for the worse atrocities have some kind of excuse to themselves that justifies that act.
Typical excuses include:
"If we didn't got them they would've gotten us"
"I was protecting my family/community/country"
"They were guilty of [crime]"
"I was just following orders"
"They were 'Evil' people"
This human need to not feel evil is so strong that often people will even believe a twisted view of reality if that's what it takes to seem like were they were doing the right thing.
I'm always shocked when I see the "There's much worse places in the world, so what we do is alright" argument.
Let me put thing this way: - If any democratic country needs to be put side-by-side with the worse countries in the world to look good, then it's a failure.
Beyond that, there's also the issue of direction - as in, "What is the direction things are taking?" - which seems to be quietly ignored by the apologists of "We're better than North Korea" style of argument.
Given that in the US (and also, to an extent, in most Western Democracies) things are getting worse when it comes to respect for people's rights while, for example, in North Korea they're not (in fact, they can only get better over there), then the US looks worse (going down) than North Korea (not going anywhere).
If you want to be a real patriot, I suggest you look at the road ahead and try and get the driver to avoid driving you down a deep canyon rather than spending your time looking at the car seats and comenting on how wonderful it all is.
FOSS tools are widelly use in enterprises because of three reasons:
They're free: no need to justify a budget for them and the cost of failure (i.e. if it doesn't work for the company's needs) is low (all you loose is time)
They're used in many places: so your new developers often already know the tools in question because they used them somewhere else. New developers are much less likelly to be familiar with specific third party tools since they probably haven't used them in a previous job or at home.
Trying them out is easy: it's usually just a question of downloading them, installing them and trying them. FOSS tools usually come with simple and/or well known licenses (GNU, Apache) which probably have already been checked by the company's legal team for another tool. Compare this with tools from 3rd party vendors which often require getting in contact with the vendor in question to arrange a trial (if at all possible) and include a proprietary license, different from everybody else's.
It has more or less been known for quite a while that things like self-control are correlated with success. More specifically we're talking about things like the ability to delay self-gratification (i.e. "you can have a cookie now before dinner or a big slice of cake as desert, which do you prefer?").
[I think almost all of us know somebody that never seems to be able to save enough to go on those dream vacations he/she always wanted and yet throws away money in thrifles and things that he/she only uses for about a week.]
More widelly, this is part of the whole EQ (Emotional Quotient) theory, which also states as predictors of success other things such as being an optimist.
These things are in fact believed to be learned traits, so it wouldn't be surprising that, for example, children whose parents have self-control problems themselves ("just give a cookie to the kid so that he shuts up") will end up with low self-control.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that's a very good question. The ratio of PMs to Devs should be at least 1-to-5 at the lowest level (i.e. 1 team leader per 5 developers) and as one goes up the management chain the ratio between a level and the one below should remain similar.
For a company to have as many devs as managers the ratio would need to be at least 1-to-2 .
So, how come the top looked-for professionals in almost all cities are Project Managers?
The only explanation I can think of is that Developers are listed in a more specific way (i.e. Oracle devs, C Devs, Java Devs, .NET Devs) while Project Managers are all under one category.
So if you aggregate all Dev entries into a coarse "Developer" category, then it does add up to a PM-to-Dev ratio which is closer to 5-to-1.
Having worked in multiple countries in Europe, first as an employee and, for the last 7 years, as a contractor, here's a couple of points from my experience:
Copyright rules designed to create/protect monopolies and cartels in intellectual property business areas and more in general give them a huge first mover advantage only make sense for countries which already have large and well-established "creative" (not just media but also product design) multinational corporations.
If a country's companies have already been out staking claims in the "ideas territory" and charging for access to it for a long time, it makes all sense for that country to try and protect those claims and revenue sources.
(It's not by chance that countries such as the UK and the US that have the biggest and oldest media industries are the ones pushing hardest for international rules that create artificial scarcity and establish/protect monopolies in the ideas space).
If however you are a country without big creative companies and/or whose companies are late entrants, the kind of copyright protections pushed by first-mover nations serves only to hinder your own company's progression and increase their costs in that space, something that the companies that went there first did not have to face.
Pretty much all BRICs are in the position of being tol-payers rather than tol-owners in the ideas space, thus it makes all sense for them to be against copyright as pushed by the likes of the US and the UK.
Many banks (at least in the UK) still use a variant of username+password authentication to access online banking (susceptible to things like keyloggers in the user's machine and phishing, not to mention cryptographical attacks against SSL in old browsers) instead of the much safer challenge-response method using an external pin-device (like this) + banking-card where no kind of password ever gets typed into an unsafe device (a general use, personal PC, used by somebody with little or no IT security training qualifies as an unsafe device).
This for me is the biggest sign that they're perfectly willing to seriously sacrifice security for the sake of saving a couple of pounds per customer on the pin-device.
Cloud computing makes sense when an organisation is not big enough to justify having it's own datacenter(s) with dedicate personel and procurement and/or has wildly variable computer processing needs.
In that situation, by using cloud computing the organisation will save some money because it shares in the benefits that the cloud computing provider has from economies of scale.
However, if an organisation has big enough, reasonably stable computing power needs, it should already benefit from economies of scale (by having their own datacenters), in which case going for cloud computing would be more expensive (since it would then be sharing the savings from economies of scale with the cloud computing provider instead of capturing all of those savings)
So, for example, while it might make sense for the UK Census (which happens every 10 years) to rent computing power for number-crunching, it makes no sense for the HMRC (tax department) to do so.
This doesn't even go into the issues of vendor lock-in, data protection and increased reliance on external networking links.
And here, my friends, is a good example of the human behavioral pattern that underpins any Tragedy of the Commons situation.
That said, we did manage to reverse river polution and get back (mostly) smogg-free cities in Western nations, so there is still some hope that once things get bad enough in the right places then people will do something about it.
On the other hand, as long as the floods and the ever-increasing dry seasons are something that only happens to brown people in faraway places, soccer moms will continue to drive their SUVs 1/4 of a mile around the block to take the kids to school.
First a big fat disclaimer to avoid ad-hominem attacks: I fully support the transition for a Democracy in Egypt and only wish it happened in more places.
That said, at some points your post reads like propaganda:
- "instead of supporting the people"
- "complied with and acted upon the requests of a tyrannical leader"
- "in an attempt to silence the people"
(emphasis mine)
It reminds me of the kind of words that could be heard in a number of "revolutionary" cleanups like those in Mao-Tse Tung's China and Stalin's Russia were people were killed for "sidding with a tyrannical leader", "attempting to silence the people" and other such accusations of lack of "revolutionary zeal".
No matter how much you believe the righteousness of your cause, beware of falling into emotion-appealing cliches.
As for Vodafone:
Until Mubarak fell, from the point of view of any company working in Egypt, Mubarak was the leader of that nation and what he said was what they had to do.
It's not up to foreigners to take political sides in a revolution in a country, more so with companies. If they operate in a country, as long as the law of the land says they must "do X", then they have to "do X".
The best you can expect is that the local employees of the company (who were likelly Egiptions, lived and worked in Egypt and actually might had an opinion on this) might be exceptionally slow in doing what Mubarak ordered from them while headquarters studiously ignored their unusual slowness in complying with Mubarak's orders.
This is most likelly meant to improve automated processing of intercepted messages.
People trying to communicate over a non-encrypted channel which have secrets they want to keep from well funded state agents KNOW that pretty much any and all conversations on an insecure channel are monitored and automatically processed (in fact, thanks to government mandated secret backdoors and weaknesses in cryptographic implementations, probably many "secure" channels are monitored).
I suspect that, outside the cases were the sender and the recipient have pre-exchanged a dictionary of "secret words" by a secure channel, the only half-decent way of avoiding that an "open-air" conversation is detected as important by the automated systems and flagged for human processing is using analogies.
If you build a database of analogies in all languages you can make your automated systems be able to detect "keywords" which were said by way of analogy.
I second the VPS advice.
I myself have been looking into this for my own project and came to the conclusion that, as things stand now, Cloud computing is more expensive, more limiting in terms of development freedom (you're often restricted in things like how you can store data) AND has a huge amount of vendor lock-in (you have to adjust the design of your sofware to use the paradigm of a vendor and actually code with the vendor's libraries, so moving over requires a rewrite of your software) versus VPSs. On the other hand, you do your own admin with a VPS (though, at least for Unix, you can get pre-setup and pre-hardenned images to deploy in your virtual machines - have a look at Turnkey Linux)
That said, I also second the opinion of most posters that the OP does not seem to have the necessary expertise to pull this off on his own:
- I have an usual mix of know-how, currently doing Java server side for mission critical, high performance corporate systems, have past experience with web-based user and machine interfaces plus a bit of everything else all the way back to C coding, know quite a lot about Windows/Unix systems admin and database admin for several major DBs AND have about 16 years of professional experience as a designer/developer.
Yet, although I think I could pull it off on my own, as I look deeper into this I find there is a lot I don't know and I expect to end up doing some really dumb mistakes.
How will somebody who thinks just Windows and SQL Server is an appropriate mission-critical and highly scalable solution for the Internet manage to do this on his own is beyond me.
If the above mentioned cups of coffee are so called American coffee (aka Filter coffee) then 6 of them might be equivalent to about 2 expressos.
A single standard medium sized capuccino from one of the well known coffeeshop chains (such as Starbucks) usually contains 2 expressos.
I remember when AOL joined the Net:
- Before it was a community of mostly well behaved university students and teachers. Anybody coming into an existing online community (which at the time where mostly Usenet groups and mailing lists) quickly learned to be polite and RTFM/RTFF before asking stupid questions.
- Afterwards such was the influx of noobs, asshats and generally ignorant people that wouldn't be bothered to RTFM that most online communities ended up swamped and eventually destroyed by the suddenly much worse SnR due too many lazy people asking questings before reading the FAQ, spamming, misbehaviour and overall asshatery.
While the Net nowadays is way beyond our wildest dreams back then, the "Polite community" spirit was gone when AOL openned the floodgates.
You kids had it lucky!
In my days, all we had was Usenet and Listserve mailing lists and the closest equivalent we had to changing our AIM status to available was to send an instance of Xeyes to a friend's X-terminal (or an Xkill if you felt particularly jocular).
Aaah, those where the days.
Now "Get out of my lawn!"
Huge number of commits. The actual value of those commits is negative since you made it much harder for others to see the real changes when they diff between versions.
In fact, the sequence of events will likelly be:
- Re-indent all the code "your way"
- Commit all
- Huge flame-war follows. The discussion boards and mailing lists go into meltdown. Your real e-mail is added to a number of goatse mailing lists. People are about to kick you out of the project.
- You undo all your changes, thus making another huge number of commits, thus crossing the magic 10k number.
- You continue receiving goatse e-mails.
All you need to maintain a proper conspiracy is that the number of those in it is small, that most participants know who the other participants are (and thus can enact reprisals for blowing the whistle) and that it's in the best interest of all participants to keep quiet about it (maybe because of the intensity of possible reprisals).
This is why government conspiracies are such a popular theory (and probably also popular in practice), since governments do have the strongest power to silence and punish whistleblowers.
In addition to this, it also helps if the nature of what is being hidden by the conspiracy is so outrageous that if somebody does blow the whistle on it, they can be made to look like nut-cases, creating the interesting paradigm that it should be easier to maintain a conspiracy around a set of events that looks highly unlikelly than it is to do so around a set of events that looks like just a variant of common occurrence.
Three points:
1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?
We have centuries of experience with paying BEFORE for people to produce something and that seems to have worked out ok (Michelangelo didn't exactly paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for free and sold tickets AFTER)
2) There are in fact successful comercial models that include free distribution of the copyrighted product. For example, Redhat makes is money from support. Similarly, some game makers distribute the game for free and make their money solely from paid subscription to access a managed online environment for that game.
3) In computer systems DRM is more than just a means of protecting copyright. It is essentially an automated digital Agent for the seller which is present in the sold product and imposes arbitrary after-sale limitations on the use of it. With online authorization and updating, the seller can even easilly and at no cost change the allowed use of the product AFTER the buyer has paid for it and the only recourse for the buyer is (costly) legal action to recover access to those features they already paid for.
A good real-life example of how DRM is used by the seller to change after-sale features of a product is the "Removal of Linux access on the PS3" situation.
To use a car analogy, it's like buying a car and discovering that you have a representative of the brand on board always with you when you drive. He can stop you doing certain things (say, turning the radio on, opening the windows or having passengers on the back-seats) and will, once in a while, phone home office and get a new list of limitations he will impose. He works for free and if he suddenly adds a new limit on your use of the car you bought (say, by only allowing the aircon to be off or full-blast on) you have to go to court with it and show that the contract you signed when you bought the car actually included the right to use that function of the car which you've just been denied the use of (i.e. that the contract actually stated you could regulate the level of the aircon).
With Physical Property like a car, the law is in your side in that you can just kick the seller's agent out of your car.
However, with Intellectual Property laws in places like the US you actually have no easy way to do that since:
- AFTER the sale you have to accept the EULA to use the product you just bought, which in some States as per-law means you just signed a contract that pretty much gives the Seller any arbitrary rights they want.
- Laws like DCMA restrict your access to tools that would allow removing of seller's digital Agent(s) from a product you bought.
Current Intellectual Property laws de facto support the right of the seller to arbitrarilly enforce and change at will limitations on a product that the buyer has already bought, something which, with products which are purelly physical, is not allowed.
This is why Intellectual Property when it comes to products which can contain digital Agents is flawed.
Actually it sounds more like:
"People that enjoy helping out or socializing pay less, those that enjoy griefing pay more"
It basically makes the subscription price reflect the externalities of one's behaviour in a Multiplayer environment - if your in-game behaviour makes others feel bad (and more likelly to leave) then you pay more, if on the other hand it makes others feel good (and want to stay) then you pay less.
That said, I can see a couple of problems with this:
- It makes it socially acceptable to behave badly (i.e. "I'm paying for it, so I can do whatever I want"). It would be the equivalent of, say, in real-life being allowed to pay to opt-out of obeying certain laws.
- I don't really trust the companies that manage Online games to actually behave in a fair and balanced way and not to use this as a way to sneakilly boost profits: more specifically, I expect that the "Good Behaviour discount" would total less than the "Bad Behaviour penalty".
Developers don't need two monitors, they don't even need a proper monitor: a 7'' display at 640x400 is enough ...
as long as their man-hour costs are low enough that their reduced productivity is worth less than the cost of a monitor
Now, it's easy enough to justify the cost of a single monitor instead of the above mentioned 7'' display since the productivity difference is huge.
However, the productivity difference between one and two monitors depends a lot on the work the Developer does so it might not be worth it for a lowly paid dev doing, say, shell script development on Unix while it would likely be worth it for a Senior Developer doing GUI development.
It all about profiting or not from somebody else's work.
While a lot of /.ers think nothing of pirating music for personal use, you'll be hard-pressed to find one that condones breaking other people's copyright for profit.
It is thus perfectly possible to hold a position on copyright where one defends the right of people to freely copy ANY data for personal, non-profit used while being against people or companies using copyrighted material for profit without the authorisation of the copyright owners.
And then there's also the issue of how long should copyright last: I for one see not problem with republishing 10 year old (or older) pictures, wether for profit or not, without having go through the overhead of copyright compliance.
That's basically the crux of the question now, isn't it?
What's a "better adult"?
The whole think just sounds like a big circular reference kind of thing:
- Geeks make "better adults" as per the definition of "better adult" that's most commonly held by geeks.
Somehow I suspect that in the eyes of, say, born again christians, geeks do not make better adults.
There are no real "Evil" people outside fiction - the typical vilain that purposefully hurts other for no reason other than making them hurt does not exit in real life.
Nobody believes themselves to be "Evil" and even those responsible for the worse atrocities have some kind of excuse to themselves that justifies that act.
Typical excuses include:
This human need to not feel evil is so strong that often people will even believe a twisted view of reality if that's what it takes to seem like were they were doing the right thing.
I'm always shocked when I see the "There's much worse places in the world, so what we do is alright" argument.
Let me put thing this way:
- If any democratic country needs to be put side-by-side with the worse countries in the world to look good, then it's a failure.
Beyond that, there's also the issue of direction - as in, "What is the direction things are taking?" - which seems to be quietly ignored by the apologists of "We're better than North Korea" style of argument.
Given that in the US (and also, to an extent, in most Western Democracies) things are getting worse when it comes to respect for people's rights while, for example, in North Korea they're not (in fact, they can only get better over there), then the US looks worse (going down) than North Korea (not going anywhere).
If you want to be a real patriot, I suggest you look at the road ahead and try and get the driver to avoid driving you down a deep canyon rather than spending your time looking at the car seats and comenting on how wonderful it all is.
Is public geek masturbation (which is essentially what this story is) indecent or just a waste if our time?
Discuss ...
FOSS tools are widelly use in enterprises because of three reasons:
Actually there are other means of controling people which are based in eliciting emotion and do not require lying.
Violence is a pretty damn good example of this. Charm is another one.
It has more or less been known for quite a while that things like self-control are correlated with success. More specifically we're talking about things like the ability to delay self-gratification (i.e. "you can have a cookie now before dinner or a big slice of cake as desert, which do you prefer?").
[I think almost all of us know somebody that never seems to be able to save enough to go on those dream vacations he/she always wanted and yet throws away money in thrifles and things that he/she only uses for about a week.]
More widelly, this is part of the whole EQ (Emotional Quotient) theory, which also states as predictors of success other things such as being an optimist.
These things are in fact believed to be learned traits, so it wouldn't be surprising that, for example, children whose parents have self-control problems themselves ("just give a cookie to the kid so that he shuts up") will end up with low self-control.