One alternative is that a company that's developing code could decide to release their old code after some time has elapsed. For example, surely it wouldn't hurt Microsoft if they GPLed Windows 95. No one's going to create a competitive product from it, and if they removed their trademarks from it, they could free it and allow others to maintain it.
This idea has been pretty well decimated here on slashdot. However, one effect that's seldom acknowledged is the "torpedo effect".
See, OpenOffice is Open because Sun wanted to torpedo Microsoft's big cash cow, MS Office. Open Office is a fiscal torpedo, arranged primarily to suck some of the air out of Microsoft. (and, from what I see, it's working)
Often, this "torpedo effect" can happen when a company goes out of business, or decides to change strategies. (EG: IBM's Cloudscape, Borland's Interbase) In this case, it's more like a land mine left by retreating infantry - the battle is lost, but some collatoral damage is left behind to dismay potential future competitors in some related field.
I guess people don't want to acknowledge that OSS is often provided because of its power to destroy competition rather than because of a need to be loved by "the community".
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal"
I would guess that Bush's cabinet would love to fund more research like this!
Anyhow, studies and scientific research serves as an early warning system. Not only do ominous sounding warnings dominate the findings, but that's the way it's supposed to be.
Let's pretend that you're roofing on your home with your oldest son. Are you going to tell him "don't worry about the roof caving in" or are you going to tell him "be careful, if you slip and fall off you could die."?
See, warnings from studies and the like are there to prevent problems from occuring. It's not just a case of alarms for self-service - it's the point. Predictions for the future will always consist primarily of warnings - because that's where the time, attention, and finances must be invested to prevent problems.
I know, different way of getting to your solution. It isn't as secure or 'cool'. But the self-contained binary for the software I wanted was really impressive.
The Big Binary File (BBF) sounds nice from the standpoint of getting started. It's all there, point, click, away you go. What could be better than that?
BBF's are nice for little stuff that doesn't matter much, but quickly become very sucktastic once you start to scale up.
For example, what happens when a security hole is found in a library used in that binary? How would you fix it, other than to d/l the entire BBF binary all over again?
What about disk space? If you have 270 apps that all use the same functionality, you now have 270 copies of that library strewn about your hard disk. Shared libraries only keep one. (sometimes two if there are major revisions to the library)
What about adding functionality, such as SSL encryption, or PHP/Perl/Python on a modular basis? Oops! BBF can't do that, either.
Oh, but some BBF's come with PHP? What about when you need a feature released in 4.3 but your BBF was compiled with 4.1.3? (see previous notes about security updates)
Believe it or not, the shared library (*.so or *.dll) is a big improvement over what you propose, for the reasons above and many more.
I have my own personal mail server, and I use Active Spam Killer to filter my email. (It's a challenge-response system)
Anyway, I have a cron job that deletes unconfirmed messages over 2 weeks old that were not replied to. What if it extracted all "img src=" URLs from the emails with a REGEX before deleting them, and then auto-generated a Spam Vampire page that anybody could download?
What if your mail provider did this for you? (though, they probably WOULDN'T want to do this because it would drive up their costs, too)
That only speaks about the size of the comapnies you are working with.
FYI: Small or midsized organizations, with between 5-200 employees. No, I'm not going to get hired for IBM like this, but then, I wouldn't want to work for IBM.
I like working closely with nice people who like working with me, and here's where I've found them.
The most important thing in the market today is experience. Go look on Monster or any of the other sites right now, and you'll see one phrase quite a bit -...or equivalent experience.
And Monster.com is where you find the -ahem- monster jobs.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an independent consultant.
In my experience, the good jobs, the real jobs, the ones that you really want to get don't come from job sites or the newspaper.
No, the good jobs are filled out on the golf course, or over fine wine at dinner, when two executives meet for business/pleasure.
The job interview really goes something like "Hey, one of my networking guys just got married and is leaving the state. Do you know anybody good?".
The words that follow that question are crucial. You should be ready to sacrifice animals to the higher gods to have your name follow such a question.
If the responding executive recommends you, you are almost guaranteed the position. You'll walk in with coveted status. You'll be appreciated for doing good work. And, you'll be paid decently without complaint.
It's OK to ask people you work with if there's anybody else who might need your services. If you're good, they'll actually mention your name prior to you meeting the referral, or meet with the referral with you.
And that's gold. Pure, and sweet.
Job? Newspaper? Website? There, you're guilty until proven innocent. You get no respect, as you are just a commodity easily compared to thousands of others. Every dollar you earn is "an expense". Yuck.
Referrals, baby. That's the ONLY way to fly. (and it's the ONLY way I've EVER promoted my myself!)
Geez. I just do Linux. Between being an admin at a few ISPs, and several businesses I run simultaneously, I admin between 15 and 20 servers. (always in flux as server X comes online, Y goes offline, etc)
Everything I do is either Linux or Linux-centric. (Perhaps the only non-Linux app is a usually-Windows client side package written in PHP-GTK that depends on intermittent communication with a Linux server)
I aim for percentages and long-term income in everything. I won't go 100% equity, but I also try to avoid 100% cash unless I just don't believe in the business model.
The best part is - Linux lets me sleep! I have an emergency only about every 6 months or so, even with 15 servers! And, with emergencies, they're almost never a disaster. They're all backed up nightly, patched monthly, and stable as anything, despite (for some) very heavy loads.
About 2/3 of my income is software programming services, the other third is sysadmin/hosting related.
Malware is an Application layer issue, and while Network/Transport layer security may help mitigate damage, it's not going to keep Clicky McFucktwit from opening GOODTIMES.EXE attached to his e-mail.
I am amazed that you would choose my family name as some sort of pseudonym for stupidity. I mean, nobody in my family would ever, in their right minds, even use EMAIL let alone click on some file called "GOODTIMES.EXE" We all know that it's "goodtimes.EXE" - next time get the case right, you pompous, self-serving bastard. Our family served in three world wars, and both of the US revolutionary wars.
Where the hell where your ancestors? Or maybe, they could be called "Incestors"?
I'll bet your last name is something like "McTardMeister", you prick.
One major point to pay attention to here is that if you have a data retention policy that is written that says for example, "I don't keep logs older than 1 hour" and you follow it, you can't respond to subpoenas for any data that falls outside your retention period.
A very, very good point. I work at two competing ISPs. Once logs everything and keeps logs for months, the other (on my advice) keeps them for as short as reasonable. (30 days)
You can guess which one got caught up in a nasty discovery distraction during a client lawsuit....
Better just to clear the log, and get it out of the way. What's the point in keeping old email or RADIUS logs? Parse them for the statistical numbers, and then dump 'em!
Slashdotters help me with this; on the right I have an over-engineered J2EE with a dozen of work arounds that are over hyped like EJB facades and dozens of frameworks that are difficult to learn and slow (..and kinky, every one and their mom developed a framework), and there are no free (as in beer) quality servers (I know JBoss but good luck without the documentation), on the extreme left I have LAMP, a loosely coupled system, PHP is popular but lets admit it is an ugly hack just looking at PHP5 reconfirms my believe that PHP didn't handle it fast growth properly, in the middle there is Microsoft which I hate and don't want to consider., I want a decent middle ware, that is cross platform, fast, and well documented, free as in beer (and preferably as in speech also).
Summary of post: Everybody: mumble mumble sucks mumble sucks mumble mumble it all sucks WTF?.
And, this is modded insightful! (mods, wake up before moderating!)
10 people get together and write a book. Without a clear agreement to define how these 10 people work together, they'll most assuredly run into severe problems.
They need to have an agreement (contract) between them so that they can function, and so that if one of the parties decides to quit, the rest can continue.
This is a corporation, and in this case, the agreement itself becomes a legal entity. Thus, the 10 people can claim their piece of the collective property only within the terms of their agreement.
These 10 people above, all wanting to ensure their piece of the whole, have probably all signed an agreement that whatever copyrights they have to whatever they author under their agreement belong to the collective and not to them personally. This kind of thing would work somewhat like the GPL - it would tend to hold the works together and make the group more cohesive, and avoid fragmentation. This provides necessary social stability within this small group.
How would this actually work in your inexperienced world?
It's already the case that by authoring anything, I own all copyrights to it. It's also the case that I can sell those rights for whatever price I deem appropriate.
Me, I keep my rights close to my chest. In fact, although my profession is to write copyrighted works, I haven't sold a copyright in years. I only sell rights to use my copyrighted works under the terms of whatever contract I negotiate with my clients.
Ask yourself: Have you checked to see what copyrights you're waiving by posting on Slashdot? Do you actually own the posts you leave? I'm pretty willing to bet that:
1) You haven't checked, and
2) Posting to Slashdot wouldn't work in your world, either.
I've got a new idea that's simple enough. Don't let companies own copyrights.
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easily implemented, and wrong.
Yours is one of these solutions.
Within the United States, we have a strong right to contract. I can sell you just about anything. (with a few exceptions - EG: slaves, certain chemical compounds, thermonuclear weapons, etc) I can sell a group of people just about anything.
I can own 50% of the stake of a car, and so can my wife. Together, we own the car 100%. Perfectly OK, right?
Except that a corporation is an embodiment of a group ownership contract with rules for how the people will work together.
Sooo.... a copyright can only be owned by one person?
It might be a little rigid, but not necessarily that bad. HyperTalk goes: put the sum of var1 and var2 into varX
or: set varX to the sum of var1 and var2
or: add var1 and var2 put the result into varX
Which could be more rapidly written as $varX=$var1+$var2;
or $varX=$var1+$var2;
or $varX=$var1+$var2;
(Didn't I just make your code more readable by minimizing the permutations to getting something done?)
Earlier in this thread, I saw somebody mention sheetmusic as a specialized language. Like it or not, a computer is *not* a person. Why try to negotiate with one as though it were?
It took years to learn to communicate well with other people. It takes substantial effort to learn to read sheetmusic, or algebraic notation,or chemistry formulas.
Why should computing be any different?
There are different languages emphasising different approaches to structuring and manipulating data - when faced with a problem, choose languages that will be effective at solving your specific problems and use them!
Well of course nobody thinks the US will remain the leading superpower forever
So... what's next? India? China?
The thing about the US is that it's... damn big. I read a statement once that makes it clear.
In the US, they think 100 years is a long time. In Europe, they think 100 miles is a long way.
Just to highlight a detail, it takes 12 full hours averaging at good highway speeds (65 M.P.H.) to cover the 786.5 miles (1,265.74 kilometers for you Europeans) just to travel the length of ONE U.S. state.
It's a trip comparable to traveling from Paris, France all the way to Vienna, Austria! How many countries would you travel on such a trip?
Some more facts:
Europe 3,837,000 Sq Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km) North America 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km) USA (not Candada or Mexico) 3,618,770 Sq Miles (5, 823,845.79)
In short, the US of A covers a landmass similar to all of Europe. In area, only the USSR and Canada have more, and much of their land is desolate and cold.
Let's not get into politics or economics. Eventually, I'm quite certain that someday the USA will no longer be a "super power". All things come to an end, someday. But, it will probably take a while.
Write your applications such that the artwork can be easily added/updated later. Make it clear that artwork is NOT your forte, and that you'll structure your application to allow this later improvement without requiring (much of) your assistance. Make sure it works OK, and doesn't look TOO bad.
If anybody asks about looks, point to the contract. Also, maintain a good relationship with a good graphic artist, and don't forget to recommend him/her.
NASA already has follow-on telescopes in the planning and construction phases, and ground-based scopes are now in many ways more powerful than Hubble. This whole issue will come up again in a few more years, when Hubble needs servicing again, but seriously, it has to die sometime.
Not necessarily. Hubble will be with us for some time, methinks. See, Hubble has something those other satellites do not - name recognition. Sad and sorry, but it does. Hubble is almost a household name!
I wouldn't be surprised if Hubble was extended repeatedly for years to come. They'll do it this time, and in 5-10 years will already have worked out many of the kinks to be able to do it again.
It's amazing how many times a "temporary fix" becomes permanent. Witness the entire PC industry, built out of a computer that IBM thought would never sell all that well.
I don't know about you, but Epcot in California is the lamest, most retarded excuse for a place to give yourself nausea since the whole building is spinning without any way to visually orient yourself to what's really going on.
So, what do you get for your price of sickening nausea?
An entire sea of cheap PCs set up with dumb flash games for the kids that they can also get (coincidentally) by going to any of a number of sites on the Intarweb.
I sincerely hope there's something better in Florida, 'cause the one in California is a no-go.
Can they start teaching in school that using IE is like having un-protected sex with 15 donkeys?
Protected, unprotected, doesn't really matter much. Have you ever heard of anybody contracting any particular illness from donkeys? (trying it might land you in jail, though)
Now, jittery, arm-slapping, meth-addict whores, that's another thing entirely...
If MS wants to have Windows Media Center infiltrate the living rooms of America, this is a logical step. It also follows that they want to get their DRM involved at this side of things,
Why is it that MS has been trying for years to get into the living room, and still hasn't succeeded?
Remember WebTV? What about the X-Box, which has been lackluster as a video console? (but makes a great cheapie Linux Webserver!)
And, it will probably be about 2025 before this old saw finally is put to rest.
What I find interesting is that the very force that allows outsourcing to India allows people in the Midwest to find work elsewhere.
Sorry, but the fallout from the 90's is over. All industries swing. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes. I'll paraphrase here:
Everybody knows how stupid the average guy is. I mean, the average guy is just incredibly, horribly, terrifyingly, knuckle-draggingly stupid. But, what's even more frightening, is that half of everybody else is even dumber than that!
Same thing with IT. Sometimes you're above the average, sometimes you're below. Get over it. There's work to be found. You might have to create your job, instead of apply for it.
Somebody has to create every job. Either you do it, and do what you decided to do, or you let somebody else do it, and accept work on their terms. Pick one, but don't whine that there's no job because somebody didn't create one for you!
Find a need, then fill it! It's just wrong to think that there is no need... Do something somebody else is doing, only do it better, or cheaper, or both. Listen to people complain about the services/products they buy. Particularly listen to groups of people or individuals with money/power. If you listen carefully, you'll hear the jingle of valuable coin in those whines!
Or, find somebody nobody else is doing, and do it.
For four years ending in early 2000, I owned a computer store.
Apparently it didn't work for him. I read "I owned" as "it went belly-up."
I sold it to persue my current career as a software developer. It's still in business today.
My average income was approximately $50-60,000/year, fairly steadily, though it seemed to entail more work as the pricepoint of new computers declined.
The biggest reason I sold was - it wasn't fun anymore. When I started, my consultative-sale approach, complete with teaching people about computers, what they did, and what to expect from a computer, was fun. People appreciated the helping hand and a friendly smile - and life was good.
By 2000, it had become rather ugly. It was much more price conscious as the lower pricepoints of computers enabled their reach to include a lower-income, much less pleasant kind of audience.
Computers are commoditizing, and the value isn't in the hardware anymore, it's in the software and related services - so that's where I went.
It's much more fun here! I work for people who apprecate quality work, and make more than I ever did at the Computer Store!
For four years ending in early 2000, I owned a computer store.
The name of the store was "Computers Cheap!" which was a great draw for audience. We were the only guys in town who'd sell a used computer with warrantee.
But, with a name like "Computers Cheap!" you can be sure that we got plenty of people we called "bug people". Named after the nerdy entymologists on "Silence of the Lambs", they were people who had lots of time, and very little money. They were VERY good at wasting time and demanding refunds on used, "AS-IS" hardware that turned out not to work.
We built our own customer-filter - the $1 box. A box set in the corner, with a bright orange sign that said something like: "Wow! $1.00, no warrantee". It was filled with MFM hard drives, ancient motherboards, ISA video cards (when AGP had long since come out) and stuff that was generally worthless.
It was out of the way enough that you had to get down on your knees to get to it. It was also nearly 100% effective at identifying the "bug people".
It was incredible... over months and years we found that it was simply never wrong.
If you were caught kneeling in front of that box, you were immediately put on my "ignore" list. I'd be nice, but wouldn't give anything but a monosyllabic response from anyone.
On a side note, that $1 box came in real handy selling OEM copies of Windows legally. See, the contract requires that it be sold with a hard drive or motherboard. No mention of new/used, nor was there any requirement for a warrantee. So, we sold lots of copies of Windows with a used motherboard for $1....
Slashdot Mirror
One alternative is that a company that's developing code could decide to release their old code after some time has elapsed. For example, surely it wouldn't hurt Microsoft if they GPLed Windows 95. No one's going to create a competitive product from it, and if they removed their trademarks from it, they could free it and allow others to maintain it.
This idea has been pretty well decimated here on slashdot. However, one effect that's seldom acknowledged is the "torpedo effect".
See, OpenOffice is Open because Sun wanted to torpedo Microsoft's big cash cow, MS Office. Open Office is a fiscal torpedo, arranged primarily to suck some of the air out of Microsoft. (and, from what I see, it's working)
Often, this "torpedo effect" can happen when a company goes out of business, or decides to change strategies. (EG: IBM's Cloudscape, Borland's Interbase) In this case, it's more like a land mine left by retreating infantry - the battle is lost, but some collatoral damage is left behind to dismay potential future competitors in some related field.
I guess people don't want to acknowledge that OSS is often provided because of its power to destroy competition rather than because of a need to be loved by "the community".
I guess it's very hard to get continued funding for a study that says "Everything's fine, situation normal"
I would guess that Bush's cabinet would love to fund more research like this!
Anyhow, studies and scientific research serves as an early warning system. Not only do ominous sounding warnings dominate the findings, but that's the way it's supposed to be.
Let's pretend that you're roofing on your home with your oldest son. Are you going to tell him "don't worry about the roof caving in" or are you going to tell him "be careful, if you slip and fall off you could die."?
See, warnings from studies and the like are there to prevent problems from occuring. It's not just a case of alarms for self-service - it's the point. Predictions for the future will always consist primarily of warnings - because that's where the time, attention, and finances must be invested to prevent problems.
I know, different way of getting to your solution. It isn't as secure or 'cool'. But the self-contained binary for the software I wanted was really impressive.
The Big Binary File (BBF) sounds nice from the standpoint of getting started. It's all there, point, click, away you go. What could be better than that?
BBF's are nice for little stuff that doesn't matter much, but quickly become very sucktastic once you start to scale up.
For example, what happens when a security hole is found in a library used in that binary? How would you fix it, other than to d/l the entire BBF binary all over again?
What about disk space? If you have 270 apps that all use the same functionality, you now have 270 copies of that library strewn about your hard disk. Shared libraries only keep one. (sometimes two if there are major revisions to the library)
What about adding functionality, such as SSL encryption, or PHP/Perl/Python on a modular basis? Oops! BBF can't do that, either.
Oh, but some BBF's come with PHP? What about when you need a feature released in 4.3 but your BBF was compiled with 4.1.3? (see previous notes about security updates)
Believe it or not, the shared library (*.so or *.dll) is a big improvement over what you propose, for the reasons above and many more.
I just had an idea.
I have my own personal mail server, and I use Active Spam Killer to filter my email. (It's a challenge-response system)
Anyway, I have a cron job that deletes unconfirmed messages over 2 weeks old that were not replied to. What if it extracted all "img src=" URLs from the emails with a REGEX before deleting them, and then auto-generated a Spam Vampire page that anybody could download?
What if your mail provider did this for you? (though, they probably WOULDN'T want to do this because it would drive up their costs, too)
BEGIN TIN.FOIL.HAT
/TIN.FOIL.HAT
1) What if the spammers are taking down the server(s) deliberately, so that they can claim an effective DDoS? (and perhaps sue Lycos?)
2) What if they update their DNS to point to 213.115.182.123 (IP address for www.makelovenotspam.com) instead of wherever it is now?
That only speaks about the size of the comapnies you are working with.
FYI: Small or midsized organizations, with between 5-200 employees. No, I'm not going to get hired for IBM like this, but then, I wouldn't want to work for IBM.
I like working closely with nice people who like working with me, and here's where I've found them.
The most important thing in the market today is experience. Go look on Monster or any of the other sites right now, and you'll see one phrase quite a bit - ...or equivalent experience.
And Monster.com is where you find the -ahem- monster jobs.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an independent consultant.
In my experience, the good jobs, the real jobs, the ones that you really want to get don't come from job sites or the newspaper.
No, the good jobs are filled out on the golf course, or over fine wine at dinner, when two executives meet for business/pleasure.
The job interview really goes something like "Hey, one of my networking guys just got married and is leaving the state. Do you know anybody good?".
The words that follow that question are crucial. You should be ready to sacrifice animals to the higher gods to have your name follow such a question.
If the responding executive recommends you, you are almost guaranteed the position. You'll walk in with coveted status. You'll be appreciated for doing good work. And, you'll be paid decently without complaint.
It's OK to ask people you work with if there's anybody else who might need your services. If you're good, they'll actually mention your name prior to you meeting the referral, or meet with the referral with you.
And that's gold. Pure, and sweet.
Job? Newspaper? Website? There, you're guilty until proven innocent. You get no respect, as you are just a commodity easily compared to thousands of others. Every dollar you earn is "an expense". Yuck.
Referrals, baby. That's the ONLY way to fly. (and it's the ONLY way I've EVER promoted my myself!)
I do linux gigs on the side.
Geez. I just do Linux. Between being an admin at a few ISPs, and several businesses I run simultaneously, I admin between 15 and 20 servers. (always in flux as server X comes online, Y goes offline, etc)
Everything I do is either Linux or Linux-centric. (Perhaps the only non-Linux app is a usually-Windows client side package written in PHP-GTK that depends on intermittent communication with a Linux server)
I aim for percentages and long-term income in everything. I won't go 100% equity, but I also try to avoid 100% cash unless I just don't believe in the business model.
The best part is - Linux lets me sleep! I have an emergency only about every 6 months or so, even with 15 servers! And, with emergencies, they're almost never a disaster. They're all backed up nightly, patched monthly, and stable as anything, despite (for some) very heavy loads.
About 2/3 of my income is software programming services, the other third is sysadmin/hosting related.
So, which of these would be the "side job"?
Exit polls should never be used as a substitute for having a secure, monitored, verifiable election system,
Nor should insecure, unmonitored, unverifiable elections systems be used. In case you RTFA, that's the point of this f-cking thread.
The point is, without any kind of verification, all you HAVE are the poll results! This is terrible, and why thhis is oposed unilaterallyhere.
Malware is an Application layer issue, and while Network/Transport layer security may help mitigate damage, it's not going to keep Clicky McFucktwit from opening GOODTIMES.EXE attached to his e-mail.
I am amazed that you would choose my family name as some sort of pseudonym for stupidity. I mean, nobody in my family would ever, in their right minds, even use EMAIL let alone click on some file called "GOODTIMES.EXE" We all know that it's "goodtimes.EXE" - next time get the case right, you pompous, self-serving bastard. Our family served in three world wars, and both of the US revolutionary wars.
Where the hell where your ancestors? Or maybe, they could be called "Incestors"?
I'll bet your last name is something like "McTardMeister", you prick.
One major point to pay attention to here is that if you have a data retention policy that is written that says for example, "I don't keep logs older than 1 hour" and you follow it, you can't respond to subpoenas for any data that falls outside your retention period.
A very, very good point. I work at two competing ISPs. Once logs everything and keeps logs for months, the other (on my advice) keeps them for as short as reasonable. (30 days)
You can guess which one got caught up in a nasty discovery distraction during a client lawsuit....
Better just to clear the log, and get it out of the way. What's the point in keeping old email or RADIUS logs? Parse them for the statistical numbers, and then dump 'em!
Slashdotters help me with this; on the right I have an over-engineered J2EE with a dozen of work arounds that are over hyped like EJB facades and dozens of frameworks that are difficult to learn and slow (..and kinky, every one and their mom developed a framework), and there are no free (as in beer) quality servers (I know JBoss but good luck without the documentation), on the extreme left I have LAMP, a loosely coupled system, PHP is popular but lets admit it is an ugly hack just looking at PHP5 reconfirms my believe that PHP didn't handle it fast growth properly, in the middle there is Microsoft which I hate and don't want to consider., I want a decent middle ware, that is cross platform, fast, and well documented, free as in beer (and preferably as in speech also).
Summary of post: Everybody: mumble mumble sucks mumble sucks mumble mumble it all sucks WTF?.
And, this is modded insightful! (mods, wake up before moderating!)
Ahem...
10 people get together and write a book. Without a clear agreement to define how these 10 people work together, they'll most assuredly run into severe problems.
They need to have an agreement (contract) between them so that they can function, and so that if one of the parties decides to quit, the rest can continue.
This is a corporation, and in this case, the agreement itself becomes a legal entity. Thus, the 10 people can claim their piece of the collective property only within the terms of their agreement.
These 10 people above, all wanting to ensure their piece of the whole, have probably all signed an agreement that whatever copyrights they have to whatever they author under their agreement belong to the collective and not to them personally. This kind of thing would work somewhat like the GPL - it would tend to hold the works together and make the group more cohesive, and avoid fragmentation. This provides necessary social stability within this small group.
How would this actually work in your inexperienced world?
It's already the case that by authoring anything, I own all copyrights to it. It's also the case that I can sell those rights for whatever price I deem appropriate.
Me, I keep my rights close to my chest. In fact, although my profession is to write copyrighted works, I haven't sold a copyright in years. I only sell rights to use my copyrighted works under the terms of whatever contract I negotiate with my clients.
Ask yourself: Have you checked to see what copyrights you're waiving by posting on Slashdot? Do you actually own the posts you leave? I'm pretty willing to bet that:
1) You haven't checked, and
2) Posting to Slashdot wouldn't work in your world, either.
I've got a new idea that's simple enough. Don't let companies own copyrights.
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easily implemented, and wrong.
Yours is one of these solutions.
Within the United States, we have a strong right to contract. I can sell you just about anything. (with a few exceptions - EG: slaves, certain chemical compounds, thermonuclear weapons, etc) I can sell a group of people just about anything.
I can own 50% of the stake of a car, and so can my wife. Together, we own the car 100%. Perfectly OK, right?
Except that a corporation is an embodiment of a group ownership contract with rules for how the people will work together.
Sooo.... a copyright can only be owned by one person?
Sorry. That ain't going to fly. Try again.
It might be a little rigid, but not necessarily that bad. HyperTalk goes:
put the sum of var1 and var2 into varX
or:
set varX to the sum of var1 and var2
or:
add var1 and var2
put the result into varX
Which could be more rapidly written as
$varX=$var1+$var2;
or
$varX=$var1+$var2;
or
$varX=$var1+$var2;
(Didn't I just make your code more readable by minimizing the permutations to getting something done?)
Earlier in this thread, I saw somebody mention sheetmusic as a specialized language. Like it or not, a computer is *not* a person. Why try to negotiate with one as though it were?
It took years to learn to communicate well with other people. It takes substantial effort to learn to read sheetmusic, or algebraic notation,or chemistry formulas.
Why should computing be any different?
There are different languages emphasising different approaches to structuring and manipulating data - when faced with a problem, choose languages that will be effective at solving your specific problems and use them!
So... what's next? India? China?
The thing about the US is that it's... damn big. I read a statement once that makes it clear.Just to highlight a detail, it takes 12 full hours averaging at good highway speeds (65 M.P.H.) to cover the 786.5 miles (1,265.74 kilometers for you Europeans) just to travel the length of ONE U.S. state.
It's a trip comparable to traveling from Paris, France all the way to Vienna, Austria! How many countries would you travel on such a trip?
Some more facts:
Europe 3,837,000 Sq Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km)
North America 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km)
USA (not Candada or Mexico) 3,618,770 Sq Miles (5, 823,845.79)
In short, the US of A covers a landmass similar to all of Europe. In area, only the USSR and Canada have more, and much of their land is desolate and cold.
Let's not get into politics or economics. Eventually, I'm quite certain that someday the USA will no longer be a "super power". All things come to an end, someday. But, it will probably take a while.
Yep. You heard it.
Write your applications such that the artwork can be easily added/updated later. Make it clear that artwork is NOT your forte, and that you'll structure your application to allow this later improvement without requiring (much of) your assistance. Make sure it works OK, and doesn't look TOO bad.
If anybody asks about looks, point to the contract. Also, maintain a good relationship with a good graphic artist, and don't forget to recommend him/her.
NASA already has follow-on telescopes in the planning and construction phases, and ground-based scopes are now in many ways more powerful than Hubble. This whole issue will come up again in a few more years, when Hubble needs servicing again, but seriously, it has to die sometime.
Not necessarily. Hubble will be with us for some time, methinks. See, Hubble has something those other satellites do not - name recognition. Sad and sorry, but it does. Hubble is almost a household name!
I wouldn't be surprised if Hubble was extended repeatedly for years to come. They'll do it this time, and in 5-10 years will already have worked out many of the kinks to be able to do it again.
It's amazing how many times a "temporary fix" becomes permanent. Witness the entire PC industry, built out of a computer that IBM thought would never sell all that well.
Isn't this basically the same idea as Epcot?
I don't know about you, but Epcot in California is the lamest, most retarded excuse for a place to give yourself nausea since the whole building is spinning without any way to visually orient yourself to what's really going on.
So, what do you get for your price of sickening nausea?
An entire sea of cheap PCs set up with dumb flash games for the kids that they can also get (coincidentally) by going to any of a number of sites on the Intarweb.
I sincerely hope there's something better in Florida, 'cause the one in California is a no-go.
Hey, I found that AMD K6 chips are faster than their Intel counterparts at the same clockspeed!
I have a K6/233 that acts more like a 266, at least!
The sad part is, I'm NOT kidding.
Can they start teaching in school that using IE is like having un-protected sex with 15 donkeys?
Protected, unprotected, doesn't really matter much. Have you ever heard of anybody contracting any particular illness from donkeys? (trying it might land you in jail, though)
Now, jittery, arm-slapping, meth-addict whores, that's another thing entirely...
If MS wants to have Windows Media Center infiltrate the living rooms of America, this is a logical step. It also follows that they want to get their DRM involved at this side of things,
Why is it that MS has been trying for years to get into the living room, and still hasn't succeeded?
Remember WebTV? What about the X-Box, which has been lackluster as a video console? (but makes a great cheapie Linux Webserver!)
Now, they're trying again, with the Tivo-alike.
(sigh)
I won't be holding my breath.
And, it will probably be about 2025 before this old saw finally is put to rest.
What I find interesting is that the very force that allows outsourcing to India allows people in the Midwest to find work elsewhere.
Sorry, but the fallout from the 90's is over. All industries swing. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes. I'll paraphrase here:Same thing with IT. Sometimes you're above the average, sometimes you're below. Get over it. There's work to be found. You might have to create your job, instead of apply for it.
Somebody has to create every job. Either you do it, and do what you decided to do, or you let somebody else do it, and accept work on their terms. Pick one, but don't whine that there's no job because somebody didn't create one for you!
Find a need, then fill it! It's just wrong to think that there is no need... Do something somebody else is doing, only do it better, or cheaper, or both. Listen to people complain about the services/products they buy. Particularly listen to groups of people or individuals with money/power. If you listen carefully, you'll hear the jingle of valuable coin in those whines!
Or, find somebody nobody else is doing, and do it.
What, you're out of work, and you're still here?
For four years ending in early 2000, I owned a computer store.
Apparently it didn't work for him. I read "I owned" as "it went belly-up."
I sold it to persue my current career as a software developer. It's still in business today.
My average income was approximately $50-60,000/year, fairly steadily, though it seemed to entail more work as the pricepoint of new computers declined.
The biggest reason I sold was - it wasn't fun anymore. When I started, my consultative-sale approach, complete with teaching people about computers, what they did, and what to expect from a computer, was fun. People appreciated the helping hand and a friendly smile - and life was good.
By 2000, it had become rather ugly. It was much more price conscious as the lower pricepoints of computers enabled their reach to include a lower-income, much less pleasant kind of audience.
Computers are commoditizing, and the value isn't in the hardware anymore, it's in the software and related services - so that's where I went.
It's much more fun here! I work for people who apprecate quality work, and make more than I ever did at the Computer Store!
For four years ending in early 2000, I owned a computer store.
The name of the store was "Computers Cheap!" which was a great draw for audience. We were the only guys in town who'd sell a used computer with warrantee.
But, with a name like "Computers Cheap!" you can be sure that we got plenty of people we called "bug people". Named after the nerdy entymologists on "Silence of the Lambs", they were people who had lots of time, and very little money. They were VERY good at wasting time and demanding refunds on used, "AS-IS" hardware that turned out not to work.
We built our own customer-filter - the $1 box. A box set in the corner, with a bright orange sign that said something like: "Wow! $1.00, no warrantee". It was filled with MFM hard drives, ancient motherboards, ISA video cards (when AGP had long since come out) and stuff that was generally worthless.
It was out of the way enough that you had to get down on your knees to get to it. It was also nearly 100% effective at identifying the "bug people".
It was incredible... over months and years we found that it was simply never wrong.
If you were caught kneeling in front of that box, you were immediately put on my "ignore" list. I'd be nice, but wouldn't give anything but a monosyllabic response from anyone.
On a side note, that $1 box came in real handy selling OEM copies of Windows legally. See, the contract requires that it be sold with a hard drive or motherboard. No mention of new/used, nor was there any requirement for a warrantee. So, we sold lots of copies of Windows with a used motherboard for $1....