This. Yes, there's some free-speech debate to be had around this, but let's have that debate, not the rest of the thread so far which is ever-closer to fulfilling Godwin's Law at a record speed. This should be treated equally as to someone posting the same text in their front yard, and this is one of the tricky areas in US free speech laws - hate speech.
So, I was very recently in this scenario. I gave up and bought a Canon T3i. I don't think the mirrorless cameras have really matured enough yet, outside of/maybe/ the Sony NEX series. But then you're dealing with Sony. To be fair, I have some brand loyalty to Canon because (a) they have a solid service department and (b) have been decent about the amazing side-loading firmware that the folks over at CHDK and MagicLantern have put together. If you just want DSLR-ish features (and then some) of long exposures, motion detection, timelapse, and HDR auto-bracketing, then look at a CHDK-supported, high-end Canon point-and-shoot.
The huge benefit that MILCs and DSLRs have is an almost 10x larger sensor space (and the lenses required to deal with that). This gives you insanely better shots at a much wider range of light settings, as you need less light to enter to develop a good picture.
MILCs are also much, much smaller than their DSLR cousins. This is good and bad. The lenses (especially telephotos) are still going to be weighty and unbalance a smaller camera, but you could conceivably pop it off and pocket the body, which is handy for travel.
I lost my patience, and just bought a not-insane DSLR. For 830 I got the T3i, a 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm telephoto. I love it, but I'd love something even more portable more. I actually just came across this blog post the other day, which gets far geekier than I am on the future of MILC-likes: stuckincustoms.com/2012/01/04/dslrs-are-a-dying-breed-3rd-gen-cameras-are-the-future/
To be fair, I always try to work myself out of any IT-related work. If it ca be automated, it is probably boring me to tears, and I can find something more exciting/challenging to do.
To date, I've failed at eliminating my own job, but created a lot of very happy employers and had a fun time doing it.
So, I agree with your premise, that you shouldn't give out professional expertise/work for free. But you already did. You worked off-hours on a project you knew there was no budget for. It will help your team and you directly, and you've already done the work. Talk it over with your supervisor - you saw a problem, and created a tool to fix it in your free time. You normally charge X amount for clients, but you know there was no budget for this project. Still, you'd like to implement it - free of charge to the company. However, you do not want your scope of work to change without a discussion of salary re-appraisal for a new skillset. Before or outside of this salary/job responsibilities discussion, you can support this tool during work hours for 1-2 hours/week without disrupting your core tasks, and can take on further custom development outside of work hours at a discounted fee.
This one is a learning experience and a door to open a raise discussion. Next time, negotiate this beforehand, so your "client" gets a say in the product you develop for them, and you get a paycheck for said product.
I can't even imagine the complexity of graphing the content of a mystery-meat style hotdog: multiple cuts, animals, processing plants, species, segments of time.... perhaps forcing this to be labeled would shift our eating habits back towards higher-quality, more expensive cuts of meat, lowering our overall consumption and reducing the environmental impact of heavy meat consumption.
It might even make super market meat taste decent over time!
Therefore, I'm not at all worried about this getting implemented inside the US.
I've spent the better part of my career as a nonprofit tech warrior, from serving in the Peace Corps to a variety of domestic and internationally focused NGOs and non-profits, small and large, contract, full-time and pro-bono.
I hate the constant drive that non-profits feel towards minimizing anything that could be counted as "overhead." It's misleading, and eventually kills efficiency. Not having someone to answer phones, not having a budget to roll out a website, penny-pinching on every single thing that's not directly program-related does a variety of things. It burns staff out at an alarming rate, as they spend their often-unreported and uncompensated overtime to balance the lack of budget to hire additional staff or contractors. Second, it causes cost-cutting in ways that often lead to waste or additional in the long run. It suppresses wages and pushes good staff out of the sector entirely. Finally, it causes a donor-driven view of accounting, where every dollar must be accountable to some chunk of some program, instead of being broadly useful to the health of the organization and its mission.
This hurts the organizations, obviously - but as a donor, that's less important - you (like those working at the organization) care about the cause. And year-end campaigns are a huge benefit to organizations - providing them with unrestricted funds that they can use for the health of the organization, instead of funds driven by grant projects.
So give - as others have noted, find a local cause you're familiar with. Use CharityNavigator to weed out suspicious/dubious causes, but please - do not be turned off by high overheads. They're healthy. They mean the organization has a longer-term view on its role in making change.
Even better - find a social enterprise - an organization that has a double or triple bottom line, creating a profit or self-sustaining funding situation by selling products or services which also help them lift up a community through employment, skills training, and so on.
I won't buy from them because they were too wussy to take up the Quake 3 challenge for the already-ridiculous copyright lawsuit against Notch for the word "Scrolls" (http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/08/17/1838230/notch-asks-for-trial-by-combat).
Just because a system becomes open, doesn't mean it will automatically be flooded by bad contributions. Reputational mechanics would have to play a big role, as would some rules for the road. It's not unlike open source software in that way. There are ways to get this done that don't open us up to mob rule.
I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad a few years ago, and outside of their capacative slider bar (which acts as a normal button with some work for me, but no control beyond that), it works great. The benefits for a Mac convert are decent design, features like toslink digital audio hiding inside the headphone jack, SD card, and other niceties. I remain envious of my wife's battery life and aluminum case.
That being said, it was a breeze to set up, and all the drivers worked functionally out of the box, though updating the nvidia to the latest driver helped the 3D and external monitor situation.
I've fainted from eating too much Magnum 357 hot sauce (which advertises using 5M Scoville unit extract), so I can see how this could get more serious.
The web is indeed probably the best example of a miracle of the commons, where everyone using non-rivalrous goods builds a larger, greater ecosystem that would otherwise be possible.
Perhaps the Internet is just spreading awareness of the symptoms of satanic possession, and that's leading to the uptake in exorcism requests. Or it's the endtimes approaching. Or perhaps twitter usage. Lots of fun correlations to draw. What do you say? Correlation is not causation? How intriguing.
And the running commentary at WaPo for this article ranges from "yes, wikileaks shouldn't have published that" to "WTF, is your day job to write for Fox News?"
"An electronic input device such as an electronic pen is provided to annotate a paper document. The input device records an annotation and an image of human-comprehensible content in the document sufficient to identify the document and possibly a location in the document. The human-comprehensible content is used to locate a digital version of the document and determine a corresponding location of the annotation in the digital version of the document. A computer system such as a server system may receive and store the annotation in association with the digital version of the document. The server system may further augment the digital version of the document with the annotation and send the augmented version to an output device for display and/or printing."
I am a dreamhost customer. Their shared hosting service is as described above. They also have this habit of killing your php scripts if they go over certain memory/cpu limits, which can make debugging a real pain.
Pros: Cheap service, responsive and geeky tech support, good documentation on where their systems are wonky. Free hosting for non profits, and they don't nickle and dime you for crap like per-site fees, subdomains, etc - if it's free to them, it's free to you. When you outgrow their shared hosting abilities, and you will, you can move up relatively painlessly to a VPS offering which I've found to be pretty decent on some site with decent demands.
Cons: They've had a few really painful problems in the past few years. 06 and 08 were, as vintners would say, not good years. Email coming out of DH is often considered spam (last I checked it was straight up impossible to deliver to any AOL users; luckily I stopped needing to send to anyone with aol accounts)
Slashdot Mirror
This. Yes, there's some free-speech debate to be had around this, but let's have that debate, not the rest of the thread so far which is ever-closer to fulfilling Godwin's Law at a record speed. This should be treated equally as to someone posting the same text in their front yard, and this is one of the tricky areas in US free speech laws - hate speech.
Only if you care about data integrity...
So, I was very recently in this scenario. I gave up and bought a Canon T3i. I don't think the mirrorless cameras have really matured enough yet, outside of /maybe/ the Sony NEX series. But then you're dealing with Sony. To be fair, I have some brand loyalty to Canon because (a) they have a solid service department and (b) have been decent about the amazing side-loading firmware that the folks over at CHDK and MagicLantern have put together. If you just want DSLR-ish features (and then some) of long exposures, motion detection, timelapse, and HDR auto-bracketing, then look at a CHDK-supported, high-end Canon point-and-shoot.
The huge benefit that MILCs and DSLRs have is an almost 10x larger sensor space (and the lenses required to deal with that). This gives you insanely better shots at a much wider range of light settings, as you need less light to enter to develop a good picture.
MILCs are also much, much smaller than their DSLR cousins. This is good and bad. The lenses (especially telephotos) are still going to be weighty and unbalance a smaller camera, but you could conceivably pop it off and pocket the body, which is handy for travel.
I lost my patience, and just bought a not-insane DSLR. For 830 I got the T3i, a 18-55mm lens and a 75-300mm telephoto. I love it, but I'd love something even more portable more. I actually just came across this blog post the other day, which gets far geekier than I am on the future of MILC-likes: stuckincustoms.com/2012/01/04/dslrs-are-a-dying-breed-3rd-gen-cameras-are-the-future/
(And yes, I've already rooted it.)
To be fair, I always try to work myself out of any IT-related work. If it ca be automated, it is probably boring me to tears, and I can find something more exciting/challenging to do.
To date, I've failed at eliminating my own job, but created a lot of very happy employers and had a fun time doing it.
So, I agree with your premise, that you shouldn't give out professional expertise/work for free. But you already did. You worked off-hours on a project you knew there was no budget for. It will help your team and you directly, and you've already done the work. Talk it over with your supervisor - you saw a problem, and created a tool to fix it in your free time. You normally charge X amount for clients, but you know there was no budget for this project. Still, you'd like to implement it - free of charge to the company. However, you do not want your scope of work to change without a discussion of salary re-appraisal for a new skillset. Before or outside of this salary/job responsibilities discussion, you can support this tool during work hours for 1-2 hours/week without disrupting your core tasks, and can take on further custom development outside of work hours at a discounted fee.
This one is a learning experience and a door to open a raise discussion. Next time, negotiate this beforehand, so your "client" gets a say in the product you develop for them, and you get a paycheck for said product.
I can't even imagine the complexity of graphing the content of a mystery-meat style hotdog: multiple cuts, animals, processing plants, species, segments of time.... perhaps forcing this to be labeled would shift our eating habits back towards higher-quality, more expensive cuts of meat, lowering our overall consumption and reducing the environmental impact of heavy meat consumption.
It might even make super market meat taste decent over time!
Therefore, I'm not at all worried about this getting implemented inside the US.
I've spent the better part of my career as a nonprofit tech warrior, from serving in the Peace Corps to a variety of domestic and internationally focused NGOs and non-profits, small and large, contract, full-time and pro-bono.
I hate the constant drive that non-profits feel towards minimizing anything that could be counted as "overhead." It's misleading, and eventually kills efficiency. Not having someone to answer phones, not having a budget to roll out a website, penny-pinching on every single thing that's not directly program-related does a variety of things. It burns staff out at an alarming rate, as they spend their often-unreported and uncompensated overtime to balance the lack of budget to hire additional staff or contractors. Second, it causes cost-cutting in ways that often lead to waste or additional in the long run. It suppresses wages and pushes good staff out of the sector entirely. Finally, it causes a donor-driven view of accounting, where every dollar must be accountable to some chunk of some program, instead of being broadly useful to the health of the organization and its mission.
This hurts the organizations, obviously - but as a donor, that's less important - you (like those working at the organization) care about the cause. And year-end campaigns are a huge benefit to organizations - providing them with unrestricted funds that they can use for the health of the organization, instead of funds driven by grant projects.
So give - as others have noted, find a local cause you're familiar with. Use CharityNavigator to weed out suspicious/dubious causes, but please - do not be turned off by high overheads. They're healthy. They mean the organization has a longer-term view on its role in making change.
Even better - find a social enterprise - an organization that has a double or triple bottom line, creating a profit or self-sustaining funding situation by selling products or services which also help them lift up a community through employment, skills training, and so on.
I won't buy from them because they were too wussy to take up the Quake 3 challenge for the already-ridiculous copyright lawsuit against Notch for the word "Scrolls" (http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/08/17/1838230/notch-asks-for-trial-by-combat).
Just because a system becomes open, doesn't mean it will automatically be flooded by bad contributions. Reputational mechanics would have to play a big role, as would some rules for the road. It's not unlike open source software in that way. There are ways to get this done that don't open us up to mob rule.
I have been told many times that I write code very perlly.
I bought a Lenovo IdeaPad a few years ago, and outside of their capacative slider bar (which acts as a normal button with some work for me, but no control beyond that), it works great. The benefits for a Mac convert are decent design, features like toslink digital audio hiding inside the headphone jack, SD card, and other niceties. I remain envious of my wife's battery life and aluminum case.
That being said, it was a breeze to set up, and all the drivers worked functionally out of the box, though updating the nvidia to the latest driver helped the 3D and external monitor situation.
I've fainted from eating too much Magnum 357 hot sauce (which advertises using 5M Scoville unit extract), so I can see how this could get more serious.
The web is indeed probably the best example of a miracle of the commons, where everyone using non-rivalrous goods builds a larger, greater ecosystem that would otherwise be possible.
Two qubits should be enough for anyone.
Oh c'mon, somebody had to say it. Might as well save some budding tech CEO from being cursed with that quote for all time.
Perhaps the Internet is just spreading awareness of the symptoms of satanic possession, and that's leading to the uptake in exorcism requests. Or it's the endtimes approaching. Or perhaps twitter usage. Lots of fun correlations to draw. What do you say? Correlation is not causation? How intriguing.
And the running commentary at WaPo for this article ranges from "yes, wikileaks shouldn't have published that" to "WTF, is your day job to write for Fox News?"
To quote the great mathematician, pianist, and parody-song-writer Tom Lehrer, "When Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years"
Yeah, I mean, I always thought that was a feature of the Inspiron laptop line.
There's a Redmond joke in here somewhere. Regardless, I'm going to start blaming all my typos on bitflips caused by cosmic rays.
and, by the GP's logic, they wouldn't care about the difference between 12" and 18"
Which might actually help the situation. Not sure I care to find out about that.
Amazon patented that last year - http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/06/Amazon_patents_electronic_pen_technology_49100176.html (see patent here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,546,524.PN.&OS=PN/7,546,524&RS=PN/7,546,524 )
"An electronic input device such as an electronic pen is provided to annotate a paper document. The input device records an annotation and an image of human-comprehensible content in the document sufficient to identify the document and possibly a location in the document. The human-comprehensible content is used to locate a digital version of the document and determine a corresponding location of the annotation in the digital version of the document. A computer system such as a server system may receive and store the annotation in association with the digital version of the document. The server system may further augment the digital version of the document with the annotation and send the augmented version to an output device for display and/or printing."
What about the iPad? I hear it's super-open. /sarcasm
(2) : Yes, because broadband competition has been so successful so far. I can now choose between Comcast Cablemodems and Verizon DSL!
I am a dreamhost customer. Their shared hosting service is as described above. They also have this habit of killing your php scripts if they go over certain memory/cpu limits, which can make debugging a real pain.
Pros: Cheap service, responsive and geeky tech support, good documentation on where their systems are wonky. Free hosting for non profits, and they don't nickle and dime you for crap like per-site fees, subdomains, etc - if it's free to them, it's free to you. When you outgrow their shared hosting abilities, and you will, you can move up relatively painlessly to a VPS offering which I've found to be pretty decent on some site with decent demands.
Cons: They've had a few really painful problems in the past few years. 06 and 08 were, as vintners would say, not good years. Email coming out of DH is often considered spam (last I checked it was straight up impossible to deliver to any AOL users; luckily I stopped needing to send to anyone with aol accounts)
No, they just ran out of Capital Letters to make Various Departments and Policies sound More Official.