Null termination sounds lovely when you've a teenager writing assembly and doing register allocation by hand, but it's obviously bad once you've seriously thought about runtimes, like after taking an algorithms class.
I spent my formative programming years primarily writing code in assembly and I resent that statement.:-) Runtime is always in one's mind and optimizing for speed is the desired goal. Optimizing for size is something that is merely forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control. No true assembly programmer, nor any true Scotsman, would prioritize size over speed if avoidable.
They don't look the same to me, these days the "IT" decisions are taken by the MBA type guys, with the sole purpose of maximizing their chances to get more visibility, "exceed objectives" and get a larger bonus/promotion/whatever. Sure they're rational too but what do they have in common with CS?
Programmer for 20+ years here, BS and MS in CS. I used to share such opinions. Then I went to business school. I really enjoyed business school in part because I was constantly amused by how ignorant and wrong I had been regarding such opinions. May I be bold enough to suggest that the portrayal of MBAs in popular and nerd cultures are about as accurate as the portrayal of programmers in popular and non-nerd cultures.
None of the above should be interpreted to mean that business school makes one appreciate Dilbert any less. Dilbert is actually pretty popular with MBA types and their professors as well.
this could have been a perfectly typical and rational IT or CS decision, like the many similar decisions we all make every day
Actually the tradeoff may not have been rational. The storage bytes saved may have been offset by the extra code bytes necessary for handling unknown length strings. Perhaps this is actually an example of premature optimization, optimizing things before proper profiling and analysis has shown the problem exists and the proposed solution is beneficial.
There is nothing at all confusing about an obvious lie. Now if you are willing to provide something that is actually verifiable, then that's another matter.
I cited an industry publication (InfoWorld) that has been around for over 30 years. A publication that has covered PCs, Macs and "big iron"; DOS, OS/2, Windows, Linux and Unix; iOS and Android;... They cited a wall street research firm (Global Equities Research) that does work for Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan.
I think the above debunks your "obvious lie" suggestion. Now if I had quoted some guy at a Mac fan blog then you would have had a point. What is your reference to debunk the idea that fortune 500 firms are currently offering some employees an option between Macs and PCs and that in such cases Macs are preferred? I admit I was surprised to read this but when I followed the various links it mentioned this was a side effect of 80% of fortune 500 currently supporting iPads to some degree. Seems plausible, especially given that Macs run Windows and Linux in virtual machines quite nicely - legacy apps are not the deal breaker they once were.
No. Sometimes money is important and so is scalability. If a system is too expensive to be built, it never will be built. The operational costs will drag down the entire operation to the point where it collapses. Cheap solutions make some problems solvable. There's really no getting around that. Fixating on SunOS is a great example because Sun hardware in general back in the day did not scale well enough for some tasks regardless of how much money you wanted to throw at a problem. It's a really poor example to bring up here.
I'm not fixating on Sun, that's just one of the more obvious examples of cannibalization. Google could have gone done many other paths as well. I'm not 100% sure but at the time of the first round of investment wasn't Google operating on less than 100 PCs? Scalability may only become an issue long after they had investor funding so it may not be the dire problem you suggest. Again, Linux sure was convenient but it is highly questionably that it was a necessity.
You lost it with that last remark. One third of big companies allowing Macs? What are you smoking? If you are going to make sh*t up, at least make it believable.
Did something about the infoworld link and their reference to Global Equities Research confuse you?
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard.
I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company.
And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
Google would have found some other hardware/software combination to boot strap itself. You seem to be confusing a convenience with a necessity.
"New data from Gartner and IDC show that sales of Macs in the United States have crossed the 10 percent threshold -- which hasn't happened since 1991"
"As U.S. PC sales declined 4.2 percent (according to IDC) or 5.6 percent (according to Gartner), Mac sales shot up more than any other PC line. Apple's performance far exceed the industry average"
"The high Mac sales figures comes on the heels of a report from Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry showing that one-third of big businesses now offer employees the option of a Mac, and that most employees offered the choice select a Mac rather than a Windows PC."
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC
Either you need to include Apple computers, in which case it's not everyone, or else your definition of PC is so narrow it wouldn't include a Linux PC anyway.
The GP seems fundamentally correct, let me rephrase things. New computers generally come with a bundled OS, Windows or Mac OS X, and consumers generally see no need to replace either OS with Linux. The switching cost does not seem to exceed the perceived benefits. You can argue the consumers are mistaken but the GP's point that a bundled OS is an incredible hurdle for Linux on the desktop is correct.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc.
FOSS has largely cannibalized the support contracts of traditional Unix vendors and displaced the proprietary versions of Unix formerly used on new equipment. FOSS did not really generate new economic activity, it commoditized formerly premium priced services. Its questionable whether commodity based pricing has increased economic activity, companies at the low end would probably have purchased a virtual SunOS host rather than a virtual Linux host. Now for hobbyists FOSS has been a great boon, but I'm not sure their usage translates into much economic activity.
In the midst of an economic crisis the more expensive Mac platform enjoys a sharp increase in market share. I'd say the proposition is false, price is not the primary driver of operating system selection.
Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.
Actually they did this. IIRC they determined that you need to be about 400 yards out. However they also determined that you can't see the muzzle flash that far out.
most employment contracts let the company OWN YOUR ASS, even outside of work hours and using your own equipment, even doing work not related to the core business of the company... we tried FOR A MONTH to negotiate some contracts that would allow me to work on my DIY audio hw/sw/fw stuff and not have them own it.
Strange, most contracts I've seen, and contracts described by others, do make provisions for exceptions. At my previous employer is was part of the standard HR process for new hires to list personal projects that you wanted a waiver for. It was quite easy to get a waiver for proejcts unrelated to work. One coworker had a personal project that did overlap with the company business, the company said he could only fix bugs in the existing code and not add new features or other enhance the overlapping project. YMMV.
And I'm swedish, I may not be a lawyer but I still find it highly unlikely that if I write a small piece of code for a larger work project and I then go home and, in my own time, write a more general version of the same code (say, rather than just a class with a couple of essential functions I write a small library) and then deploy it at work (without actually doing any development on that codebase at work) that an employer would have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting a court to give them the copyright for the code written at home. There's a difference between loyalty toward your employer while you're on the clock and loyalty to your employer when they're not paying you...
I don't see the cited legal summary making any such distinction. Note:
"In brief, loyalty means an obligation of the employee to put the interests of the employer ahead of personal interests and to avoid situations entailing a collision of interests."
The hypothetical situation you describe may be in conflict from both the personal interests and collision of interests perspective. Also I would not be surprised if the act of inserting your code into work product made your sole ownership of the code questionable or at the least gives the company perpetual rights to use the inserted code as they wish, without any need to comply with whatever FOSS license you normally use.
... You also left out the last paragraph from that abstract which explains the part that is generally held as "if you're the boss your public image and all that stuff is important off the clock, if you're just another employee with normal pay then you can't be expected to give a fuck". That is, what you linked is, at least among swedes, also about your general behaviour and how it's not ok to fire a cashier or a programmer for posting pics of themselves really drunk on Facebook while the CEO is expected to be more loyal to the employer due to his/her position in the company
That's an irrelevant tangent. We are only discussing work product and creating a competing product/service on your own time while employed. What would be relevant is "nature of the work tasks" and "position of the employee". In the hypothetical scenario you describe a person employed as a programmer wrote code related to work tasks at home. It would seem that the duty of loyalty would be applicable.
I just think you're making a lot of assumptions about the laws in the jurisdiction I'm in. Heck, the employment contract I signed was a grand total of one A4 page that was mostly taken up by personal information. Apart from this I also signed a second agreement where I promised not to abuse the company's IT resources (this is the part that included not giving business secrets to competitors or using them against the company in some other way).
Employment agreements do not need to repeat things that are essentially the law of the land. You mentioned Sweden earlier. I did a quick google and found an established "duty of loyalty". This seems to be the local version of the general concept I was referring to.
"Under Swedish law, employees have a far-reaching obligation to be loyal to their employers. The concept of loyalty covers an array of different obligations. Between themselves, these are rather divergent. Their common denominator is that they are considered to be part of a general and overriding employee obligation to be loyal to their employer.
In brief, loyalty means an obligation of the employee to put the interests of the employer ahead of personal interests and to avoid situations entailing a collision of interests. To phrase it differently, employees must not act in such a way as to harm the employer. Yet another way to express the concept of loyalty succinctly is to say that the employer enjoys exclusive rights."
https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&doctype=cite&docid=20+Comp.+Lab.+L.+%26+Pol'y+J.+297&key=ed9a6102cc17d06fdd60c65923ef953f
A laser could easily target something as fast as a bullet. We're talking lightspeed here... bullets move only marginally faster than mach 1.
No. The flight time of a laser beam has nothing to do with *tracking*. What sensor is detecting the incoming bullet? How many readings does it need to accurately determine a trajectory? How fast are the servo motors that point the laser? How far is the laser's current vector from the desired vector?
How is future contamination avoided? I skimmed the article and didn't notice anything. Better fuels, motors, handling? Or no more launches from these sites?
He played on Battle.net, but only ever by himself. He didn't trade items, either. I couldn't fathom why anyone would do that, considering the palpable negative effects the added latency and the occasional full-on desync had on the game itself.
Perhaps to only level up a character once? If he changed his mind about multiplayer he would be ready. Single player characters could not be transferred to Battle.net, at least last time I played.
There is also the possibility of using Battle.net to store his character. If he played from multiple computers this could be convenient.
This sort of clause is to prevent employees from doing a poor job at work and then rushing off home to do the "proper job" and then setting up in competition.
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself but in my case I didn't do a poor job, I just wrote the code that was required, if anything my employer would've had issues with me wasting company time writing code they wouldn't need. The "proper job" at home was a much more generalized class. There's also the fact that I was obviously not tasked with just writing that class, it was merely something that had to be created to complete the task at hand.
I think "poor job" should have been in quotes just like "proper job". You seem to be taking things too literally. Employee contracts often require you to submit any good ideas you may have that further the company's business, improve its products, and also not compete while you are an employee. This sounds like the sort of thing to have submitted a waiver for.
The employer pays a salary rather than weekly wages and expects to have the creative output of it's employees.
I don't know what kind of wacky employment contract you have but mine clearly states I should work 40 hours per week and that's what I'm getting paid for, I'm not getting paid for the code I write at home in my own time.
True, but as an employee you are also probably prohibited from competing with your employer on your own time. Even if not explicitly in your contract it may be part of the law in your jurisdiction that you can not actively compete while employed, just as it is part of the law that you may compete after you leave.
The employer is not subsidising R&D and training of it's employees future inventions.
And I'm not writing code for free.
That may not have been your intention but if you write competing code while employed you may very well have done so. It is best to apply your home coding time to things unrelated to work or its industry.
My contract has such a clause but is limited to software that relates to the companies business. So I can write a tic-tac-toe solver at home and keep rights to it.
My contract actually has no non-compete clause at all except for a bit of legalese which (when translated to english from swedish legalese) can be summed up as "You can't use information stolen from us to compete with us or any other shady stuff like that", it doesn't prohibit me from leaving to create a competing service/product or going to work with a competitor, I just can't use any insider information (like knowledge of upcoming products or technical limitations in the software we use).
Quitting and starting up a competing shop or working for a competitor are generally protected by law. No-compete clauses that state otherwise are often not enforceable, except for weird circumstances where you were an owner, etc. However this does not mean you can begin to compete ***while*** you are an employee. You may very well be allowed to create an improved version of your former employer's product the day after you leave, barring use of confidential information and trade secrets - generally knowledge is fine though, but if you show up with a market ready product on the day after you leave there may very well be some legal intervention.
I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license.
If that is the case, and the employment contract does not have some absurd "we own everything you do, including in your spare time" clause, then the employer will need to obtain a license for redistribution - just like with any other copyrighted code.
Those clauses are not absurd if the work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry. When you are an employee you are not paid merely to type, you are paid to design or improve the company's product. This may include good ideas. If you work at home on something related you may be effectively competing while you are an employee. The argument you are making generally assumes that the stuff you do at work and at home are unrelated. It is not clear that this is the case here. If work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry then you generally need to get a waiver from the company.
Such waivers are about as common as the spare time clauses, things are not as absurd as you are suggesting. All the companies I've had contracts with were pretty good at issuing waivers.
***Assuming*** the code in question was employee work product and the company is the actual copy holder this incident raises an interesting issue. If you are the sole FOSS advocate at your company, and you get company approval to release code under FOSS, your "mission" seems to not be over. It seems you have to advocate/convert others if you wish the code to remain FOSS after you leave. If there is no one around who cares then the company is perfectly within their rights to fork the code and continue in a proprietary fashion.
Obvious. Have a lawyer send them a lovely letter telling them to cease and desist. If they do neither... sue the fuckraping bitchpiss out of them. What else?
It is not obvious. Who owns the copyright? He said he was an employee, so *IF* the code was "work product" he may only have had the right to GPL the code as an agent of the company. Since he is no longer with the company he no longer would have such authority. If the company is the copyright holder they are free to "fork" it and go proprietary. It is not clear if the code is employee work product so nothing is obvious.
The google account tied to my phone is completely unrelated to the google account that has my email/etc. What sort of crazy person wouldn't create a random google account when setting up the phone in the first place?
Ahhhhh.. I guess when Google revokes your account you'll ring up and complain using your pseudonymous name right!
You do not have to use pseudonyms, use your real name. For example John Doe might create john.doe and jdoe. Use one for an Android Market account and nothing else. Google has to allow duplicate names in account profile info.
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Null termination sounds lovely when you've a teenager writing assembly and doing register allocation by hand, but it's obviously bad once you've seriously thought about runtimes, like after taking an algorithms class.
I spent my formative programming years primarily writing code in assembly and I resent that statement. :-) Runtime is always in one's mind and optimizing for speed is the desired goal. Optimizing for size is something that is merely forced upon us by circumstances beyond our control. No true assembly programmer, nor any true Scotsman, would prioritize size over speed if avoidable.
They don't look the same to me, these days the "IT" decisions are taken by the MBA type guys, with the sole purpose of maximizing their chances to get more visibility, "exceed objectives" and get a larger bonus/promotion/whatever. Sure they're rational too but what do they have in common with CS?
Programmer for 20+ years here, BS and MS in CS. I used to share such opinions. Then I went to business school. I really enjoyed business school in part because I was constantly amused by how ignorant and wrong I had been regarding such opinions. May I be bold enough to suggest that the portrayal of MBAs in popular and nerd cultures are about as accurate as the portrayal of programmers in popular and non-nerd cultures.
None of the above should be interpreted to mean that business school makes one appreciate Dilbert any less. Dilbert is actually pretty popular with MBA types and their professors as well.
this could have been a perfectly typical and rational IT or CS decision, like the many similar decisions we all make every day
Actually the tradeoff may not have been rational. The storage bytes saved may have been offset by the extra code bytes necessary for handling unknown length strings. Perhaps this is actually an example of premature optimization, optimizing things before proper profiling and analysis has shown the problem exists and the proposed solution is beneficial.
Amazon sold it for $0.00? What's 20% of $0.00? You could correctly argue that the developer received 1000% of the sale price.
The publisher said Amazon claims to give developers 20% of the normal asking price, not the current sale price.
There is nothing at all confusing about an obvious lie. Now if you are willing to provide something that is actually verifiable, then that's another matter.
I cited an industry publication (InfoWorld) that has been around for over 30 years. A publication that has covered PCs, Macs and "big iron"; DOS, OS/2, Windows, Linux and Unix; iOS and Android; ... They cited a wall street research firm (Global Equities Research) that does work for Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Jefferies, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan.
I think the above debunks your "obvious lie" suggestion. Now if I had quoted some guy at a Mac fan blog then you would have had a point. What is your reference to debunk the idea that fortune 500 firms are currently offering some employees an option between Macs and PCs and that in such cases Macs are preferred? I admit I was surprised to read this but when I followed the various links it mentioned this was a side effect of 80% of fortune 500 currently supporting iPads to some degree. Seems plausible, especially given that Macs run Windows and Linux in virtual machines quite nicely - legacy apps are not the deal breaker they once were.
No. Sometimes money is important and so is scalability. If a system is too expensive to be built, it never will be built. The operational costs will drag down the entire operation to the point where it collapses. Cheap solutions make some problems solvable. There's really no getting around that. Fixating on SunOS is a great example because Sun hardware in general back in the day did not scale well enough for some tasks regardless of how much money you wanted to throw at a problem. It's a really poor example to bring up here.
I'm not fixating on Sun, that's just one of the more obvious examples of cannibalization. Google could have gone done many other paths as well. I'm not 100% sure but at the time of the first round of investment wasn't Google operating on less than 100 PCs? Scalability may only become an issue long after they had investor funding so it may not be the dire problem you suggest. Again, Linux sure was convenient but it is highly questionably that it was a necessity.
You lost it with that last remark. One third of big companies allowing Macs? What are you smoking? If you are going to make sh*t up, at least make it believable.
Did something about the infoworld link and their reference to Global Equities Research confuse you?
So, Google would have used SunOS, and MS Windows Server licenses, to run the servers they salvaged from the junkyard. I believe they could have acheived the same computing power growth, at thousands of dollars per server, when starting the company. And it's not like companies like GOOG do generate any (direct and indirect) economic activity.
Google would have found some other hardware/software combination to boot strap itself. You seem to be confusing a convenience with a necessity.
"New data from Gartner and IDC show that sales of Macs in the United States have crossed the 10 percent threshold -- which hasn't happened since 1991"
"As U.S. PC sales declined 4.2 percent (according to IDC) or 5.6 percent (according to Gartner), Mac sales shot up more than any other PC line. Apple's performance far exceed the industry average"
"The high Mac sales figures comes on the heels of a report from Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry showing that one-third of big businesses now offer employees the option of a Mac, and that most employees offered the choice select a Mac rather than a Windows PC."
http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/apple-mac-sales-back-above-10-percent-after-10-years-002
Nope, because of Microsoft's monopoly everyone buys a Windows license when they buy a new PC
Either you need to include Apple computers, in which case it's not everyone, or else your definition of PC is so narrow it wouldn't include a Linux PC anyway.
The GP seems fundamentally correct, let me rephrase things. New computers generally come with a bundled OS, Windows or Mac OS X, and consumers generally see no need to replace either OS with Linux. The switching cost does not seem to exceed the perceived benefits. You can argue the consumers are mistaken but the GP's point that a bundled OS is an incredible hurdle for Linux on the desktop is correct.
Open-source can also stimulate economic activity through sales of support contracts, new equipment, etc.
FOSS has largely cannibalized the support contracts of traditional Unix vendors and displaced the proprietary versions of Unix formerly used on new equipment. FOSS did not really generate new economic activity, it commoditized formerly premium priced services. Its questionable whether commodity based pricing has increased economic activity, companies at the low end would probably have purchased a virtual SunOS host rather than a virtual Linux host. Now for hobbyists FOSS has been a great boon, but I'm not sure their usage translates into much economic activity.
In the midst of an economic crisis the more expensive Mac platform enjoys a sharp increase in market share. I'd say the proposition is false, price is not the primary driver of operating system selection.
Perhaps FOSS apps have some advantage but Mac OS X is unix based so many run as well on Mac as they do under Linux. Some FOSS apps also have windows ports. So there does not seem to be a real economic driver for Linux on the desktop via FOSS apps either.
Now there is a proposition for Mythbusters!
Actually they did this. IIRC they determined that you need to be about 400 yards out. However they also determined that you can't see the muzzle flash that far out.
most employment contracts let the company OWN YOUR ASS, even outside of work hours and using your own equipment, even doing work not related to the core business of the company ... we tried FOR A MONTH to negotiate some contracts that would allow me to work on my DIY audio hw/sw/fw stuff and not have them own it.
Strange, most contracts I've seen, and contracts described by others, do make provisions for exceptions. At my previous employer is was part of the standard HR process for new hires to list personal projects that you wanted a waiver for. It was quite easy to get a waiver for proejcts unrelated to work. One coworker had a personal project that did overlap with the company business, the company said he could only fix bugs in the existing code and not add new features or other enhance the overlapping project. YMMV.
And I'm swedish, I may not be a lawyer but I still find it highly unlikely that if I write a small piece of code for a larger work project and I then go home and, in my own time, write a more general version of the same code (say, rather than just a class with a couple of essential functions I write a small library) and then deploy it at work (without actually doing any development on that codebase at work) that an employer would have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting a court to give them the copyright for the code written at home. There's a difference between loyalty toward your employer while you're on the clock and loyalty to your employer when they're not paying you ...
I don't see the cited legal summary making any such distinction. Note:
"In brief, loyalty means an obligation of the employee to put the interests of the employer ahead of personal interests and to avoid situations entailing a collision of interests."
The hypothetical situation you describe may be in conflict from both the personal interests and collision of interests perspective. Also I would not be surprised if the act of inserting your code into work product made your sole ownership of the code questionable or at the least gives the company perpetual rights to use the inserted code as they wish, without any need to comply with whatever FOSS license you normally use.
... You also left out the last paragraph from that abstract which explains the part that is generally held as "if you're the boss your public image and all that stuff is important off the clock, if you're just another employee with normal pay then you can't be expected to give a fuck". That is, what you linked is, at least among swedes, also about your general behaviour and how it's not ok to fire a cashier or a programmer for posting pics of themselves really drunk on Facebook while the CEO is expected to be more loyal to the employer due to his/her position in the company
That's an irrelevant tangent. We are only discussing work product and creating a competing product/service on your own time while employed. What would be relevant is "nature of the work tasks" and "position of the employee". In the hypothetical scenario you describe a person employed as a programmer wrote code related to work tasks at home. It would seem that the duty of loyalty would be applicable.
I just think you're making a lot of assumptions about the laws in the jurisdiction I'm in. Heck, the employment contract I signed was a grand total of one A4 page that was mostly taken up by personal information. Apart from this I also signed a second agreement where I promised not to abuse the company's IT resources (this is the part that included not giving business secrets to competitors or using them against the company in some other way).
Employment agreements do not need to repeat things that are essentially the law of the land. You mentioned Sweden earlier. I did a quick google and found an established "duty of loyalty". This seems to be the local version of the general concept I was referring to.
"Under Swedish law, employees have a far-reaching obligation to be loyal to their employers. The concept of loyalty covers an array of different obligations. Between themselves, these are rather divergent. Their common denominator is that they are considered to be part of a general and overriding employee obligation to be loyal to their employer. In brief, loyalty means an obligation of the employee to put the interests of the employer ahead of personal interests and to avoid situations entailing a collision of interests. To phrase it differently, employees must not act in such a way as to harm the employer. Yet another way to express the concept of loyalty succinctly is to say that the employer enjoys exclusive rights." https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&doctype=cite&docid=20+Comp.+Lab.+L.+%26+Pol'y+J.+297&key=ed9a6102cc17d06fdd60c65923ef953f
A laser could easily target something as fast as a bullet. We're talking lightspeed here... bullets move only marginally faster than mach 1.
No. The flight time of a laser beam has nothing to do with *tracking*. What sensor is detecting the incoming bullet? How many readings does it need to accurately determine a trajectory? How fast are the servo motors that point the laser? How far is the laser's current vector from the desired vector?
How is future contamination avoided? I skimmed the article and didn't notice anything. Better fuels, motors, handling? Or no more launches from these sites?
He played on Battle.net, but only ever by himself. He didn't trade items, either. I couldn't fathom why anyone would do that, considering the palpable negative effects the added latency and the occasional full-on desync had on the game itself.
Perhaps to only level up a character once? If he changed his mind about multiplayer he would be ready. Single player characters could not be transferred to Battle.net, at least last time I played.
There is also the possibility of using Battle.net to store his character. If he played from multiple computers this could be convenient.
This sort of clause is to prevent employees from doing a poor job at work and then rushing off home to do the "proper job" and then setting up in competition.
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself but in my case I didn't do a poor job, I just wrote the code that was required, if anything my employer would've had issues with me wasting company time writing code they wouldn't need. The "proper job" at home was a much more generalized class. There's also the fact that I was obviously not tasked with just writing that class, it was merely something that had to be created to complete the task at hand.
I think "poor job" should have been in quotes just like "proper job". You seem to be taking things too literally. Employee contracts often require you to submit any good ideas you may have that further the company's business, improve its products, and also not compete while you are an employee. This sounds like the sort of thing to have submitted a waiver for.
The employer pays a salary rather than weekly wages and expects to have the creative output of it's employees.
I don't know what kind of wacky employment contract you have but mine clearly states I should work 40 hours per week and that's what I'm getting paid for, I'm not getting paid for the code I write at home in my own time.
True, but as an employee you are also probably prohibited from competing with your employer on your own time. Even if not explicitly in your contract it may be part of the law in your jurisdiction that you can not actively compete while employed, just as it is part of the law that you may compete after you leave.
The employer is not subsidising R&D and training of it's employees future inventions.
And I'm not writing code for free.
That may not have been your intention but if you write competing code while employed you may very well have done so. It is best to apply your home coding time to things unrelated to work or its industry.
My contract has such a clause but is limited to software that relates to the companies business. So I can write a tic-tac-toe solver at home and keep rights to it.
My contract actually has no non-compete clause at all except for a bit of legalese which (when translated to english from swedish legalese) can be summed up as "You can't use information stolen from us to compete with us or any other shady stuff like that", it doesn't prohibit me from leaving to create a competing service/product or going to work with a competitor, I just can't use any insider information (like knowledge of upcoming products or technical limitations in the software we use).
Quitting and starting up a competing shop or working for a competitor are generally protected by law. No-compete clauses that state otherwise are often not enforceable, except for weird circumstances where you were an owner, etc. However this does not mean you can begin to compete ***while*** you are an employee. You may very well be allowed to create an improved version of your former employer's product the day after you leave, barring use of confidential information and trade secrets - generally knowledge is fine though, but if you show up with a market ready product on the day after you leave there may very well be some legal intervention.
According to the article (see comments section):
I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license.
If that is the case, and the employment contract does not have some absurd "we own everything you do, including in your spare time" clause, then the employer will need to obtain a license for redistribution - just like with any other copyrighted code.
Those clauses are not absurd if the work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry. When you are an employee you are not paid merely to type, you are paid to design or improve the company's product. This may include good ideas. If you work at home on something related you may be effectively competing while you are an employee. The argument you are making generally assumes that the stuff you do at work and at home are unrelated. It is not clear that this is the case here. If work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry then you generally need to get a waiver from the company.
Such waivers are about as common as the spare time clauses, things are not as absurd as you are suggesting. All the companies I've had contracts with were pretty good at issuing waivers.
***Assuming*** the code in question was employee work product and the company is the actual copy holder this incident raises an interesting issue. If you are the sole FOSS advocate at your company, and you get company approval to release code under FOSS, your "mission" seems to not be over. It seems you have to advocate/convert others if you wish the code to remain FOSS after you leave. If there is no one around who cares then the company is perfectly within their rights to fork the code and continue in a proprietary fashion.
Obvious. Have a lawyer send them a lovely letter telling them to cease and desist. If they do neither... sue the fuckraping bitchpiss out of them. What else?
It is not obvious. Who owns the copyright? He said he was an employee, so *IF* the code was "work product" he may only have had the right to GPL the code as an agent of the company. Since he is no longer with the company he no longer would have such authority. If the company is the copyright holder they are free to "fork" it and go proprietary. It is not clear if the code is employee work product so nothing is obvious.
The google account tied to my phone is completely unrelated to the google account that has my email/etc. What sort of crazy person wouldn't create a random google account when setting up the phone in the first place?
Ahhhhh.. I guess when Google revokes your account you'll ring up and complain using your pseudonymous name right!
You do not have to use pseudonyms, use your real name. For example John Doe might create john.doe and jdoe. Use one for an Android Market account and nothing else. Google has to allow duplicate names in account profile info.
Creationist are not qualified to be scientists. Dr Roy Spencer is a creationist.
So was Isaac Newton. Is he qualified to be a scientist? :-)