My company pays 10% of the usual hourly wage for everyone who is on call. When a call comes in, the rate jumps to the usual hourly rate. If this makes you work more hours than agreed upon in your contract, an overtime percentage is added.
Sometimes I get the feeling this kind of legislation is driven by the way corporations view the world: as a place to make money. In such a simple world view anything that allows you to get more money or make it harder for others to get yours is A Good Thing.
If everything is valued in terms of money, moral issues tend to slip aside. The question Americans need to ask their legislators is: does this law make our society a better one? People can debate on waht makes society better, but allowing corporations to own the idea space is not an improvement IMHO.
Like other posters have noted: where's is the evidence? Are people supposed to believe statements like these at face value? Modern politics seem to have lost the accountability that used to be more common. Over here in The Netherlands the ruling parties are blocking a parlementary investigation into what led the Dutch to support the attack on Iraq...
As a Dutch taxpayer I would love to see any government organisation spend less on licenses for software while maintaining or even improving the functionality.
The central issue here is the balance of power between the supplier and the customer. Having all of your data locked up in a format that is only understood by the tools of a single supplier is a bad thing. Now this might be a very simple statement, but the hard part is getting people to see that they are being held hostage by their software suppliers. MS is the current capo di tutti capi, but the IT family has played this game for a very long time.
One of the things we need to give these IT mobsters credit for is creative use of language: "an IBM discount", "Open Office XML",....
How does all of this compare to IntelliJ IDEA? It's been a long time sine I've looked at NetBeans, and from time to time I try to use Eclipse, but compared to IntelliJ Eclipse feels clunky, slow and overly complicated. The basic idea is very nice, but the problem with flexibility is that you can have too much of it. IntelliJ hits the sweet spot between power and ease of use, IMHO.
However, I would like to be able to use a free (as in beer) IDE for my casual Java coding at home.
Last time I checked, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a compilation of European folk stories that existed long before Walt Disney or copyright/trademark laws. As the dad of three, it bugs me more than a little when Disney Inc attempts to own childhood fantasy and retroactively copyright/trademark/turn-into-disney-IP all kinds of things that were part of the childhood psyche-scape long before Uncle Walt was even born.
Last time I checked, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was in Grimm's Fairy Tales, a compilation of European folk stories that existed long before Walt Disney or copyright/trademark laws. As the dad of three, it bugs me more than a little when Disney Inc attempts to own childhood fantasy and retroactively copyright/trademark/turn-into-disney-IP all kinds of things that were part of the childhood psyche-scape long before Uncle Walt was even born. Warning: ranting may occur in this post.
Hey, but Disney lets you buy all kinds of beautiful toys, for just a small amount of money. The whole ecosystem around companies like Disney and McDonalds is not really what I would like to see for my kids (I'm father of two). Little kids are able to recognize the McDonalds logo long before they can read, just because of the inescapable commercials that are aired in and around childrens programmes on TV. Just take a look at the way McDonalds lures kids: shiny toys, laughing children all over the place. As far as I'm concerned commercials for fast food would have to contain pictures of obese children and adults suffering a heart attack from bad eating habits. Just the fact the McDonalds calls itself a 'restaurant' is an insult to restaurants all over the world. Does anybody really think Paul Bocuse and a burger joint are in the same league?
My personal feeling is that companies feel that they have the right to occupy more and more of the public domain, both in the physical and the psychological domain.
Ease of use is not very cool in certain circles. Lots of people who are really interested in developing software tend to be curious and want to try new things all the time. Contrast this with the greyhaired COBOL coder that is still typing ugly code, but gets the job done.
I happen to develop in Java, and a lot of the stuff we use is, well, mature. Apache Jakarta is a great source of quality software, most of the version control systems that are NOT Visual Source Safe are usable, IntelliJ runs circles around VS as far as refactroing and basic code editing is concerned.
Ehat is missing is the tooling to do the quick and dirty prototypes in that business people love and tend to use as the final product. OSS needs things like VB, Access and FrontPage that allow people with very limited knowledge to produce something that works for them. We know it's ugly, but it will scratch THEIR itch. Want to be famous? Write an Access with VBA clone that uses drag 'n drop that allows someone to slap together an application in a couple of hours. Allow the result to run on your platform of choice and everybody should be happy.
Ah, the joys of Office and trying to understand what you can do with it. What about the wonderful decision to REALLY I8N the macro language used in for instance Excel? It's always fun to try to get an English macro/function/script (whatever you want to call it) to run in the Dutch version. It doesn't because even the keywords have been translated.
And what about the quality of the documentation? In Excel 2000 the help file says the argument seperator for the IF function is a comma. Excel itself says it must be a;. Just a small example of how dedicated MS is to quality.
Same here, the tabs were a major improvement. Having the ability to have a lot of sites open in just one window was a very big advantage for me. After installing the Tab Mix Plus extension it got even better, and I find myself wanting to rearrange tabs in my IDE, or shift focus to a particular tab by just hovering the mouse pointer over it.
Another major plus is security. There has been a lot of discussion whether som security problems of Firefox are as bad as some of the IE security problems, but I feel more secure when using Firefox. I'm wondering how IE 7 will do in the security departement.
And finally: performance. IE 6 is noticably slower rendering pages, and especially its reload behaviour can be annoying. I've never had the mahor memory leaks other people complain about. Even keeping FF open for days on end does not lead to excessive memory usage. YMMV, I guess.
This kind of thing has been attempted by a Dutch newspaper http://wethepeople.nrc.nl/. The subject under discussion was/is how to go forward with European integration after the people France and The Netherlands had not accepted the proposed constitution. The software used was not really user friendly, and the discussion was channeled by allowing only 3 alternatives to be discussed, but the experiment is interesting, also because some politiicians of name joined it.
At least an initiative like this will bring the discussion more in the open and make the process of policymaking a little more transparent.
That figure of 20% is just the average of the percentages in all countries measured, which is very misleading. If very small countries like Liechtenstein and Andorra would have 100% Firefox usage (meaning all 25 people living there use FF), the figure would zoom up, even with a marginal increase in the actual number of users.
That being said, I'm ashamed to be Dutch. Only 10%, what a disappointment...
Sounds an awful lot like XSL-FO to me. The idea might be nice, but the problem remains the same: what applications can handle what kind of content? Passing XML around may sound like a general solution, but it doesn't do anything at all. There is still the need for the actual components that process the data, regardless of the format the data is in.
That's just a matter of opinion, but my opinion of people who actually produce this kind of documents can not be summarised in uncensored terms. I especially enjoyed the Word screenshots (hit previous a couple of times on the link given above). The document uthat was shown was some kind of corporate newsletter, the kind of thing we all love to ignore. I think the choice of subject makes it very clear who MS is aiming for...
The funny thing is that you have to be careful with the name of your shortcut. I did a little, very unscientific and in no way documented experiment under W2K, SP4:
1. Try to assign a shortcut key to cmd.exe (the command processor). Did not find a way to do this directly, because the online documentation is plain wrong. Had to create a shortcut (on the desktop) to get it to work. 2. Try it a couple of times: it WORKS! 3. Now rename the shortcut on the desktop (just for fun and also because I don't want to clutter my desktop with 'Shortcut to' drivel. 4. Try it again: it DOESN'T WORK anymore!. Just a simple rename will break this....
Over here in the Netherlands and more in particular in the larger cities, money is not the only factor deciding who uses the bus/tram/trolley/.
Especially here in Den Haag the tram is a very good option if you want to get somewhere fast and don't want to be stuck in traffic. You have to keep in mind that cities over here have not been build around cars.
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My company pays 10% of the usual hourly wage for everyone who is on call. When a call comes in, the rate jumps to the usual hourly rate. If this makes you work more hours than agreed upon in your contract, an overtime percentage is added.
Not if you happen to be Finnish. In that case you need to write it yourself.
You know the RIAA is taking care of the poor artists. Since the artist is dead, the work can die too...
How many kids does Ballmer have?
Sometimes I get the feeling this kind of legislation is driven by the way corporations view the world: as a place to make money. In such a simple world view anything that allows you to get more money or make it harder for others to get yours is A Good Thing.
If everything is valued in terms of money, moral issues tend to slip aside. The question Americans need to ask their legislators is: does this law make our society a better one? People can debate on waht makes society better, but allowing corporations to own the idea space is not an improvement IMHO.
Like other posters have noted: where's is the evidence? Are people supposed to believe statements like these at face value? Modern politics seem to have lost the accountability that used to be more common. Over here in The Netherlands the ruling parties are blocking a parlementary investigation into what led the Dutch to support the attack on Iraq...
I read an interesting story on http://slashdot.org/articles/08/03/17/0649200.shtmlthis very subject.
As a Dutch taxpayer I would love to see any government organisation spend less on licenses for software while maintaining or even improving the functionality.
The central issue here is the balance of power between the supplier and the customer. Having all of your data locked up in a format that is only understood by the tools of a single supplier is a bad thing. Now this might be a very simple statement, but the hard part is getting people to see that they are being held hostage by their software suppliers. MS is the current capo di tutti capi, but the IT family has played this game for a very long time.
One of the things we need to give these IT mobsters credit for is creative use of language: "an IBM discount", "Open Office XML",....
How does all of this compare to IntelliJ IDEA? It's been a long time sine I've looked at NetBeans, and from time to time I try to use Eclipse, but compared to IntelliJ Eclipse feels clunky, slow and overly complicated. The basic idea is very nice, but the problem with flexibility is that you can have too much of it. IntelliJ hits the sweet spot between power and ease of use, IMHO.
However, I would like to be able to use a free (as in beer) IDE for my casual Java coding at home.
when they sang 'bend your words like Uri Gellers' spoons'.
Hey, but Disney lets you buy all kinds of beautiful toys, for just a small amount of money. The whole ecosystem around companies like Disney and McDonalds is not really what I would like to see for my kids (I'm father of two). Little kids are able to recognize the McDonalds logo long before they can read, just because of the inescapable commercials that are aired in and around childrens programmes on TV. Just take a look at the way McDonalds lures kids: shiny toys, laughing children all over the place. As far as I'm concerned commercials for fast food would have to contain pictures of obese children and adults suffering a heart attack from bad eating habits. Just the fact the McDonalds calls itself a 'restaurant' is an insult to restaurants all over the world. Does anybody really think Paul Bocuse and a burger joint are in the same league?
My personal feeling is that companies feel that they have the right to occupy more and more of the public domain, both in the physical and the psychological domain.
Ease of use is not very cool in certain circles. Lots of people who are really interested in developing software tend to be curious and want to try new things all the time. Contrast this with the greyhaired COBOL coder that is still typing ugly code, but gets the job done.
I happen to develop in Java, and a lot of the stuff we use is, well, mature. Apache Jakarta is a great source of quality software, most of the version control systems that are NOT Visual Source Safe are usable, IntelliJ runs circles around VS as far as refactroing and basic code editing is concerned.
Ehat is missing is the tooling to do the quick and dirty prototypes in that business people love and tend to use as the final product. OSS needs things like VB, Access and FrontPage that allow people with very limited knowledge to produce something that works for them. We know it's ugly, but it will scratch THEIR itch. Want to be famous? Write an Access with VBA clone that uses drag 'n drop that allows someone to slap together an application in a couple of hours. Allow the result to run on your platform of choice and everybody should be happy.
And this definitely proves NTSC is Not The Smart Choice.
Ah, the joys of Office and trying to understand what you can do with it. What about the wonderful decision to REALLY I8N the macro language used in for instance Excel? It's always fun to try to get an English macro/function/script (whatever you want to call it) to run in the Dutch version. It doesn't because even the keywords have been translated.
;. Just a small example of how dedicated MS is to quality.
And what about the quality of the documentation? In Excel 2000 the help file says the argument seperator for the IF function is a comma. Excel itself says it must be a
Same here, the tabs were a major improvement. Having the ability to have a lot of sites open in just one window was a very big advantage for me. After installing the Tab Mix Plus extension it got even better, and I find myself wanting to rearrange tabs in my IDE, or shift focus to a particular tab by just hovering the mouse pointer over it.
Another major plus is security. There has been a lot of discussion whether som security problems of Firefox are as bad as some of the IE security problems, but I feel more secure when using Firefox. I'm wondering how IE 7 will do in the security departement.
And finally: performance. IE 6 is noticably slower rendering pages, and especially its reload behaviour can be annoying. I've never had the mahor memory leaks other people complain about. Even keeping FF open for days on end does not lead to excessive memory usage. YMMV, I guess.
This kind of thing has been attempted by a Dutch newspaper http://wethepeople.nrc.nl/. The subject under discussion was/is how to go forward with European integration after the people France and The Netherlands had not accepted the proposed constitution. The software used was not really user friendly, and the discussion was channeled by allowing only 3 alternatives to be discussed, but the experiment is interesting, also because some politiicians of name joined it.
At least an initiative like this will bring the discussion more in the open and make the process of policymaking a little more transparent.
That figure of 20% is just the average of the percentages in all countries measured, which is very misleading. If very small countries like Liechtenstein and Andorra would have 100% Firefox usage (meaning all 25 people living there use FF), the figure would zoom up, even with a marginal increase in the actual number of users.
That being said, I'm ashamed to be Dutch. Only 10%, what a disappointment...
Sounds an awful lot like XSL-FO to me. The idea might be nice, but the problem remains the same: what applications can handle what kind of content? Passing XML around may sound like a general solution, but it doesn't do anything at all. There is still the need for the actual components that process the data, regardless of the format the data is in.
That's just a matter of opinion, but my opinion of people who actually produce this kind of documents can not be summarised in uncensored terms. I especially enjoyed the Word screenshots (hit previous a couple of times on the link given above). The document uthat was shown was some kind of corporate newsletter, the kind of thing we all love to ignore. I think the choice of subject makes it very clear who MS is aiming for...
The funny thing is that you have to be careful with the name of your shortcut. I did a little, very unscientific and in no way documented experiment under W2K, SP4:
1. Try to assign a shortcut key to cmd.exe (the command processor). Did not find a way to do this directly, because the online documentation is plain wrong. Had to create a shortcut (on the desktop) to get it to work.
2. Try it a couple of times: it WORKS!
3. Now rename the shortcut on the desktop (just for fun and also because I don't want to clutter my desktop with 'Shortcut to' drivel.
4. Try it again: it DOESN'T WORK anymore!. Just a simple rename will break this....
Over here in the Netherlands and more in particular in the larger cities, money is not the only factor deciding who uses the bus/tram/trolley/. Especially here in Den Haag the tram is a very good option if you want to get somewhere fast and don't want to be stuck in traffic. You have to keep in mind that cities over here have not been build around cars.