I take it nobody has sent you any naughty pictures recently? You may not be the target group for it.
Technically the target audience would be the people sending the pictures, the ones receiving would be a secondary audience - and only use the program because the primary audience is sending naked tits to them via it. Akin to why many people around here, allegedly, use Facebook, because other people use it and they wish to participate./nitpick_off
But this is by far not the first time I've heard of it, although I wouldn't have been able to name it by name, I knew of chat apps for phones that tried to implement a kind of DRM scheme for sexting. A dead end, but people seemed to have bought it nonetheless.
Dark energy - a term coined to hide the fact that "we don't know". Dark energy seems to be accelerating the expansion after a period of deceleration, this is baffling but fits observational results. The theory is that gravity used to slow the expansion down, but apparently we passed a cut-off point where space has become stretched enough so that gravity is too weak - another force is taking over and stretching space again. A force with no obvious cause, not to us at least.
Certainly not a 2000 thousand year old book, written by a bunch of dubious people as a tool for governing a population that was uneducated. Since we do live in a democracy (most of us that participate here), the answer is blindingly obvious - the people. Not your God, not a politician, judge or other subset of people, but the people.
That we have these laws and loopholes in them to begin with should be your first clue that democracy has been raped brutally by capitalism and greed. Steering the choice of how and why back to the people, an educated population, will fix many, if not all, of these issues. And formally killing the notion of "the American dream" might help a lot too. This is a dream created and maintained by the wealthy few, to make it seem like anybody has a chance of also becoming like them - to give the "masses" a goal to strive for. In reality society has no need to strive for individual wealth, as shown by revisions to Adam Smith's theories, we get much better results when we think of the group before ourselves.
Lorentz transformation and Einstein's theories govern motion in space. Space itself can expand at much greater velocities than c. The Observable Universe is something like ~80 billion LY across (today), but the objects furthest from us are ~14 billion LY away (when they emitted the light). If space could not expand faster than c, it would only be ~14 billion LY across today. Look up inflation if you're genuinely interested.
Tiny nations like Ireland are competitive to try keep their people employed.
There are no jobs created doing this, except for a few clerks maybe, that is the whole fucking point. The only reason they have an office in Ireland is because of the tax cut it yields. Where the people are ACTUALLY employed, the tax is not being paid - this means that the society who lends Apple (or whatever-corp.) their infrastructure foots the bill alone.
In the low tax country, the government is the recipient of all the money. The problem for Ireland is that this is not sustainable, there is nothing keeping the money coming in, other than the tax cut. For no investment, another country might undercut them and the money stream is gone. Going the "lower tax than our neighbors" route represents the easy way out - they do this instead of trying to be competitive with something of real value.
In court, the spirit of the law is meaningless and void, but what counts is the actual wording of the law as passed by the legislature and subsequent interpretations by other courts previous decisions
That might be the case where you live, not so much where I live, and that I am grateful for. Over here (Europe) we do have sane judges that cannot immediately be replaced by a 3 line program with an if-then-else statement - they do actually care about what the spirit of the law is.
The topic of my reply was the ethics of it though. There might be a loophole in the law that lets you do certain things, but you are not required to utilize it. There are corporation management models that include stuff like ethics and social responsibility, and saying "I have a duty to my shareholders to fuck everyone over for profit" is not always true. Profit can be measured in other numbers than money, like positive community branding and social conscience. If you create a reputation for being a complete asshole, you might find that none of the really skilled people you need will want to work for you - especially around here.
Of course, you fit the problem to the deadline. The point was also more like --- if they always show up prepared, give them something they can't prepare for. And I threw in an example. I believe Google does this kind of thing actually: Random hacks of kindness, although I'm not sure how much time each team prepares for it.
More generic, you could spend a bit of time and ask small business owners or non profit groups in the local community if they have any special/quirky needs that normal software won't satisfy, and make that the mission for the hackathon. The point being that you don't announce the challenge ahead of time and you don't present a challenge that some or most will have met before.
Then they will all come unprepared and you can have fun and help someone who might not be able to afford it at the same time.
I've also seen a few rants here about how the dude shouldn't be relying on the customer to find bugs, etc. I didn't see him state that, either. I didn't see anything about who catches the bugs. For all we know, he's doing thorough acceptance-testing and he catches all of the bugs himself.
Even if that assumption is true, he still has a problem with the contracts he signs. If there is no legal recourse (he does not imply that there is even talk of suing, so I will assume that there is no breach of contract involved) then it means he seriously fucked up his contract. At the very least he accepted a devliverable, paid the money, ran the tests and found the bug (spot the wrong order here?).
This implies a basic lack of understanding of how software development works, which could lead to the conclusion that
A) He is fucking with us, and the whole Ask Slashdot is a lie and he is masturbating furiously right now B) He has no business being in software development - yet (He could go back to school or ally up with someone more knowledgeable than him).
I can't be sure no, I assume from the context given. The basic assumption would be that all relevant facts have been laid forth, if not there really is no point in asking a question. If we assume that his post contains all that there is to it, he has a serious problem of either hiring way too cheap or spending way too little time on wording a contract - and probably that would be a symptom of knowing too little about software development to begin with.
"Shopping around for developers" is not a viable business model all on its own, and leads to exactly the kind of problems he is trying to solve - except there is no solution if the only options are hiring a developer he can't afford or try to force people to work off-contract, for free.
If on the other hand he forgot to mention this little bit of information, at the expense of using half the post to sing his own praises, well then by inference we could come to much the same conclusion really - he has no clue what he is doing.
Right, so why does he have a problem? Why is he here asking for solutions?
Honestly he sounds like a cowboy gone contractor. Thinking "hey, I can do this real cheap!", then started cowboying out his "solutions" and found out to his surprise that project management is more than "shopping around" for developers.
The real problem is coming to Slashdot with this rather than seeking advice from someone provably knowledgeable in this field - or go back to school and brush up on software development models, organization and specifically project management.
I've been using basically the same policy he describes for years without issue
I'm sure you have, and I'm sure "basically" covers a lot of little differences that make your model viable, and his not. The only clue that we really have that his model is flawed is him asking here, on Slashdot of all places, for advice on how to force developers to work for free or how to hire a senior developer that he admits he can't afford.
I'm guessing your contracts contain at least basic provisions for how you and your contractor deal with faults and bugs discovered after sign off. This whole thing would be a non-issue if that had been the case for the OP.
In fact, I'm guessing you don't quite understand what he is referring to by "specs."
Possibly, I put in the word he used himself. The "spec" was not the pivotal point either, as you seem to think. The point was that he has a severely broken model and has done nothing to remedy that. He commits the basic sin of delivering a piece of paper to someone else and then act surprised when their work turns out to be less than expected. Everybody seem to forget that he himself hired the developer, presumably on merit, and as such the developer's quality is on OP alone. He commits another basic sin of having no provisions in his contract for handling bugs, and is now surprised that it got him stuck.
The only thing that is not his responsibility in all this is acceptance testing, which it sounds like his system is failing. He really has nobody to blame but himself. Instead of crying over developers not wanting to work for free, maybe he could solicit advice as to how to improve his process - a few pointers on how to correctly identify bugs in early development instead of having his end users find them, and so on. But no, it is of course the developers fault, it's the easy target.
Yeah, although that was not by accident at all. Somehow people like the AC who asked the question pushes my buttons. The whole story reeks of a lack of understanding of how software development works, yet it is somehow the fault of somebody else. God forbid he looks at his own process with an eye towards making improvements.
Some/.-ers see through the smoke and recognize that "empathy for developers" is a marketing stunt because he knows/. - and knows that half the audience is going to eat that right up.
When asking questions at least be honest and, as with all homework, show the work you have so far. Setting himself up to be some kind of hero defeats the purpose. If he's such a God among mortals, why is he having these basic problems at all?
Yeah, and more importantly he needs to agree with his contractors on what a "deliverable" is, and when one is "done". He might be the victim of poor developers, but since his entire business model is "shopping around" for developers, that's all on him.
I certainly care about the product I deliver. I don't care much for middlemen though, and I certainly don't care for middlemen who thinks their job is done when they deliver the specification. Where was the acceptance testing? Why was this code signed off on? Why does he even have this problem to begin with? He sets himself up to sound like a fucking legend, yet it smells to high heaven of greed and incompetence.
No - he is dealing with his own lack of a process model. I wouldn't take work from him or you either, what I would do is go straight to your customer and offer a better product at a cheaper price, because I know process models and I just cut out the greedy middleman.
Of course you fix your bugs - this guy however signs off on code and then expects to be able to un-sign off on it at a later date. That is not how sane software development works. You boil down tests in every phase to a yes/no response, and that is your basis of signing off. If he signed off on shit, then it later proves to be shit, then that is all on him for not doing proper unit/integration/acceptance/whatever testing. So yeah, again, fuck him - his type is what is wrong with software development - he acts the middleman and peddles absolute shit to paying customers and expects to pass the turd on to someone else.
Correct. You agree up front what kind of repairs the retailer is responsible for. You don't come running when it turns out that the windmill you thought you ordered turns out to be a batch of tulips. You word the contract appropriately, and you have a process to verify that what has been delivered is the actual wanted product. Saying "I don't pay for bugs" is more telling than anything that this guy has NO process, and no clue.
Waking up would be a good solution to your problem. You don't pay for bugs? Oh shut the fuck up, if your specs were so masterfully created there would be no bugs. Own up to your part of the miscommunication and deal with it. Put a fault tolerance number into your contracts if your too much of a douche bag to realize that working with humans creates mistakes.
Invoking [politician you don't agree with] for this kind of thing is absurd. This has nothing to do with Obama, Bush or whomever else you guys have been employing as a figurehead recently.
This is about the spirit of the law saying something to the effect of "when you create wealth in our land, you must give the state a portion of this wealth". The word of the law says something like "the portion of your surplus generated wealth must be given to the state". Multinational corporations then use this to circumvent the spirit of the law by setting up a front office in a low tax country, selling all their crap to this front office and then buying it back in whatever other country they operate. That way they can show a net 0 gain (in most cases equal to a $0 tax bill) in the high tax country, and hand over a much lesser bit in the country they located the front office in.
This system creates an incentive for dubious governments to set their corporate income tax low in order to lure corporations onto their soil. They'll take a much lesser cut than the country the wealth was generated in would, but that's fine for them - it's that or nothing. The issue is that the tax shelter is taking a cut for doing absolutely nothing useful at the expense of the people of a whole host of other countries, people who now have to foot the bill for maintaining the infrastructure that was used to create the wealth in the first place. This pisses me off, and apparently also the politicians that represent me (fucking finally).
This might be a bit of a shock to you - not every corporation is chained to the business model of "more, more, more for me - fuck everyone else not living the dream". Corporate social responsibility
Cannot be done, moral is per definition a subjective concept - you can only prove it to yourself, your conclusion is not valid for anyone else. We may arrive at similar conclusions with regard to certain actions, and word them into law, but they remain subjective. Most of us might agree that murder is not acceptable, and thus we write it into law that in order to participate in our society, you cannot murder people.
What the big corporations are doing, to me at least, is morally questionable. Short story is that they buy services and goods from branches located in places where the income tax is lower than where the actual revenue is generated. This shows a blatant disregard for the fact that, to generate the revenue, they make use of infrastructure, labor and the market that buys their shit - not only a disregard for the services offered to the corporation in order to help it create said revenue, but a decision that paying society back for those services is not necessary.
Another side of the story are governments who decide that they would like a bit of the cut in aforementioned revenue, and undercut their neighbors corporate tax (hello Ireland, various piece of shit Island states in the Pacific, and so on), thereby creating the tax havens Apple is raking in the dough from. This to me is equally morally questionable.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it nobody has sent you any naughty pictures recently? You may not be the target group for it.
Technically the target audience would be the people sending the pictures, the ones receiving would be a secondary audience - and only use the program because the primary audience is sending naked tits to them via it. Akin to why many people around here, allegedly, use Facebook, because other people use it and they wish to participate. /nitpick_off
But this is by far not the first time I've heard of it, although I wouldn't have been able to name it by name, I knew of chat apps for phones that tried to implement a kind of DRM scheme for sexting. A dead end, but people seemed to have bought it nonetheless.
Dark energy - a term coined to hide the fact that "we don't know". Dark energy seems to be accelerating the expansion after a period of deceleration, this is baffling but fits observational results. The theory is that gravity used to slow the expansion down, but apparently we passed a cut-off point where space has become stretched enough so that gravity is too weak - another force is taking over and stretching space again. A force with no obvious cause, not to us at least.
but who decides what those ethics should be?
Certainly not a 2000 thousand year old book, written by a bunch of dubious people as a tool for governing a population that was uneducated. Since we do live in a democracy (most of us that participate here), the answer is blindingly obvious - the people. Not your God, not a politician, judge or other subset of people, but the people.
That we have these laws and loopholes in them to begin with should be your first clue that democracy has been raped brutally by capitalism and greed. Steering the choice of how and why back to the people, an educated population, will fix many, if not all, of these issues. And formally killing the notion of "the American dream" might help a lot too. This is a dream created and maintained by the wealthy few, to make it seem like anybody has a chance of also becoming like them - to give the "masses" a goal to strive for. In reality society has no need to strive for individual wealth, as shown by revisions to Adam Smith's theories, we get much better results when we think of the group before ourselves.
Lorentz transformation and Einstein's theories govern motion in space. Space itself can expand at much greater velocities than c. The Observable Universe is something like ~80 billion LY across (today), but the objects furthest from us are ~14 billion LY away (when they emitted the light). If space could not expand faster than c, it would only be ~14 billion LY across today. Look up inflation if you're genuinely interested.
Tiny nations like Ireland are competitive to try keep their people employed.
There are no jobs created doing this, except for a few clerks maybe, that is the whole fucking point. The only reason they have an office in Ireland is because of the tax cut it yields. Where the people are ACTUALLY employed, the tax is not being paid - this means that the society who lends Apple (or whatever-corp.) their infrastructure foots the bill alone.
In the low tax country, the government is the recipient of all the money. The problem for Ireland is that this is not sustainable, there is nothing keeping the money coming in, other than the tax cut. For no investment, another country might undercut them and the money stream is gone. Going the "lower tax than our neighbors" route represents the easy way out - they do this instead of trying to be competitive with something of real value.
In court, the spirit of the law is meaningless and void, but what counts is the actual wording of the law as passed by the legislature and subsequent interpretations by other courts previous decisions
That might be the case where you live, not so much where I live, and that I am grateful for. Over here (Europe) we do have sane judges that cannot immediately be replaced by a 3 line program with an if-then-else statement - they do actually care about what the spirit of the law is.
The topic of my reply was the ethics of it though. There might be a loophole in the law that lets you do certain things, but you are not required to utilize it. There are corporation management models that include stuff like ethics and social responsibility, and saying "I have a duty to my shareholders to fuck everyone over for profit" is not always true. Profit can be measured in other numbers than money, like positive community branding and social conscience. If you create a reputation for being a complete asshole, you might find that none of the really skilled people you need will want to work for you - especially around here.
Of course, you fit the problem to the deadline. The point was also more like --- if they always show up prepared, give them something they can't prepare for. And I threw in an example. I believe Google does this kind of thing actually: Random hacks of kindness, although I'm not sure how much time each team prepares for it.
More generic, you could spend a bit of time and ask small business owners or non profit groups in the local community if they have any special/quirky needs that normal software won't satisfy, and make that the mission for the hackathon. The point being that you don't announce the challenge ahead of time and you don't present a challenge that some or most will have met before.
Then they will all come unprepared and you can have fun and help someone who might not be able to afford it at the same time.
I've also seen a few rants here about how the dude shouldn't be relying on the customer to find bugs, etc. I didn't see him state that, either. I didn't see anything about who catches the bugs. For all we know, he's doing thorough acceptance-testing and he catches all of the bugs himself.
Even if that assumption is true, he still has a problem with the contracts he signs. If there is no legal recourse (he does not imply that there is even talk of suing, so I will assume that there is no breach of contract involved) then it means he seriously fucked up his contract. At the very least he accepted a devliverable, paid the money, ran the tests and found the bug (spot the wrong order here?).
This implies a basic lack of understanding of how software development works, which could lead to the conclusion that
A) He is fucking with us, and the whole Ask Slashdot is a lie and he is masturbating furiously right now
B) He has no business being in software development - yet (He could go back to school or ally up with someone more knowledgeable than him).
I can't be sure no, I assume from the context given. The basic assumption would be that all relevant facts have been laid forth, if not there really is no point in asking a question. If we assume that his post contains all that there is to it, he has a serious problem of either hiring way too cheap or spending way too little time on wording a contract - and probably that would be a symptom of knowing too little about software development to begin with.
"Shopping around for developers" is not a viable business model all on its own, and leads to exactly the kind of problems he is trying to solve - except there is no solution if the only options are hiring a developer he can't afford or try to force people to work off-contract, for free.
If on the other hand he forgot to mention this little bit of information, at the expense of using half the post to sing his own praises, well then by inference we could come to much the same conclusion really - he has no clue what he is doing.
Right, so why does he have a problem? Why is he here asking for solutions?
Honestly he sounds like a cowboy gone contractor. Thinking "hey, I can do this real cheap!", then started cowboying out his "solutions" and found out to his surprise that project management is more than "shopping around" for developers.
The real problem is coming to Slashdot with this rather than seeking advice from someone provably knowledgeable in this field - or go back to school and brush up on software development models, organization and specifically project management.
I've been using basically the same policy he describes for years without issue
I'm sure you have, and I'm sure "basically" covers a lot of little differences that make your model viable, and his not. The only clue that we really have that his model is flawed is him asking here, on Slashdot of all places, for advice on how to force developers to work for free or how to hire a senior developer that he admits he can't afford.
I'm guessing your contracts contain at least basic provisions for how you and your contractor deal with faults and bugs discovered after sign off. This whole thing would be a non-issue if that had been the case for the OP.
In fact, I'm guessing you don't quite understand what he is referring to by "specs."
Possibly, I put in the word he used himself. The "spec" was not the pivotal point either, as you seem to think. The point was that he has a severely broken model and has done nothing to remedy that. He commits the basic sin of delivering a piece of paper to someone else and then act surprised when their work turns out to be less than expected. Everybody seem to forget that he himself hired the developer, presumably on merit, and as such the developer's quality is on OP alone. He commits another basic sin of having no provisions in his contract for handling bugs, and is now surprised that it got him stuck.
The only thing that is not his responsibility in all this is acceptance testing, which it sounds like his system is failing. He really has nobody to blame but himself. Instead of crying over developers not wanting to work for free, maybe he could solicit advice as to how to improve his process - a few pointers on how to correctly identify bugs in early development instead of having his end users find them, and so on. But no, it is of course the developers fault, it's the easy target.
Well, a little rude, but not totally wrong.
Yeah, although that was not by accident at all. Somehow people like the AC who asked the question pushes my buttons. The whole story reeks of a lack of understanding of how software development works, yet it is somehow the fault of somebody else. God forbid he looks at his own process with an eye towards making improvements.
Some /.-ers see through the smoke and recognize that "empathy for developers" is a marketing stunt because he knows /. - and knows that half the audience is going to eat that right up.
When asking questions at least be honest and, as with all homework, show the work you have so far. Setting himself up to be some kind of hero defeats the purpose. If he's such a God among mortals, why is he having these basic problems at all?
Yeah, and more importantly he needs to agree with his contractors on what a "deliverable" is, and when one is "done". He might be the victim of poor developers, but since his entire business model is "shopping around" for developers, that's all on him.
I certainly care about the product I deliver. I don't care much for middlemen though, and I certainly don't care for middlemen who thinks their job is done when they deliver the specification. Where was the acceptance testing? Why was this code signed off on? Why does he even have this problem to begin with? He sets himself up to sound like a fucking legend, yet it smells to high heaven of greed and incompetence.
No - he is dealing with his own lack of a process model. I wouldn't take work from him or you either, what I would do is go straight to your customer and offer a better product at a cheaper price, because I know process models and I just cut out the greedy middleman.
Of course you fix your bugs - this guy however signs off on code and then expects to be able to un-sign off on it at a later date. That is not how sane software development works. You boil down tests in every phase to a yes/no response, and that is your basis of signing off. If he signed off on shit, then it later proves to be shit, then that is all on him for not doing proper unit/integration/acceptance/whatever testing. So yeah, again, fuck him - his type is what is wrong with software development - he acts the middleman and peddles absolute shit to paying customers and expects to pass the turd on to someone else.
Correct. You agree up front what kind of repairs the retailer is responsible for. You don't come running when it turns out that the windmill you thought you ordered turns out to be a batch of tulips. You word the contract appropriately, and you have a process to verify that what has been delivered is the actual wanted product. Saying "I don't pay for bugs" is more telling than anything that this guy has NO process, and no clue.
Waking up would be a good solution to your problem. You don't pay for bugs? Oh shut the fuck up, if your specs were so masterfully created there would be no bugs. Own up to your part of the miscommunication and deal with it. Put a fault tolerance number into your contracts if your too much of a douche bag to realize that working with humans creates mistakes.
Or just shoot it down to put pressure on whomever needed what the drone carried. So many fun things to do with weapons and nothing but free time.
Invoking [politician you don't agree with] for this kind of thing is absurd. This has nothing to do with Obama, Bush or whomever else you guys have been employing as a figurehead recently.
This is about the spirit of the law saying something to the effect of "when you create wealth in our land, you must give the state a portion of this wealth". The word of the law says something like "the portion of your surplus generated wealth must be given to the state". Multinational corporations then use this to circumvent the spirit of the law by setting up a front office in a low tax country, selling all their crap to this front office and then buying it back in whatever other country they operate. That way they can show a net 0 gain (in most cases equal to a $0 tax bill) in the high tax country, and hand over a much lesser bit in the country they located the front office in.
This system creates an incentive for dubious governments to set their corporate income tax low in order to lure corporations onto their soil. They'll take a much lesser cut than the country the wealth was generated in would, but that's fine for them - it's that or nothing. The issue is that the tax shelter is taking a cut for doing absolutely nothing useful at the expense of the people of a whole host of other countries, people who now have to foot the bill for maintaining the infrastructure that was used to create the wealth in the first place. This pisses me off, and apparently also the politicians that represent me (fucking finally).
This might be a bit of a shock to you - not every corporation is chained to the business model of "more, more, more for me - fuck everyone else not living the dream". Corporate social responsibility
Cannot be done, moral is per definition a subjective concept - you can only prove it to yourself, your conclusion is not valid for anyone else. We may arrive at similar conclusions with regard to certain actions, and word them into law, but they remain subjective. Most of us might agree that murder is not acceptable, and thus we write it into law that in order to participate in our society, you cannot murder people.
What the big corporations are doing, to me at least, is morally questionable. Short story is that they buy services and goods from branches located in places where the income tax is lower than where the actual revenue is generated. This shows a blatant disregard for the fact that, to generate the revenue, they make use of infrastructure, labor and the market that buys their shit - not only a disregard for the services offered to the corporation in order to help it create said revenue, but a decision that paying society back for those services is not necessary.
Another side of the story are governments who decide that they would like a bit of the cut in aforementioned revenue, and undercut their neighbors corporate tax (hello Ireland, various piece of shit Island states in the Pacific, and so on), thereby creating the tax havens Apple is raking in the dough from. This to me is equally morally questionable.
Yeah I got that - although if they have to cover their asses, maybe they shouldn't be running at full speed with those claims :)