Well... he's not entirely wrong. There are ways to minimize support requirements, like proper training. One hour spend showing the right way to do it, can save ten hours if the client is left to "figure it out" and completely fucks it up. Or you could do more testing and interface refinements to make the thing more intuitive. Either way, it involves some investment up-front.
Just because you don't want or need to, doesn't mean you should sign your rights away. You don't have to lose something, to give your enemy a gain. The employer/employee relationship is just that: a battle. Hopefully not an overtly violent one, more like a card game, and if you give them all the strong cards you "didn't need" for that hand, you can be sure they will play them against you later on when you're vulnerable.
But seriously, us shallow-minded developers are too busy trying to make these things easy for PEOPLE to use, and BB gets in our way. But don't let that get in the way of your dickless anonymous trolling. Carry on, squirt.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "out there", unless you mean shipping, in which case there is insurance. Doesn't the long period from first piece to last piece kind of screw you for warranties ? What if you find out 3 months in that your PSU is a dud ? I'd much rather exchange over-the-counter than have to RMA before the PC is even christened.
And since when do Taiwanese OEMs have the slightest clue about anything besides cost-cutting ? Yeah, duh, they'll jump on ARM because it'll be loads cheaper than Intel/AMD/Via, so instead of charging a 5x premium to box it and ship it overseas, they will charge a 10x premium.
That's like asking: if you could bottle tap water and sell it to cretinous americans for $3.00 a litre, would you ?
Why is it that the police, aka public servants, are elevated to near untouchable status with these discriminatory laws ?
If you work for the government, be it federal, provincial/state or municipal, your actions are liable to be scrutinized by the public. Police should not be an exception. They get too many "magic rights" that allow them to dominate the public they were hired to serve. If cops weren't wrongly treated as superheroes in the law, they might start behaving a little less like spoiled bullies and more like human beings again. And I dare to dream that the career would attract a lower proportion of psychopaths (seriously, look it up if you don't believe me).
Agreed. I'll take sound deadening over temperature adjustement. I'm admittedly very sensitive, but for each hour I spend at the DC, my ears ring for three.
I had a spare PC, sans-chassis, that lived on my desk just under the monitor riser for about a year. The mobo box was cut up into hard drive standoffs and fan shrouds, and the PCI cards were held up with a strip of slotted foam.
I have never understood the point of buying a PC in batches. Even for a complete twit, it takes less than a day to assemble your first PC. For most tech-minded people, it's an hour or two. My current rig is an epeen showpiece, with peltiers, water, dual Xeons and SLI graphics, and it took maybe 4 hours to put together, including all the drilling and dremeling to make things fit. If you can't restrain your "get it running jitters" for a few hours without jumping out of your skin, um... well then I'm glad I'm not you:)
At the very end of the spectrum, I used to have clients that would come in every payday and buy one component. Two or three months later they'd finally have a working PC. I don't know what annoyed me more, the fact that a gainfully employed person couldn't let that same $1000 accrue in the bank, or having to listen to them mentally masturbate over their future PC every week. Every. Goddamned. Week. Fuck. Off. Kid.
I dunno, maybe because for me it's work, not play, I prefer to do things as efficiently as possible. Play begins once I pop in an OS disc.
Surprise! Script kiddies have finally realized Mac users would make for easy targets. After all, they haven't been trained to install eleven malware scanners and click "cancel" on every popup that comes along.
How is this deemed newsworthy ? It's a computer, it's gonna get rooted. Hell, even BeOS had malware, and that OS was used by all of seven people.
If years of experience and those goddamned certifications aren't opening any doors for you, I hate to say it but maybe you're relying on those too much. I'm no better, but I do know that scoring cool jobs and promotions is about 20% effort, 80% networking. Sure, that 20% has to be good enough to leave a positive impression on the manager who will help you get that job or promotion, but if your people skills are lacking you won't get anywhere.
Alternately, if you think you're worth more than you earn, try branching out as a consultant. It won't be any easier, but the pay is better, and nothing beats trial by fire to make you learn job and contract hunting skills. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Perhaps the reason FlashPeak SlimBrowser gets so few downloads is because the web site looks exactly like those shady download sites that scrape and index all the freeware and demos, are full of ads and/or spyware.
If they invested $29 in a modern and professional-looking template, maybe a few screenshots and better promotional text, they'd see more conversions. Policy alone can't convince people to trust you if your image is that of a 3rd world splog.
Well, given that the app your IDE spits out is unencumbered by any sort of DRM, you can put it on a web site and have people install it directly from you. It is simply a file. If you want to tie that into a payment process of some sort, you're free to do pretty much anything, and since security is very lax on Android apps, you could potentially associate an app license with a hardware ID and roll your own rudimentary copy protection.
If you're actually making use of that meeting time (and space), corporate equipment, insider info, and proximity of like-minded developers and engineers, seems to me I'd rather get 70% of something big with no up-front investment besides my time, than 100% of something I had to subsidize myself and do on my own.
You know, the hardest part of turning an idea into a business isn't the creation/production aspect, it's usually the motivation. If you have significant start-up costs, a hard time finding skilled partners, or even the controversial drag of a whiny wife & kids at home, any or all of these will stress you out and endanger the business in its most vulnerable nascent state. Being able to piggyback on Microsoft's establishment for some of those steps, and yet even telling the wife "I gotta work late" just to get some peace and quiet, can make the difference between failure and success.
I'm not saying I'm 100% behind this scheme, but it's better than nothing, and if you don't like it, you can always get a completely unrelated gig elsewhere.
Sure RIM has apps. They put apps on the map, centuries ago when they were billed as a "corporate mobile communications device". What I'm astonished over is that the Blackberry actually has users.
I don't think it's overrated. If I had that 20% at my previous job, I think their network would be in much better shape because I'd have written better provisioning scripts, backup tools and whatnot. My employer would have benefitted, and I would have been a happier cog. Instead, my job was to put out fires rather than prevent them, so after a few years I burned out and left.
That 20% doesn't mean money down the drain, it's more like a slight gamble - give a little, to potentially get a lot. Sure, if someone works on a project that doesn't take off, well that potentially sucks, but you can think of it as your employee acquiring related skills or honing existing ones. surely that must count for something.
People sign this shit, because: 99% of people out there are uncreative and just do whatever is needed to get a paycheck.
Do you honestly think that design-by-committee Java guy next to you has even the slightest spark of inspiration ? He probably can't even get it up without writing 4 support interfaces that describe the various ways one can (choose not to) interact with his cock.
Dude, I do use CentOS on a daily basis, and yes it is very rough around the edges. That's not my point. My point is that even though RHEL/CentOS is a mess, it is marketed and maintained in a very professional manner.
And just to feed your nitpicking, my distro of choice is Gentoo, and I never bother with a distro's default configs for Apache. Heck, I don't even write them myself anymore, any sysadmin worth their salt should have written scripts to maintain that stuff programmatically. It is trivial to implement per-module configs yourself, I even set up symlinks to easily switch individual modules and vhosts on and off without clobbering the actual config file.
Right... but it basically *is* AMD's response to the ION, which is the killer chipset for Atom. I've been deploying ION-based systems for nearly two years now, and non-ION Atom kits a year prior. You'll have to forgive me for being unimpressed by AMD being so late to the party. ION1 kits can be had for about $125, with ION2 hovering near $200, and a plain old D510 reference board is only $60. To me, that's not enough of a price gap to justify moving to an unproven, first-gen platform by a renowned corner-cutting underdog.
With a video card, sure, but that's the great thing about the NVidia ION chipset, its "IGP" is a Geforce 9400M, so it handles VDPAU right in the chipset. This makes for a very compact HTPC. I have one on each TV here, running XBMC. Best damn media player ever. It smoothly handles everything I've ever thrown at it, up to high-bitrate H.264 1080p.
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Well... he's not entirely wrong. There are ways to minimize support requirements, like proper training. One hour spend showing the right way to do it, can save ten hours if the client is left to "figure it out" and completely fucks it up. Or you could do more testing and interface refinements to make the thing more intuitive. Either way, it involves some investment up-front.
Just because you don't want or need to, doesn't mean you should sign your rights away. You don't have to lose something, to give your enemy a gain. The employer/employee relationship is just that: a battle. Hopefully not an overtly violent one, more like a card game, and if you give them all the strong cards you "didn't need" for that hand, you can be sure they will play them against you later on when you're vulnerable.
Business is, by definition, ruthless.
Also, cocks.
But seriously, us shallow-minded developers are too busy trying to make these things easy for PEOPLE to use, and BB gets in our way. But don't let that get in the way of your dickless anonymous trolling. Carry on, squirt.
That's great, except when I'm spending most of those hours on the phone with a vendor, trying to fix the overpriced hunk of junk they sold us.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "out there", unless you mean shipping, in which case there is insurance. Doesn't the long period from first piece to last piece kind of screw you for warranties ? What if you find out 3 months in that your PSU is a dud ? I'd much rather exchange over-the-counter than have to RMA before the PC is even christened.
This was before any of those guys came to Canada, nice try though.
And since when do Taiwanese OEMs have the slightest clue about anything besides cost-cutting ? Yeah, duh, they'll jump on ARM because it'll be loads cheaper than Intel/AMD/Via, so instead of charging a 5x premium to box it and ship it overseas, they will charge a 10x premium.
That's like asking: if you could bottle tap water and sell it to cretinous americans for $3.00 a litre, would you ?
Why is it that the police, aka public servants, are elevated to near untouchable status with these discriminatory laws ?
If you work for the government, be it federal, provincial/state or municipal, your actions are liable to be scrutinized by the public. Police should not be an exception. They get too many "magic rights" that allow them to dominate the public they were hired to serve. If cops weren't wrongly treated as superheroes in the law, they might start behaving a little less like spoiled bullies and more like human beings again. And I dare to dream that the career would attract a lower proportion of psychopaths (seriously, look it up if you don't believe me).
Agreed. I'll take sound deadening over temperature adjustement. I'm admittedly very sensitive, but for each hour I spend at the DC, my ears ring for three.
I had a spare PC, sans-chassis, that lived on my desk just under the monitor riser for about a year. The mobo box was cut up into hard drive standoffs and fan shrouds, and the PCI cards were held up with a strip of slotted foam.
Bestest damn VM server I ever had :)
I have never understood the point of buying a PC in batches. Even for a complete twit, it takes less than a day to assemble your first PC. For most tech-minded people, it's an hour or two. My current rig is an epeen showpiece, with peltiers, water, dual Xeons and SLI graphics, and it took maybe 4 hours to put together, including all the drilling and dremeling to make things fit. If you can't restrain your "get it running jitters" for a few hours without jumping out of your skin, um... well then I'm glad I'm not you :)
At the very end of the spectrum, I used to have clients that would come in every payday and buy one component. Two or three months later they'd finally have a working PC. I don't know what annoyed me more, the fact that a gainfully employed person couldn't let that same $1000 accrue in the bank, or having to listen to them mentally masturbate over their future PC every week. Every. Goddamned. Week. Fuck. Off. Kid.
I dunno, maybe because for me it's work, not play, I prefer to do things as efficiently as possible. Play begins once I pop in an OS disc.
Surprise! Script kiddies have finally realized Mac users would make for easy targets. After all, they haven't been trained to install eleven malware scanners and click "cancel" on every popup that comes along.
How is this deemed newsworthy ? It's a computer, it's gonna get rooted. Hell, even BeOS had malware, and that OS was used by all of seven people.
If years of experience and those goddamned certifications aren't opening any doors for you, I hate to say it but maybe you're relying on those too much. I'm no better, but I do know that scoring cool jobs and promotions is about 20% effort, 80% networking. Sure, that 20% has to be good enough to leave a positive impression on the manager who will help you get that job or promotion, but if your people skills are lacking you won't get anywhere.
Alternately, if you think you're worth more than you earn, try branching out as a consultant. It won't be any easier, but the pay is better, and nothing beats trial by fire to make you learn job and contract hunting skills. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Perhaps the reason FlashPeak SlimBrowser gets so few downloads is because the web site looks exactly like those shady download sites that scrape and index all the freeware and demos, are full of ads and/or spyware.
If they invested $29 in a modern and professional-looking template, maybe a few screenshots and better promotional text, they'd see more conversions. Policy alone can't convince people to trust you if your image is that of a 3rd world splog.
Well, given that the app your IDE spits out is unencumbered by any sort of DRM, you can put it on a web site and have people install it directly from you. It is simply a file. If you want to tie that into a payment process of some sort, you're free to do pretty much anything, and since security is very lax on Android apps, you could potentially associate an app license with a hardware ID and roll your own rudimentary copy protection.
Sure, it's a stretch, but can you out-lawyer Microsoft if and when they argue otherwise ?
If you're actually making use of that meeting time (and space), corporate equipment, insider info, and proximity of like-minded developers and engineers, seems to me I'd rather get 70% of something big with no up-front investment besides my time, than 100% of something I had to subsidize myself and do on my own.
You know, the hardest part of turning an idea into a business isn't the creation/production aspect, it's usually the motivation. If you have significant start-up costs, a hard time finding skilled partners, or even the controversial drag of a whiny wife & kids at home, any or all of these will stress you out and endanger the business in its most vulnerable nascent state. Being able to piggyback on Microsoft's establishment for some of those steps, and yet even telling the wife "I gotta work late" just to get some peace and quiet, can make the difference between failure and success.
I'm not saying I'm 100% behind this scheme, but it's better than nothing, and if you don't like it, you can always get a completely unrelated gig elsewhere.
Sure RIM has apps. They put apps on the map, centuries ago when they were billed as a "corporate mobile communications device". What I'm astonished over is that the Blackberry actually has users.
I don't think it's overrated. If I had that 20% at my previous job, I think their network would be in much better shape because I'd have written better provisioning scripts, backup tools and whatnot. My employer would have benefitted, and I would have been a happier cog. Instead, my job was to put out fires rather than prevent them, so after a few years I burned out and left.
That 20% doesn't mean money down the drain, it's more like a slight gamble - give a little, to potentially get a lot. Sure, if someone works on a project that doesn't take off, well that potentially sucks, but you can think of it as your employee acquiring related skills or honing existing ones. surely that must count for something.
People sign this shit, because: 99% of people out there are uncreative and just do whatever is needed to get a paycheck.
Do you honestly think that design-by-committee Java guy next to you has even the slightest spark of inspiration ? He probably can't even get it up without writing 4 support interfaces that describe the various ways one can (choose not to) interact with his cock.
Well thank you for modding this troll, whoever you are. Clearly you've never installed nor managed a spam-filtered mail server.
Then it is a contract issue, to be resolved in court, not a criminal matter involving jail time.
Dude, I do use CentOS on a daily basis, and yes it is very rough around the edges. That's not my point. My point is that even though RHEL/CentOS is a mess, it is marketed and maintained in a very professional manner.
And just to feed your nitpicking, my distro of choice is Gentoo, and I never bother with a distro's default configs for Apache. Heck, I don't even write them myself anymore, any sysadmin worth their salt should have written scripts to maintain that stuff programmatically. It is trivial to implement per-module configs yourself, I even set up symlinks to easily switch individual modules and vhosts on and off without clobbering the actual config file.
Right... but it basically *is* AMD's response to the ION, which is the killer chipset for Atom. I've been deploying ION-based systems for nearly two years now, and non-ION Atom kits a year prior. You'll have to forgive me for being unimpressed by AMD being so late to the party. ION1 kits can be had for about $125, with ION2 hovering near $200, and a plain old D510 reference board is only $60. To me, that's not enough of a price gap to justify moving to an unproven, first-gen platform by a renowned corner-cutting underdog.
With a video card, sure, but that's the great thing about the NVidia ION chipset, its "IGP" is a Geforce 9400M, so it handles VDPAU right in the chipset. This makes for a very compact HTPC. I have one on each TV here, running XBMC. Best damn media player ever. It smoothly handles everything I've ever thrown at it, up to high-bitrate H.264 1080p.