You are clearly illiterate so I'll use smaller words:
Users can update all they want, I encourage them! Developers should be allowed control. If I need to test against version X because that's what's installed on my client's company-wide desktop image, then I don't want X to become X+1 just because Mozilla says so. My code isn't wrong if it does what the client paid for. If someone called me tomorrow and said I needed to support IE 3 and Netscape Navigator 4 - OK, fine! Here's what it's going to cost, your money, your call! If the client doesn't give a flying fuck about Mozilla's latest, then as long as they're paying my hourly rate, neither do I.
If honouring my clients' requirements makes me a smug prick, then I'd like to offer you a lifetime supply of anal lube so you can go fuck yourself.
Of course I'm a developer, why else would I be speaking for developers ? Yes. it is a PITA to test backward compatibility, and I wish everyone would just use the latest FF, Chrome, Safari or even IE9, but they don't, and they often have perfectly valid reasons not to. As long as they're paying for my time, it's my duty to support whatever they have.
The great majority of us developers aren't sitting in fancy Class-A swing space, suckling at the sweet ignorant teat of venture capital, dreaming up the next big pointless social media experiment. We can't tell people "PinBookFaceTubeSpace requires $LATEST_FAD_BROWSER". Perhaps more importantly, we don't have to. When I'm whipping up HTML templates, I have a pretty good sense of what works cross-browser, and what doesn't, so supporting IE7 is usually a simple matter of firing up a VM and adding a few CSS hacks or an IE7-specific stylesheet until things look decent. I can even cheat and flip IE9 into compatibility mode for much of that tweaking, then run the real IE7 for the final tests. If I'm going for flair (and lag), I can sneak in a shim library to replicate those rounded corners and alpha layers. The difference between supporting only the latest browsers, or going back 6 years, is roughly 15% of the templating budget. The cost of updating an office-wide desktop image is several times more than that.
Just because you have low standards does not mean everyone else should settle for mediocre products. That has long been the plague of Android smartphones and now tablets. You'd think Apple's high prices would give competitors plenty of room to compete, but the sobering reality is that today's flagship Android tablets have just barely caught up with the 1st gen iPad, in terms of functionality and performance. We have idiots like Asus trying to push quad-core tablets users don't need, while the market is flooded with cheap tablets out of China that force us developers to target Android 2.1, if we hope to have any sizable audience for our apps.
The Xoom would have been a great tablet two years ago, if it had launched at $299 alongside the original iPad. But it didn't. It launched last year, costing as much as the brand new iPad 2, which ran circles around it. Worse yet: it was a Motorola product. They're not exactly known for selling high-quality devices with great after-sales service - just Google "OPMOSH" for millions of angry customers.
I'd sooner blame shit tools. I think game houses are working hard but not working smart. If the industry had true rapid-design tools integrated with an open-source, generic, modular, scriptable 3D engine, not only would the development process be shortened, but they'd have access to a much larger pool of skilled developers and artists.
Instead, we have single-use engines with in-house tools that never quite reach maturity, or expensive proprietary middleware that also lack polish. They lock you into a suboptimal workflow, lengthy, error-prone build cycles and impose their own idiosyncrasies on your project. A significant chunk of time is spent working around the engine's limitations or managing media resources. I can trivially program a web CMS that crops/scales/rotates/compresses images and video automagically, but a game middleware suite can't even read a goddamned AVI video without me converting it beforehand ? That's pretty lame, but a very small customer base results in infrequent updates and very little debugging beyond the runtime engine. It's just plain ugly.
As long as I can opt-out of the silent updates, I see no problem with this. The quicker we can get users to update, the better. Developers, on the other hand, need stability and control.
We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent
In other words, crooks!
Call me old-school, call me a goddamned luddite, but I see nothing wrong with the current set of TLDs. What I do see wrong with the system is the continued encouragement of domain squatting by entities who add zero value to the internet. We don't need more domains, we need the current ones to be taken away from some of these parasitic organisations who thrive on "tasting", search spam, and pure flipping. There are domains that have been held ransom for 15+ years now, which have never been associated with a proper site other than "click here to buy this domain".
My solution is quite simple: unless you own a registered trademark, or use your real name or surname, you have to use it or lose it! That takes care of a ALL existing domain squatters who hang on to tens of thousands of domains each, because it only takes one four-figure sale a month to subsidize their entire rotten portfolio. The way ICANN has handled things is an absolute travesty and a gross distortion of DNS' original purpose: to help people find stuff!
Regardless of application, I feel that all patents are a bad idea. Inventing something gives you an edge over the competition, not just because you're the first to do it, but because you possess intricate knowledge while your competitors are playing catch-up. If that means that a year from now, you will be driven out by market forces, then so be it. The way patents are used today, they artificially inflate prices by forcing producers to enter protectionist contracts, also known as "licensing". You're allowed to produce X widgets at Y price, under Z abusive terms, for the low-low fee of $(X*Y*n) or else we sue you for ($X*Y*2n)^4.
Outside of the IP industry, this is often called racketeering. Instead of breaking your legs and smashing your shop like Little Joe and his thugs, IP trolls use weaponized tomes of law. I think I prefer the thugs, because it's harder to claim self-defense when you kill a gang of lawyers.
Yes, I too hate that paper-pushing assholes are harassing every great mind into catatonic, stunting progress at every opportunity and forcing humanity into intellectual stupor.
The problem isn't the practice of law, the problem is money. All this bullshit exists to protect and/or subvert wealth. If it weren't for money, nobody would give a flying fuck about patents and the thrill of creation would be sufficient reward to an inventor.
The argument will always be that he merely offered a service that was in huge demand. What the users did with it cannot be blamed on the operator. At least, not when you stick to basic common sense and not U.S. protectionist copyright laws.
You should hate it. It's a shitty hack to make it look like your LCD has better contrast on paper.
I briefly owned a display like that. If I turned the dynamic contrast off, it looked washed out, and no amount of tweaking would get it looking even halfway decent. It was a shitty LCD but it was also 1/3rd the cost of my current photorealistic dazzlers.
It's the visual equivalent of the bass and treble boost knobs on cheap stereos.
Well... the price is completely separate issue. I don't see how Windows can be worth $200+ at retail, but I'm not in the business of creating and selling desktop operating systems so I can't speak with authority.
If Windows continues to price itself out of the netbook market, tough tits. We'll use something else. I don't see Apple charging through the nose for its operating system, the real money is in application software. You know, the stuff that actually delivers results, not the bloated foundational blocks said apps are built against.
Well, maybe not a proper switch, but just about anyone with more than one computer has a router.
That said, just a few months ago I hooked up a friend with an 8TB Synology box. They're not quite plug-and-play yet, but it only took a few minutes to walk him through initial configuration. The guy is not a programmer or network admin, he's a "people person" like in Office Space. I call him the meat shield. He deals with clients so I don't have to. If a guy like that is at a point where his family needs a networked file server, then I'd hazard a guess that a lot more people are headed that way.
Buddy, I'm from Ottawa. I live just a few minutes from the main Cognos building, where many of my old college buddies used to work. In the opposite direction used to be RIM's big bad campus. Another few km north stood Nortel. And I can't remember the name but there was this giant faceless consulting firm a few years ago, J.P. somethign... J.M.B. I dunno, started with J. Anyway, they're all gone.
If I've learned anything from this city, it's that we can't sustain any big tech company. We have lots of highly educated, skilled and knowledgeable individuals, but there is a very disturbing lack of drive. People get stuck in the routine and innovation goes into cryostasis. Entrepreneurs aim low, people are averse to risk taking. I don't expect nor believe an Ottawa company could ever create a truly innovative product of sufficient quality to be a global contender. Our businesses prefer make-work projects and long-term contract jobs that don't rock the status quo. Cognos is the product of that underachiever culture, as is the Blackberry and its equally retarded step-cousin QNX. I blame the overbearing office drone mentality, where most workers' greatest achievement is passing a government interview and settling into their cushy navel-gazing career.
In that perspective, Cognos fits very well within IBM's bubble. They don't really know why they're here or what they do, but neither do their clients, so everyone is happy by way of ignorance.
As another user posted, NDAs are just a "cover your ass" document that makes it easier for your employer to sue you. If you run off with insider info and try to start your own company with it, NDA or not, you can be sued. The NDA just puts it in writing so they don't need to formulate an actual argument defending their stance. They can just point to the document you signed and say "These were the terms we agreed upon. Those terms were violated. Now give me money bitch!"
Of course Java developers are tolerant: they have themselves been tolerated in the programming industry for over 15 years, despite being the technical equivalent of double-talkers.
I kid, I kid! I don't blame Java developers for being stupid, I blame James Gosling for inventing a language stupid people could leverage on their résumés.
Okay, but seriously, I know of exactly one female coder, and I've been alive for a reasonable amount of time, in and out of UGs and whatnot. Even as far back as my college days, I remember two women in the I.T. classes. One was looking for an easy credit (and failed!), the other was following her fuck buddy around and loafing all day long. Oh, right, her fuck buddy was me. It's a small sample, but over the years I've also worked with at least a thousand developers, all male except for one, who actually knows her stuff. I know, because I grilled her; a part of me wasn't ready to accept that a woman could be a skilled programmer, but she proved me wrong. It's not so much a chauvinistic thing as an observational one. In my 15 year career, I have known only one other woman who claimed to be a programmer. She was a bullshit artist who probably never touched a keyboard in her entire life, and unfortunately she was briefly my boss - thankfully it only took her a few months to fuck someone in upper management and move out of my department. So, yeah, not a real coder. Sorry ladies, if the tables were turned and I were the sole male subject, you'd think all men were coked-out whores too...
Maybe it's my environment. Maybe it's small business. Maybe coding is a mental exercise that does not appeal to a woman's supposedly white-matter-dominant brain patterns. Maybe it's this town's macroeconomics. Maybe it's lingering gender pressure that hasn't yet washed out of the modern social dynamic. Maybe it's the influx of foreign graduates coming from cultures where women aren't yet seen as equals. Maybe Ottawans have defective DNA and end up with more male than female children (wouldn't surprise me). Or maybe we coders are the result of a series of formative experiences and genetic makeup that simply does not present itself as readily to the XX chromosome. I know plenty of geek girls, that's different, but just the one coder. So while that one lone femcoder is quite awesome, she is a statistical aberration. For that matter, most of the male coders I know are aberrations too: socially awkward, clingy, creepy, emotionally unstable. I don't make the stereotypes, but on some level they're either eerily veracious, or self-fulfilling. If that's what scares women away from our industry, I cannot fault them. Those weirdos scare ME away from my own kind...
If it were a no-compromise experience, then they'd release just one goddamned edition of the OS at one price point and let you add/remove feature sets if and when needed.
In other words, just the Pro, thank you. Segmenting an operating system in 2012 is antiquated and moronic. All it does is piss off us techies who are forced to support the substandard "Home" editions.
I run a "label", really more of an online marketing business, that helps put indie bands on the web, sell their music and merch online, fill gigs with eager fans, and steer them toward quality studios and producers. I'm not quitting my day job, but we do decently and we don't rely on underage kids who don't have any significant income nor well defined tastes. We can book out-of-town shows and fill a couple of school buses with fans who follow the bands just to attend a gig and spread the love. Attendance is not a problem, but then again I'm not signing screamo or hip-hop or any other teenage market bands.
I'm not saying every band deserves to thrive, but the few good ones don't need big music in order to succeed anymore.
Same here in Canada, where the CRTC, our supposed media regulator, forces a certain amount of "Canadian Content". The idea is cute, but it's still protectionism at its worst. I'd rather play good foreign music than Nickelback, Celine Dion and Douchemau5. Don't get me wrong, we have many solid bands, but they are all gathered in a few narrow genres. If you're trying to put together an electronic music radio show, things get complicated and if you want to abide by the law, you have to put in a lot of Canadian filler to meet your quota and renew that stupid license.
The internet, by definition, is global. If I want to play goddamned Sitar music from southeast asia, no seat-warming big music shill can tell me not to, and ultimately that's what the CRTC has become: a bunch of ex-media executives backhanding favours to their cronies. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom, which has resulted in a lot of still-authentic artists avoiding it altogether.
One of the few remaining advantages of big box stores is you can easily return a product if it doesn't work out, the only cost being your gas and travel time. Online, you have to get RMA numbers, ship things back and it's a royal pain. If the big box stores implement prohibitive return policies, buyers will be more likely to go online and enjoy the same lack of customer service at a lower price. The big box stores will die, like they should have many years ago.
Computer shops have adapted to counter "free rentals" by applying restocking fees on opened returns, or offering store credit in lieu of a refund. I do it, works fine. You buy something from me, decide a week later you don't like it / have buyer's remorse ? Either I refund your money minus a 20% fee, or the full amount as a credit note toward your next purchase(s). The restocking fee (hopefully) covers the difference in having to sell an open-box, refurb or used item. More importantly, it's a fee I can waive as I see fit, so I can deter abusers without punishing honest clients. That jerkoff who only comes on the 1st of the month, wastes my afternoon haggling and asking bogus questions, and returns his Geforce on the 28th before the return window expires ? Yeah, FUCK HIM! Tough tits, 20% restocking fee, doors to your left. The other 99% of returns are people who buy something, take it home, find out it's not compatible, won't fit, doesn't do what it should, or any other honest mistake, and I'm quite sympathetic. If it's in good condition, or a common enough item that I can use it in a system build, or for my own internal use, I probably won't even charge the dumb fee, because it exists to protect me, not to defraud clients.
To effectively blacklist someone for 90 days because of a defective product that was exchanged, I consider that fucking hostile! What if I bought a TV, a Blu-Ray, a few movies and maybe a PS3, and find out two or more of those items are defective, as is all too common with today's made-in-china garbage ? You're going to replace my TV, but not my PS3 ? How about I drag your district manager to small claims court and waste a day of his salary ? Treat me like a crook, and I'll be inclined to live up to that expectation. Heck, I'll go buy the most expensive item in the store every 90 days and return it, just to spite the policy.
Customer service used to mean something, back when retail staff were more than just interchangeable teenagers with matching shirts.
Big music is in decline because local, unsigned bands are enjoying a surge in popularity. This isn't specifically a French thing, it's happening all over. A lot of young adults and wise teens are fed up with the current state of commercial music and are looking elsewhere for their entertainment. Bands themselves often prefer to DIY, many feel the big label's distribution network no longer justifies the loss of freedom and control over their own work, not when the internet is right there and all their fans are on Facebook, MySpace, Reverbnation, SoundCloud and it's all free.
Perhaps the French are being hit harder as the result of public backlash against the harsh laws, but I'd bet they're going out more to see live acts, playing music that is actually made for enjoyment rather than profit. Big Music has lost its advantage over the everyman, they have little to offer that can't be bootstrapped with the take from a few gigs at local bars.
The big gap now is in studio recording. This is where the indies have some catching up to do. I work a lot with local bands and my biggest beef is that their recordings are poorly mixed. A lot of indie studios out there are shitting all over their clients' work. They boast impressive gear which lures people in the door, but lack the experience and critical ear to use that gear to its full potential.
This much I knew. What got Megaupload in hot water is all the dirty stuff Kim Dotcom was doing on the side, not the web site itself.
So then, are these other file hosts also engaging in money laundering on U.S. soil ? Or is this just another case of MAFIAA lawyers making baseless threats for profit ?
Seems to me, it's the lawyers who are laundering money by getting paid from dirty warez profits. o_O
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You are clearly illiterate so I'll use smaller words:
Users can update all they want, I encourage them! Developers should be allowed control. If I need to test against version X because that's what's installed on my client's company-wide desktop image, then I don't want X to become X+1 just because Mozilla says so. My code isn't wrong if it does what the client paid for. If someone called me tomorrow and said I needed to support IE 3 and Netscape Navigator 4 - OK, fine! Here's what it's going to cost, your money, your call! If the client doesn't give a flying fuck about Mozilla's latest, then as long as they're paying my hourly rate, neither do I.
If honouring my clients' requirements makes me a smug prick, then I'd like to offer you a lifetime supply of anal lube so you can go fuck yourself.
Of course I'm a developer, why else would I be speaking for developers ? Yes. it is a PITA to test backward compatibility, and I wish everyone would just use the latest FF, Chrome, Safari or even IE9, but they don't, and they often have perfectly valid reasons not to. As long as they're paying for my time, it's my duty to support whatever they have.
The great majority of us developers aren't sitting in fancy Class-A swing space, suckling at the sweet ignorant teat of venture capital, dreaming up the next big pointless social media experiment. We can't tell people "PinBookFaceTubeSpace requires $LATEST_FAD_BROWSER". Perhaps more importantly, we don't have to. When I'm whipping up HTML templates, I have a pretty good sense of what works cross-browser, and what doesn't, so supporting IE7 is usually a simple matter of firing up a VM and adding a few CSS hacks or an IE7-specific stylesheet until things look decent. I can even cheat and flip IE9 into compatibility mode for much of that tweaking, then run the real IE7 for the final tests. If I'm going for flair (and lag), I can sneak in a shim library to replicate those rounded corners and alpha layers. The difference between supporting only the latest browsers, or going back 6 years, is roughly 15% of the templating budget. The cost of updating an office-wide desktop image is several times more than that.
Just because you have low standards does not mean everyone else should settle for mediocre products. That has long been the plague of Android smartphones and now tablets. You'd think Apple's high prices would give competitors plenty of room to compete, but the sobering reality is that today's flagship Android tablets have just barely caught up with the 1st gen iPad, in terms of functionality and performance. We have idiots like Asus trying to push quad-core tablets users don't need, while the market is flooded with cheap tablets out of China that force us developers to target Android 2.1, if we hope to have any sizable audience for our apps.
The Xoom would have been a great tablet two years ago, if it had launched at $299 alongside the original iPad. But it didn't. It launched last year, costing as much as the brand new iPad 2, which ran circles around it. Worse yet: it was a Motorola product. They're not exactly known for selling high-quality devices with great after-sales service - just Google "OPMOSH" for millions of angry customers.
Not quite.
I'd sooner blame shit tools. I think game houses are working hard but not working smart. If the industry had true rapid-design tools integrated with an open-source, generic, modular, scriptable 3D engine, not only would the development process be shortened, but they'd have access to a much larger pool of skilled developers and artists.
Instead, we have single-use engines with in-house tools that never quite reach maturity, or expensive proprietary middleware that also lack polish. They lock you into a suboptimal workflow, lengthy, error-prone build cycles and impose their own idiosyncrasies on your project. A significant chunk of time is spent working around the engine's limitations or managing media resources. I can trivially program a web CMS that crops/scales/rotates/compresses images and video automagically, but a game middleware suite can't even read a goddamned AVI video without me converting it beforehand ? That's pretty lame, but a very small customer base results in infrequent updates and very little debugging beyond the runtime engine. It's just plain ugly.
As long as I can opt-out of the silent updates, I see no problem with this. The quicker we can get users to update, the better. Developers, on the other hand, need stability and control.
We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent
In other words, crooks!
Call me old-school, call me a goddamned luddite, but I see nothing wrong with the current set of TLDs. What I do see wrong with the system is the continued encouragement of domain squatting by entities who add zero value to the internet. We don't need more domains, we need the current ones to be taken away from some of these parasitic organisations who thrive on "tasting", search spam, and pure flipping. There are domains that have been held ransom for 15+ years now, which have never been associated with a proper site other than "click here to buy this domain".
My solution is quite simple: unless you own a registered trademark, or use your real name or surname, you have to use it or lose it! That takes care of a ALL existing domain squatters who hang on to tens of thousands of domains each, because it only takes one four-figure sale a month to subsidize their entire rotten portfolio. The way ICANN has handled things is an absolute travesty and a gross distortion of DNS' original purpose: to help people find stuff!
Regardless of application, I feel that all patents are a bad idea. Inventing something gives you an edge over the competition, not just because you're the first to do it, but because you possess intricate knowledge while your competitors are playing catch-up. If that means that a year from now, you will be driven out by market forces, then so be it. The way patents are used today, they artificially inflate prices by forcing producers to enter protectionist contracts, also known as "licensing". You're allowed to produce X widgets at Y price, under Z abusive terms, for the low-low fee of $(X*Y*n) or else we sue you for ($X*Y*2n)^4.
Outside of the IP industry, this is often called racketeering. Instead of breaking your legs and smashing your shop like Little Joe and his thugs, IP trolls use weaponized tomes of law. I think I prefer the thugs, because it's harder to claim self-defense when you kill a gang of lawyers.
... and into the legal services industry ?
Yes, I too hate that paper-pushing assholes are harassing every great mind into catatonic, stunting progress at every opportunity and forcing humanity into intellectual stupor.
The problem isn't the practice of law, the problem is money. All this bullshit exists to protect and/or subvert wealth. If it weren't for money, nobody would give a flying fuck about patents and the thrill of creation would be sufficient reward to an inventor.
The argument will always be that he merely offered a service that was in huge demand. What the users did with it cannot be blamed on the operator. At least, not when you stick to basic common sense and not U.S. protectionist copyright laws.
*whoosh*, as they say.
Appending "the terrorists win" to a sentence implies it's a load of bullshit, as popularized by countless anti-terrorism pundits since 9/11.
Nope.
It's a stupid copy/paste effect, the kind any 12 year old could have written with 8 lines of PHP code and a few generic templates.
Why aren't they buying memegenerator.net for a billion dollars then ? Their tech is arguably superior since they can render UPPERCASE ARIAL FONT TEXT!
Pretty much anything with Facebook and "money" in the same sentence is guaranteed to be nonsensical.
You should hate it. It's a shitty hack to make it look like your LCD has better contrast on paper.
I briefly owned a display like that. If I turned the dynamic contrast off, it looked washed out, and no amount of tweaking would get it looking even halfway decent. It was a shitty LCD but it was also 1/3rd the cost of my current photorealistic dazzlers.
It's the visual equivalent of the bass and treble boost knobs on cheap stereos.
Well... the price is completely separate issue. I don't see how Windows can be worth $200+ at retail, but I'm not in the business of creating and selling desktop operating systems so I can't speak with authority.
If Windows continues to price itself out of the netbook market, tough tits. We'll use something else. I don't see Apple charging through the nose for its operating system, the real money is in application software. You know, the stuff that actually delivers results, not the bloated foundational blocks said apps are built against.
Well, maybe not a proper switch, but just about anyone with more than one computer has a router.
That said, just a few months ago I hooked up a friend with an 8TB Synology box. They're not quite plug-and-play yet, but it only took a few minutes to walk him through initial configuration. The guy is not a programmer or network admin, he's a "people person" like in Office Space. I call him the meat shield. He deals with clients so I don't have to. If a guy like that is at a point where his family needs a networked file server, then I'd hazard a guess that a lot more people are headed that way.
My counterargument is that, if the business model relies on secrets, it's probably not a very good business model.
Knowing shit isn't nearly as valuable as doing shit with that knowledge.
Buddy, I'm from Ottawa. I live just a few minutes from the main Cognos building, where many of my old college buddies used to work. In the opposite direction used to be RIM's big bad campus. Another few km north stood Nortel. And I can't remember the name but there was this giant faceless consulting firm a few years ago, J.P. somethign... J.M.B. I dunno, started with J. Anyway, they're all gone.
If I've learned anything from this city, it's that we can't sustain any big tech company. We have lots of highly educated, skilled and knowledgeable individuals, but there is a very disturbing lack of drive. People get stuck in the routine and innovation goes into cryostasis. Entrepreneurs aim low, people are averse to risk taking. I don't expect nor believe an Ottawa company could ever create a truly innovative product of sufficient quality to be a global contender. Our businesses prefer make-work projects and long-term contract jobs that don't rock the status quo. Cognos is the product of that underachiever culture, as is the Blackberry and its equally retarded step-cousin QNX. I blame the overbearing office drone mentality, where most workers' greatest achievement is passing a government interview and settling into their cushy navel-gazing career.
In that perspective, Cognos fits very well within IBM's bubble. They don't really know why they're here or what they do, but neither do their clients, so everyone is happy by way of ignorance.
You're right. Whores get paid to get fucked, whereas it is this Dutch guy's clients who are the lucky fuckees, paying $3k for a simple illusion.
As another user posted, NDAs are just a "cover your ass" document that makes it easier for your employer to sue you. If you run off with insider info and try to start your own company with it, NDA or not, you can be sued. The NDA just puts it in writing so they don't need to formulate an actual argument defending their stance. They can just point to the document you signed and say "These were the terms we agreed upon. Those terms were violated. Now give me money bitch!"
Of course Java developers are tolerant: they have themselves been tolerated in the programming industry for over 15 years, despite being the technical equivalent of double-talkers.
I kid, I kid! I don't blame Java developers for being stupid, I blame James Gosling for inventing a language stupid people could leverage on their résumés.
Okay, but seriously, I know of exactly one female coder, and I've been alive for a reasonable amount of time, in and out of UGs and whatnot. Even as far back as my college days, I remember two women in the I.T. classes. One was looking for an easy credit (and failed!), the other was following her fuck buddy around and loafing all day long. Oh, right, her fuck buddy was me. It's a small sample, but over the years I've also worked with at least a thousand developers, all male except for one, who actually knows her stuff. I know, because I grilled her; a part of me wasn't ready to accept that a woman could be a skilled programmer, but she proved me wrong. It's not so much a chauvinistic thing as an observational one. In my 15 year career, I have known only one other woman who claimed to be a programmer. She was a bullshit artist who probably never touched a keyboard in her entire life, and unfortunately she was briefly my boss - thankfully it only took her a few months to fuck someone in upper management and move out of my department. So, yeah, not a real coder. Sorry ladies, if the tables were turned and I were the sole male subject, you'd think all men were coked-out whores too...
Maybe it's my environment. Maybe it's small business. Maybe coding is a mental exercise that does not appeal to a woman's supposedly white-matter-dominant brain patterns. Maybe it's this town's macroeconomics. Maybe it's lingering gender pressure that hasn't yet washed out of the modern social dynamic. Maybe it's the influx of foreign graduates coming from cultures where women aren't yet seen as equals. Maybe Ottawans have defective DNA and end up with more male than female children (wouldn't surprise me). Or maybe we coders are the result of a series of formative experiences and genetic makeup that simply does not present itself as readily to the XX chromosome. I know plenty of geek girls, that's different, but just the one coder. So while that one lone femcoder is quite awesome, she is a statistical aberration. For that matter, most of the male coders I know are aberrations too: socially awkward, clingy, creepy, emotionally unstable. I don't make the stereotypes, but on some level they're either eerily veracious, or self-fulfilling. If that's what scares women away from our industry, I cannot fault them. Those weirdos scare ME away from my own kind...
If it were a no-compromise experience, then they'd release just one goddamned edition of the OS at one price point and let you add/remove feature sets if and when needed.
In other words, just the Pro, thank you. Segmenting an operating system in 2012 is antiquated and moronic. All it does is piss off us techies who are forced to support the substandard "Home" editions.
What are you trying to accomplish here ?
I run a "label", really more of an online marketing business, that helps put indie bands on the web, sell their music and merch online, fill gigs with eager fans, and steer them toward quality studios and producers. I'm not quitting my day job, but we do decently and we don't rely on underage kids who don't have any significant income nor well defined tastes. We can book out-of-town shows and fill a couple of school buses with fans who follow the bands just to attend a gig and spread the love. Attendance is not a problem, but then again I'm not signing screamo or hip-hop or any other teenage market bands.
I'm not saying every band deserves to thrive, but the few good ones don't need big music in order to succeed anymore.
Same here in Canada, where the CRTC, our supposed media regulator, forces a certain amount of "Canadian Content". The idea is cute, but it's still protectionism at its worst. I'd rather play good foreign music than Nickelback, Celine Dion and Douchemau5. Don't get me wrong, we have many solid bands, but they are all gathered in a few narrow genres. If you're trying to put together an electronic music radio show, things get complicated and if you want to abide by the law, you have to put in a lot of Canadian filler to meet your quota and renew that stupid license.
The internet, by definition, is global. If I want to play goddamned Sitar music from southeast asia, no seat-warming big music shill can tell me not to, and ultimately that's what the CRTC has become: a bunch of ex-media executives backhanding favours to their cronies. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom, which has resulted in a lot of still-authentic artists avoiding it altogether.
One of the few remaining advantages of big box stores is you can easily return a product if it doesn't work out, the only cost being your gas and travel time. Online, you have to get RMA numbers, ship things back and it's a royal pain. If the big box stores implement prohibitive return policies, buyers will be more likely to go online and enjoy the same lack of customer service at a lower price. The big box stores will die, like they should have many years ago.
Computer shops have adapted to counter "free rentals" by applying restocking fees on opened returns, or offering store credit in lieu of a refund. I do it, works fine. You buy something from me, decide a week later you don't like it / have buyer's remorse ? Either I refund your money minus a 20% fee, or the full amount as a credit note toward your next purchase(s). The restocking fee (hopefully) covers the difference in having to sell an open-box, refurb or used item. More importantly, it's a fee I can waive as I see fit, so I can deter abusers without punishing honest clients. That jerkoff who only comes on the 1st of the month, wastes my afternoon haggling and asking bogus questions, and returns his Geforce on the 28th before the return window expires ? Yeah, FUCK HIM! Tough tits, 20% restocking fee, doors to your left. The other 99% of returns are people who buy something, take it home, find out it's not compatible, won't fit, doesn't do what it should, or any other honest mistake, and I'm quite sympathetic. If it's in good condition, or a common enough item that I can use it in a system build, or for my own internal use, I probably won't even charge the dumb fee, because it exists to protect me, not to defraud clients.
To effectively blacklist someone for 90 days because of a defective product that was exchanged, I consider that fucking hostile! What if I bought a TV, a Blu-Ray, a few movies and maybe a PS3, and find out two or more of those items are defective, as is all too common with today's made-in-china garbage ? You're going to replace my TV, but not my PS3 ? How about I drag your district manager to small claims court and waste a day of his salary ? Treat me like a crook, and I'll be inclined to live up to that expectation. Heck, I'll go buy the most expensive item in the store every 90 days and return it, just to spite the policy.
Customer service used to mean something, back when retail staff were more than just interchangeable teenagers with matching shirts.
This.
Big music is in decline because local, unsigned bands are enjoying a surge in popularity. This isn't specifically a French thing, it's happening all over. A lot of young adults and wise teens are fed up with the current state of commercial music and are looking elsewhere for their entertainment. Bands themselves often prefer to DIY, many feel the big label's distribution network no longer justifies the loss of freedom and control over their own work, not when the internet is right there and all their fans are on Facebook, MySpace, Reverbnation, SoundCloud and it's all free.
Perhaps the French are being hit harder as the result of public backlash against the harsh laws, but I'd bet they're going out more to see live acts, playing music that is actually made for enjoyment rather than profit. Big Music has lost its advantage over the everyman, they have little to offer that can't be bootstrapped with the take from a few gigs at local bars.
The big gap now is in studio recording. This is where the indies have some catching up to do. I work a lot with local bands and my biggest beef is that their recordings are poorly mixed. A lot of indie studios out there are shitting all over their clients' work. They boast impressive gear which lures people in the door, but lack the experience and critical ear to use that gear to its full potential.
This much I knew. What got Megaupload in hot water is all the dirty stuff Kim Dotcom was doing on the side, not the web site itself.
So then, are these other file hosts also engaging in money laundering on U.S. soil ? Or is this just another case of MAFIAA lawyers making baseless threats for profit ?
Seems to me, it's the lawyers who are laundering money by getting paid from dirty warez profits. o_O