If you want to get paid to write software then you're writing it for a company. If you want to write software to give away then stop expecting people to pay you for it. They want something for them. Not something for the world to use. By expecting to just give away their code you're telling them you're not focused on their product for their company. And why would they pay you to write software that a competitor can just use for free? If no competitor would use it, then why are you making it open source?
If you want to contribute to open source then do it on your own time with your own money.
It seems to me the bigger problem is that you're not a programmer, you simply find existing things that kind of do what the customer wants and piece them together.
If you can't write custom code for a client without using GPL code then you're not very good at your job.
And if you can't see the stupidity of giving something away that a client paid you thousands for then there's no help for you.
I started programming at about 6 because I wanted to make games. So I came up with game ideas and then learned what I needed to in order to make them. Then I got into web programming 10 years later because I wanted to make web sites. I make a good living making other people's web-sites and still make own as well when I need something. I needed to track my time for clients and projects so I wrote my own site to do it the way I wanted to do it. I needed to track my finances so I wrote a site to do that.
What does the kid want to do that involves programming?
What problem does he want to solve?
Java is free and it's not too terribly difficult to get a simple software rendering app going that he can start rendering math functions and apply what he's learning to graphical visualizations.
C# is free as well now. Visual Studio Express is more than sufficient to do graphics programming. Even JavaScript has gotten good enough to handle software rendering using the Canvas. I used that to show students how parameters affect a function during my student teaching.
Money is not a problem. Everything is free. There are tons of resources on the internet and libraries tend to have programming books. The problem is that you're looking for a solution to a problem the kid hasn't found yet.
Yep, and since 2010 the Republicans have been passing budgets in the house. The Democrat controlled house never passed a budget for the Democrat controlled house to pass. The Democrats just keep spending money without bothering to pass a budget first and refuse to vote on the house passed budgets. It's easier for them to spend when they don't have any guidelines for it.
If the Democrats can overspend by a trillion dollars every year, then they could include NASA in that budgetless spending if they wanted to. It's pretty absurd to blame the Republicans when they failed to block ObamaCare. Obviously, they weren't too much trouble for that.
Also note, the Democrats have controlled congress since 2007. Bush signed off on their runaway spending and the result was the tea party cleaning house in 2010. A lot of incumbent Republicans lost their jobs.
It's about time the Democrats cleaned house as well.
Medicare and Social Security are not the government's money. It's our money we specifically paid in for those programs. They're mandated savings accounts.
Finland allows teachers half of their paid time to prep and collaborate with parents and peers. They actually respect them.
There are buckets of problems with the US education system. I'm certified to teach HS Math and have a master's in sec ed and a BA in math. I'm spending the next year exploring my options for what can be done to make teaching not be a crappy work environment. In the mean time I'm web developer making good money so I have no rush to change careers. I'm happily volunteering my time to work with kids. I have a lot more freedom to experiment that way.
Charter school can kick kids out. That's a big reason they get better results. Kids that don't perform don't stay.
The whole public education system is a mess. We only pay teachers to teach. We don't pay them to grade papers, prepare lessons, spend time working with students, spend time working with peers or spend time working with parents.
Nobody, no matter how good they are at their job, can sustain working well over 40 hours a week. The irony is that unions like to talk about "what they accomplished" and the big thing was the 40 hour work week. Which teachers don't get.
Spend 40% or more of the budget on *take home* pay for teachers (not administrators), hire more of them, get them working 40 hours a week and you'll have a massive work force to choose from and far better results. Going from the standard 33% of funds paying teachers to 40% and that's a 21% increase in the number of teachers working which means smaller classrooms or more time to do other teacher jobs that are just as important as presenting a lesson.
If you want to run a tech business then you need to know the difference between crappy programmers and quality programmers. If you don't know anything about code and what quality code looks like, you could doom your business to failure before you even launch your first product. The longest running product I've got going is 3 years old. The design decisions early on are requiring some massive reworking but the actual business logic of the code is remaining untouched. The code was properly designed to be upgraded to new methodologies without breaking everything. In less than 80 hours the old code will be able to take advantage of new methodologies and we can go full steam ahead with new features.
Plenty of companies don't have that ability because they hire crappy programmers. 3 years down the road, they'll find out the code has to be thrown out entirely because it has turned to unmanageable spaghetti. And the end result is you're out of business.
School has limited hours and plenty to teach. If my daughter wants to learn programming I will get her what she needs to learn on her own time. I want schools to focus on the fundamentals, I as a parent, will focus on particular applications that my particular child is interested in.
Schools have already cut the arts and PE out in favor of the standard subjects like math. We're killing creativity in pursuit of nothing really. I learned how to program as a kid because I spent hours of my own time on it. Far more time than a school could devote to it. When I got to do LOGO in 7th grade, I ended up getting a book so I could learn more than the class was teaching.
My ISP cut off my internet connection after accusing me of spamming while providing no evidence that I was. I blocked port 25 at my router but that wasn't good enough for them. Since I couldn't connect to the internet I couldn't install any sort of anti-malware software. And once I did, I found it wasn't infected with anything. And I never got anything from my ISP showing what was going on.
They wanted to have a tech come in and check things out and have third party validation that my computers were clean. I told them the only tech coming in my house would be a competing ISP. And they could pound sand if they thought I was going to pay someone to inspect my computer which I need running and on-line to do my job of web development.
All without any actual documentation to show what they were accusing me off. They didn't even contact me before shutting off my internet to see if we could do a quick fix if needed. It's a good thing their competitor is Century Link (previously known as Qwest).
The only reason I got quick resolution is because they had a local office I went to and started in on them there. Their phone support kept trying to pass me off and just refused to do anything. They had customers hearing about how they just shut off my internet connection for no reason and with no warning so that was a bit of motivation for them to stop being morons.
I really hate that Qwest is the only competitor. I unblocked port 25 recently and if they give me grief again I'm done since there's no other option. Turns out, sites in progress have various email features that need to be checked.
"Millions of years" "God doesn't exist" and "common ancestor" have exactly nothing to do with knowing about and using observable, repeatable, usable things that are actually science and not science fiction.
Bill Nye is just being a bigot if he think being a Creationist prevents you from using science.
Nothing science has actually observed does anything to negate the idea of intelligent design.
Intelligent Design is about understanding how God did it and how his creations work. Evolution (in the Bill Nye sense) tries to make God irrelevant which is just stupid and not science at all.
I wouldn't "happily" work more if I were making salary. Salary is based on a 40 hour work week. So by the end of the year the overs and unders should average 40 hours a week. Most companies don't see it that way. It's just a way to get around labor laws.
Since I get paid by the hour I work as much as I need to. I have a couple clients that want to make me salary and I'm going with "no" on that. Working from home, making my own hours and having a direct correlation between time and money seems to be ideal. Right now I can't go over 40 a week with a particular client because it would be time and a half by state law where he's at. Somehow, I don't think that would be a concern if I were salary. That's just business. So I do business differently.
The ad was for as long as "they" exist. "They" don't exist anymore. Obviously the new company didn't buy your contracts so they're done holding up their end of the bargain.
6 years of service for $500 is pretty reasonable. About $6.95 a month which is comparable to GoDaddy.
The cost and hassle of trying to sue them is not worth it and really just silly.
Just because you blew money you didn't really have doesn't make the contract any different than it is. You made a bet that they'd exist for Y years and they lasted 6. Not surprising. It costs money to run a business and it was approaching "not worth it" on their lifetime product.
It's about $5 per year per student. Kids can access it from home, parents have their own login. They can see what homework they're missing, how a homework assignment affected their grade.
Sometimes it's just better to spend the little bit of money.
I've been volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club while I transition careers from web developer to high school math teacher and they have many old computers and brand new ones. The reason the brand new ones run horribly slow is because of all the "protection" software that's one them. A cleaned up P4 they have in stacks runs really well after I clean installed Windows XP. Their dual core 2+ Ghz systems the kids use now are tedious to work with. Windows spends more time preventing kids from breaking the computers or visiting the wrong sites than just doing what you tell it to do.
I'm teaching a week long class there now that involves tearing down and putting together old computers and seeing how much parts cost. I'll be having them put Ubuntu and LibreOffice on them to make them useful. There are about 12 donated systems that claim to be Windows XP ready. I'm holding off on the P4 ThinkCentre's until I get more enthusiasm for what I'm doing. That will be more of an investment since they really need new hard drives which are the biggest cause of slowness in them. The kids will get to take the computers home so they can do homework and what not.
Why would Romney, with buckets of successful private sector experience, need someone with private sector experience? He needs someone who's spent years working on the problem of the economy at the national scale and can help get things done within the system that is Washington.
What is Biden but a retarded court jester who hasn't done anything? When's the last time Biden was in the news except because he said something stupid?
The Romney / Paul ticket gives you experts in the private and public sector with a common worldview combined with Romney's track record of success both in MA and the private sector.
Or you could go with the boy king and his court jester who have spent $5 trillion and have nothing to show for it.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not writing operating systems.
When someone is paying you, it's "their" work. They are paying you to build something they own.
You no longer own it as soon as you cash the check for the work you did.
If you want to get paid to write software then you're writing it for a company. If you want to write software to give away then stop expecting people to pay you for it. They want something for them. Not something for the world to use. By expecting to just give away their code you're telling them you're not focused on their product for their company. And why would they pay you to write software that a competitor can just use for free? If no competitor would use it, then why are you making it open source?
If you want to contribute to open source then do it on your own time with your own money.
It seems to me the bigger problem is that you're not a programmer, you simply find existing things that kind of do what the customer wants and piece them together.
If you can't write custom code for a client without using GPL code then you're not very good at your job.
And if you can't see the stupidity of giving something away that a client paid you thousands for then there's no help for you.
I started programming at about 6 because I wanted to make games. So I came up with game ideas and then learned what I needed to in order to make them. Then I got into web programming 10 years later because I wanted to make web sites. I make a good living making other people's web-sites and still make own as well when I need something. I needed to track my time for clients and projects so I wrote my own site to do it the way I wanted to do it. I needed to track my finances so I wrote a site to do that.
What does the kid want to do that involves programming?
What problem does he want to solve?
Java is free and it's not too terribly difficult to get a simple software rendering app going that he can start rendering math functions and apply what he's learning to graphical visualizations.
C# is free as well now. Visual Studio Express is more than sufficient to do graphics programming. Even JavaScript has gotten good enough to handle software rendering using the Canvas. I used that to show students how parameters affect a function during my student teaching.
Money is not a problem. Everything is free. There are tons of resources on the internet and libraries tend to have programming books. The problem is that you're looking for a solution to a problem the kid hasn't found yet.
Yep, and since 2010 the Republicans have been passing budgets in the house. The Democrat controlled house never passed a budget for the Democrat controlled house to pass. The Democrats just keep spending money without bothering to pass a budget first and refuse to vote on the house passed budgets. It's easier for them to spend when they don't have any guidelines for it.
If the Democrats can overspend by a trillion dollars every year, then they could include NASA in that budgetless spending if they wanted to. It's pretty absurd to blame the Republicans when they failed to block ObamaCare. Obviously, they weren't too much trouble for that.
Also note, the Democrats have controlled congress since 2007. Bush signed off on their runaway spending and the result was the tea party cleaning house in 2010. A lot of incumbent Republicans lost their jobs.
It's about time the Democrats cleaned house as well.
everything is possible.
It's physics that's the problem.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/apr/13/business/fi-rup13.11
yes, because it's not possible for the pilot to be able to control the windows from the cockpit and have them only open when the plane has stopped.
But let's pretend he was talking about opening the windows mid flight, and not on the ground during the evacuation phase.
Socialized Medicine: Because if someone can't afford excellent care, everyone should have mediocre care.
There's a reason people come to the US for medical treatments.
Medicare and Social Security are not the government's money. It's our money we specifically paid in for those programs. They're mandated savings accounts.
Finland allows teachers half of their paid time to prep and collaborate with parents and peers. They actually respect them.
There are buckets of problems with the US education system. I'm certified to teach HS Math and have a master's in sec ed and a BA in math. I'm spending the next year exploring my options for what can be done to make teaching not be a crappy work environment. In the mean time I'm web developer making good money so I have no rush to change careers. I'm happily volunteering my time to work with kids. I have a lot more freedom to experiment that way.
Charter school can kick kids out. That's a big reason they get better results. Kids that don't perform don't stay.
The whole public education system is a mess. We only pay teachers to teach. We don't pay them to grade papers, prepare lessons, spend time working with students, spend time working with peers or spend time working with parents.
Nobody, no matter how good they are at their job, can sustain working well over 40 hours a week. The irony is that unions like to talk about "what they accomplished" and the big thing was the 40 hour work week. Which teachers don't get.
Spend 40% or more of the budget on *take home* pay for teachers (not administrators), hire more of them, get them working 40 hours a week and you'll have a massive work force to choose from and far better results. Going from the standard 33% of funds paying teachers to 40% and that's a 21% increase in the number of teachers working which means smaller classrooms or more time to do other teacher jobs that are just as important as presenting a lesson.
The same people who decide what is and isn't harassment: the victims who report it. And then the police either say "yep" or "nope."
The difference is that "on the internet" harassment can be blocked. In "real life" that can be much more difficult.
If you want to run a tech business then you need to know the difference between crappy programmers and quality programmers. If you don't know anything about code and what quality code looks like, you could doom your business to failure before you even launch your first product. The longest running product I've got going is 3 years old. The design decisions early on are requiring some massive reworking but the actual business logic of the code is remaining untouched. The code was properly designed to be upgraded to new methodologies without breaking everything. In less than 80 hours the old code will be able to take advantage of new methodologies and we can go full steam ahead with new features.
Plenty of companies don't have that ability because they hire crappy programmers. 3 years down the road, they'll find out the code has to be thrown out entirely because it has turned to unmanageable spaghetti. And the end result is you're out of business.
^ This.
School has limited hours and plenty to teach. If my daughter wants to learn programming I will get her what she needs to learn on her own time. I want schools to focus on the fundamentals, I as a parent, will focus on particular applications that my particular child is interested in.
Schools have already cut the arts and PE out in favor of the standard subjects like math. We're killing creativity in pursuit of nothing really. I learned how to program as a kid because I spent hours of my own time on it. Far more time than a school could devote to it. When I got to do LOGO in 7th grade, I ended up getting a book so I could learn more than the class was teaching.
My ISP cut off my internet connection after accusing me of spamming while providing no evidence that I was. I blocked port 25 at my router but that wasn't good enough for them. Since I couldn't connect to the internet I couldn't install any sort of anti-malware software. And once I did, I found it wasn't infected with anything. And I never got anything from my ISP showing what was going on.
They wanted to have a tech come in and check things out and have third party validation that my computers were clean. I told them the only tech coming in my house would be a competing ISP. And they could pound sand if they thought I was going to pay someone to inspect my computer which I need running and on-line to do my job of web development.
All without any actual documentation to show what they were accusing me off. They didn't even contact me before shutting off my internet to see if we could do a quick fix if needed. It's a good thing their competitor is Century Link (previously known as Qwest).
The only reason I got quick resolution is because they had a local office I went to and started in on them there. Their phone support kept trying to pass me off and just refused to do anything. They had customers hearing about how they just shut off my internet connection for no reason and with no warning so that was a bit of motivation for them to stop being morons.
I really hate that Qwest is the only competitor. I unblocked port 25 recently and if they give me grief again I'm done since there's no other option. Turns out, sites in progress have various email features that need to be checked.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/04/coming-soon-to/
"Coming Soon To All 50 States: The 60 mpg VW Jetta Diesel"
That was in 2008.
A motorcycle and other small cars can't always take advantage of the advances that are available in larger engines.
"Millions of years" "God doesn't exist" and "common ancestor" have exactly nothing to do with knowing about and using observable, repeatable, usable things that are actually science and not science fiction.
Bill Nye is just being a bigot if he think being a Creationist prevents you from using science.
Nothing science has actually observed does anything to negate the idea of intelligent design.
Intelligent Design is about understanding how God did it and how his creations work. Evolution (in the Bill Nye sense) tries to make God irrelevant which is just stupid and not science at all.
http://toastytech.com/guis/win31logo.png
I'd say it was the other way around. Microsoft has just adapted a variation of the Windows Logo as their company logo.
I wouldn't "happily" work more if I were making salary. Salary is based on a 40 hour work week. So by the end of the year the overs and unders should average 40 hours a week. Most companies don't see it that way. It's just a way to get around labor laws.
Since I get paid by the hour I work as much as I need to. I have a couple clients that want to make me salary and I'm going with "no" on that. Working from home, making my own hours and having a direct correlation between time and money seems to be ideal. Right now I can't go over 40 a week with a particular client because it would be time and a half by state law where he's at. Somehow, I don't think that would be a concern if I were salary. That's just business. So I do business differently.
The ad was for as long as "they" exist. "They" don't exist anymore. Obviously the new company didn't buy your contracts so they're done holding up their end of the bargain.
6 years of service for $500 is pretty reasonable. About $6.95 a month which is comparable to GoDaddy.
The cost and hassle of trying to sue them is not worth it and really just silly.
Just because you blew money you didn't really have doesn't make the contract any different than it is. You made a bet that they'd exist for Y years and they lasted 6. Not surprising. It costs money to run a business and it was approaching "not worth it" on their lifetime product.
Spreadsheets translate to databases which translate to websites easily if you just need some simple software for teachers to use.
Alternatively, I'd recommend JupiterGrades.com
http://jupitersis.com/
It's about $5 per year per student. Kids can access it from home, parents have their own login. They can see what homework they're missing, how a homework assignment affected their grade.
Sometimes it's just better to spend the little bit of money.
I've been volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club while I transition careers from web developer to high school math teacher and they have many old computers and brand new ones. The reason the brand new ones run horribly slow is because of all the "protection" software that's one them. A cleaned up P4 they have in stacks runs really well after I clean installed Windows XP. Their dual core 2+ Ghz systems the kids use now are tedious to work with. Windows spends more time preventing kids from breaking the computers or visiting the wrong sites than just doing what you tell it to do.
I'm teaching a week long class there now that involves tearing down and putting together old computers and seeing how much parts cost. I'll be having them put Ubuntu and LibreOffice on them to make them useful. There are about 12 donated systems that claim to be Windows XP ready. I'm holding off on the P4 ThinkCentre's until I get more enthusiasm for what I'm doing. That will be more of an investment since they really need new hard drives which are the biggest cause of slowness in them. The kids will get to take the computers home so they can do homework and what not.
Can we finally kill that stupid dog by flipping it off?
Why would Romney, with buckets of successful private sector experience, need someone with private sector experience? He needs someone who's spent years working on the problem of the economy at the national scale and can help get things done within the system that is Washington.
What is Biden but a retarded court jester who hasn't done anything? When's the last time Biden was in the news except because he said something stupid?
The Romney / Paul ticket gives you experts in the private and public sector with a common worldview combined with Romney's track record of success both in MA and the private sector.
Or you could go with the boy king and his court jester who have spent $5 trillion and have nothing to show for it.