I live in Texas which is an "at will" state and I accepted an at will offer. What they did was actually perfectly legal. After talking to a lawyer I used what leverage I had to get a nice settlement. But, it was due to other leverage, not the fact that I was fired, that got me the money.
People have a lot of funny ideas about how much their "rights" are really worth.
I've seen the good the band and the ugly of unions. I've known a number of people who were members of the UMW. At least one of them is still alive because of safety rules put in place because of the union. On the other hand I've seen a Union voted out of a company after management was able to keep a plant operating with a tenth of the staff during a strike. Of course they staffed the plant with Engineers, but 1 engineer costs a lot less than 10 Union technicians. (Putting the engineers on the line had one other unintended consequence, over the next year, based on their experience on the line, the engineers were able to redesign processes and add automation that dramatically reduced staffing in the plant and improve production rates and quality. Engineers NEED to spend time on the line.)
On the other hand, I'm pushing fifty. Five years ago after 3 months of coding 14+ hours a day 6+ days a week I wound up in the hospital at 3:00 a.m. with chest pains. Turned out to be a panic attack, not a heart attack. The cardiologist identified my as a programmer near a deadline from the symptoms. Turns out he sees 2 or 3 programmers a week having sever physical symptoms as the result of the stress of to many hours spent coding, too much caffeine, and to little sleep.
When I told my manager that I was under doctors orders to cut back my work hours to something near normal (40 hours a week) I was fired.
I am not a fan of Unions. But, I know that programmers are being exploited. So what if we make 2 or 3 times the average salary in the US. What good is that if you work 2 or 3 times as many hours to get it? What good is it if you can't keep working as a programmer when you are 40+ years old? What good is it if you burn out, freak out, or simply die?
The problem is that good programmers program because they love it. And that love is being exploited.
Now, when I interview for a job I tell people up front that if they are looking for someone to spend 60+ hours a week coding then don't hire me 'cause I won't do it. It makes it a lot harder to find jobs... But, I've managed. In some ways it seems to make me more valuable in the eyes of management.
Some days I still program for 12+ hours a day. But, when I do no more than 8 of those hours are for someone else. The rest is for me.
One of my Uncles wrote code some of the code for the UNIVAC I that was used to predict the out come of the 1952 presidential election. He would tell the story every time he was around his techie kids and relations. Seems most of the folks on the project were hard core Democrats and they all believed deep down inside that the other guy (Stevenson?) was going to win.
When they got the first numbers and ran the analysis the UNIVAC said that Eisenhower
was going to win by a landslide. Well, the programmers didn't believe it so they started looking for the bugs in their code. They looked really hard and fixed a couple of bugs and they got new data and they reran the analysis and it said Eisenhower by a landslide. So they went looking for more bugs...
Finally they had to report their results and they did with great embarrassment because nobody, including the press, believed the Eisenhower could possibly win.
Eisenhower won in a landslide.
My Uncle would always end the story with a moral about having to trust the results of experiments even when they disagreed with your personal belief. He's a great guy, I wish I knew him better.
Education, like travel, is a way to learn other points of view. Some of the best (and worst) techies I have worked with had MBAs on top of a technical degree and solid technical experience.
The worst ones were usually well educated but not very good and they wanted the MBA so they would "get the recongnition the deserve." These folks have real problems and the MBA got them nothing. The result was a very bitter person with a number of degrees.
The best learned enough about business to be able to understand how what they do fits into the bottom line of the company and learn to channel their efforts to actually improve the bottom line. These people get the big bucks and the big options and they are why some companies have a technical track. Of course, some of them moved up in management and some started their own businesses.
Being able to understand your boss, your grandboss, and your great grand boss is not a bad thing.
Then there is the simple advantage of having an advanced degree. I went to college in the early 70s and graduated at a time when demand for techies was just starting to boom. During the lat 60s early 70s a technical degree was good for wiping your butt and not much else. I went back and got a MS degree during the early 80s when demand for techies was peaking. During the late 80s early 90s when techies couldn't find jobs that MS helped me stay employeed where people with BS degrees were learning to sell insurance. If you want to be a techie at the end of the next down turn you might want to get a graduate degree now.
I have two children and have been through all of this. I've learned the following...
Teach them to lie. Never tell a web site or anyone you meet on the net your real name, your zip code, your address. We sat together as a family and explained why it is OK to lie to protect yourself and your family. And, just like we rehearsed what to do in case of a fire we rehearsed how to lie on the Internet by creating false identities on Yahoo.
My kids believed me on this and it has worked well so far.
Don't down load programs without asking a parent. That changed to don't down load ANYTHING with out asking a parent. And the related rule that when the anti-virus software wants to be updated, update it. And don't ever disable the anit-virus software.
The kids decided this was a good idea after we found that their computer was a zombie.
Have one computer for the kids and a different one for the grown ups.
If you are going to visit adult web sites don't have the browser set to have the last page you visited be your home page. Also, learn to wipe the history and the cache on the borwser so I don't have to explain to Mom that it is normal for 15 year old boys to look at "stuff like that."
Your children's friends will wind up using your childrens computer. And, if you are not careful they will use your computer too.
While the kids are young keep the computer in a public room. Right next to daddy's computer in a room next to where the grown ups watch TV is a good place.
Keep spare printer ink and paper around. A school project can result in the sudden need to print 20 full color pictures at 10 p.m. on a school night.
If you aren't prepared to explain "what that man is doing to that goat" to a 7 year old don't let a 7 year old use the web when you aren't looking. If you CAN'T explain sex to a 7 year old consider not having kids...
Oh yeah, if you didn't pick it up from all of the above. Have a computer for the kids and one for the adults. You keep your room the way you want it and argue with the kids to keep their room(s) up to your standards. The same goes for computers. If you don't want to boot up and find Punk wall paper don't let the kids use your computer.
If you have more than one kid you will have fights over who gets to use it. Sort of like fights over what program to watch on TV. Though, I found that the better network connection I have the less TV gets watched. Set up a schedule and live with it.
Last time I tried to verify numbers like those you are quoting it turned out that the people quoting them, BSA, were assuming that if you bought a computer without Windows on it you were going to steal a copy of Windows.
As I understand it, the countries you list also happen to be countries with very high levels of free software usage (Linux, FreeBSD...) and would therefore have large sales of PCs without Windows. And the folks at Microsoft and the other BSA members would assume they were stealing what they are getting legally for free.
There are many great business reasons to use ASPs.
The simplest is that using an ASP turns capital investment dollars into expense dollars. Capital investment has to be depreciated on taxes over a period of several years. Which in the case of software is long past its usable life span. Exepense dollars come off of your taxes this year.
Also, sharing the services of a set of experts whose only business is providing a specific service is much cheaper than trying to duplicate those experts inside your company. This is especially true for small businesses. Very few small businesses print their own pay checks. That service has been contracted out for decades. ASPs make it possible to subcontract out even more services. WONDERFUL!
Of course, if you bet your business on a free service, well... you deserve whatever happens to you. You get what you pay for. Trust is an absolute requirement in an ASP relationship. That is one reason why the telecos have been getting into the ASP business. They have such a reputation of trust with customers (hard to believe, but true) that they have a big edge over other ASPs. Not to mention, they are big enough (10s of billions in revenue per year) and have been around long enough (100 years or so) that people beleive them when they say they'll be around to continue providing the service.
But I have read the US Constituion. (Most of you would benefit from doing the same thing.)
This just means that the next appeal is to the US supreme court where it can still be overturned. No state supreme court has federal jurisdiction. Only s federal court can decide a federal issue.
With domain names. At least one county government in California woke up to find that the slow process needed for paying a $30 dollar registration fee allowed a porn vendor to buy up their "abandonded" domain name.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
If you don't recognize the quotation is from the Declaration of Independence which you can read at http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/de claration.html
To translate for modern readers, it says that the only rights that governments have are those given freely by the people to the government. And, that when the governement stops acting in the best interests of the governed, the people have the right to change the governement. There are no such things as governement rights only human rights granted to governements by humans.
In the US when to telcos exchange traffic the recieving telco gets paid by the sending telco. I was working under the mistaken assumption that it worked that way elsewhere.
Thanks for the info.
StoneWolf
You used University of Utah equipment and resources and you are a student at the UoU. It is their property. That's it, nothing more to say. Having graduated from the UofU a couple of times As a former student and staffer at the U I'm well aware of their rules and the law.
My guess is that they are upset about the content and about your reaction when they first tried to control the content. They probobly have good grounds for both civil and criminal charges against you.
GET A LAWYER RIGHT NOW.
He will be able to help you apologize, kiss ass, and beg while avoiding self incrimination. With enough groveling you might be allowed to finish your degree. Without it you are totally completely hosed.
Oh yeah, there is no free speech question here. None at all. Stop even thinking about it. The publisher (the University of Utah) has the right to control the content of anything it publishes. And that includes web sites published by students using UofU equipment.
The fact that you volunteered to create the site makes NO DIFFERENCE. You chose to give them 2000 hours of work and they chose to through it away. You each made your choices. Your choices in no way create an obligation and any one else.
Stop whining. Suck it up. Hire a lawyer. Start pleading, begging apologizing, and groveling.
But, normally a network provider pays to for outbound traffic and gets paid for inbound traffic. This means they want more, a lot more, in bound (download) traffic than out bound traffic. This means they want you to pay to UPLOAD, not download data. They make money off of your downloads, and pay for your up loads.
The DSL service I have limits my UPLOADs to 5GB/month. Which normally means I can download about 50GB/month. And then they charge extra for each GB above 5GB I up load.
Sound like your ISP is truely ripping you off. Or else I don't know what I'm talking about.
I worked for many years as a programmer in a t-shirts and levis environment. I liked it. I did learn to wear a suit when I was giving presentations to executives, but I considered it a pain to be avoided as much as possible. But, I noticed that when I went out to lunch in a suit I got seated at better tables...
Then I went to work for a game company. The official dress code said all the naughty bits have to be covered and you can't stink. But, I noticed that even assitant producers (the lowest form of life next to used car salesmen) treated me like garbage. So, on days the producers were around I started wearing black silk shirts, black dockers, black shades, and shiny black boots (I was in Texas). Even producers started treating me well and APs would bow down when I walked into a room. And, I got treated really nice by the waitresses when I went out to lunch. But, I got followed by security any time I went into a store.
Then I went to work for a networking company. Strict "Business casual" dress code. I cut my hair and kept my beard short. Felt really weird. But, I got good tables at restaurants, and I got called "sir" by people in stores.
Then I went to work for a start up. WOW! FREEDOM! Back to t-shirts and levis for me! Grew my hair really long. Let the beard drop toward my knees. And, after about a year I noticed I missed being treated with respect by both strangers and managers. Truely weird. So, now I compromise between how I want to look and how I want to be treated.
Try it. You might like how it feels. It took me a long time learn this simple lesson. Only your peers know what you can do and judge you by that. Everyone else judges you by how you look. Use their stupidity to get what YOU want.
StoneWolf
Reacting to this is just plain silly...
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We don't have enough information about this suit to even justify getting upset about it. We do not know the details of the licenses. We don't know what kind of talks were going on before the suit was filed. We don't know the nature of the talks that are going on now. This is actually a very private dispute between business partners. It doesn't concern us at all.
In a contract dispute a suit is often filed, or at least threatened, to get the attention of a party who is in violation of a contract who is refusing to discuss the problem with the other parties. It is the legal equivalent of grounding a teenager who thinks that "be home at 11:00" means "be home before I wake up." Sometimes you have to do nasty things just to get their attention.
> > It is upto the developers to stop the cheating.
>
> Not a flame, but obviously you're not a game/graphics programmer, else
> you would know this is "pratically" IMPOSSIBLE. (You will see why I
> say pratically below.)
I am a graphics programmer with 20+ years of experience. And, I have written
a commercial 1st person 3d game. Since I last saw it referenced on a list of
the worst RPGs ever written I will admit that I'm not the best game programmer
in the world.
>
> > Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw
> > things that you can not see.
>
> In the *ideal* client/server game, yes, the server would tell the
> client what it can and can't see. This style of client is commonly
> called a "dumb terminal." It takes input, sends it to the server, and
> renders what the server says.
>
> Let's see how this would work:
>
> Client is standing still, looking straight ahead. Server sends updates
> to what the client can see. e.g. players move around.
>
> Now the client does a quick 180 turn. Server needs to send the client
> all the new objects the client can now see. Unfortunately you TOTALLY
> forgot about network latency. Objects "pop" into view, and you kill
> bandwidth since you are constantly telling the server where you are
> looking, along with the server constantly sending what you can see.
>
> This one reason it is pratically why it is impossible to write a
> cheat-proof client/sever game. The network connection just doesn't
> make it feasible.
>
> If you need more examples, I'm sure John Carmack could point out a few
> more examples, since he's been implementing First Person Shooter's for
> a while.
Interesting style of argument. First you create a strawman and argue
against it and then you appeal to an authority without a quotation.
You start with the insane supposition that the server would have to do
all visibility checking when in fact the client can make the decision
to draw or not draw something locally. The fact that the client knows
that something exists does NOT imply that it MUST draw it. Truth is
that earlier versions of Quake used a scan line buffer for HLHSR that
doesn't suffer from these problems.
>
> > This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line &
> > Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers. Nonsense. BSP's only
> > really work for static objects. You still need a z-buffer for dynamic
> > objects. BSP's aren't free.
>
> Are you going to generate a BSP for each "frame" of animation, when
> the frame is generated dynamically?? (i.e. blended animation)
Merging mobile objects into the small subregion of space that the
existing BSP tree marks as visible is not all that complicated or that
slow. So, it is practical to do just that. An octtree can be used to
track the location of mobile objects and support fast volumetric
searches allowing you to quickly find the potentially visible set of
objects. Then you need to do a quick BSP visibility check on just
their bounding box to classify them into definitely invisible and
possibly visible sets. IF you only render the potentially visible set
of mobile objects in Z order (as obtained from the BSP tree) you will
not have anyhave eliminated the 99% of the advantage of cheating
drivers while not significantly affect rendering performance
Can build a shim into the D3D driver stack and enable transparency without any help from the driver vendors.
And, on any open source OS a skilled programmer can hack the X server, the DRI, the tcp/ip stack and anything else that might make it possible to cheat.
Cheaters will cheat. It is upto the developers to stop the cheating. Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see. This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.
StoneWolf
Who has forgotten they live in the US?
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Language chauvinism is an ugly thing.
For the uniformed, French is not a foreign language in Louisiana. And, last time I checked Louisiana was part of the US. Same thing goes for German in parts of Texas. And for Spanish in Texas, California, and about a third of the rest of the US states. And, I'd be truly remiss if I failed to mention all the Native American languages that are still spoken throughout the US. English is not the mother tongue of many Americans.
That Tauzin has a version of his page in the language spoken by many of his constituents is simply good politics and good service. Why do you think George W. made such a big deal about speaking Spanish? Because so many of the citizens of Texas speak it as their primary language.
To make my own offensively chauvinist statement, you sound like a damn yankee.
Has the term P2P been perverted to only mean file sharing systems like Napster? Doesn't anyone remember that IP is an inherently P2P technology? Has anyone pointed out that email is the most widely used P2P technology? Followed perhaps by usenet, the world wide web, and of course NFS? Not to mention CVS?
How about examples like Internet telephony and video telephony? For that matter what about FTP and aptget? Or, one that we all know and love... Windows Update. There are also many networked games that are P2P.
Don't let THEM define the term P2P. P2P is anything in which two or more network peers communicated with each other as peers. It isn't just file sharing.
Nokia is in business to make money. That means they have a plan to make money on this box. Maybe they make part of the money selling the box and most of it selling a service through the box. That would make sense since they do the same thing with cell phones.
But, HOW they plan to make money DOES NOT MATTER. Nokia would not be doing this if they didn't have a way to make money off of it.
To make the obvious conclusion. If Nokia is going to make money off of this then everyone who codes for them deserves a share of that money. I don't see anywhere on ostdev.net where it shows how we get our share of the money.
Looks like they are just ripping off those of us who don't know any better.
"It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
We have seen Mexico City move away from Microsoft. We have just seen Argentina take the first baby steps away from Microsoft. The above statement FROM Microsoft tells us that those moves away from MS are the tip of the iceberg of an international movement away from Microsoft.
Why is this happening now? Two things have happened in the last couple of years that make this possible. First is StarOffice and the other liberated software office productivity applications that have come out. The application base of liberated software has reached critical mass. The second is simply price. You don't have to have a Microsoft OS to run the key applications you need to get business done any more. The other thing is that Microsoft software is expensive. MS software is seen as expensive even in the US, arguably the wealthiest country in the world. In every other country it is seen as outrageously expensive. It is also seen as American and not to be trusted because it is to some extent under the control of the US government. (Remember the NSA key?) If you use liberated software you don't have to pay MS's high prices and you don't have to worry about who has set up backdoors in your system.
And yes, this means we are in a very dangerous place in history. We have already won many battles we didn't even know we were fighting. But, now the beast has been awakened. MS will not rest until liberated software is illegal.
StoneWolf
P.S.
I'm using the phrase "liberated software" instead of "free software" because I hate having to say "free, as in free speech, not free, as in free beer" to make people understand what I'm talking about.
IANAL so I don't know if this will stand up legally....
Ever listened to a Mozart Sonata? Ever played Quake? The sonata was written in very peculiar, highly artificial, notation that requires a lot of training to understand and even more training to write. Yet, could anyone say that music written in musical notation is not expressive? Quake is also written in a very peculiar, highly artificial, notation that also requires a great deal of training to understand and even more training to write.
To play Quake the creative intent of the writer is expressed by use of a tool called a computer. To listen to Mozart we can use another tool called a player piano. Before we can play Quake the prewritten instructions are compiled into instructions designed to be interpreted by the computer. Before we can listen to Mozart we must compile the musical notation into instructions designed to be interpreted by a player piano.
Both the computer and the player piano are completely automatic devices that are needed to express the creative intent of the authors of works written in highly artificial notations.
Where is there any difference between a computer program and a Mozart Sonata? The key difference is that most programs would lose much of their expressive power if "played" at the speed of a human piano player. This difference is in the speed of execution needed to bring out the expression embodied in the program. Never the less, just as one trained in musical notation can appreciate the beauty of Mozart's music without having to hear a performance of it, someone trained in programming can appreciate the beauty of a program just by reading it. In fact, it can be much more beautiful to the reader than to someone who just uses the program on a computer.
As a programmer who has read a great number of computer programs I can testify that I have had chills go up and down my spine, laughed, giggled, and experienced flashes of enlightenment from reading programs. The experience is much like reading a mathematical proof expressed as haiku. It took several years of study and practice of the art of programming before I could appreciate programs at that level.
That someone cannot see the parallels between programs and music is proof that they lack sufficient training in music or programming.
But, have you ever noticed that the same companies that never reply to customer email are the same ones that complain they can't hire enough techies to do the job? And, that they are the same ones that never reply to emailed job applications?
I don't know what bothers me the most. The cranking and grinding about every failed dot com or the fact that I've never even heard of most of the dot coms that people are cranking and grinding about.
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who looked at the dot com boom knew that more than 90% of dot coms were going to fail. 90% of ALL new businesses fail. In a brand new market where no one is an expert you have to expect that 99% of all new businesses are going to fail. We all knew that. So why do we care when one more me too dot com with a bogus business plan bites the big one?
It is not a bad thing that poorly run companies with no revenue and no viable business plan go out of business. It is a good thing.
Most of the really sucessful dot coms haven't even been established yet. The GMs, Fords, AT&Ts, and IBMs of the Internet will be spawned over the next 10 years. And they'll be spawned by people who learned their lesson in the great dot com bust.
Yeah, right around 73-74 I changed my major from history to computer science. My advisor explained to me very slooooowly in small words that with a history degree I could get a job teaching or maybe go to law school. But that the only thing I could do with a CS degree was wipe my a$$.
At the time people with degrees, even graduate degrees in engineering, computer science, and the hard science couldn't find jobs. No college recruiting, nothing.
I've seen this cycle repeat itself, 3 or 4 times.
StoneWolf
P.S.
I was looking at the Intel job site a couple of days ago. They only seem to have about 20 job openings in the entire USA.
Slashdot Mirror
People have a lot of funny ideas about how much their "rights" are really worth.
StoneWolf
On the other hand, I'm pushing fifty. Five years ago after 3 months of coding 14+ hours a day 6+ days a week I wound up in the hospital at 3:00 a.m. with chest pains. Turned out to be a panic attack, not a heart attack. The cardiologist identified my as a programmer near a deadline from the symptoms. Turns out he sees 2 or 3 programmers a week having sever physical symptoms as the result of the stress of to many hours spent coding, too much caffeine, and to little sleep.
When I told my manager that I was under doctors orders to cut back my work hours to something near normal (40 hours a week) I was fired.
I am not a fan of Unions. But, I know that programmers are being exploited. So what if we make 2 or 3 times the average salary in the US. What good is that if you work 2 or 3 times as many hours to get it? What good is it if you can't keep working as a programmer when you are 40+ years old? What good is it if you burn out, freak out, or simply die?
The problem is that good programmers program because they love it. And that love is being exploited.
Now, when I interview for a job I tell people up front that if they are looking for someone to spend 60+ hours a week coding then don't hire me 'cause I won't do it. It makes it a lot harder to find jobs... But, I've managed. In some ways it seems to make me more valuable in the eyes of management.
Some days I still program for 12+ hours a day. But, when I do no more than 8 of those hours are for someone else. The rest is for me.
StoneWolf
When they got the first numbers and ran the analysis the UNIVAC said that Eisenhower was going to win by a landslide. Well, the programmers didn't believe it so they started looking for the bugs in their code. They looked really hard and fixed a couple of bugs and they got new data and they reran the analysis and it said Eisenhower by a landslide. So they went looking for more bugs...
Finally they had to report their results and they did with great embarrassment because nobody, including the press, believed the Eisenhower could possibly win.
Eisenhower won in a landslide.
My Uncle would always end the story with a moral about having to trust the results of experiments even when they disagreed with your personal belief. He's a great guy, I wish I knew him better.
StoneWolf
The worst ones were usually well educated but not very good and they wanted the MBA so they would "get the recongnition the deserve." These folks have real problems and the MBA got them nothing. The result was a very bitter person with a number of degrees.
The best learned enough about business to be able to understand how what they do fits into the bottom line of the company and learn to channel their efforts to actually improve the bottom line. These people get the big bucks and the big options and they are why some companies have a technical track. Of course, some of them moved up in management and some started their own businesses.
Being able to understand your boss, your grandboss, and your great grand boss is not a bad thing.
Then there is the simple advantage of having an advanced degree. I went to college in the early 70s and graduated at a time when demand for techies was just starting to boom. During the lat 60s early 70s a technical degree was good for wiping your butt and not much else. I went back and got a MS degree during the early 80s when demand for techies was peaking. During the late 80s early 90s when techies couldn't find jobs that MS helped me stay employeed where people with BS degrees were learning to sell insurance. If you want to be a techie at the end of the next down turn you might want to get a graduate degree now.
Stonewolf
Teach them to lie. Never tell a web site or anyone you meet on the net your real name, your zip code, your address. We sat together as a family and explained why it is OK to lie to protect yourself and your family. And, just like we rehearsed what to do in case of a fire we rehearsed how to lie on the Internet by creating false identities on Yahoo.
My kids believed me on this and it has worked well so far.
Don't down load programs without asking a parent. That changed to don't down load ANYTHING with out asking a parent. And the related rule that when the anti-virus software wants to be updated, update it. And don't ever disable the anit-virus software.
The kids decided this was a good idea after we found that their computer was a zombie.
Have one computer for the kids and a different one for the grown ups.
If you are going to visit adult web sites don't have the browser set to have the last page you visited be your home page. Also, learn to wipe the history and the cache on the borwser so I don't have to explain to Mom that it is normal for 15 year old boys to look at "stuff like that."
Your children's friends will wind up using your childrens computer. And, if you are not careful they will use your computer too.
While the kids are young keep the computer in a public room. Right next to daddy's computer in a room next to where the grown ups watch TV is a good place.
Keep spare printer ink and paper around. A school project can result in the sudden need to print 20 full color pictures at 10 p.m. on a school night.
If you aren't prepared to explain "what that man is doing to that goat" to a 7 year old don't let a 7 year old use the web when you aren't looking. If you CAN'T explain sex to a 7 year old consider not having kids...
Oh yeah, if you didn't pick it up from all of the above. Have a computer for the kids and one for the adults. You keep your room the way you want it and argue with the kids to keep their room(s) up to your standards. The same goes for computers. If you don't want to boot up and find Punk wall paper don't let the kids use your computer.
If you have more than one kid you will have fights over who gets to use it. Sort of like fights over what program to watch on TV. Though, I found that the better network connection I have the less TV gets watched. Set up a schedule and live with it.
StoneWolf
As I understand it, the countries you list also happen to be countries with very high levels of free software usage (Linux, FreeBSD...) and would therefore have large sales of PCs without Windows. And the folks at Microsoft and the other BSA members would assume they were stealing what they are getting legally for free.
So, I say to you: Prove it, put up or shut up.
StoneWolf
The simplest is that using an ASP turns capital investment dollars into expense dollars. Capital investment has to be depreciated on taxes over a period of several years. Which in the case of software is long past its usable life span. Exepense dollars come off of your taxes this year.
Also, sharing the services of a set of experts whose only business is providing a specific service is much cheaper than trying to duplicate those experts inside your company. This is especially true for small businesses. Very few small businesses print their own pay checks. That service has been contracted out for decades. ASPs make it possible to subcontract out even more services. WONDERFUL!
Of course, if you bet your business on a free service, well... you deserve whatever happens to you. You get what you pay for. Trust is an absolute requirement in an ASP relationship. That is one reason why the telecos have been getting into the ASP business. They have such a reputation of trust with customers (hard to believe, but true) that they have a big edge over other ASPs. Not to mention, they are big enough (10s of billions in revenue per year) and have been around long enough (100 years or so) that people beleive them when they say they'll be around to continue providing the service.
StoneWolf
But I have read the US Constituion. (Most of you would benefit from doing the same thing.)
This just means that the next appeal is to the US supreme court where it can still be overturned. No state supreme court has federal jurisdiction. Only s federal court can decide a federal issue.
StoneWolf
It will happen with subscription model software.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
If you don't recognize the quotation is from the Declaration of Independence which you can read at http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/de claration.html
To translate for modern readers, it says that the only rights that governments have are those given freely by the people to the government. And, that when the governement stops acting in the best interests of the governed, the people have the right to change the governement. There are no such things as governement rights only human rights granted to governements by humans.
StoneWolf
In the US when to telcos exchange traffic the recieving telco gets paid by the sending telco. I was working under the mistaken assumption that it worked that way elsewhere. Thanks for the info. StoneWolf
My guess is that they are upset about the content and about your reaction when they first tried to control the content. They probobly have good grounds for both civil and criminal charges against you.
GET A LAWYER RIGHT NOW.
He will be able to help you apologize, kiss ass, and beg while avoiding self incrimination. With enough groveling you might be allowed to finish your degree. Without it you are totally completely hosed.
Oh yeah, there is no free speech question here. None at all. Stop even thinking about it. The publisher (the University of Utah) has the right to control the content of anything it publishes. And that includes web sites published by students using UofU equipment.
The fact that you volunteered to create the site makes NO DIFFERENCE. You chose to give them 2000 hours of work and they chose to through it away. You each made your choices. Your choices in no way create an obligation and any one else.
Stop whining. Suck it up. Hire a lawyer. Start pleading, begging apologizing, and groveling.
StoneWolf
But, normally a network provider pays to for outbound traffic and gets paid for inbound traffic. This means they want more, a lot more, in bound (download) traffic than out bound traffic. This means they want you to pay to UPLOAD, not download data. They make money off of your downloads, and pay for your up loads.
The DSL service I have limits my UPLOADs to 5GB/month. Which normally means I can download about 50GB/month. And then they charge extra for each GB above 5GB I up load.
Sound like your ISP is truely ripping you off. Or else I don't know what I'm talking about.
StoneWolf
Then I went to work for a game company. The official dress code said all the naughty bits have to be covered and you can't stink. But, I noticed that even assitant producers (the lowest form of life next to used car salesmen) treated me like garbage. So, on days the producers were around I started wearing black silk shirts, black dockers, black shades, and shiny black boots (I was in Texas). Even producers started treating me well and APs would bow down when I walked into a room. And, I got treated really nice by the waitresses when I went out to lunch. But, I got followed by security any time I went into a store.
Then I went to work for a networking company. Strict "Business casual" dress code. I cut my hair and kept my beard short. Felt really weird. But, I got good tables at restaurants, and I got called "sir" by people in stores.
Then I went to work for a start up. WOW! FREEDOM! Back to t-shirts and levis for me! Grew my hair really long. Let the beard drop toward my knees. And, after about a year I noticed I missed being treated with respect by both strangers and managers. Truely weird. So, now I compromise between how I want to look and how I want to be treated.
Try it. You might like how it feels. It took me a long time learn this simple lesson. Only your peers know what you can do and judge you by that. Everyone else judges you by how you look. Use their stupidity to get what YOU want.
StoneWolf
In a contract dispute a suit is often filed, or at least threatened, to get the attention of a party who is in violation of a contract who is refusing to discuss the problem with the other parties. It is the legal equivalent of grounding a teenager who thinks that "be home at 11:00" means "be home before I wake up." Sometimes you have to do nasty things just to get their attention.
StoneWolf
I am a graphics programmer with 20+ years of experience. And, I have written a commercial 1st person 3d game. Since I last saw it referenced on a list of the worst RPGs ever written I will admit that I'm not the best game programmer in the world.
> > > Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw > > things that you can not see. > > In the *ideal* client/server game, yes, the server would tell the > client what it can and can't see. This style of client is commonly > called a "dumb terminal." It takes input, sends it to the server, and > renders what the server says. > > Let's see how this would work: > > Client is standing still, looking straight ahead. Server sends updates > to what the client can see. e.g. players move around. > > Now the client does a quick 180 turn. Server needs to send the client > all the new objects the client can now see. Unfortunately you TOTALLY > forgot about network latency. Objects "pop" into view, and you kill > bandwidth since you are constantly telling the server where you are > looking, along with the server constantly sending what you can see. > > This one reason it is pratically why it is impossible to write a > cheat-proof client/sever game. The network connection just doesn't > make it feasible. > > If you need more examples, I'm sure John Carmack could point out a few > more examples, since he's been implementing First Person Shooter's for > a while.
Interesting style of argument. First you create a strawman and argue against it and then you appeal to an authority without a quotation.
You start with the insane supposition that the server would have to do all visibility checking when in fact the client can make the decision to draw or not draw something locally. The fact that the client knows that something exists does NOT imply that it MUST draw it. Truth is that earlier versions of Quake used a scan line buffer for HLHSR that doesn't suffer from these problems.
> > > This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & > > Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers. Nonsense. BSP's only > > really work for static objects. You still need a z-buffer for dynamic > > objects. BSP's aren't free. > > Are you going to generate a BSP for each "frame" of animation, when > the frame is generated dynamically?? (i.e. blended animation)
Merging mobile objects into the small subregion of space that the existing BSP tree marks as visible is not all that complicated or that slow. So, it is practical to do just that. An octtree can be used to track the location of mobile objects and support fast volumetric searches allowing you to quickly find the potentially visible set of objects. Then you need to do a quick BSP visibility check on just their bounding box to classify them into definitely invisible and possibly visible sets. IF you only render the potentially visible set of mobile objects in Z order (as obtained from the BSP tree) you will not have anyhave eliminated the 99% of the advantage of cheating drivers while not significantly affect rendering performance
And, on any open source OS a skilled programmer can hack the X server, the DRI, the tcp/ip stack and anything else that might make it possible to cheat.
Cheaters will cheat. It is upto the developers to stop the cheating. Having transparent walls does you no good if the game doesn't draw things that you can not see. This is one reason to prefer BSP trees for HLHSR (Hidden Line & Hidden Surface Removal) instead of Z buffers.
StoneWolf
For the uniformed, French is not a foreign language in Louisiana. And, last time I checked Louisiana was part of the US. Same thing goes for German in parts of Texas. And for Spanish in Texas, California, and about a third of the rest of the US states. And, I'd be truly remiss if I failed to mention all the Native American languages that are still spoken throughout the US. English is not the mother tongue of many Americans.
That Tauzin has a version of his page in the language spoken by many of his constituents is simply good politics and good service. Why do you think George W. made such a big deal about speaking Spanish? Because so many of the citizens of Texas speak it as their primary language.
To make my own offensively chauvinist statement, you sound like a damn yankee.
StoneWolf
How about examples like Internet telephony and video telephony? For that matter what about FTP and aptget? Or, one that we all know and love... Windows Update. There are also many networked games that are P2P.
Don't let THEM define the term P2P. P2P is anything in which two or more network peers communicated with each other as peers. It isn't just file sharing.
StoneWolf
But, HOW they plan to make money DOES NOT MATTER. Nokia would not be doing this if they didn't have a way to make money off of it.
To make the obvious conclusion. If Nokia is going to make money off of this then everyone who codes for them deserves a share of that money. I don't see anywhere on ostdev.net where it shows how we get our share of the money.
Looks like they are just ripping off those of us who don't know any better.
Stonewolf
"It's happening very, very broadly in a way that is troubling to us," he said. "I could highlight a dozen countries around the world who have open-source initiatives."
We have seen Mexico City move away from Microsoft. We have just seen Argentina take the first baby steps away from Microsoft. The above statement FROM Microsoft tells us that those moves away from MS are the tip of the iceberg of an international movement away from Microsoft.
Why is this happening now? Two things have happened in the last couple of years that make this possible. First is StarOffice and the other liberated software office productivity applications that have come out. The application base of liberated software has reached critical mass. The second is simply price. You don't have to have a Microsoft OS to run the key applications you need to get business done any more. The other thing is that Microsoft software is expensive. MS software is seen as expensive even in the US, arguably the wealthiest country in the world. In every other country it is seen as outrageously expensive. It is also seen as American and not to be trusted because it is to some extent under the control of the US government. (Remember the NSA key?) If you use liberated software you don't have to pay MS's high prices and you don't have to worry about who has set up backdoors in your system.
And yes, this means we are in a very dangerous place in history. We have already won many battles we didn't even know we were fighting. But, now the beast has been awakened. MS will not rest until liberated software is illegal.
StoneWolf
P.S.
I'm using the phrase "liberated software" instead of "free software" because I hate having to say "free, as in free speech, not free, as in free beer" to make people understand what I'm talking about.
Ever listened to a Mozart Sonata? Ever played Quake? The sonata was written in very peculiar, highly artificial, notation that requires a lot of training to understand and even more training to write. Yet, could anyone say that music written in musical notation is not expressive? Quake is also written in a very peculiar, highly artificial, notation that also requires a great deal of training to understand and even more training to write.
To play Quake the creative intent of the writer is expressed by use of a tool called a computer. To listen to Mozart we can use another tool called a player piano. Before we can play Quake the prewritten instructions are compiled into instructions designed to be interpreted by the computer. Before we can listen to Mozart we must compile the musical notation into instructions designed to be interpreted by a player piano.
Both the computer and the player piano are completely automatic devices that are needed to express the creative intent of the authors of works written in highly artificial notations.
Where is there any difference between a computer program and a Mozart Sonata? The key difference is that most programs would lose much of their expressive power if "played" at the speed of a human piano player. This difference is in the speed of execution needed to bring out the expression embodied in the program. Never the less, just as one trained in musical notation can appreciate the beauty of Mozart's music without having to hear a performance of it, someone trained in programming can appreciate the beauty of a program just by reading it. In fact, it can be much more beautiful to the reader than to someone who just uses the program on a computer.
As a programmer who has read a great number of computer programs I can testify that I have had chills go up and down my spine, laughed, giggled, and experienced flashes of enlightenment from reading programs. The experience is much like reading a mathematical proof expressed as haiku. It took several years of study and practice of the art of programming before I could appreciate programs at that level.
That someone cannot see the parallels between programs and music is proof that they lack sufficient training in music or programming.
StoneWolf
StoneWolf
Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who looked at the dot com boom knew that more than 90% of dot coms were going to fail. 90% of ALL new businesses fail. In a brand new market where no one is an expert you have to expect that 99% of all new businesses are going to fail. We all knew that. So why do we care when one more me too dot com with a bogus business plan bites the big one?
It is not a bad thing that poorly run companies with no revenue and no viable business plan go out of business. It is a good thing.
Most of the really sucessful dot coms haven't even been established yet. The GMs, Fords, AT&Ts, and IBMs of the Internet will be spawned over the next 10 years. And they'll be spawned by people who learned their lesson in the great dot com bust.
StoneWolf
At the time people with degrees, even graduate degrees in engineering, computer science, and the hard science couldn't find jobs. No college recruiting, nothing.
I've seen this cycle repeat itself, 3 or 4 times.
StoneWolf
P.S.
I was looking at the Intel job site a couple of days ago. They only seem to have about 20 job openings in the entire USA.