Public speaking classes tell you that over 1/2 of the communication between you and an audience is through non verbal cues including tone and body language, mostly body language. Even regular conversations are better in person because your meeting is better conveyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
I completely agree with that.
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
I completely disagree with that.
Communication *is* impaired by a lack of face-to-face contact. This means you need to employ (or train, but that is less reliable) employees that are superb at communication to compensate. Nonetheless, "reading the directions" is probably a very small aspect of most jobs. You need to find the place that produces the most cost effective results and I'm sure that there are many jobs that are ideally suited to telecommuting because you can still communicate when you need to, but you avoid a lot of the frivolous communication you see in office-based environments.
I say that as someone who works from home, and manages employees based in an office and other employees based remotely.
My software company sells software in a similar price bracket. We don't bother with hard-core DRM or protection. We aren't aware of any widespread piracy (admittedly that might be an artefact of working in a fairly narrow niche. Most people just wouldn't care to use the software.). We encourage legal licensing through two mechanisms:
1) The stick. We do have a simple licensing system, but it is easy to defeat if you have the desire to do so. Honestly, it is more to act a as reminder to customers that licenses have expired and need renewal or that they've installed it on too many PCs. 2) The carrot. Make it worth the money. The customer gets support from us that is worth the cost of the software. One of our scientists will happily work with you to get results from the software and employing an outside consultant to do that work would definitely cost more.
You could say that our business is customer support, and the software is the hook to bring custom to us. With that mind-set, piracy is mostly irrelevant to us.
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message
That great if you don't have any other work to do! Email is much less distracting, so doesn't interupt work flow, and can be processed in a batch at convenient times during the day. Phone calls and IM, require an immeiate shift of focus. If my input is really needed for something/now/ then fine, call me. If not, I'd rather you'd not assume that want to be disturbed.
The converse is also true though... if you need my attention urgently and immediately, email is not the best approach as I will make no guarantees to when it will be dealt with. Please don't send an email if you are going to get upset when I haven't responded within any given timespan. You'll probably get confirmation, by email, when I've dealt with it but you'll have to wait until I've finished these annoying phone calls on otherwise non-time-sensitive topics!
Does a software package need to be "widely used" to be classed as "successful"?
My company, for example, was built around an academic software package. We are nowhere near the league of the Googles or Oracles out there, but we provide a fair number of employees with a good salary. I'd never say our software was widely used as I can count our customer base on the digits of my hands and feet. Our kind of niche market will often use software from academia - because that's the main source of innovation - and the purely commercial argument for developing and validating the software in the first place would be weak.
To answer your question directly, in my field a vanishingly small fraction of academically developed software is ever used outside the research group that produced it. Even in the cases that the software would be more widely applicable, it just isn't shared/sold/licensed more widely. A couple of times, we have tried obtaining commercial rights to software that we thought could be valuable outside academia but we've never managed to negotiate realistic terms with the universities. Either the researchers aren't interested in pursuing this option as there is no personal reward for them, or the I.P. departments get greedy and the royalties they demand just makes the whole idea unviable.
I am firmly in the 2-space crowd... but I am held there against my will. I've tried to reform several times, but I always revert when I stop actively thinking about it.
I learnt the 2-space convention at school, and several years later I realised that a word processor is not a typewriter, and therefore the double spacing is pretty pointless. But now it is too late - I just can't change. This is easily fixed with an auto-correction rule in OpenOffice and friends - but people will still have to endure my double spacing in emails. Sorry.
I'm interested in Computational Chemistry/Molecular Modelling with a view to drug design. I don't have anything like the resources available to the big pharma companies, but as it turns out, that doesn't matter in a hobbyist setting. Think of it as a manual equivalent of running the DrugDiscovery@Home or the old Screensaver lifesaver project ( http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html )
All the software you would need can be freely obtained as you aren't doing this commercially, although I try to use as much of my own code as possible, being the geek that I am. There's nothing to prevent people modelling proteins, docking molecules into those proteins, making toxicity predictions, and so on, with open source software and a moderately good PC.
Sure, I'll never be able to run in vitro screening, and I'll definitely never get to the stage of running a clinical trial, but I'm going to have fun at the beginning of the process. If I found myself without a job and with a spare $5-$10 million, then I'd love to take it to the next stage!
Something that worked well for me in similar situations was this:
Request that the software is released under an open license (in my case, the BSD license), a request that an academic organisation is unlikely to refuse. There is no need to actually give anyone else a copy of the source. When you leave the university, you have full rights as bestowed by the license even if the copyright on the source belongs to "Regents of the University of California", or whoever. Problem solved.
Having said that, if your software is anything like typical academic software (my own included) then the source code will be dreadful and worth next to nothing. It is the ideas encoded in the code that are valuable - and the ownership of those is a whole other argument.
Two of my three most recently purchased printers were bought in the US. Region encoding would force me to import cheaper ink rather than using the more convient local UK suppliers. Hmmm, the only people who lose out are the local shop owners as far as I see.
Okay. In that case, there are 13 000 more gun-related killings in the US than there really ought to be. That's an extra 13 000 people with absolutely no freedoms because they are *dead*. That's not a price that I'm willing to make other people pay on my behalf.
High earners pay more money in absolute terms, and a greater percentage of their total income
But that's the point! Here, high earners *don't* pay a greater percentage of their total income. The tax rate increases with increasing gross income, but the allowances and deductions more than counteract this increase. In some extreme cases it might not even be true that high earners pay more in absolute terms. (NB/ I specifically wasn't mentioning low-earners -- I compared middle-earners to high-earners.) At least UK income taxes are, my humble opinion, fair.
There are numerous additional concerns regarding low-earners like, for example, lack of medical insurance or affordable healthcare.
I'd be interested to hear what those are...
The two things that come immediately to mind (irrespective of whether I might be doing them) are oral sex and giving my 19 year old son (or 14 year old for that matter) a glass of wine with their Sunday dinner.
This brings up several points. Since I have a home in the UK and a home in the US, I think I'm qualified to state my opinions (although that is all they are).
Video surveillance of city streets. [I've heard they're much more common in the UK.]
True, and in certain places I wish they were much more common here in the states. I'd happily walk around the streets at 4am anywhere in London. I definitely wouldn't do that in most of LA.
Time and paperwork required to buy a handgun. [A lot more in the UK. I'm not saying the US policy is better, just different and, in a sense, giving more freedom to an individual. This cuts both ways, depending on how much you trust your fellow citizens to be responsible.]
And that's why it is so easy to get a gun here in the states just because some people believe that they need to defend themselves from the king of England, or whatever. ~600 killings with guns in the UK every year. ~16000 in the US. Hmmm. I wonder whether carrying a gun actually makes people feel that they have more freedom?
Tax load. [The more of your earned income that gets deducted from your pay means more goes to group-elected spending decisions instead of individual spending decisions. Some find the latter to be an important freedom, but it's a matter of personal opinion, depends what the government's spending money on, etc.]
In the US, middle-earners and below get taxed heavily, while high earners are comparatively taxed less. Why to the rich deserve more "freedom"?
One thing that concerns me is that the typical American citizen believes that they have more freedom than those in almost any other country in the developed world. Here, "Constitutional rights" rule over common sense. True, the UK doesn't have a written constitution or the legal concept of freedom of speech. In reality, UK citizens don't endure any lack of freedoms. In fact, there are many things that I am free to do in the privacy of my own home in the UK that I can 't (legally) do in my home in the US.
People are always saying that consumers should vote with their wallets. In reality very few people ever do and, consequently, the US consumer gets screwed.
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions? They probably were. Think back two years. Maybe many of us were unsure of the legal and business ramifications of the DMCA, and we needed to have (or thought we needed to have) answers?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check? The question was seeking their opinion on a very specific example of reverse engineering fileformats. It was not a FAQ (or at least not an answered FAQ).
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad Its hardly a jihad. I simply chose not to use Adobe products and when we are making descisions on software purchases, I simply state my frank opinions of the company and offer alternative suggestions. I'd do the same if we were considering SCO software, but luckily we aren't.
you sent email to a huge company In hindsight, I should have logged it as a support request. I really don't recall where I sent it.
Approximately 2 years ago, I emailed them asking for an opinion on th DMCA and never got a reply. This was a time when anti-Adobe feelings were running fairly high here on slashdot. I emailed again, this time less politely stating that I would boycott their products if they didn't respond to my simple query.
Well, I was true to my word and as a result of this they've directly lost out on several thousand dollars worth of license fees for photoshop and illustrator alone.
(And, this also means we have one less reason to continue maintaining windows machines, but that's another story).
Slashdot Mirror
I think this trend has more to do with Brian Cox than any government initiative.
Public speaking classes tell you that over 1/2 of the communication between you and an audience is through non verbal cues including tone and body language, mostly body language. Even regular conversations are better in person because your meeting is better conveyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language
I completely agree with that.
If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.
I completely disagree with that.
Communication *is* impaired by a lack of face-to-face contact. This means you need to employ (or train, but that is less reliable) employees that are superb at communication to compensate. Nonetheless, "reading the directions" is probably a very small aspect of most jobs. You need to find the place that produces the most cost effective results and I'm sure that there are many jobs that are ideally suited to telecommuting because you can still communicate when you need to, but you avoid a lot of the frivolous communication you see in office-based environments.
I say that as someone who works from home, and manages employees based in an office and other employees based remotely.
My software company sells software in a similar price bracket. We don't bother with hard-core DRM or protection. We aren't aware of any widespread piracy (admittedly that might be an artefact of working in a fairly narrow niche. Most people just wouldn't care to use the software.). We encourage legal licensing through two mechanisms:
1) The stick. We do have a simple licensing system, but it is easy to defeat if you have the desire to do so. Honestly, it is more to act a as reminder to customers that licenses have expired and need renewal or that they've installed it on too many PCs.
2) The carrot. Make it worth the money. The customer gets support from us that is worth the cost of the software. One of our scientists will happily work with you to get results from the software and employing an outside consultant to do that work would definitely cost more.
You could say that our business is customer support, and the software is the hook to bring custom to us. With that mind-set, piracy is mostly irrelevant to us.
Programming with 6502 assembly... all of us cool kids were doing that back in those days.
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message
That great if you don't have any other work to do! Email is much less distracting, so doesn't interupt work flow, and can be processed in a batch at convenient times during the day. Phone calls and IM, require an immeiate shift of focus. If my input is really needed for something /now/ then fine, call me. If not, I'd rather you'd not assume that want to be disturbed.
The converse is also true though... if you need my attention urgently and immediately, email is not the best approach as I will make no guarantees to when it will be dealt with. Please don't send an email if you are going to get upset when I haven't responded within any given timespan. You'll probably get confirmation, by email, when I've dealt with it but you'll have to wait until I've finished these annoying phone calls on otherwise non-time-sensitive topics!
Does a software package need to be "widely used" to be classed as "successful"?
My company, for example, was built around an academic software package. We are nowhere near the league of the Googles or Oracles out there, but we provide a fair number of employees with a good salary. I'd never say our software was widely used as I can count our customer base on the digits of my hands and feet. Our kind of niche market will often use software from academia - because that's the main source of innovation - and the purely commercial argument for developing and validating the software in the first place would be weak.
To answer your question directly, in my field a vanishingly small fraction of academically developed software is ever used outside the research group that produced it. Even in the cases that the software would be more widely applicable, it just isn't shared/sold/licensed more widely. A couple of times, we have tried obtaining commercial rights to software that we thought could be valuable outside academia but we've never managed to negotiate realistic terms with the universities. Either the researchers aren't interested in pursuing this option as there is no personal reward for them, or the I.P. departments get greedy and the royalties they demand just makes the whole idea unviable.
Would I be allowed to buy a rat, for example, if I promised to test drugs on it?
...lots of jokes at Tesla's expense.
And... on that bombshell...
// the following code delivers cake to the subject
// the preceding comment is a lie!
// the above comment explains the joke
// TODO: I think the above comments are correct, but we need to check and correct them if necessary.
I am firmly in the 2-space crowd... but I am held there against my will. I've tried to reform several times, but I always revert when I stop actively thinking about it.
I learnt the 2-space convention at school, and several years later I realised that a word processor is not a typewriter, and therefore the double spacing is pretty pointless. But now it is too late - I just can't change. This is easily fixed with an auto-correction rule in OpenOffice and friends - but people will still have to endure my double spacing in emails. Sorry.
I'm interested in Computational Chemistry/Molecular Modelling with a view to drug design. I don't have anything like the resources available to the big pharma companies, but as it turns out, that doesn't matter in a hobbyist setting. Think of it as a manual equivalent of running the DrugDiscovery@Home or the old Screensaver lifesaver project ( http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/curecancer.html )
All the software you would need can be freely obtained as you aren't doing this commercially, although I try to use as much of my own code as possible, being the geek that I am. There's nothing to prevent people modelling proteins, docking molecules into those proteins, making toxicity predictions, and so on, with open source software and a moderately good PC.
Sure, I'll never be able to run in vitro screening, and I'll definitely never get to the stage of running a clinical trial, but I'm going to have fun at the beginning of the process. If I found myself without a job and with a spare $5-$10 million, then I'd love to take it to the next stage!
Something that worked well for me in similar situations was this:
Request that the software is released under an open license (in my case, the BSD license), a request that an academic organisation is unlikely to refuse. There is no need to actually give anyone else a copy of the source. When you leave the university, you have full rights as bestowed by the license even if the copyright on the source belongs to "Regents of the University of California", or whoever. Problem solved.
Having said that, if your software is anything like typical academic software (my own included) then the source code will be dreadful and worth next to nothing. It is the ideas encoded in the code that are valuable - and the ownership of those is a whole other argument.
Two of my three most recently purchased printers were bought in the US. Region encoding would force me to import cheaper ink rather than using the more convient local UK suppliers. Hmmm, the only people who lose out are the local shop owners as far as I see.
Please excuse my ignorance but I haven't owned a usable Windows license for more than 7 seven years.
Is there a simpler set of commands for configuring, compiling and installing from source code on Windows?
Adjust for population...
Okay. In that case, there are 13 000 more gun-related killings in the US than there really ought to be. That's an extra 13 000 people with absolutely no freedoms because they are *dead*. That's not a price that I'm willing to make other people pay on my behalf.
High earners pay more money in absolute terms, and a greater percentage of their total income
But that's the point! Here, high earners *don't* pay a greater percentage of their total income. The tax rate increases with increasing gross income, but the allowances and deductions more than counteract this increase. In some extreme cases it might not even be true that high earners pay more in absolute terms. (NB/ I specifically wasn't mentioning low-earners -- I compared middle-earners to high-earners.) At least UK income taxes are, my humble opinion, fair.
There are numerous additional concerns regarding low-earners like, for example, lack of medical insurance or affordable healthcare.
I'd be interested to hear what those are...
The two things that come immediately to mind (irrespective of whether I might be doing them) are oral sex and giving my 19 year old son (or 14 year old for that matter) a glass of wine with their Sunday dinner.
This brings up several points. Since I have a home in the UK and a home in the US, I think I'm qualified to state my opinions (although that is all they are).
Video surveillance of city streets. [I've heard they're much more common in the UK.]
True, and in certain places I wish they were much more common here in the states. I'd happily walk around the streets at 4am anywhere in London. I definitely wouldn't do that in most of LA.
Time and paperwork required to buy a handgun. [A lot more in the UK. I'm not saying the US policy is better, just different and, in a sense, giving more freedom to an individual. This cuts both ways, depending on how much you trust your fellow citizens to be responsible.]
And that's why it is so easy to get a gun here in the states just because some people believe that they need to defend themselves from the king of England, or whatever. ~600 killings with guns in the UK every year. ~16000 in the US. Hmmm. I wonder whether carrying a gun actually makes people feel that they have more freedom?
Tax load. [The more of your earned income that gets deducted from your pay means more goes to group-elected spending decisions instead of individual spending decisions. Some find the latter to be an important freedom, but it's a matter of personal opinion, depends what the government's spending money on, etc.]
In the US, middle-earners and below get taxed heavily, while high earners are comparatively taxed less. Why to the rich deserve more "freedom"?
One thing that concerns me is that the typical American citizen believes that they have more freedom than those in almost any other country in the developed world. Here, "Constitutional rights" rule over common sense. True, the UK doesn't have a written constitution or the legal concept of freedom of speech. In reality, UK citizens don't endure any lack of freedoms. In fact, there are many things that I am free to do in the privacy of my own home in the UK that I can 't (legally) do in my home in the US.
- There is no contact information, no street address, and it's hard to even tell what country they are in.
Click "contact us" and read: 3 Coventry Road, Bulkington, Bedworth, Warks. CV12 9LY United Kingdom.
- They accept Paypal instead of having a normal credit card processor
Actually, they accept PayPal in addition to a normal credit card processor.
But your point does stand -- it does look dodgy.
The bit that caught my eye was, "We have no current outstanding complaints." It would appear that they have at least one!
Could my girl robot really learn to love me? ;)
To cut a long story short, I was actually in a position to do this.
Sadly, they always approve you -- but would you take out a loan at 38.4% interest?
(Did I mention that I love the credit agencies?)
Hmm, I seem to have said everything I want to say in the subject.
Indeed.
People are always saying that consumers should vote with their wallets. In reality very few people ever do and, consequently, the US consumer gets screwed.
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions?
They probably were. Think back two years. Maybe many of us were unsure of the legal and business ramifications of the DMCA, and we needed to have (or thought we needed to have) answers?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check?
The question was seeking their opinion on a very specific example of reverse engineering fileformats. It was not a FAQ (or at least not an answered FAQ).
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad
Its hardly a jihad. I simply chose not to use Adobe products and when we are making descisions on software purchases, I simply state my frank opinions of the company and offer alternative suggestions. I'd do the same if we were considering SCO software, but luckily we aren't.
you sent email to a huge company
In hindsight, I should have logged it as a support request. I really don't recall where I sent it.
...so this doesn't bother me very much.
Approximately 2 years ago, I emailed them asking for an opinion on th DMCA and never got a reply. This was a time when anti-Adobe feelings were running fairly high here on slashdot. I emailed again, this time less politely stating that I would boycott their products if they didn't respond to my simple query.
Well, I was true to my word and as a result of this they've directly lost out on several thousand dollars worth of license fees for photoshop and illustrator alone.
(And, this also means we have one less reason to continue maintaining windows machines, but that's another story).
Oh, that sucks. I didn't realise that import duty was charged in addition to VAT.
Although thinking about it, that makes sense -- when exporting goods from the UK, you can often claim the original VAT back again.
Yes, but even so, I'm pretty sure that import duty is less than UK VAT (equivalent of sales tax) anyway!