' So is the law OK with it or can the new owners sue or whatever ?'
sue whom ? it's their own failure in the purchase process if they failed to set up sufficient benefits for the existing employees. suing one self is not that profitable.
I'm a software developer myself, professionally for about 10 years, a little more. But when it comes down to a discussion of "bug free" programs, i totally disagree with the herd it seems.
You don't expect your doctor to make a bug while fixing you up. If they do, they are pretty screwed. You don't expect your car maker to give you a buggy car (Toyota anyone ?). If they sell you a really bad car, they are really screwed. You don't expect your mobile operator to give you a buggy phone. You don't expect a cola bottle that has the drink but doesn't open properly, you don't want a cigarette lighter that burns your house down. This list could pretty much continue forever...
Why do developers think that they are all sacred cows and not responsible for not planning & producing their product properly. There are about 10 more than bazillion good developers out there today. There's nothing holy about you if you optimize the code down to be 5% faster, but there is great holiness if you can provide algorithms that are way more bulletproof.
Why should anyone pay money for software that doesn't really do what it should ? I know that it's freaking expensive to write nearly perfect code, but as the expression goes "you get what you pay for". If you look at your "main enemy Microsoft", their windows is a burrito in the software world, it's a cheap deal, don't expect it to be a full blown lunch at a mighty restaurant.
If there are 3rd party items that make your product unstable, make sure the client understands it before he buys it (just like you tell people not to put their cat into the microwave... , or not to use the microwave with the wrong electricity voltage line).
And as far as "independent developer" jam follows, do what the rest of the industry does. 1) work for someone else, until you have enough budget and a good idea 2) fork away your own company, and roll it.
Nobody really starts a car factory from zero and nobody builds a McJimmy's burger place into downtown from zero investment or out of the fun of an experiment. If you want to make money - it's a business, get on the train.
We are Borg^H^H^H^H Skype. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Might just be that Verizon figured out that resistance to voip calls is futile, and they'd better be on the smiling bunch than the grumpy one. Thumbs up for the brave move, let's see how the mobile competition responds to this. AT&T, are you there ? If you are - tough luck;-)
Do you really forget accidental child porn on your hdd for a year ? If you do "forget it there", you belong where law says you should be at. Every normal person would delete the file after opening it.
I think google should just opt-out from selling the devices to Optus if this really is the case. There is no way that G should let itself to be blackmailed this way, hopefully the aussie company will understand it before they just miss out the whole android ride.
The days where a mobile company could do whatever they want are over.
A) Without the vaccine you can develop pretty serious health issues.
B) You will then spread it to others. H1N1 is contagious 3 days before symptoms show up. So you will spread it to someone else, possible someone less healthy then you.
C) the that are vaccinated the smaller the impact of the disease.
Really, two pokes and 5 minutes is better the H1N1.
dude, wake up. really. the kill ratio of swine flu turned out to be no more serious than any regular flu. and the doctors aren't even sure that the current vaccine is effective against all the variations of the disease. blind trust into the word "vaccine" is misleading. especially if the illness isn't so severe.
malaria kills 1000 times more people per year than swineflu. why aren't you vaccinated against that one ? (and no, there is no iron garden that would defend you from getting it anywhere in the world (except alaska and siberia in winter time), just the chances are really low).
Most likely nobody gets fired for this. You can't just pick new gmail level developers and administrators up from the streets. But work collisions like this will always happen if you go past some size in the company. Google just has to improve it's procedures so it wouldn't happen at this scale again.
Modern operating systems are written predominately in high-level languages like C and C++. Menuet, however, is written entirely in assembly language: a symbolic representation of machine language. These days many programmers have minimal if any contact with assembly language, but that hasn't deterred the Menuet development team and the result is a slick, compact and super-quick
operating system.
Two of the Menuet developers, Ville Turjanmaa and Madis Kalme, took time out to talk to PC World Australia about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of the OS and future plans for it.
Firstly, what inspired the creation of MenuetOS? Most people would consider writing an entire operating system in assembly language to be a pretty audacious project.
Ville: The original idea for assembly OS came a few years ago when I was browsing the Internet and came across to a page which used a scripting language. And even with my relatively new computer, the short script executed quite slowly. So it seemed like there will always be the need to create a language which uses the last cycles from a new CPU. So I decided to go to the other extreme
end and just use assembly as much as possible.
Can you give me some idea of the backgrounds of the core developers? Do you have people contributing from outside the core team?
Madis: My passion has always been assembly language. As a teenager I started with some programmable calculators where ML [machine language] was the only way to go. Compared to that, assembly is really a breeze and such an elegant way to program.
Menuet
Ville: We come from different countries and with different backgrounds, but most of us core developers have a university background. I've used different programming languages during the last 30 years. From BASIC and Pascal, to C and assembly. And yes, there are people contributing from outside the core team; the MP3 player is one such contribution.
What aspect of Menuet are you most proud of? Are there any parts of the OS that were particularly challenging to code?
Madis: I am very excited about the GUI part because most hobby operating systems go as far as implementing only a command-line type of OS, but with a true-colour, VESA-supported GUI, it differs from all of these and therefore its ideal for games and small graphical demos. The 64-bit register extensions helped me to make a register-only line and circle routines and these I consider my
"u-achievements" that I can be proud of. "Challenging to code?" - I will let Ville answer that
Ville: As for the actual coding, I'm most pleased with pre-emptive scheduling and USB support. Maybe we have also made a small difference to mindsets about what can be done with assembly language.
What next for Menuet? Do you have a timeline for getting to version 1.0? Are there any features coming up that you're especially proud of?
Ville: We need to add new drivers and improve existing applications. Other than that, there are one or two completely new features I'd like to add before hitting the 1.0 mark.
The 32-bit version of Menuet was released under the GPL, but the 64-bit version uses a non-open-source licence that is free for "personal and educational use". Why did you decide to licence the 64-bit version differently? Has this had any impact on encouraging people to join the effort?
Ville: With a completely new type of open source project, people seem to have strong opinions about what direction to take. Even up to a point when
"Insightful" ??? Has everybody on the planet lost their brains or smth?
Pirate Bay was a Bittorrent web server. There were zero "movies" or "games" or anything alike on the server, zero bytes of copyrighted information.
It only had torrents, which tell you where you can get the files from, it's about the same as a google server that can tell you which links contain information about your favorite artist (Britney, doh...)
They didn't have to pay for huge bandwidths because they only shot you around 10 kbytes of data for each movie/game/whatever, where to download the movie from.
Now somebody mod down the above post, the guy doesn't have a clue.
I hope the article author understands that unless he's really lucky, he is in deep legal trouble already. It's not the first time that the messenger was slaughtered, although the message was honorable.
Gotta think over the SSL certs one more. I never really liked the mechanism behind it, i like it even less now.
the thing is, our applications are today running hundreds of processes in a box, even if you get 256 cores on a cpu, we'll still keep them all busy without a change.
who ever wrote the logic for the article was probably on coke or smth, seriously, no company with over 50 employees (and hence reasonable salaries for non-owners), will migrate to any functional language any time soon, they can't afford it, they don't have time for it and most of all, they don't want a software that only works due to the knowledge of "those 2 guys"...
people want software that a lot of people can understand, people want to hire people that can be replaced (in case they get hit by a train or go over to the competitor). nobody wants "this unique piece of s.it that is 5% faster". welcome to the "enterprise".
big players just don't care. they want simple solutions that can be extended and handled cheaply. buying an extra box with a network connection behind it is cheap. hiring niche people is expensive as hell.
enough complained, i think those who have ever worked more than a few years in big companies understood the point already while reading the title or article...
Back in the days when i was in school, warm-ups were there to avoid injuries, not to increase your performance.
By making your muscles weaker, the chance to get an injury decreases as well. People have proved over time (and quite many times) that you are able to hurt yourself with the strength of your muscles alone (ever seen those 100m sprinters falling like bricks on half way ?).
I vote up for the way #1... although i got my first job over way #3
All jobs after that have arrived with an invitation so far, more or less #1
If there's nothing else that you can do, throw some personal projects and create a little startup... it doesn't take all that much money these days and you'll have a solid proof of experience when you demo it to your future employer.
PC. On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Apple â" and inventor Steve Jobs â" a patent for their User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access, aka 'The Dock', after a rather lengthy nine-year wait."
i have a slightly different opinion here. Our country already has an unlimited for month and unlimited for day plans, and the latter comes up about 50% more expdensive if used every day. I use the latter, because i only need it 6-7 days a month. Just sending an sms does the day activation. And now even this note here got written with a mobile.
while i can't disagree for the font issue... my biggest problem with linux is hw support, still...
hardware, hardware, hardware, drivers.
i have been a big fan of linux since 99 (was using sco unix beore that, sorry). the visual side of linux is advancing pretty well and i don't actually see a point here that needs extra money. kde 3.5 already was sleek enough to compete with commercial desktops. underneath the xorg did a pretty fine job, opengl games worked, browsers were pretty fancy (couldn't care less for the crashing flash).
my issue with linux is hardware support, still. do you have a box with ipw3945 on board ? if you do and have tried to keep yourself up to date, you know what i'm talking about. do you switch stuff often , like usb headsets etc ? have you tried to install ubuntu on a machine that has ati's late graphic cards ? you'd be amazed that the freakin installer won't even show up (since x crashes beneath due to hw issues and lack of proper drivers from ati).
on my job i just switched, to mac. while it's not free as in beer and occasionally annoying with the gui, the thing works. i have a unix that allows me to do my work, all the command line goodies, compilers and whatever i need for my job.
i just don't have the time to run around forums and figure out why this latest update on the kernel here or there broke half of the freaking universe and what kind of super-duper patches do i need to apply to make it all work again. yes stuff can be made to work, but i have job to do, a real job, that fills my wallet. and linux as a desktop is getting in my way.
still running gentoo at home, but only because my laptop is 2 years old and now the box is pretty stable (still using ndiswrapper for the wifi, and running my own driver for the builtin camera).
still running linux on servers, although i have also tried running bsd-s (and behold, bsd actually _is_ fancy, with jails etc.)
i have been using unix or unix-alike systems for roughly 13 years, i have been working and hacking around linux for 9 years (of which 7 years have been linux-only, nothing else) and i'm losing the appetite for linux, at least on the desktop. for the desktop use it's still stuck in 'beta', but not because of kde/opengl/xorg.
people in my age are growing out of the cool hacking phase, they want stuff that primarily works, the fancy-schmancy gui is a secondary issue. we get new hardware each year, and the way linux is done hinders us often from using the new and cool hardware. open source is nice, however the ability to simply use wpa wifi and accelerated 3d graphics is nicer, as well just switching around your usb audio too.
Slashdot Mirror
can Slashdot get *any* worse than this?
yes
ps. i'm not trolling, this is bad, but it can be a lot worse.
i was about to hit the same topic. the same fact surprised me as well when i was visiting japan.
' So is the law OK with it or can the new owners sue or whatever ?'
sue whom ? it's their own failure in the purchase process if they failed to set up sufficient benefits for the existing employees. suing one self is not that profitable.
I'm a software developer myself, professionally for about 10 years, a little more.
But when it comes down to a discussion of "bug free" programs, i totally disagree with the herd it seems.
You don't expect your doctor to make a bug while fixing you up. If they do, they are pretty screwed.
You don't expect your car maker to give you a buggy car (Toyota anyone ?). If they sell you a really bad car, they are really screwed.
You don't expect your mobile operator to give you a buggy phone.
You don't expect a cola bottle that has the drink but doesn't open properly, you don't want a cigarette lighter that burns your house down.
This list could pretty much continue forever...
Why do developers think that they are all sacred cows and not responsible for not planning & producing their product properly. There are about 10 more than bazillion good developers out there today. There's nothing holy about you if you optimize the code down to be 5% faster, but there is great holiness if you can provide algorithms that are way more bulletproof.
Why should anyone pay money for software that doesn't really do what it should ? I know that it's freaking expensive to write nearly perfect code, but as the expression goes "you get what you pay for". If you look at your "main enemy Microsoft", their windows is a burrito in the software world, it's a cheap deal, don't expect it to be a full blown lunch at a mighty restaurant.
If there are 3rd party items that make your product unstable, make sure the client understands it before he buys it (just like you tell people not to put their cat into the microwave ... , or not to use the microwave with the wrong electricity voltage line).
And as far as "independent developer" jam follows, do what the rest of the industry does.
1) work for someone else, until you have enough budget and a good idea
2) fork away your own company, and roll it.
Nobody really starts a car factory from zero and nobody builds a McJimmy's burger place into downtown from zero investment or out of the fun of an experiment. If you want to make money - it's a business, get on the train.
We are Borg^H^H^H^H Skype. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Might just be that Verizon figured out that resistance to voip calls is futile, and they'd better be on the smiling bunch than the grumpy one. Thumbs up for the brave move, let's see how the mobile competition responds to this. AT&T, are you there ? If you are - tough luck ;-)
Do you really forget accidental child porn on your hdd for a year ? If you do "forget it there", you belong where law says you should be at. Every normal person would delete the file after opening it.
I think google should just opt-out from selling the devices to Optus if this really is the case. There is no way that G should let itself to be blackmailed this way, hopefully the aussie company will understand it before they just miss out the whole android ride.
The days where a mobile company could do whatever they want are over.
What? That's insane and selfish.
A) Without the vaccine you can develop pretty serious health issues.
B) You will then spread it to others. H1N1 is contagious 3 days before symptoms show up. So you will spread it to someone else, possible someone less healthy then you.
C) the that are vaccinated the smaller the impact of the disease.
Really, two pokes and 5 minutes is better the H1N1.
dude, wake up. really. the kill ratio of swine flu turned out to be no more serious than any regular flu. and the doctors aren't even sure that the current vaccine is effective against all the variations of the disease. blind trust into the word "vaccine" is misleading. especially if the illness isn't so severe.
malaria kills 1000 times more people per year than swineflu. why aren't you vaccinated against that one ? (and no, there is no iron garden that would defend you from getting it anywhere in the world (except alaska and siberia in winter time), just the chances are really low).
savage 2 did this idea a while ago :)
but actually it is fun, i don't think EA should miss out on multiple massive online ganking games.
indeed. nethack is the game. period.
Damn it feels so good to be thousands of miles away from the US.
However, i hope that you enrich your laws sometime soon with "patents can be ignored if their build-up is just plain stupid blackmail"
I second that :)
Most likely nobody gets fired for this. You can't just pick new gmail level developers and administrators up from the streets. But work collisions like this will always happen if you go past some size in the company. Google just has to improve it's procedures so it wouldn't happen at this scale again.
and link to the super evil company as well
http://www.rovedigital.com/
their homepage vs the homepage displayed in pdf files ... not really hidden well enough
I for one welcome our new Cybercriminal Tartu Overlords ...
(Especially since they have to within a 3 mile radius from me, being in Tartu as well)
but i am ..
copied from the linked page
~~ snip ~~
Modern operating systems are written predominately in high-level languages like C and C++. Menuet, however, is written entirely in assembly language: a symbolic representation of machine language. These days many programmers have minimal if any contact with assembly language, but that hasn't deterred the Menuet development team and the result is a slick, compact and super-quick
operating system.
Two of the Menuet developers, Ville Turjanmaa and Madis Kalme, took time out to talk to PC World Australia about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of the OS and future plans for it.
Firstly, what inspired the creation of MenuetOS? Most people would consider writing an entire operating system in assembly language to be a pretty audacious project.
Ville: The original idea for assembly OS came a few years ago when I was browsing the Internet and came across to a page which used a scripting language. And even with my relatively new computer, the short script executed quite slowly. So it seemed like there will always be the need to create a language which uses the last cycles from a new CPU. So I decided to go to the other extreme
end and just use assembly as much as possible.
Can you give me some idea of the backgrounds of the core developers? Do you have people contributing from outside the core team?
Madis: My passion has always been assembly language. As a teenager I started with some programmable calculators where ML [machine language] was the only way to go. Compared to that, assembly is really a breeze and such an elegant way to program.
Menuet
Ville: We come from different countries and with different backgrounds, but most of us core developers have a university background. I've used different programming languages during the last 30 years. From BASIC and Pascal, to C and assembly. And yes, there are people contributing from outside the core team; the MP3 player is one such contribution.
What aspect of Menuet are you most proud of? Are there any parts of the OS that were particularly challenging to code?
Madis: I am very excited about the GUI part because most hobby operating systems go as far as implementing only a command-line type of OS, but with a true-colour, VESA-supported GUI, it differs from all of these and therefore its ideal for games and small graphical demos. The 64-bit register extensions helped me to make a register-only line and circle routines and these I consider my
"u-achievements" that I can be proud of. "Challenging to code?" - I will let Ville answer that
Ville: As for the actual coding, I'm most pleased with pre-emptive scheduling and USB support. Maybe we have also made a small difference to mindsets about what can be done with assembly language.
What next for Menuet? Do you have a timeline for getting to version 1.0? Are there any features coming up that you're especially proud of?
Ville: We need to add new drivers and improve existing applications. Other than that, there are one or two completely new features I'd like to add before hitting the 1.0 mark.
The 32-bit version of Menuet was released under the GPL, but the 64-bit version uses a non-open-source licence that is free for "personal and educational use". Why did you decide to licence the 64-bit version differently? Has this had any impact on encouraging people to join the effort?
Ville: With a completely new type of open source project, people seem to have strong opinions about what direction to take. Even up to a point when
"Insightful" ??? Has everybody on the planet lost their brains or smth?
Pirate Bay was a Bittorrent web server. There were zero "movies" or "games" or anything alike on the server, zero bytes of copyrighted information.
It only had torrents, which tell you where you can get the files from, it's about the same as a google server that can tell you which links contain information about your favorite artist (Britney, doh ...)
They didn't have to pay for huge bandwidths because they only shot you around 10 kbytes of data for each movie/game/whatever, where to download the movie from.
Now somebody mod down the above post, the guy doesn't have a clue.
While the link is already being slashdotted ...
I hope the article author understands that unless he's really lucky, he is in deep legal trouble already. It's not the first time that the messenger was slaughtered, although the message was honorable.
Gotta think over the SSL certs one more. I never really liked the mechanism behind it, i like it even less now.
i kind of agree, don't bother about fp.
the thing is, our applications are today running hundreds of processes in a box, even if you get 256 cores on a cpu, we'll still keep them all busy without a change.
who ever wrote the logic for the article was probably on coke or smth, seriously, no company with over 50 employees (and hence reasonable salaries for non-owners), will migrate to any functional language any time soon, they can't afford it, they don't have time for it and most of all, they don't want a software that only works due to the knowledge of "those 2 guys" ...
people want software that a lot of people can understand, people want to hire people that can be replaced (in case they get hit by a train or go over to the competitor). nobody wants "this unique piece of s.it that is 5% faster". welcome to the "enterprise".
big players just don't care. they want simple solutions that can be extended and handled cheaply. buying an extra box with a network connection behind it is cheap. hiring niche people is expensive as hell.
enough complained, i think those who have ever worked more than a few years in big companies understood the point already while reading the title or article...
Back in the days when i was in school, warm-ups were there to avoid injuries, not to increase your performance.
By making your muscles weaker, the chance to get an injury decreases as well. People have proved over time (and quite many times) that you are able to hurt yourself with the strength of your muscles alone (ever seen those 100m sprinters falling like bricks on half way ?).
I vote up for the way #1 ... although i got my first job over way #3
All jobs after that have arrived with an invitation so far, more or less #1
If there's nothing else that you can do, throw some personal projects and create a little startup ... it doesn't take all that much money these days and you'll have a solid proof of experience when you demo it to your future employer.
Okay, so HP doesn't show video anymore, neither does mac ... but that minor issue aside, we're still able to crack the WPA key's http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/12/1724230 with it , right ?
PC. On Tuesday, the USPTO awarded Apple â" and inventor Steve Jobs â" a patent for their User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access, aka 'The Dock', after a rather lengthy nine-year wait."
Didn't everyone already have a dock 9 years ago ?
too bad this is windows only :(
looking at the trailer definitely got me hooked, would play it if it would be available for mac or linux.
i have a slightly different opinion here. Our country already has an unlimited for month and unlimited for day plans, and the latter comes up about 50% more expdensive if used every day. I use the latter, because i only need it 6-7 days a month. Just sending an sms does the day activation. And now even this note here got written with a mobile.
while i can't disagree for the font issue ... ...
my biggest problem with linux is hw support, still
hardware, hardware, hardware, drivers.
i have been a big fan of linux since 99 (was using sco unix beore that, sorry). the visual side of linux is advancing pretty well and i don't actually see a point here that needs extra money. kde 3.5 already was sleek enough to compete with commercial desktops. underneath the xorg did a pretty fine job, opengl games worked, browsers were pretty fancy (couldn't care less for the crashing flash).
my issue with linux is hardware support, still. do you have a box with ipw3945 on board ? if you do and have tried to keep yourself up to date, you know what i'm talking about. do you switch stuff often , like usb headsets etc ? have you tried to install ubuntu on a machine that has ati's late graphic cards ? you'd be amazed that the freakin installer won't even show up (since x crashes beneath due to hw issues and lack of proper drivers from ati).
on my job i just switched, to mac. while it's not free as in beer and occasionally annoying with the gui, the thing works. i have a unix that allows me to do my work, all the command line goodies, compilers and whatever i need for my job.
i just don't have the time to run around forums and figure out why this latest update on the kernel here or there broke half of the freaking universe and what kind of super-duper patches do i need to apply to make it all work again. yes stuff can be made to work, but i have job to do, a real job, that fills my wallet. and linux as a desktop is getting in my way.
still running gentoo at home, but only because my laptop is 2 years old and now the box is pretty stable (still using ndiswrapper for the wifi, and running my own driver for the builtin camera).
still running linux on servers, although i have also tried running bsd-s (and behold, bsd actually _is_ fancy, with jails etc.)
i have been using unix or unix-alike systems for roughly 13 years, i have been working and hacking around linux for 9 years (of which 7 years have been linux-only, nothing else) and i'm losing the appetite for linux, at least on the desktop. for the desktop use it's still stuck in 'beta', but not because of kde/opengl/xorg.
people in my age are growing out of the cool hacking phase, they want stuff that primarily works, the fancy-schmancy gui is a secondary issue. we get new hardware each year, and the way linux is done hinders us often from using the new and cool hardware. open source is nice, however the ability to simply use wpa wifi and accelerated 3d graphics is nicer, as well just switching around your usb audio too.