Unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy direct answer to this question. There are different lawyers for different things, e.g., personal injury, crime, insurance, child support and family law, copyright issues, collections etc. In a way, and I mean this as no criticism, but it's a little like asking "When do I need a wrench?" Well, when you need one. "What kind of wrench do you need?" The kind that tightens the nuts you need tightened. Pun intended.
One client of mine is a real estate broker. Recently, when about to close a deal on a $2 mil property, the buyer backed out at the last minute, stiffing the broker for $5,000 of a deposit that the broker had offered as a security as a favor to his multimillionaire client. Isn't this illegal, I asked? Yes, it is, but the broker's options weren't very fun. He could sue for his money, which would cost a bundle of cash and time. Or he could choose arbitration at $1,500 a pop for each meeting. His response, ultimately, was that if you've got the money you can abuse the system, as well as other individuals.
I have a friend who's an attorney who told me once that after you've been an attorney, the threat of court isn't too much of a threat any longer. Granted, those are big words for someone who knows his way around a court system and around the law, but in this case I think the point is that knowledge is power. Your best bet is to know the law around certain issues. And where you get caught unexpectedly, well, to a certain degree that's life in the big city, but there's always options. Some lawyers do, in fact, trade out services for services, and court systems are slow, so you have time to defend yourself.
One client stiffed my business $8,000. We recovered it, eventually, but it took time, an attorney on contingency, and you should've seen the letters from the opposing attorney threatening all kinds of ill will and harm if I didn't stop "harassing" his client. So I sympathize.
I have to concede your point. If I were to set out to test a db front end and tried to write an HTML parser, JavaScript engine -- an engine no less, brilliant retort, that one -- load generator, profiler, data parser, cookie handler and load distributer I would indeed be lost.
Fortunately, angerboy, I know what it means to write a unit test, which is as much a specification with requirements as it is a set of software tools to implement the specification. If you'd checked my link you might have learned something about programming, since you're already quite adept at rudeness.
Also, if ever you get a job working with a team of programmers -- those are people, remember, you may have to deal with them and listen and shut up to learn something -- you may learn to tell the difference between when someone is talking out their butt from when someone is speaking plain sense to your face, although now from reading your response I can see why you're probably frequently confused.
Also, while you're learning about unit tests you might check out Perl and/or Python. No, no, wait. Better yet, for you, just go out and buy something...
You really sound like you THINK your problem centers around testing when it really is more of a teamwork issue that is revealing a testing deficiency now that your projects are getting larger.
For example, your statement: Now, while we enjoy programming, we're pretty lazy when it comes to testing.
Ouch, bro. Testing IS part of programming. If you'd already incorporated testing into your process, building unit tests for planned iterations of code, then you would A) perceive the tests to be indispensable in your code design phase, and B), you'd see that you've already, almost assuredly (unless your development tasks are pretty near trivial) created far more work for yourself over time by being lazy about testing. The fact is, it's really pretty hard to work on large projects on larger teams while ignoring unit tests, no matter what team paradigm you're using.
But a better team paradigm might actually be your ticket. You may want to check out XP which makes testing, test frameworks, refactoring, and other team coding techniques integral to the overall process. But whatever you decide, the result of adopting any good team paradigm that solidly implements a flexible, necessary testing process is, in the long run, vastly increased efficiency, better code reuse, and less dependence on specific individuals.
Now that your code base is getting larger it sounds like what you're really seeking in testing solutions is a better overall team plan. And after all, if you really like the coding phase, well, the unit tests need to be coded as well. That's really what a Tools Developer does, anyway.
I love MySQL, love the speed, the accessibility, the ease of deployment and its suitability for small and medium-sized projects. I'm an advocate.
But -- it can be a tough sell to the big fish.
I was hired by a Fortune 500 financial services and real estate company to do an internal project that really was not challenging development. Essentially, the requirements boiled down to a very hobbled version of Slashcode. I bid the project at X dollars, spec-ing PHP and MySQL, figuring that I was going a bit high for the actual hours involved and that I would make a nice roll of dough if they accepted. But I still knew that given the sheer size of the company, that my bid would be considered a bargain, if not a lowball.
What threw it? MySQL and PHP. What are they? (WHAT ARE THEY?!?!?!) Well, we're going to have to get through Standards and Compliance, issue an exception, and well, we'll see, we just don't know. Okay, said I, I'll do it for four times the cost and implement it entirely from scratch using ASP and SQL Server.
Great! Sold. Damn. And you have to understand I really TRIED. I wrote two papers, directed them to a bunch of links... Nope. ASP and SQL Server. I cried my way to the bank.
I believe inroads will continue to be made for open source. I have faith. But I think there's still some time and a lot of tireless advocacy to come...
Say goodbye? No need. It was never here. Or perhaps, I'll venture, I'm missing it, but please demonstrate five major medical research programs in the U.S. that don't get funding from large pharmaceuticals (some of which, btw, make Microsoft look like Holy Saints Inc.). Or nuclear energy research programs that throw their hands out and say "No! We will not be influenced!" when the DoD comes by with a few mil. And please don't hold up those one-off programs at every university that serve as exceptions that prove the rule. Every major university and college gets money with special interest behind it, and that ain't just in this great nation. Microsoft has been giving money to educational institutions for many, many moons.
It's only because it's Microsoft that this even got posted. The better question isn't "Where's the money coming from?" (because I think that's just naive in this country and in this day and age) but "What's the money buying?" Is.Net evil? Is C# useless? What would be the difference if Waterloo graduates emerge from their classes drooling.Net Framework acronyms instead of Java Framework acronyms? If you don't like what your college is teaching then shake your fist until something more important comes along, say, like a mortgage.
One of the arguments for open source is that the hivemind's access and ongoing audit of the source code leads to more secure applications, as well as benefiting from a community that is proactive and agile in addressing new security issues.
But Windows, historically one of the most closed-source and yet widely used pieces of software on the planet, seems to get the benefit of security audits from the hivemind all the time.
I'd love to write more code on Linux. But I can't, I have to make a buck and my clients use Windows, and that's that. Also, none of my clients read Slashdot. They read EOnline. They use Windows because it's easy and familiar for them. So I get frustrated sometimes, but there's not a lot I can do to proselytize Unix or Linux to these people. They read EOnline.
So maybe we could highlight less front page articles on the latest security flaw in an OS that is widely known as security flawed, and we could do more work to put up stories about ease-of-use work on Linux. Otherwise it seems like we've got a sharp sword to use against a dragon that doesn't seem to be wounded by swords.
As someone who has spent a good deal of time studying cooking and who cooks at home quite a bit, I'm a little fuzzy on the intent of this proposal. I do NOT want to troll this post and I'm not trying to put it down at all. But this is a bit like asking the community, "Hey everyone, I'm writing some software and I'd like you all just to throw in some lines of code that you really like."
Fact is, great cookbooks are like great software of any kind. They're focused, they have recipes that frequently complement each other, they have a specific problem or series of related problems they're trying to address and they have a specific audience: Beginners, grillers, southwestern interests, Chinese, French, quick chicken dishes, etc. So far as I can read I'm still not getting a clear picture and it's not that one wasn't attempted. But what exactly is the sort of thing that would go really well after four hours coding? Various cheese dishes? One coder's caviar is another coder's grease I'm afraid.
Also, judging from some of the posts already, there's something that truly gifted cooks and truly powerful coders have in common: They're rare...
Does anyone else read this as ego-maniacal crap?
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
·
· Score: 1
All I can say is ouch.
Being a prolific author is not the same thing as being a good one or an important one. The fact that many Slashdotters may be familiar with Piers Anthony's work does not, de facto, elevate him to any important literary status either generally or within his own genre. Is his stuff really important fantasy or science fiction?
The argument seems to extend to the comments on these pages. Many readers comment here that they read his stuff as kids and then moved on. Anthony replies in one instance that the reader "... grew up and disappeared into an adult..." and then refers to that as a disaster. That's ridiculous, but telling. Growing up and becoming an adult is what's supposed to happen, Piers, and if your text isn't relevant to adults, and you can't find publishers for your adult material, it may not be publisher bias. It may be because you never grew up and so you therefore view growing up as some kind of disaster. How many real adults, dealing with the complexities of adulthood, do you suppose pay close attention to stories written by Peter Pan?
You correspond with pedophiles? Okay. Well at least you oppose it.
You approve of libraries? Oh, do you?
Were your responses too feisty? you asked. Well, maybe you hope they are feisty. Perhaps, you figure that if they're feisty that means they're relevant. Maybe that's why you can't speak to adults effectively, this one included. Maybe you're so engaged in adolescent rebellion you've forgotten that long ago you were supposed to grow up and disappear into adulthood. That you did not may have afforded you a career at the cost of relevancy.
My girlfriend's kids downloaded GameSpy yesterday, ironically, so they could hook the Xbox up to the router and look for other Halo devotees. And they succeeded.
They also succeeded in hosing two W2K systems on our home network via the file share traversal vulnerability. One was my girlfriend's system, the only one with out-of-date virus protection and, of course, the only unprotected machine with truly irreplaceable files. Sigh.
Well, I downloaded AVG and it's getting clean as I type this, but I thought it might be of interest to those who posted saying that only those machines running IIS can be infected. That ain't the truth. The two infected machines on this network were W2K systems, neither of them running IIS. They were just poorly monitored and vulnerable.
It's/., actually, posting this story that made me realize the source of my pain. And for that I say thanks, because for those of you that said so-what-big-deal, well, it's true that this didn't really constitute a national emergency but, speaking now from experience, I can honestly say that NIMDA SUCKS.
But here's the rundown: I've got nine machines networked here at home, four W2Ks, four Linux, and one Xbox. Well, two of the W2Ks met Nimda first hand, but two others didn't since all of the extant fileshares require logons. Email wasn't a factor, and on the one W2K system that IS running IIS and was potentially vulnerable to attack, well, I've got all the latest patches installed and everything on that machine is clean.
The Linux boxes, of course, didn't even raise an eyebrow...
This article is interesting in that it talks about "... surging white box volume" and the industry taken as an aggregate -- because Plexus' stated 150 units by themselves aren't going to impress anyone but Plexus -- is an ever-more-important market for components manufacturers and for customers in the position to consider alternatives.
But I don't think anyone really ever disagreed with his final point: "The lesson: Publicly traded companies are not the whole computer industry, and the publicly traded stock market is not the whole economy." Was this ever a source of controversy?
The reason Dell and Gateway and large manufacturers are so important have to do with the support contracts they offer, the shipping options, the warranties, the phone support, the willingness and ability to ship next-day in the event of component failure: In short, the security blanket that makes department managers at large companies feel comfortable purchasing those systems.
Now we could argue back and forth about how you know some guy that purchases systems all the time from Little White Box Manufacturer and they're great and cheaper and you don't know why everybody doesn't do it, and that makes sense because to the Slashdot community those white boxes are very, very important. For many of us it's our job and for the rest if it isn't directly our job then it's an important facet. But for the typical purchasing manager the irony is that they are just white boxes. If he feels he can *safely* cut costs he might, but he will check on the support features and he might not want to be bothered with long term concerns about equipment. Not that small manufacturers don't have excellent support. But he doesn't know them and here enters the important issue of brand value, identity, and leverage.
Not to mention that the Dells and Gateways can, in fact, ship in the hundreds of units per day, manufacture in the thousands per week and purchase components in the billions of dollars per year. That's why they're important and has that really ever been a mystery?
This reporter got a good story and then took the wrong angle.
The Register did a great job. It printed a story, got Slashdotted, engendered tons of click-throughs and comments regardless of its accuracy or relevancy, and created a nice click report for its advertisers so that it can create more revenue. Creating controversy, people. That's the name of the journalism game regardless of all the "they're entitled to know the truth" crap that's bandied about in movies and, oh yeah, college.
New York's telemarketing law does work - since we put our number on the list, we've gotten a couple of calls from charities (not covered by the law) and a couple of calls from Time-Warner Cable...
Exactly how is the unearthing of this memo going to dent their $40 billion in cash reserves or their dominance in the marketplace. They've already been sued by the U.S. gov and the states as well as by their peers and competitors.
But this memo will haunt them.
I think it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is, in part, so arrogant precisely because this stuff never really does haunt them.
Okay, security's important, but come on people. The settings are configurable, the policy is easy to understand and what we're talking about in terms of the data being stored is essentially what amounts to Cookies for Flash. The camera and mic stuff can be turned off. If you don't like Flash this won't make you love it and if you love Flash this won't make you hate it. So people are posting about WHAT exactly?
"I have to turn my camera off for Flash! Invasion of privacy! Invasion of privacy! Cookies are evil! The sun is disappearing, the dragons are coming! The dragons are coming!
The character of this question bothers me on a number of levels.
Firstly I agree with one comment that replied this person must not have contracted very much. I tend to agree. Is this really a query that's going to come up with major players? If you're contracting for a Fortune 500 company, that has its own overworked and underpaid IT staff, are they going to let you open source something they just gave you $80,000 to develop?
Don't think so, probably not at best. Sure, it's POSSIBLE, depending on your relationship with your client, but many of the large clients are going to have you sign NDAs and/or non-competes and you can go to the High Church of Principle all you want about signing agreements, but if someone is paying you a boatload of cash and you've got kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, well...
The reason this question is even posed is because, as you stated, you're servicing a small client, one that may not be able to strongarm you into any kind of enforceable agreement. Or if they can, their ability to enforce may be limited, or their awareness level surrounding your line of work may be limited. You may feel you have recourse, or an argument to pose with a little (or smaller) guy than you do with, say, a large, truly powerful client.
So what is the nature of your query then? It sure isn't of the nature of, say, "How do I convince my 50 billion-a-year client to let me release the source code they just paid $100,000 for to a SourceForge slot?" Because they won't be wild about it, and there's so much abstraction in the management that you'll have a helluva time trying to end up talking to anyone with any real definitive control over that decision. Even top-level IT managers have to report to Standards and Practices and Legal in large organizations.
So you're really posing this question for small clients. And the answer really should be simple. You should be pretty up front about it before you start coding. Because if there's a chance you may end up arguing about this later, and your client hasn't clearly understood your intentions or philosophies in this matter, then you haven't been fair. If they do agree up front, then great. You're clear, they're clear and if they balk later then you can produce that paperwork they signed that gives you explicit rights. No arguments, no problems.
There's only a potential issue if it's after-the-fact and they're small enough to argue with.
Uh, our registered impression numbers? Oh. Well. Those. Heh. Funny you should ask! Um... Well... Well, you know what it is... Uhhhh... Oh! Oh! I know! It's those PVRs!!! It's the VIEWERS! They're STEALING! That's it! It's not us! It's the VIEWERS! Gosh, boy am I MAD! Gladys! Get in here and take a letter! I'm so MAD I'm going to issue a STATEMENT!
I can't think of any organs of mine, offhand, that I would let go for $80, much less broadband access. I still use a 56k modem, and I make my living (a good one at that) designing Web-oriented applications. I've never needed broadband for that. In fact, I've found it advantageous to avoid broadband in many cases for my development work.
Come to think of it... Slashdot comes up just find a my normal 50.6k rate. Yahoo and Google both work. Salon comes up. Devshed, DevX, developerWorks, and OnLamp all come up. Even EOnline works fine.
MP3s are what, 5 to 6 MB on avg.?
Maybe Rogers just figured out what the rest of us already know. There's only one thing for which one really needs broadband in order to satisfy the requirements of very large downloads as well as a sense of very palpable urgency.
Let me just state up front that anyone compelled to take their own life is obviously in a state of pain and suffering, whether that be explicit and consciously felt, or subdued and controlled to the point of being out of touch with those feelings. This is a sad story.
However...
I'm always highly suspicious of these kinds of stories. I think it's difficult at best to draw straight lines between two points in a person's psyche, and I think it's pretty obvious that the decision to take one's life is typically rooted in what is usually a complex configuration of personality traits, circumstances, perceptions and decisions. It is my opinion that unless you are intimately knowledgable about the configurations of those elements within a person's psychology then you run a really ridiculously high risk of committing any number of logical fallacies when trying to assess their reasons for taking any particular action.
The fallacy of joint effect, for example: One thing is held to cause another when in fact both are the effect of a single underlying cause. It would certainly seem likely that this kid took his own life as the result of a threat of imprisonment, especially since he cited this as the reason. But psychological motivations are frequently difficult to decipher. Did he have a predisposal to perfectionism? Was there parental pressures of unreasonable approval/disapproval? Was he even stable to begin with? And are we to trust any media source with being able to truly get to the bottom of these kinds of questions reliably and without bias towards creating a story that is designed to sell a paper?
I'm not defending the school. I'm just saying that regarding a case like this I don't really know what the hell happened, and most no one else does either. Something is held up to cause another thing when, in fact, they may not be as closely related as the media would purport them to be.
Of course, given how reliable general news sources are, this probably isn't a concern...
Another point that could be made here is over real customer service and what Netscape obviously perceives, or perhaps more importantly does not perceive, as a customer.
After all, companies are companies and, grand schemes and noble ideals aside, they're in it for the money, no question. Interestingly it seems that just in the last twelve months or so the realization of marketplace pressures, revenue streams and real product distribution, etc., have become as important as they are in any industry. It's valuable to see how the companies that are surviving in the "e-" sector, which would include Netscape even as a progenitor of that sector, are adapting. In this case the question is, "How do we identify with our customer?"
In some sectors this is not taken for granted. The automobile industry spends, quite literally, millions on trying to identify the target for an automobile down to the clothes those people buy, where the buy them and how they like to wear them, along with a myriad of other details. Sometimes, however, (to make a leap) it seems as though software companies that cater to developers occasionally just assume that since they've got developers on staff then, well, they intuitively understand their customers by a proxy of self-identity -- not always, perhaps, but seemingly more often than, say, oh lawnmower manufacturers.
It's an unfortunate truth, however, that it's easiest to hold contempt for your own kind. Someone can go through their whole day being nice to strangers, only to reserve frustration and bottled up whatever for the lucky family suffering at home with them. The same, it seems, held true for Netscape.
Marketing shmarketing. Customer shmustomer. RSS? They don't need their stinkin' RSS! Pull it! Screw 'em! Or maybe it was just a more gradual ah-who-even-cares decline. Who knows. Maybe they have some grand plan in store, something that will make up for what in any other industry would really be perceived as a Microsoft-scaled blunder. But it sure doesn't seem like anyone over there is listening to the customer. You know, those guys that are supposed to be, in some way, paying the salaries over there?
Of course things like this happen in other companies and to other customer bases, usually right before that company truly begins to flirt with really large and impressive failures. And judging from Netscape's track record of listening -- how many years went by waiting for Netscape 6 while Microsoft slowly crept upon the unsuspecting town and preyed on the needs of the poor townfolk? -- this is just another step in the wrong direction.
Interesting move, Netscape. People hate Microsoft with a passion. But people are just starting to look at you with, well, *yawn*...
Slashdot Mirror
... you discover you needed a yesterday.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy direct answer to this question. There are different lawyers for different things, e.g., personal injury, crime, insurance, child support and family law, copyright issues, collections etc. In a way, and I mean this as no criticism, but it's a little like asking "When do I need a wrench?" Well, when you need one. "What kind of wrench do you need?" The kind that tightens the nuts you need tightened. Pun intended.
One client of mine is a real estate broker. Recently, when about to close a deal on a $2 mil property, the buyer backed out at the last minute, stiffing the broker for $5,000 of a deposit that the broker had offered as a security as a favor to his multimillionaire client. Isn't this illegal, I asked? Yes, it is, but the broker's options weren't very fun. He could sue for his money, which would cost a bundle of cash and time. Or he could choose arbitration at $1,500 a pop for each meeting. His response, ultimately, was that if you've got the money you can abuse the system, as well as other individuals.
I have a friend who's an attorney who told me once that after you've been an attorney, the threat of court isn't too much of a threat any longer. Granted, those are big words for someone who knows his way around a court system and around the law, but in this case I think the point is that knowledge is power. Your best bet is to know the law around certain issues. And where you get caught unexpectedly, well, to a certain degree that's life in the big city, but there's always options. Some lawyers do, in fact, trade out services for services, and court systems are slow, so you have time to defend yourself.
One client stiffed my business $8,000. We recovered it, eventually, but it took time, an attorney on contingency, and you should've seen the letters from the opposing attorney threatening all kinds of ill will and harm if I didn't stop "harassing" his client. So I sympathize.
Dear Trollboy,
...
I have to concede your point. If I were to set out to test a db front end and tried to write an HTML parser, JavaScript engine -- an engine no less, brilliant retort, that one -- load generator, profiler, data parser, cookie handler and load distributer I would indeed be lost.
Fortunately, angerboy, I know what it means to write a unit test, which is as much a specification with requirements as it is a set of software tools to implement the specification. If you'd checked my link you might have learned something about programming, since you're already quite adept at rudeness.
Also, if ever you get a job working with a team of programmers -- those are people, remember, you may have to deal with them and listen and shut up to learn something -- you may learn to tell the difference between when someone is talking out their butt from when someone is speaking plain sense to your face, although now from reading your response I can see why you're probably frequently confused.
Also, while you're learning about unit tests you might check out Perl and/or Python. No, no, wait. Better yet, for you, just go out and buy something
Write your own. You really should anyway.
You really sound like you THINK your problem centers around testing when it really is more of a teamwork issue that is revealing a testing deficiency now that your projects are getting larger.
For example, your statement: Now, while we enjoy programming, we're pretty lazy when it comes to testing.
Ouch, bro. Testing IS part of programming. If you'd already incorporated testing into your process, building unit tests for planned iterations of code, then you would A) perceive the tests to be indispensable in your code design phase, and B), you'd see that you've already, almost assuredly (unless your development tasks are pretty near trivial) created far more work for yourself over time by being lazy about testing. The fact is, it's really pretty hard to work on large projects on larger teams while ignoring unit tests, no matter what team paradigm you're using.
But a better team paradigm might actually be your ticket. You may want to check out XP which makes testing, test frameworks, refactoring, and other team coding techniques integral to the overall process. But whatever you decide, the result of adopting any good team paradigm that solidly implements a flexible, necessary testing process is, in the long run, vastly increased efficiency, better code reuse, and less dependence on specific individuals.
Now that your code base is getting larger it sounds like what you're really seeking in testing solutions is a better overall team plan. And after all, if you really like the coding phase, well, the unit tests need to be coded as well. That's really what a Tools Developer does, anyway.
Peace.
my name is jeff and ive ben workeng 2 daze strate now an d i thin k no evry theng is fin im fine ther is no fiffrenc in my wrk..
this is a funny tire d boy. im fine. i lov u an d we all do. ok no sleep no w i go work more on do ing som e code
vec tor,vectr>string get_sleep(vedtor&&& pointy)
{{
includ #algorthmmllllam.fffffffff fd.....
]}
I love MySQL, love the speed, the accessibility, the ease of deployment and its suitability for small and medium-sized projects. I'm an advocate.
... Nope. ASP and SQL Server. I cried my way to the bank.
...
But -- it can be a tough sell to the big fish.
I was hired by a Fortune 500 financial services and real estate company to do an internal project that really was not challenging development. Essentially, the requirements boiled down to a very hobbled version of Slashcode. I bid the project at X dollars, spec-ing PHP and MySQL, figuring that I was going a bit high for the actual hours involved and that I would make a nice roll of dough if they accepted. But I still knew that given the sheer size of the company, that my bid would be considered a bargain, if not a lowball.
What threw it? MySQL and PHP. What are they? (WHAT ARE THEY?!?!?!) Well, we're going to have to get through Standards and Compliance, issue an exception, and well, we'll see, we just don't know. Okay, said I, I'll do it for four times the cost and implement it entirely from scratch using ASP and SQL Server.
Great! Sold. Damn. And you have to understand I really TRIED. I wrote two papers, directed them to a bunch of links
I believe inroads will continue to be made for open source. I have faith. But I think there's still some time and a lot of tireless advocacy to come
-- Say goodbye to independent academia.
.Net evil? Is C# useless? What would be the difference if Waterloo graduates emerge from their classes drooling .Net Framework acronyms instead of Java Framework acronyms? If you don't like what your college is teaching then shake your fist until something more important comes along, say, like a mortgage.
Say goodbye? No need. It was never here. Or perhaps, I'll venture, I'm missing it, but please demonstrate five major medical research programs in the U.S. that don't get funding from large pharmaceuticals (some of which, btw, make Microsoft look like Holy Saints Inc.). Or nuclear energy research programs that throw their hands out and say "No! We will not be influenced!" when the DoD comes by with a few mil. And please don't hold up those one-off programs at every university that serve as exceptions that prove the rule. Every major university and college gets money with special interest behind it, and that ain't just in this great nation. Microsoft has been giving money to educational institutions for many, many moons.
It's only because it's Microsoft that this even got posted. The better question isn't "Where's the money coming from?" (because I think that's just naive in this country and in this day and age) but "What's the money buying?" Is
What the hell is a kumquat?
One of the arguments for open source is that the hivemind's access and ongoing audit of the source code leads to more secure applications, as well as benefiting from a community that is proactive and agile in addressing new security issues.
But Windows, historically one of the most closed-source and yet widely used pieces of software on the planet, seems to get the benefit of security audits from the hivemind all the time.
I'd love to write more code on Linux. But I can't, I have to make a buck and my clients use Windows, and that's that. Also, none of my clients read Slashdot. They read EOnline. They use Windows because it's easy and familiar for them. So I get frustrated sometimes, but there's not a lot I can do to proselytize Unix or Linux to these people. They read EOnline.
So maybe we could highlight less front page articles on the latest security flaw in an OS that is widely known as security flawed, and we could do more work to put up stories about ease-of-use work on Linux. Otherwise it seems like we've got a sharp sword to use against a dragon that doesn't seem to be wounded by swords.
As someone who has spent a good deal of time studying cooking and who cooks at home quite a bit, I'm a little fuzzy on the intent of this proposal. I do NOT want to troll this post and I'm not trying to put it down at all. But this is a bit like asking the community, "Hey everyone, I'm writing some software and I'd like you all just to throw in some lines of code that you really like."
...
Fact is, great cookbooks are like great software of any kind. They're focused, they have recipes that frequently complement each other, they have a specific problem or series of related problems they're trying to address and they have a specific audience: Beginners, grillers, southwestern interests, Chinese, French, quick chicken dishes, etc. So far as I can read I'm still not getting a clear picture and it's not that one wasn't attempted. But what exactly is the sort of thing that would go really well after four hours coding? Various cheese dishes? One coder's caviar is another coder's grease I'm afraid.
Also, judging from some of the posts already, there's something that truly gifted cooks and truly powerful coders have in common: They're rare
All I can say is ouch.
..." and then refers to that as a disaster. That's ridiculous, but telling. Growing up and becoming an adult is what's supposed to happen, Piers, and if your text isn't relevant to adults, and you can't find publishers for your adult material, it may not be publisher bias. It may be because you never grew up and so you therefore view growing up as some kind of disaster. How many real adults, dealing with the complexities of adulthood, do you suppose pay close attention to stories written by Peter Pan?
Being a prolific author is not the same thing as being a good one or an important one. The fact that many Slashdotters may be familiar with Piers Anthony's work does not, de facto, elevate him to any important literary status either generally or within his own genre. Is his stuff really important fantasy or science fiction?
The argument seems to extend to the comments on these pages. Many readers comment here that they read his stuff as kids and then moved on. Anthony replies in one instance that the reader "... grew up and disappeared into an adult
You correspond with pedophiles? Okay. Well at least you oppose it.
You approve of libraries? Oh, do you?
Were your responses too feisty? you asked. Well, maybe you hope they are feisty. Perhaps, you figure that if they're feisty that means they're relevant. Maybe that's why you can't speak to adults effectively, this one included. Maybe you're so engaged in adolescent rebellion you've forgotten that long ago you were supposed to grow up and disappear into adulthood. That you did not may have afforded you a career at the cost of relevancy.
My girlfriend's kids downloaded GameSpy yesterday, ironically, so they could hook the Xbox up to the router and look for other Halo devotees. And they succeeded.
/., actually, posting this story that made me realize the source of my pain. And for that I say thanks, because for those of you that said so-what-big-deal, well, it's true that this didn't really constitute a national emergency but, speaking now from experience, I can honestly say that NIMDA SUCKS.
...
They also succeeded in hosing two W2K systems on our home network via the file share traversal vulnerability. One was my girlfriend's system, the only one with out-of-date virus protection and, of course, the only unprotected machine with truly irreplaceable files. Sigh.
Well, I downloaded AVG and it's getting clean as I type this, but I thought it might be of interest to those who posted saying that only those machines running IIS can be infected. That ain't the truth. The two infected machines on this network were W2K systems, neither of them running IIS. They were just poorly monitored and vulnerable.
It's
But here's the rundown: I've got nine machines networked here at home, four W2Ks, four Linux, and one Xbox. Well, two of the W2Ks met Nimda first hand, but two others didn't since all of the extant fileshares require logons. Email wasn't a factor, and on the one W2K system that IS running IIS and was potentially vulnerable to attack, well, I've got all the latest patches installed and everything on that machine is clean.
The Linux boxes, of course, didn't even raise an eyebrow
Peace.
This article is interesting in that it talks about "... surging white box volume" and the industry taken as an aggregate -- because Plexus' stated 150 units by themselves aren't going to impress anyone but Plexus -- is an ever-more-important market for components manufacturers and for customers in the position to consider alternatives.
But I don't think anyone really ever disagreed with his final point: "The lesson: Publicly traded companies are not the whole computer industry, and the publicly traded stock market is not the whole economy." Was this ever a source of controversy?
The reason Dell and Gateway and large manufacturers are so important have to do with the support contracts they offer, the shipping options, the warranties, the phone support, the willingness and ability to ship next-day in the event of component failure: In short, the security blanket that makes department managers at large companies feel comfortable purchasing those systems.
Now we could argue back and forth about how you know some guy that purchases systems all the time from Little White Box Manufacturer and they're great and cheaper and you don't know why everybody doesn't do it, and that makes sense because to the Slashdot community those white boxes are very, very important. For many of us it's our job and for the rest if it isn't directly our job then it's an important facet. But for the typical purchasing manager the irony is that they are just white boxes. If he feels he can *safely* cut costs he might, but he will check on the support features and he might not want to be bothered with long term concerns about equipment. Not that small manufacturers don't have excellent support. But he doesn't know them and here enters the important issue of brand value, identity, and leverage.
Not to mention that the Dells and Gateways can, in fact, ship in the hundreds of units per day, manufacture in the thousands per week and purchase components in the billions of dollars per year. That's why they're important and has that really ever been a mystery?
This reporter got a good story and then took the wrong angle.
The Register did a great job. It printed a story, got Slashdotted, engendered tons of click-throughs and comments regardless of its accuracy or relevancy, and created a nice click report for its advertisers so that it can create more revenue. Creating controversy, people. That's the name of the journalism game regardless of all the "they're entitled to know the truth" crap that's bandied about in movies and, oh yeah, college.
New York's telemarketing law does work - since we put our number on the list, we've gotten a couple of calls from charities (not covered by the law) and a couple of calls from Time-Warner Cable ...
Fallacious reasoning. Incidental and anecdotal.
But still an interesting article.
Exactly how is the unearthing of this memo going to dent their $40 billion in cash reserves or their dominance in the marketplace. They've already been sued by the U.S. gov and the states as well as by their peers and competitors.
But this memo will haunt them.
I think it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is, in part, so arrogant precisely because this stuff never really does haunt them.
Let them eat cake!
Okay, security's important, but come on people. The settings are configurable, the policy is easy to understand and what we're talking about in terms of the data being stored is essentially what amounts to Cookies for Flash. The camera and mic stuff can be turned off. If you don't like Flash this won't make you love it and if you love Flash this won't make you hate it. So people are posting about WHAT exactly?
"I have to turn my camera off for Flash! Invasion of privacy! Invasion of privacy! Cookies are evil! The sun is disappearing, the dragons are coming! The dragons are coming!
The character of this question bothers me on a number of levels.
...
Firstly I agree with one comment that replied this person must not have contracted very much. I tend to agree. Is this really a query that's going to come up with major players? If you're contracting for a Fortune 500 company, that has its own overworked and underpaid IT staff, are they going to let you open source something they just gave you $80,000 to develop?
Don't think so, probably not at best. Sure, it's POSSIBLE, depending on your relationship with your client, but many of the large clients are going to have you sign NDAs and/or non-competes and you can go to the High Church of Principle all you want about signing agreements, but if someone is paying you a boatload of cash and you've got kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, well
The reason this question is even posed is because, as you stated, you're servicing a small client, one that may not be able to strongarm you into any kind of enforceable agreement. Or if they can, their ability to enforce may be limited, or their awareness level surrounding your line of work may be limited. You may feel you have recourse, or an argument to pose with a little (or smaller) guy than you do with, say, a large, truly powerful client.
So what is the nature of your query then? It sure isn't of the nature of, say, "How do I convince my 50 billion-a-year client to let me release the source code they just paid $100,000 for to a SourceForge slot?" Because they won't be wild about it, and there's so much abstraction in the management that you'll have a helluva time trying to end up talking to anyone with any real definitive control over that decision. Even top-level IT managers have to report to Standards and Practices and Legal in large organizations.
So you're really posing this question for small clients. And the answer really should be simple. You should be pretty up front about it before you start coding. Because if there's a chance you may end up arguing about this later, and your client hasn't clearly understood your intentions or philosophies in this matter, then you haven't been fair. If they do agree up front, then great. You're clear, they're clear and if they balk later then you can produce that paperwork they signed that gives you explicit rights. No arguments, no problems.
There's only a potential issue if it's after-the-fact and they're small enough to argue with.
Elementary.
Uh, our registered impression numbers? Oh. Well. Those. Heh. Funny you should ask! Um ... Well ... Well, you know what it is ... Uhhhh ... Oh! Oh! I know! It's those PVRs!!! It's the VIEWERS! They're STEALING! That's it! It's not us! It's the VIEWERS! Gosh, boy am I MAD! Gladys! Get in here and take a letter! I'm so MAD I'm going to issue a STATEMENT!
Oh yeah? Well, I hack frickin' NT boxes with awk!
No wait ... The sokoban thing is a lot harder.
*****
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
I can't think of any organs of mine, offhand, that I would let go for $80, much less broadband access. I still use a 56k modem, and I make my living (a good one at that) designing Web-oriented applications. I've never needed broadband for that. In fact, I've found it advantageous to avoid broadband in many cases for my development work.
... Slashdot comes up just find a my normal 50.6k rate. Yahoo and Google both work. Salon comes up. Devshed, DevX, developerWorks, and OnLamp all come up. Even EOnline works fine.
Come to think of it
MP3s are what, 5 to 6 MB on avg.?
Maybe Rogers just figured out what the rest of us already know. There's only one thing for which one really needs broadband in order to satisfy the requirements of very large downloads as well as a sense of very palpable urgency.
Porn.
Let me just state up front that anyone compelled to take their own life is obviously in a state of pain and suffering, whether that be explicit and consciously felt, or subdued and controlled to the point of being out of touch with those feelings. This is a sad story.
However ...
I'm always highly suspicious of these kinds of stories. I think it's difficult at best to draw straight lines between two points in a person's psyche, and I think it's pretty obvious that the decision to take one's life is typically rooted in what is usually a complex configuration of personality traits, circumstances, perceptions and decisions. It is my opinion that unless you are intimately knowledgable about the configurations of those elements within a person's psychology then you run a really ridiculously high risk of committing any number of logical fallacies when trying to assess their reasons for taking any particular action.
The fallacy of joint effect, for example: One thing is held to cause another when in fact both are the effect of a single underlying cause. It would certainly seem likely that this kid took his own life as the result of a threat of imprisonment, especially since he cited this as the reason. But psychological motivations are frequently difficult to decipher. Did he have a predisposal to perfectionism? Was there parental pressures of unreasonable approval/disapproval? Was he even stable to begin with? And are we to trust any media source with being able to truly get to the bottom of these kinds of questions reliably and without bias towards creating a story that is designed to sell a paper?
I'm not defending the school. I'm just saying that regarding a case like this I don't really know what the hell happened, and most no one else does either. Something is held up to cause another thing when, in fact, they may not be as closely related as the media would purport them to be.
Of course, given how reliable general news sources are, this probably isn't a concern ...
This really is a fairly big letdown.
Another point that could be made here is over real customer service and what Netscape obviously perceives, or perhaps more importantly does not perceive, as a customer.
After all, companies are companies and, grand schemes and noble ideals aside, they're in it for the money, no question. Interestingly it seems that just in the last twelve months or so the realization of marketplace pressures, revenue streams and real product distribution, etc., have become as important as they are in any industry. It's valuable to see how the companies that are surviving in the "e-" sector, which would include Netscape even as a progenitor of that sector, are adapting. In this case the question is, "How do we identify with our customer?"
In some sectors this is not taken for granted. The automobile industry spends, quite literally, millions on trying to identify the target for an automobile down to the clothes those people buy, where the buy them and how they like to wear them, along with a myriad of other details. Sometimes, however, (to make a leap) it seems as though software companies that cater to developers occasionally just assume that since they've got developers on staff then, well, they intuitively understand their customers by a proxy of self-identity -- not always, perhaps, but seemingly more often than, say, oh lawnmower manufacturers.
It's an unfortunate truth, however, that it's easiest to hold contempt for your own kind. Someone can go through their whole day being nice to strangers, only to reserve frustration and bottled up whatever for the lucky family suffering at home with them. The same, it seems, held true for Netscape.
Marketing shmarketing. Customer shmustomer. RSS? They don't need their stinkin' RSS! Pull it! Screw 'em! Or maybe it was just a more gradual ah-who-even-cares decline. Who knows. Maybe they have some grand plan in store, something that will make up for what in any other industry would really be perceived as a Microsoft-scaled blunder. But it sure doesn't seem like anyone over there is listening to the customer. You know, those guys that are supposed to be, in some way, paying the salaries over there?
Of course things like this happen in other companies and to other customer bases, usually right before that company truly begins to flirt with really large and impressive failures. And judging from Netscape's track record of listening -- how many years went by waiting for Netscape 6 while Microsoft slowly crept upon the unsuspecting town and preyed on the needs of the poor townfolk? -- this is just another step in the wrong direction.
Interesting move, Netscape. People hate Microsoft with a passion. But people are just starting to look at you with, well, *yawn* ...