If you've got a family and responsibilities like a mortgage, it's time to grow up, buckled down, and stick with the job that is going to be a career, not a contract.
If you have financial freedom and no responsibilities, you have to ask yourself whether you're more concerned about saving and building for the future than having fun at work.
Last but not least, you may well get to make decisions at the "new job", but that also means you're responsible for the systems and you can kiss your personal life good bye as you deal with 24x7 on-call support.
Personally I never want to work for a small company except as a contractor again. As a contractor, your pay is laid out, you have no benefits, and everyone knows what's expected right from the get-go. As an employee, you're expected to vaguely "contribute" above and beyond the coding aspects of the job, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll be expected to "contribute" far more than you ever thought you'd have to (without overtime, no less.)
Personally I'd stick with the stable job for a career, and start up an open source project to work on from home for the evenings and weekends to provide the "challenging" part of programming that keeps me entertained. Never confuse a job with a life -- a job will never give you a life unless you let it suck you dry. And it's not much of a life worth living if you let it do that.
The Koran translation I read explicitly ordered the Muslims to get along with the Jews and the Christians and to live in peace amongst them because they all believe in the same God.
Carson? Big entertainer, loved by tens of millions for decades.
Bergman, Presley, and Brown -- same thing.
Then there's the odd man out. A man who bought out companies and technologies, refined and repackaged them, and made obscene amounts of money selling the resulting products.
Why, precisely, are we celebrating Jobs? Despite the ravening and vocal fanbois, it's not like he was anywhere near as loved and famous as Carson, et. al. He was just a lucky business man, not an icon adored by millions.
Ah, but GNU was charging you for the media distribution, not the software itself. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one. You were paying for them to prepare a tape for you.
Existing vendors like Samsung have put their own "skin" and custom UI apps on top of Android, while still relying on the Android core.
What would Microsoft possibly want to do with Android that couldn't be done the same way? Even if Microsoft did fork Android, so what? It would be a customized distribution of the Android core, with whatever additions Microsoft wanted to make.
How is that different from what existing smartphone and tablet vendors do with Android? You can't just redirect your Samsung to use Google's update servers -- you need to wait for Samsung to deliver an upgrade that's compatible with their hardware. Is that not the very definition of a "fork" -- a distribution that is sufficiently different to be incompatible with the "base" release?
The whole theory of the article seems to be based on paranoia, not any kind of business or technical savvy.
For that kind of money, I'd personally be far more inclined to buy one of the Samsung tablets with a stylus, and still have enough money left over for a cheap desktop to replace my aging P4. And the only reason I want the Samsung is I have some ideas about software to develop for it; I have no use for it's built-in default "apps".
The whole issue is about idealism, not practicality. In practice, MP4s are available on pretty much any device.
Unfortunately, that idealism is shooting wikimedia in the foot, because there are platforms that don't have open source codecs installed by default, leaving the "average" user unable to view the videos.
So in their zeal to pursue "openness", they've closed the doors on the people who matter most: the users.
How does Google's implementation not fit the "classic" open source model?
The source code is free. You can modify it. You can build your own installer pre-configured to use alternative services. You can roll your own services if you like. You can download and install apps from any app store you choose to point your phone at.
The default is Google's implementation of those services and apps. But you're free to change it.
I don't see the conflict with open source "traditions" at all -- the deployment of services and maintenance were always at the option of "for fee" in the Open Source World. Even the GPL never objected to the idea of charging for services and deployments, just not for the software itself.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole article is just more Google-bashing and whinging from freetards who think that everything should be free. Well, it's not. Get over it, get off your ass, and roll your own distro and installer.
The Kindle is holding your copy of the book. You are annotating your copy of the book and highlighting it.
Were it a hardcopy book, your highlights would not automagically transfer to another copy of the book.
Why, then, do you expect to be able to export/read your annotations and highlights from a Kindle?
In order to do what you want, you'd effectivly have to be able to edit the book to embed your notes. If that's really what you want to do, get a document file and edit away, but don't expect an eReader to let you edit the books.
When I did contract work, we put in 60+ hour weeks because we wanted to. Rather than trying to find another "star" programmer, our team made do with the resources that we had and worked our butts off because of little issues like having to train any new hires on the techniques we were using. It would have been a good 3-4 months before a new hire would be productive, by which time the project would be almost over.
After the project, we'd take a month off and just relax, living off our savings.
Granted, it's not a life for everyone, but when you're living that way by choice because you like taking off a month at a time, it works out for both the client and the contractor.
Working as an employee outside the contractor mentality, I rarely was called upon to work overtime. The rumours of killer hours being demanded by employers are, in my experience, bullshit. The only employees I ever saw working such crunch hours were people who were so incompetent they just flat out couldn't keep up with the rest of the team. They were working overtime because they weren't good enough to be in the industry, not because anyone was forcing them to, unless expecting someone to do their job competently is "forcing" them to work overtime.
Sure there were emergencies where we had to pull all-nighters to fix problems, but those were exceptions and didn't happen more than once a month at most. If you're going to work a job that involves babysitting critical batch jobs, you're going to have the occasional night where the babysitting turns into repair and rerun -- you wouldn't be getting paid to carry a pager/cell phone if it weren't important to the company to have that backup to make sure jobs run to completion.
Startups, however, are another issue. I've worked for a couple of them, and that work environment sucks farts off dead chickens in the August heat. Startups tend to have this mentality that you're "investing" in the company and that you'll "get your rewards" when the company wins it big. But I've never worked for a company that "won it big." Instead, most of them fell over and crashed because they were dreaming big dreams without the cash and capital needed to make it reality, relying on being able to sucker staff into working obscene hours instead of paying them.
I hated working for startups. The pressure is intense, the demands are unrealistic, and the goals are unstable. The bottom line is that unless you own a startup, you're unlikely to ever see the payout. They're a con-job designed to line the pockets of the owner and investors, not to pay you what you're actually worth.
So, in short, if you're working 60 hours a week as a contractor, don't sweat it -- it's your choice. If you're called on to work 60 hours occasionally as an employee, make sure it's for the occasional emergency, not a regular fact of life. And if you're working for a startup, wake the hell up and find another job where you're going to get paid what you're worth.
Most data privacy legislation I'm aware of says that you have to take all reasonable steps to protect the data. "Inconvenience for the staff" is not a legitimate excuse for not implementing those protections.
Well clearly they didn't calculate the proper cost of their risk assessment, because this breach is going to cost them a hundred mill or so in the class actions and civil lawsuits that result. It'll take years for the payments to be issued, but it's a foregone conclusion that Target is going to pay through the nose for the breach.
Especially now that it's clear they were warned they were at risk of a breach and could have done something about it.
Where I come from, that's called "criminal negligence", and all the cost-benefit analysis in the world doesn't change that fact, because they did not do everything they "reasonably could" to protect the information.
Given the state of education, what else would you expect? We're talking about a nation that doesn't even know it's own geography, much less that of neighbours in the world. If they think Toronto or Vancouver are the capital of Canada, how can you expect them to know something like astrology vs. astronomy?
Regardless of whether the majority of the population believes astrology is "scientific" or not, one thing is clear: the population as a whole has a shitty education.
Slashdot Mirror
You have the right to practice your religion. You just don't have the right to be a bigoted asshole about it.
What's next? I want to butcher children because my religion tells me to sacrifice them to my god?
The boss is gonna be pissed if you don't wake up and get your ass back to work. :P
If you've got a family and responsibilities like a mortgage, it's time to grow up, buckled down, and stick with the job that is going to be a career, not a contract.
If you have financial freedom and no responsibilities, you have to ask yourself whether you're more concerned about saving and building for the future than having fun at work.
Last but not least, you may well get to make decisions at the "new job", but that also means you're responsible for the systems and you can kiss your personal life good bye as you deal with 24x7 on-call support.
Personally I never want to work for a small company except as a contractor again. As a contractor, your pay is laid out, you have no benefits, and everyone knows what's expected right from the get-go. As an employee, you're expected to vaguely "contribute" above and beyond the coding aspects of the job, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll be expected to "contribute" far more than you ever thought you'd have to (without overtime, no less.)
Personally I'd stick with the stable job for a career, and start up an open source project to work on from home for the evenings and weekends to provide the "challenging" part of programming that keeps me entertained. Never confuse a job with a life -- a job will never give you a life unless you let it suck you dry. And it's not much of a life worth living if you let it do that.
You've been modded down because you didn't buy into the anti-Muslim tripe that fills Slashdot like a cancer.
You are also correct about the general intent and content of the Koran, unlike the grandparent post, which is hate filled bullshit.
Funny.
The Koran translation I read explicitly ordered the Muslims to get along with the Jews and the Christians and to live in peace amongst them because they all believe in the same God.
Carson? Big entertainer, loved by tens of millions for decades.
Bergman, Presley, and Brown -- same thing.
Then there's the odd man out. A man who bought out companies and technologies, refined and repackaged them, and made obscene amounts of money selling the resulting products.
Why, precisely, are we celebrating Jobs? Despite the ravening and vocal fanbois, it's not like he was anywhere near as loved and famous as Carson, et. al. He was just a lucky business man, not an icon adored by millions.
This from a religion famous for suicide bombers.
What a shame the radicals and terrorists don't actually READ the Koran.
Ah, but GNU was charging you for the media distribution, not the software itself. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one. You were paying for them to prepare a tape for you.
Existing vendors like Samsung have put their own "skin" and custom UI apps on top of Android, while still relying on the Android core.
What would Microsoft possibly want to do with Android that couldn't be done the same way? Even if Microsoft did fork Android, so what? It would be a customized distribution of the Android core, with whatever additions Microsoft wanted to make.
How is that different from what existing smartphone and tablet vendors do with Android? You can't just redirect your Samsung to use Google's update servers -- you need to wait for Samsung to deliver an upgrade that's compatible with their hardware. Is that not the very definition of a "fork" -- a distribution that is sufficiently different to be incompatible with the "base" release?
The whole theory of the article seems to be based on paranoia, not any kind of business or technical savvy.
For that kind of money, I'd personally be far more inclined to buy one of the Samsung tablets with a stylus, and still have enough money left over for a cheap desktop to replace my aging P4. And the only reason I want the Samsung is I have some ideas about software to develop for it; I have no use for it's built-in default "apps".
Anybody could be a terrorist if global pressures, governmental stupidity, and corporate greed cause them to snap.
Anybody.
So they're not "exceeding their mandate." You just don't realize that even John Q. Milquetoast is a potential terrorist.
Suck that demographic dry...
Sorry 'bout poisoning your drinking water. Here, have a pizza and STFU.
Database at the heart of the OS?
I think you're talking about IBM's approach with the AS/400.
The question in my mind is whether their mission is to distribute information or promote ideals. I'm disappointed at the decision.
The whole issue is about idealism, not practicality. In practice, MP4s are available on pretty much any device.
Unfortunately, that idealism is shooting wikimedia in the foot, because there are platforms that don't have open source codecs installed by default, leaving the "average" user unable to view the videos.
So in their zeal to pursue "openness", they've closed the doors on the people who matter most: the users.
How does Google's implementation not fit the "classic" open source model?
The source code is free. You can modify it. You can build your own installer pre-configured to use alternative services. You can roll your own services if you like. You can download and install apps from any app store you choose to point your phone at.
The default is Google's implementation of those services and apps. But you're free to change it.
I don't see the conflict with open source "traditions" at all -- the deployment of services and maintenance were always at the option of "for fee" in the Open Source World. Even the GPL never objected to the idea of charging for services and deployments, just not for the software itself.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole article is just more Google-bashing and whinging from freetards who think that everything should be free. Well, it's not. Get over it, get off your ass, and roll your own distro and installer.
The Kindle is holding your copy of the book. You are annotating your copy of the book and highlighting it.
Were it a hardcopy book, your highlights would not automagically transfer to another copy of the book.
Why, then, do you expect to be able to export/read your annotations and highlights from a Kindle?
In order to do what you want, you'd effectivly have to be able to edit the book to embed your notes. If that's really what you want to do, get a document file and edit away, but don't expect an eReader to let you edit the books.
When I did contract work, we put in 60+ hour weeks because we wanted to. Rather than trying to find another "star" programmer, our team made do with the resources that we had and worked our butts off because of little issues like having to train any new hires on the techniques we were using. It would have been a good 3-4 months before a new hire would be productive, by which time the project would be almost over.
After the project, we'd take a month off and just relax, living off our savings.
Granted, it's not a life for everyone, but when you're living that way by choice because you like taking off a month at a time, it works out for both the client and the contractor.
Working as an employee outside the contractor mentality, I rarely was called upon to work overtime. The rumours of killer hours being demanded by employers are, in my experience, bullshit. The only employees I ever saw working such crunch hours were people who were so incompetent they just flat out couldn't keep up with the rest of the team. They were working overtime because they weren't good enough to be in the industry, not because anyone was forcing them to, unless expecting someone to do their job competently is "forcing" them to work overtime.
Sure there were emergencies where we had to pull all-nighters to fix problems, but those were exceptions and didn't happen more than once a month at most. If you're going to work a job that involves babysitting critical batch jobs, you're going to have the occasional night where the babysitting turns into repair and rerun -- you wouldn't be getting paid to carry a pager/cell phone if it weren't important to the company to have that backup to make sure jobs run to completion.
Startups, however, are another issue. I've worked for a couple of them, and that work environment sucks farts off dead chickens in the August heat. Startups tend to have this mentality that you're "investing" in the company and that you'll "get your rewards" when the company wins it big. But I've never worked for a company that "won it big." Instead, most of them fell over and crashed because they were dreaming big dreams without the cash and capital needed to make it reality, relying on being able to sucker staff into working obscene hours instead of paying them.
I hated working for startups. The pressure is intense, the demands are unrealistic, and the goals are unstable. The bottom line is that unless you own a startup, you're unlikely to ever see the payout. They're a con-job designed to line the pockets of the owner and investors, not to pay you what you're actually worth.
So, in short, if you're working 60 hours a week as a contractor, don't sweat it -- it's your choice. If you're called on to work 60 hours occasionally as an employee, make sure it's for the occasional emergency, not a regular fact of life. And if you're working for a startup, wake the hell up and find another job where you're going to get paid what you're worth.
You mean the fact that a business is on the internet doesn't mean they're entitled to print money?
Blaming suits for the loss instead of congratulating the winners is just piss poor sportsmanship and sour grapes. Shame.
Heaven forbid that someone else in the world was just better and won legitimately. No, there has to be something to blame for the loss.
For every winner of gold, there are dozens who go home with nothing. Maybe it's just your turn to be the ones who go home empty handed.
It does happen.
Most data privacy legislation I'm aware of says that you have to take all reasonable steps to protect the data. "Inconvenience for the staff" is not a legitimate excuse for not implementing those protections.
Well clearly they didn't calculate the proper cost of their risk assessment, because this breach is going to cost them a hundred mill or so in the class actions and civil lawsuits that result. It'll take years for the payments to be issued, but it's a foregone conclusion that Target is going to pay through the nose for the breach.
Especially now that it's clear they were warned they were at risk of a breach and could have done something about it.
Where I come from, that's called "criminal negligence", and all the cost-benefit analysis in the world doesn't change that fact, because they did not do everything they "reasonably could" to protect the information.
Given the state of education, what else would you expect? We're talking about a nation that doesn't even know it's own geography, much less that of neighbours in the world. If they think Toronto or Vancouver are the capital of Canada, how can you expect them to know something like astrology vs. astronomy?
Regardless of whether the majority of the population believes astrology is "scientific" or not, one thing is clear: the population as a whole has a shitty education.