While it's useful to generate a prototype that your customers can respond to, remember that they will think it's real. So if it seems to work, you may be moved on to another task and leave an inefficient, unsupportable prototype in place as "the real thing". That can be very bad. Might be good to add lots of artificial delays in the prototype. Then you can keep explaining, "this is just a mockup, powered by squirrels running on treadmills; when you like what you see, we'll re-write the whole thing for speed."
I agree with those who are saying, effectively, that software development is an interactive service. If you want to code no-ops to the hard metal based on rigorous specs, you have to get a job in aeronautic or space navigation software. Anything else is developed impulsively based on customer whims, and you have to learn to enjoy that process.
While laid off from my software development job in 2001 and 2002, I saw two really excellent NDAs.
The one for my "night job" acknowledged that, like every programmer, I probably have a portfolio of commonplace utility routines that I will carry away from the job as long as it is not specific to the application being developed.
My full time employer's NDA allowed me to do any unrelated work, as long as it was not for a competitor and not directly applicable to the employer's field. I did in fact continue the Night Job for a while.
Both of these agreements carefully limited their IP interest to what was specifically related to the business and applications in question.
But -- while I was laid off during 2001 - 2002, I met the NDA From Hell, and this was for a clerical staffing-agency job for a prominent bank, at $12 per hour!
This little one-paragraph statement was delightful. I was to sign over exclusive rights to all software creations I had ever produced, or would ever produce in the future, under any circumstances.
The job in question consisted of phoning mortgage customers to fill in missing details on their applications. Um, hello?
Fortunately they did not ask for a list -- that could have been quite an exercise, since I've been coding for 35+ years. But actually the list is very short: everything I've written has been work for hire, copyrighted by the client company. I don't own anything I have produced.
Yes, I signed the silly thing. If I ever write anything that is of sufficient value, they may notice this and come after me.
The FISA court has indicated that the fourth amendment applies to criminal prosecution, not to gathering intelligence against foreign agents. The difference is that criminal prosecution aims to punish wrongdoers after the fact, and provide a disincentive to others who might consider the same thing; while defense against foreign agents tries to actually prevent destructive acts, before the fact.
I've heard that Abe Lincoln threw seditious journalists in jail for the duration of the Civil War. During World War II, citizens were not able to send or receive foreign mail that had not been opened and, in some cases, had holes cut in it. (My own brother had to use a clever code to inform my family where he was stationed.)
In the old days there was some possibility of defending a border from infiltration by hostile forces. There were thousands of citizens taking turns in bunkers on the shore, watching for enemy submarines. Homes had blackout curtains so enemy bombers would not see where the towns were at night.
Now the people who want to freakin' kill all of us (for not being them) all have total access to information, and instant communication; and all the folks in denial of any threat are doing their best to help the (foreign) bad guys. I'm not ranting -- I'm a libertarian type and a fan of EFF (more than ACLU). I'm not panicked about getting killed, and questioning what the government does provides valuable balance. But I'm just comparing comparable situations, and I think the NSA is probably on solid ground.
This is just my guess, but I suspect that this wiretap case has seen its last favorable ruling.
The first thing I do with a new keyboard is to bend a paper clip into a clever shape, so that it fits under the Caps Lock key to hold it up, and runs beneath the keyboard where it is strapped in place with tape. If my finger hits Caps Lock, the key doesn't move. The tactile feedback has a handy "training effect" so I rarely hit that key.
Prompted by a post in this discussion, I'm now going to do that with my front-tier Insert key which bites me repeatedly each day.
I agree, it's not the first. Robots have in fact caused many human deaths, and we choose to ignore this "inconvenient truth" (sorry, Al).
For example, I once heard about a line of automated housekeeping assistants that killed more than one of their "beneficiaries". As I heard it, the victim would lean too close while this robot was drying the clothes; it would blindly draw the front of her blouse into the process, and then start to consume a sensitive part of her anatomy, and she would sometimes die of shock due to the excruciating pain. Over a half century ago such occurrences were commonly referred to by an idiom that signified being in really bad trouble.
They responded by making the robots more intelligent; they were built with sensors by which they might notice that something more than clothing was being compressed; and also, a method and apparatus by which the user might suggest that the First Law was being violated. But these were half measures, and even this lesson seems to have been lost on later generations of engineers.
What is the most deadly thing in America today? If you guessed cancer, AIDS or warfare, you may have guessed wrong. I'm guessing it's these confounded robot ricksha operators that tear along our highways and through our neighborhoods as though no living beings were endangered. Currently they exercise virtually no judgment and require the passengers' continual supervision and correction to avoid disaster. That industry is only now beginning to offer some half-hearted solutions, to detect and respond to obvious violations such as lane departure and excessive closing speed.
You may call me a troglodyte, but I have to ask if we have learned anything from over 150 years of robot design and usage. Personally, I blame evil robotics corporations for not allowing their engineers free rein to build more perceptiveness and gentleness into their products. Are productivity and speed all that matters?
I had a problem the other day, pasting some rich text out of a Thunderbird message display into OOo. Some characters wouldn't copy no matter what I did, I finally had to hand-type it. This is a basic Linux problem, of course: they've made some great strides in getting the clipboard to work more consistently, but they're not there yet.
I use Outlook at work, and we rely heavily on calendaring there. That's a major selling point. In fact, it's probably the only Office feature that I'd miss if we were using OOo and Thunderbird. I've never given Evolution a try.
It will be really fine to see a solid and mature calendar package appear in the Open Source world, but it's definitely not there yet. (I just upgraded Firefox and calendaring broke... hopefully they'll catch up really soon.)
This has a clearly stated purpose: that employers don't have to get and report diversity info on thousands of applicants, only on those who apply officially. The point is that you can't claim to be discriminated against unless you fail to meet the requirements.
That doesn't mean they can't hire someone who doesn't fully qualify; but if they do, passing up any "qualified" applicants, then they'd better be able to support that decision based on their requirements.
There is already a whole industry built around filing or avoiding discrimination claims. This shouldn't change things all that much.
I worked as a contractor on a big project, and some of the other consultants accepted offers to become direct employees of the company. When time came for the company to tighten the budget, those who had cast their lots with the company had their access cut off (which was how some of them found out!), and were asked to leave immediately. I, as a consultant, received a 30 day notice of contract termination. (I also continued doing some evening work remotely for them, over the month following the termination, while my company negotiated me back in.)
Later, I signed on directly -- the money was too good to turn down. That gave me about 22 months of direct employment before I -- you guessed it -- was laid off along with a handful of others, and escorted abruptly out of the building, because that's what's done with employees who are laid off.
I'm back in there now. Valued employees who resign tend to stay around till their announced last day, even when they are going to competitors.
Back in 1993 when I was laid off from a mainframe manufacturer, I was given a week's working notice and a week's non-working notice. That gave me time to assemble a shopping list of things not done, and after a month they brought me back off severance for six weeks to put my baby to bed, and had me suggest my final termination date. Those were the good old days, eh?
Previously that same mainframe company had previously engaged in "spot reductions", which the employees called "drive-by shootings", in which the employees would learn of the layoff by finding their passwords changed. That trashed morale very badly, and they stopped it. But it was standard policy that if you resigned to join a competitor, you definitely would be marched out the door.
"Toll roads would be more efficient -- in particular, less congested -- if they could follow the same model and charge virtually nothing in the middle of the night but high prices during rush hour."
I already have an incentive to drive off-peak hours; I don't enjoy sitting in traffic. If that pain doesn't affect my schedule, the fees won't either.
Higher costs don't make people change their plans. Look at all the owners of big cars and SUVs stopping at the name-brand gas stations and paying inflated prices, instead of driving smaller cars and shopping for lower gas prices.
As for tracking stolen cars, Mexico is just a couple of hours from my home, and my car could be long gone before I would get a report filed, so the "free LoJack effect" probably wouldn't be of any value to me.
OK, if they got this fully in place, I suppose we could revert to privately owned roads. The Man would just run a collection service and allocate the fees to me when someone cuts through my property.
Our computers at some point will charge us every time we turn around: forget GPS in the cars, they'll be implanting it under our skin at birth so we can never get lost or kidnapped, can never sneak into the movie for free, will not leave town if the sheriff tells us not to, and so the government will know everybody we associate with. Security is a Good Thing.
A lot of American values are centered on individuality and self determination. You may find that Americans are a little more resistant to this kind of thing, just as we support the right to bear arms -- it's not just for hunting, folks, it's to give politicians and potential invaders something to think about, and it has worked historically.
Authority will always be abused, and if there is a central database of all your comings and goings, someone with a Big Brother complex will find a way to use this information to your disadvantage. Read 1984; "they" are really quite a bit behind schedule, but the water is getting continually warmer and the frog shows no sign of jumping.
Hey, if they make the GPS thing mandatory I'll just live with it and probably enjoy some benefits. But I'd much prefer that they use an anonymous technique, and those techniques already exist.
The GPS thing could in fact be made anonymous, if it were designed right. Prepay for your mileage at a gas station, and transfer the balance into your car's computer. But I doubt The Suits would accept a loss of trackability.
I remember some 50 years ago, a guy in my home town was suing the government. It went to the Supreme Court, and he won. Harold Pitcairn brought the first rotorcraft to the US in the '20's and later developed cyclic and collective pitch control, and other concepts that made the helicopter possible. Since the government wanted helicopters for WWII, they bypassed the Pitcairn patents. I don't think the secrecy card was played, it was just the national security plea. So he ended up getting a fairly good settlement from the government and the helicopter manufacturers.
Mr. Bemer invented the ESC character to "escape" into an alternative character set, not to interrupt an operation nor to exit a dialog. He once expressed his displeasure at how the world came to know his brainchild.
When living in Arizona, he had "ASCII" on his vanity licence plate.
It's an excellent review on MSNBC.com by copyright historian Siva Vaidhyanathan. He's
One of the Good Guys.
Jefferson worried that the Constitution's
vague time limit on copyrights would limit
access to published works, creating information
monopolies as existed under the original British
copyright laws. He only reluctantly went along
with allowing copyrights at all, and he wished
they had set a firm time limit. And he stated
clearly that ideas could not be property: once
you have expressed an idea publicly, he said,
it's out there for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's useful to generate a prototype that your customers can respond to, remember that they will think it's real. So if it seems to work, you may be moved on to another task and leave an inefficient, unsupportable prototype in place as "the real thing". That can be very bad. Might be good to add lots of artificial delays in the prototype. Then you can keep explaining, "this is just a mockup, powered by squirrels running on treadmills; when you like what you see, we'll re-write the whole thing for speed."
I agree with those who are saying, effectively, that software development is an interactive service. If you want to code no-ops to the hard metal based on rigorous specs, you have to get a job in aeronautic or space navigation software. Anything else is developed impulsively based on customer whims, and you have to learn to enjoy that process.
While laid off from my software development job in 2001 and 2002, I saw two really excellent NDAs.
The one for my "night job" acknowledged that, like every programmer, I probably have a portfolio of commonplace utility routines that I will carry away from the job as long as it is not specific to the application being developed.
My full time employer's NDA allowed me to do any unrelated work, as long as it was not for a competitor and not directly applicable to the employer's field. I did in fact continue the Night Job for a while.
Both of these agreements carefully limited their IP interest to what was specifically related to the business and applications in question.
But -- while I was laid off during 2001 - 2002, I met the NDA From Hell, and this was for a clerical staffing-agency job for a prominent bank, at $12 per hour!
This little one-paragraph statement was delightful. I was to sign over exclusive rights to all software creations I had ever produced, or would ever produce in the future, under any circumstances.
The job in question consisted of phoning mortgage customers to fill in missing details on their applications. Um, hello?
Fortunately they did not ask for a list -- that could have been quite an exercise, since I've been coding for 35+ years. But actually the list is very short: everything I've written has been work for hire, copyrighted by the client company. I don't own anything I have produced.
Yes, I signed the silly thing. If I ever write anything that is of sufficient value, they may notice this and come after me.
I'm sure they are watching my every move.
The FISA court has indicated that the fourth amendment applies to criminal prosecution, not to gathering intelligence against foreign agents. The difference is that criminal prosecution aims to punish wrongdoers after the fact, and provide a disincentive to others who might consider the same thing; while defense against foreign agents tries to actually prevent destructive acts, before the fact.
I've heard that Abe Lincoln threw seditious journalists in jail for the duration of the Civil War. During World War II, citizens were not able to send or receive foreign mail that had not been opened and, in some cases, had holes cut in it. (My own brother had to use a clever code to inform my family where he was stationed.)
In the old days there was some possibility of defending a border from infiltration by hostile forces. There were thousands of citizens taking turns in bunkers on the shore, watching for enemy submarines. Homes had blackout curtains so enemy bombers would not see where the towns were at night.
Now the people who want to freakin' kill all of us (for not being them) all have total access to information, and instant communication; and all the folks in denial of any threat are doing their best to help the (foreign) bad guys. I'm not ranting -- I'm a libertarian type and a fan of EFF (more than ACLU). I'm not panicked about getting killed, and questioning what the government does provides valuable balance. But I'm just comparing comparable situations, and I think the NSA is probably on solid ground.
This is just my guess, but I suspect that this wiretap case has seen its last favorable ruling.
The first thing I do with a new keyboard is to bend a paper clip into a clever shape, so that it fits under the Caps Lock key to hold it up, and runs beneath the keyboard where it is strapped in place with tape. If my finger hits Caps Lock, the key doesn't move. The tactile feedback has a handy "training effect" so I rarely hit that key.
Prompted by a post in this discussion, I'm now going to do that with my front-tier Insert key which bites me repeatedly each day.
I agree, it's not the first. Robots have in fact caused many human deaths, and we choose to ignore this "inconvenient truth" (sorry, Al).
For example, I once heard about a line of automated housekeeping assistants that killed more than one of their "beneficiaries". As I heard it, the victim would lean too close while this robot was drying the clothes; it would blindly draw the front of her blouse into the process, and then start to consume a sensitive part of her anatomy, and she would sometimes die of shock due to the excruciating pain. Over a half century ago such occurrences were commonly referred to by an idiom that signified being in really bad trouble.
They responded by making the robots more intelligent; they were built with sensors by which they might notice that something more than clothing was being compressed; and also, a method and apparatus by which the user might suggest that the First Law was being violated. But these were half measures, and even this lesson seems to have been lost on later generations of engineers.
What is the most deadly thing in America today? If you guessed cancer, AIDS or warfare, you may have guessed wrong. I'm guessing it's these confounded robot ricksha operators that tear along our highways and through our neighborhoods as though no living beings were endangered. Currently they exercise virtually no judgment and require the passengers' continual supervision and correction to avoid disaster. That industry is only now beginning to offer some half-hearted solutions, to detect and respond to obvious violations such as lane departure and excessive closing speed.
You may call me a troglodyte, but I have to ask if we have learned anything from over 150 years of robot design and usage. Personally, I blame evil robotics corporations for not allowing their engineers free rein to build more perceptiveness and gentleness into their products. Are productivity and speed all that matters?
I had a problem the other day, pasting some rich text out of a Thunderbird message display into OOo. Some characters wouldn't copy no matter what I did, I finally had to hand-type it. This is a basic Linux problem, of course: they've made some great strides in getting the clipboard to work more consistently, but they're not there yet.
... hopefully they'll catch up really soon.)
I use Outlook at work, and we rely heavily on calendaring there. That's a major selling point. In fact, it's probably the only Office feature that I'd miss if we were using OOo and Thunderbird. I've never given Evolution a try.
It will be really fine to see a solid and mature calendar package appear in the Open Source world, but it's definitely not there yet. (I just upgraded Firefox and calendaring broke
This has a clearly stated purpose: that employers don't have to get and report diversity info on thousands of applicants, only on those who apply officially. The point is that you can't claim to be discriminated against unless you fail to meet the requirements.
That doesn't mean they can't hire someone who doesn't fully qualify; but if they do, passing up any "qualified" applicants, then they'd better be able to support that decision based on their requirements.
There is already a whole industry built around filing or avoiding discrimination claims. This shouldn't change things all that much.
I worked as a contractor on a big project, and some of the other consultants accepted offers to become direct employees of the company. When time came for the company to tighten the budget, those who had cast their lots with the company had their access cut off (which was how some of them found out!), and were asked to leave immediately. I, as a consultant, received a 30 day notice of contract termination. (I also continued doing some evening work remotely for them, over the month following the termination, while my company negotiated me back in.)
Later, I signed on directly -- the money was too good to turn down. That gave me about 22 months of direct employment before I -- you guessed it -- was laid off along with a handful of others, and escorted abruptly out of the building, because that's what's done with employees who are laid off.
I'm back in there now. Valued employees who resign tend to stay around till their announced last day, even when they are going to competitors.
Back in 1993 when I was laid off from a mainframe manufacturer, I was given a week's working notice and a week's non-working notice. That gave me time to assemble a shopping list of things not done, and after a month they brought me back off severance for six weeks to put my baby to bed, and had me suggest my final termination date. Those were the good old days, eh?
Previously that same mainframe company had previously engaged in "spot reductions", which the employees called "drive-by shootings", in which the employees would learn of the layoff by finding their passwords changed. That trashed morale very badly, and they stopped it. But it was standard policy that if you resigned to join a competitor, you definitely would be marched out the door.
"Toll roads would be more efficient -- in particular, less congested -- if they could follow the same model and charge virtually nothing in the middle of the night but high prices during rush hour."
I already have an incentive to drive off-peak hours; I don't enjoy sitting in traffic. If that pain doesn't affect my schedule, the fees won't either.
Higher costs don't make people change their plans. Look at all the owners of big cars and SUVs stopping at the name-brand gas stations and paying inflated prices, instead of driving smaller cars and shopping for lower gas prices.
As for tracking stolen cars, Mexico is just a couple of hours from my home, and my car could be long gone before I would get a report filed, so the "free LoJack effect" probably wouldn't be of any value to me.
OK, if they got this fully in place, I suppose we could revert to privately owned roads. The Man would just run a collection service and allocate the fees to me when someone cuts through my property.
Our computers at some point will charge us every time we turn around: forget GPS in the cars, they'll be implanting it under our skin at birth so we can never get lost or kidnapped, can never sneak into the movie for free, will not leave town if the sheriff tells us not to, and so the government will know everybody we associate with. Security is a Good Thing.
A lot of American values are centered on individuality and self determination. You may find that Americans are a little more resistant to this kind of thing, just as we support the right to bear arms -- it's not just for hunting, folks, it's to give politicians and potential invaders something to think about, and it has worked historically.
Authority will always be abused, and if there is a central database of all your comings and goings, someone with a Big Brother complex will find a way to use this information to your disadvantage. Read 1984; "they" are really quite a bit behind schedule, but the water is getting continually warmer and the frog shows no sign of jumping.
Hey, if they make the GPS thing mandatory I'll just live with it and probably enjoy some benefits. But I'd much prefer that they use an anonymous technique, and those techniques already exist.
The GPS thing could in fact be made anonymous, if it were designed right. Prepay for your mileage at a gas station, and transfer the balance into your car's computer. But I doubt The Suits would accept a loss of trackability.
I remember some 50 years ago, a guy in my home town was suing the government. It went to the Supreme Court, and he won. Harold Pitcairn brought the first rotorcraft to the US in the '20's and later developed cyclic and collective pitch control, and other concepts that made the helicopter possible. Since the government wanted helicopters for WWII, they bypassed the Pitcairn patents. I don't think the secrecy card was played, it was just the national security plea. So he ended up getting a fairly good settlement from the government and the helicopter manufacturers.
Mr. Bemer invented the ESC character to "escape" into an alternative character set, not to interrupt an operation nor to exit a dialog. He once expressed his displeasure at how the world came to know his brainchild.
When living in Arizona, he had "ASCII" on his vanity licence plate.
See this article:
It's an excellent review on MSNBC.com by copyright historian Siva Vaidhyanathan. He's One of the Good Guys.
Jefferson worried that the Constitution's vague time limit on copyrights would limit access to published works, creating information monopolies as existed under the original British copyright laws. He only reluctantly went along with allowing copyrights at all, and he wished they had set a firm time limit. And he stated clearly that ideas could not be property: once you have expressed an idea publicly, he said, it's out there for everybody.
Vic