3) This guy was banned for only a month because he was responding in a very hostile way. He was told he would be unbanned at that point. However, he seems just like an angry individual in general, and I hope he gets counseling or something in order to help with anger management issues.
I've read his comments on his repository and I'd say he's putting up a pretty good front for such an angry guy. Also angry guys/hostile individuals rarely version control their own comments like this guy did.
He was not banned because he forked Growl, I think that's kind of neat actually and the point of being open source.
You might be a better man than I am then, and it's not because I dislike forks. If it were me, I would have been slightly annoyed that a person that I would have considered "poisonous" would have forked my code. I know that logically, such an emotion doesn't make much sense, it's just that I generally have trouble remaining emotionally objective about someone's actions after I've judged that person to already be "poisonous".
He was being a poisonous person, and was removed as such. I will not discuss this any further, but wanted to address this here.
I'm sure there is no denying your perception of those events and the weird entitlement issues that some internet users, you don't even know, may have over your time. That being said, at no point does he call you names, in the present form, nor in any of his past comments (which luckily have been version controlled for us to see). Don't you think you may have been a little bit too quick to judgement over this guy? So yes, he seems to have been a little bit frustrated over the fact that he didn't have access to the source, but all these labels you've placed on him just don't seem to fit him at all.
An angry guy would have responded to your comments by now, and would only have gotten himself deeper. Looking at his posting history, he just doesn't seem to fit that profile (and in a way, I'm not surprised he hasn't responded in that manner yet, I doubt he ever will).
4) We will be providing source in the form of our chosen vcs. If you do not know how to use a vcs but you work with oss, or want to work with oss, not learning a vcs is doing yourself a disservice. Future employers, or current oss projects, will find your knowing a vcs up front an asset, and we want to promote that. Tarball distributions will be ended as of 1.3.
Has any one actually complained about having to go through your version control system? Or was this just an assumption on your part when people were asking for your tar balls? Even the "poisonous" guy you banned seems to be relying on his version control system for everything. So he couldn't be the one who complained about that. Right?
You're part of the 300,000, you just haven't noticed it yet. The NYT gives away bulk subscription at pennies on the dollar to some of its media-partners. The media-partner gives you a cookie, so you can access the article they link you to. It's a win/win scenario for everyone involved.
You're oblivious to the whole thing and you still get your free content. And the NYT still gets to claim high "paid" subscription numbers to brag about to its advertisers. The only losers are potentially the uninformed advertisers who are getting less and less on their returns-on-investment every day, but really who cares about them? I certainly don't. Those advertisers will potential wake up and move on to something else eventually.
How come is the WTO getting involved? I bet someone told them China blocked their eBay store, or something like that. That is something that might really upset the WTO. And then China responded, knowing the exact words to soothe the capitalist organization, no, no, we're not blocking eBay stores, in fact you can come to China to start your own eBay store yourself, we'll even give you tax breaks if you want.
Watch out!!! You might get on the no truck weight station list, and on the no bus station list, if you try to "occupy" wall street. You know how the TSA loves lists.
It's way worse than the no-fly list. You'll be associated with the guy who defecates on his greyhound seat, but who wasn't formally charged because the police were far too disgusted to take him in. Once you're put on that list, there is no freaking way any greyhound bus driver will ever let you on a greyhound bus or on a train ever again. You'll be lucky to make it inside the bus station at all without having a security guard trying to hose you off with a high pressure water hose.
If Tesla treats a BBC show this way. I'd hate to think what will happen to a new Tesla owner when he brings back his car for some warranty work. I can just imagine the Tesla employee at the counter yelling his lungs out, liar!! Liar!!! You wrote that the brakes were bad on the intake form!!! The brakes were not bad!!! It's the fuse to the brakes that got blown, that's why they didn't work!! This root cause makes a huge difference!! I think you just put 'brakes' down to create some kind of drama. You're such a freaking liar!!! I hate you!! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!!!
Yep, that kind of attitude from a manufacturer really makes me want to buy from them.
At least with my Android phone, I can open MS Office documents for free. That's one feature that was purposefully stripped out of Windows Phone 7 (the version for consumers at least), since Microsoft wants you to pay extra for that functionality.
The only feature I do not want from WP7 is the Facebook integration. With Windows Phone 7, you get a Facebook phone whether you like it or not. Steve Ballmer has made that decision for you. That is the single reason I will not recommend WP7 to the older members in my family. They might like the fact that the icons are all big and easy to press (which is something I can mimic with a car dock launcher on Android), but the last thing they want is a Facebook phone.
Since you actually have a problem most of us don't have, somebody might actually want your body, you should contact EFF or RMS and ask them to help you draft a special GPL-like license for it.
Just name the country where the tracks disappear. Whether the country was the source, or just used as a patsy. Everyone needs to know where the hackers were last spotted.
So far, only Google has had the balls to do that. If RSA is not willing to risk all its future business with the country in question (like Google did), then they should just pull out from our country. A technology security company can not have two masters.
Amazon has the resources to go after these guys, to remove them from the gene pool. But will they bother?
The worldwide community of geeks have the resources, the time (at least, some of us have), and the tenacity, to invalidate most patents given enough motivation, or at least seriously water them down to render them ineffective, but why would we do anything in this case? Let's just wait until they go after the little guy, or a company we really care about (just not Amazon). In that respect, the patent troll made the right decision. That's what Jackals do. They go after the animal that the rest of the herd in the same boat will never even try to protect.
(Seeing how tenaciously they hold on to the One-Click patent I somehow doubt it, but it would be nice.)
You mean "held". Now that most of the Amazon one-click patent has been defanged by one seriously pissed off lone Amazon customer with no law degree but enough time on his hands and enough motivation, it's not like Amazon is making any additional money from that patent anymore.
It was rubbish when Slashdot headlined it last week. It's still rubbish now. It's too bad the editors don't read any of our comments, otherwise they would have known not to re-post it again. I'm getting kind of sick of all of this click-baiting, I'm out of here.
Fuzzy Fuzzy Fungus, I couldn't mod you up, you were already at the maximum, but I've just got to say, yours is the best insight I've seen this year. Thank you.
The notion of "identity theft" seems like nothing more than a cynical way to shift responsibility away from the responsible parties, and the parties who could do something about it...
Except we're talking mostly about a Republican family-focused god-fearing sparsely populated rural County here (also in mostly a Republican-run State at the moment).
I'm originally from France, not Belgium, so I can't say anything about Belgium for sure.
But from a French standpoint, I think that the US legal system is all about the "letter of the law", not the "spirit of the law".
And if a French judge told me to block www.piratebay.com, www.piratebay.net, and www.piratebay.org, assuming I was an ISP in France of course, I would never even dream of playing word games with the judge. In France, that kind of "letter of the law" defense would only enrage such a judge and get me severely punished as a result. Like I said, the legal mindset in France is very different from the legal mindset in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if Belgium wasn't more like France than it is like the US.
As opposed to what exactly? Our current system. Art seems to be even more watered down when you're trying to cater to thousands of people for their patronage, instead of a single one.
IPVision is a company that sells Patent-Analysis Software. Its visionary software represents the Patent lawyer of tomorrow (without any of the pesky human limitations, nor any of his/her expensive student loans).
And just like we have essay-analysis software that can grade a student, replace a teacher, and pronounce a student "weak", we can equally analyzes complex technology patent portfolios worth billions of dollars and make vague pronouncements of "weakness" just as accurately as our essay-analysis software can do it for its students.
Let's assume for a second that the guy is indeed competent (I know, it's a huge assumption on my part, but bear with me for a moment).
What else could be happening? If it keeps on coming back, may be the virus (or a slightly different version of the virus) is already part of the back up that's being restored. May be, it was part of the original hardware all along, or part of the original image on the installation disks? Or may be, there is someone with access that keeps on infecting those computers over and over again?
In any case, you're probably right. The guy probably doesn't know what he's doing. That's the most likely explanation, but I just like to play devil's advocate once in a while.
Once your employer knows you're leaving and once *you* know you're leaving, working at the old company is no where as much fun as it used be. First off, they start excluding you from important meetings (which makes sense since you will no longer be at the company). Then, they give your office space, your keys, your bathroom key card, your extension number, and your passwords to the person who is going to replace you (again, this totally makes sense, especially if you're just working part time at your new employer's and part time at your old employer). Then, suddenly everybody gets Friday off for having worked so hard the previous months, but you don't get anytime off, you're going to be leaving the company anyway.
And of course at some point, the shit hits the fan, the guy replacing you tells them there is no way he'll be able to do your job when you're gone (something that almost everybody already knew, but had not articulated), so they panic and ask that you write down all the tacit knowledge you've accumulated within the last thirty years in excruciating details so that any monkey could understand. So the last couple of weeks of your work, you're no longer a senior developer anymore, you've become the trainer, troubleshooter, the temp, a documentation author, an historian, and an archeologist in charge of a documentation project that you know is going to fail.
And last but not least, employers in desperate situations sometimes can sabotage the hiring process of their former employees, in the hope that their former employees will come back to them. That's why you should never tell your former employer and any of your former colleagues where you're going until well after you are safely entrenched at your new employer's company.
And if you do "help" out your old company. Ask your new employer, that's right, but don't just help out of sheer obligation or guilt. Guilt is a lousy internal motivator. Charge them extremely high consulting fees. This way, if they do bring you back as a very expensive consultant, they're not going to waste your time asking you to spend your last few days fighting windmills. And furthermore, you won't have to worry about getting locked out of your office building, or locked out of the bathroom, because they gave your keys to your replacement. Extremely expensive consultants don't usually have to deal with such non-sense. They're too expensive to dick around with.
Aside from buying them good books, which is a good idea, I'd suggest:
1. That for the mobile part, that you make sure they own and actually personally use the actual phone os they're developing for. Buy them a phone/tablet if you have to, and make sure that they actually use that phone/tablet personally for two to three weeks (instead of their normal phone) before they even get started on any design.
For instance, don't ask an iPhone owner to develop the interface for an app on an Android phone. There are so many fundamental differences in basic functionality and UI design between iOS and Android that go well beyond the one button vs. four button difference that this could prove critical in many ways.
And the same goes when you're evaluating potential customers, make sure that they've owned and actually personally used the phone os they're targeting for a while, before you accept any spec-work from them. And if your app needs to run on low end phones as well, make sure that the phone you buy them is a low end phone to begin with, not an high end one.
2. Make sure your developers and designers are also actively involved in initial user-testing, even if it's just informal testing, and later involved in actual customer service support (both on the phone and email). As a developer, doing actual customer support can be very enjoyable since you actually have the power to change things for the user.
3. Have your designers and developers write UI critiques of other apps on the platforms you're targeting. That's also a good way for making them develop an eye for that kind of thing. You could also start an internal UI discussion group on good UI patterns, or better yet, start an actual user group/meetup on that topic at your company and invite/allow outside people to participate.
...and phone call state (so that it can back off if you get a call)
No, all Android apps have to back off when you get a call. That's not a permission, that's an absolute requirement.
And yes, older Android apps have this permission required by default (so the user sees it), but you should be starting to see this permission used for no reason less and less now as this is only for apps that still target API level 3 (and that only represents 1.1% of the user phones right now).
By the way, there is a very interesting Sci-fi book called The Speed of Dark where Autism is central to the story (In terms of Sci-fi, it's a near future type of Sci-fi, so it really isn't about science-fiction if that's what you're looking for). This same idea reminds me of that book. All the analysts had a particular form of Autism.
The audio version is quite good. I actually didn't read the book, but just listened to its full audio version.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of what you say is true, but there is no reason to get all monotheistic about it.
Different languages have their uses.
3) This guy was banned for only a month because he was responding in a very hostile way. He was told he would be unbanned at that point. However, he seems just like an angry individual in general, and I hope he gets counseling or something in order to help with anger management issues.
I've read his comments on his repository and I'd say he's putting up a pretty good front for such an angry guy. Also angry guys/hostile individuals rarely version control their own comments like this guy did.
He was not banned because he forked Growl, I think that's kind of neat actually and the point of being open source.
You might be a better man than I am then, and it's not because I dislike forks. If it were me, I would have been slightly annoyed that a person that I would have considered "poisonous" would have forked my code. I know that logically, such an emotion doesn't make much sense, it's just that I generally have trouble remaining emotionally objective about someone's actions after I've judged that person to already be "poisonous".
He was being a poisonous person, and was removed as such. I will not discuss this any further, but wanted to address this here.
I'm sure there is no denying your perception of those events and the weird entitlement issues that some internet users, you don't even know, may have over your time. That being said, at no point does he call you names, in the present form, nor in any of his past comments (which luckily have been version controlled for us to see). Don't you think you may have been a little bit too quick to judgement over this guy? So yes, he seems to have been a little bit frustrated over the fact that he didn't have access to the source, but all these labels you've placed on him just don't seem to fit him at all.
An angry guy would have responded to your comments by now, and would only have gotten himself deeper. Looking at his posting history, he just doesn't seem to fit that profile (and in a way, I'm not surprised he hasn't responded in that manner yet, I doubt he ever will).
4) We will be providing source in the form of our chosen vcs. If you do not know how to use a vcs but you work with oss, or want to work with oss, not learning a vcs is doing yourself a disservice. Future employers, or current oss projects, will find your knowing a vcs up front an asset, and we want to promote that. Tarball distributions will be ended as of 1.3.
Has any one actually complained about having to go through your version control system? Or was this just an assumption on your part when people were asking for your tar balls? Even the "poisonous" guy you banned seems to be relying on his version control system for everything. So he couldn't be the one who complained about that. Right?
You're part of the 300,000, you just haven't noticed it yet. The NYT gives away bulk subscription at pennies on the dollar to some of its media-partners. The media-partner gives you a cookie, so you can access the article they link you to. It's a win/win scenario for everyone involved.
You're oblivious to the whole thing and you still get your free content. And the NYT still gets to claim high "paid" subscription numbers to brag about to its advertisers. The only losers are potentially the uninformed advertisers who are getting less and less on their returns-on-investment every day, but really who cares about them? I certainly don't. Those advertisers will potential wake up and move on to something else eventually.
How come is the WTO getting involved? I bet someone told them China blocked their eBay store, or something like that. That is something that might really upset the WTO. And then China responded, knowing the exact words to soothe the capitalist organization, no, no, we're not blocking eBay stores, in fact you can come to China to start your own eBay store yourself, we'll even give you tax breaks if you want.
Watch out!!! You might get on the no truck weight station list, and on the no bus station list, if you try to "occupy" wall street. You know how the TSA loves lists.
It's way worse than the no-fly list. You'll be associated with the guy who defecates on his greyhound seat, but who wasn't formally charged because the police were far too disgusted to take him in. Once you're put on that list, there is no freaking way any greyhound bus driver will ever let you on a greyhound bus or on a train ever again. You'll be lucky to make it inside the bus station at all without having a security guard trying to hose you off with a high pressure water hose.
If Tesla treats a BBC show this way. I'd hate to think what will happen to a new Tesla owner when he brings back his car for some warranty work. I can just imagine the Tesla employee at the counter yelling his lungs out, liar!! Liar!!! You wrote that the brakes were bad on the intake form!!! The brakes were not bad!!! It's the fuse to the brakes that got blown, that's why they didn't work!! This root cause makes a huge difference!! I think you just put 'brakes' down to create some kind of drama. You're such a freaking liar!!! I hate you!! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!!!
Yep, that kind of attitude from a manufacturer really makes me want to buy from them.
At least with my Android phone, I can open MS Office documents for free. That's one feature that was purposefully stripped out of Windows Phone 7 (the version for consumers at least), since Microsoft wants you to pay extra for that functionality.
The only feature I do not want from WP7 is the Facebook integration. With Windows Phone 7, you get a Facebook phone whether you like it or not. Steve Ballmer has made that decision for you. That is the single reason I will not recommend WP7 to the older members in my family. They might like the fact that the icons are all big and easy to press (which is something I can mimic with a car dock launcher on Android), but the last thing they want is a Facebook phone.
They should just do like most Universities do with their buildings, have a reverse auction and rename the array, every couple of years.
Since you actually have a problem most of us don't have, somebody might actually want your body, you should contact EFF or RMS and ask them to help you draft a special GPL-like license for it.
This exists already. Some World phones are also satellites phones. If you want fail-over service, you have to be willing to pay for it.
Just name the country where the tracks disappear. Whether the country was the source, or just used as a patsy. Everyone needs to know where the hackers were last spotted.
So far, only Google has had the balls to do that. If RSA is not willing to risk all its future business with the country in question (like Google did), then they should just pull out from our country. A technology security company can not have two masters.
Amazon has the resources to go after these guys, to remove them from the gene pool. But will they bother?
The worldwide community of geeks have the resources, the time (at least, some of us have), and the tenacity, to invalidate most patents given enough motivation, or at least seriously water them down to render them ineffective, but why would we do anything in this case? Let's just wait until they go after the little guy, or a company we really care about (just not Amazon). In that respect, the patent troll made the right decision. That's what Jackals do. They go after the animal that the rest of the herd in the same boat will never even try to protect.
(Seeing how tenaciously they hold on to the One-Click patent I somehow doubt it, but it would be nice.)
You mean "held". Now that most of the Amazon one-click patent has been defanged by one seriously pissed off lone Amazon customer with no law degree but enough time on his hands and enough motivation, it's not like Amazon is making any additional money from that patent anymore.
It was rubbish when Slashdot headlined it last week. It's still rubbish now. It's too bad the editors don't read any of our comments, otherwise they would have known not to re-post it again. I'm getting kind of sick of all of this click-baiting, I'm out of here.
Fuzzy Fuzzy Fungus,
I couldn't mod you up, you were already at the maximum, but I've just got to say, yours is the best insight I've seen this year. Thank you.
The notion of "identity theft" seems like nothing more than a cynical way to shift responsibility away from the responsible parties, and the parties who could do something about it...
Except we're talking mostly about a Republican family-focused god-fearing sparsely populated rural County here (also in mostly a Republican-run State at the moment).
Even from Linux to Linux? And Mac to Mac? and every other combination in between?
I'm originally from France, not Belgium, so I can't say anything about Belgium for sure.
But from a French standpoint, I think that the US legal system is all about the "letter of the law", not the "spirit of the law".
And if a French judge told me to block www.piratebay.com, www.piratebay.net, and www.piratebay.org, assuming I was an ISP in France of course, I would never even dream of playing word games with the judge. In France, that kind of "letter of the law" defense would only enrage such a judge and get me severely punished as a result. Like I said, the legal mindset in France is very different from the legal mindset in the US, and I wouldn't be surprised if Belgium wasn't more like France than it is like the US.
As opposed to what exactly? Our current system. Art seems to be even more watered down when you're trying to cater to thousands of people for their patronage, instead of a single one.
IPVision is a company that sells Patent-Analysis Software. Its visionary software represents the Patent lawyer of tomorrow (without any of the pesky human limitations, nor any of his/her expensive student loans).
And just like we have essay-analysis software that can grade a student, replace a teacher, and pronounce a student "weak", we can equally analyzes complex technology patent portfolios worth billions of dollars and make vague pronouncements of "weakness" just as accurately as our essay-analysis software can do it for its students.
Let's assume for a second that the guy is indeed competent (I know, it's a huge assumption on my part, but bear with me for a moment).
What else could be happening? If it keeps on coming back, may be the virus (or a slightly different version of the virus) is already part of the back up that's being restored. May be, it was part of the original hardware all along, or part of the original image on the installation disks? Or may be, there is someone with access that keeps on infecting those computers over and over again?
In any case, you're probably right. The guy probably doesn't know what he's doing. That's the most likely explanation, but I just like to play devil's advocate once in a while.
Be careful with such a deal.
Once your employer knows you're leaving and once *you* know you're leaving, working at the old company is no where as much fun as it used be. First off, they start excluding you from important meetings (which makes sense since you will no longer be at the company). Then, they give your office space, your keys, your bathroom key card, your extension number, and your passwords to the person who is going to replace you (again, this totally makes sense, especially if you're just working part time at your new employer's and part time at your old employer). Then, suddenly everybody gets Friday off for having worked so hard the previous months, but you don't get anytime off, you're going to be leaving the company anyway.
And of course at some point, the shit hits the fan, the guy replacing you tells them there is no way he'll be able to do your job when you're gone (something that almost everybody already knew, but had not articulated), so they panic and ask that you write down all the tacit knowledge you've accumulated within the last thirty years in excruciating details so that any monkey could understand. So the last couple of weeks of your work, you're no longer a senior developer anymore, you've become the trainer, troubleshooter, the temp, a documentation author, an historian, and an archeologist in charge of a documentation project that you know is going to fail.
And last but not least, employers in desperate situations sometimes can sabotage the hiring process of their former employees, in the hope that their former employees will come back to them. That's why you should never tell your former employer and any of your former colleagues where you're going until well after you are safely entrenched at your new employer's company.
And if you do "help" out your old company. Ask your new employer, that's right, but don't just help out of sheer obligation or guilt. Guilt is a lousy internal motivator. Charge them extremely high consulting fees. This way, if they do bring you back as a very expensive consultant, they're not going to waste your time asking you to spend your last few days fighting windmills. And furthermore, you won't have to worry about getting locked out of your office building, or locked out of the bathroom, because they gave your keys to your replacement. Extremely expensive consultants don't usually have to deal with such non-sense. They're too expensive to dick around with.
Aside from buying them good books, which is a good idea, I'd suggest:
1. That for the mobile part, that you make sure they own and actually personally use the actual phone os they're developing for. Buy them a phone/tablet if you have to, and make sure that they actually use that phone/tablet personally for two to three weeks (instead of their normal phone) before they even get started on any design.
For instance, don't ask an iPhone owner to develop the interface for an app on an Android phone. There are so many fundamental differences in basic functionality and UI design between iOS and Android that go well beyond the one button vs. four button difference that this could prove critical in many ways.
And the same goes when you're evaluating potential customers, make sure that they've owned and actually personally used the phone os they're targeting for a while, before you accept any spec-work from them. And if your app needs to run on low end phones as well, make sure that the phone you buy them is a low end phone to begin with, not an high end one.
2. Make sure your developers and designers are also actively involved in initial user-testing, even if it's just informal testing, and later involved in actual customer service support (both on the phone and email). As a developer, doing actual customer support can be very enjoyable since you actually have the power to change things for the user.
3. Have your designers and developers write UI critiques of other apps on the platforms you're targeting. That's also a good way for making them develop an eye for that kind of thing. You could also start an internal UI discussion group on good UI patterns, or better yet, start an actual user group/meetup on that topic at your company and invite/allow outside people to participate.
After they just laid off 30,000 people just last week, it's probably no wonder that they don't even know what's happening.
...and phone call state (so that it can back off if you get a call)
No, all Android apps have to back off when you get a call. That's not a permission, that's an absolute requirement.
And yes, older Android apps have this permission required by default (so the user sees it), but you should be starting to see this permission used for no reason less and less now as this is only for apps that still target API level 3 (and that only represents 1.1% of the user phones right now).
By the way, there is a very interesting Sci-fi book called The Speed of Dark where Autism is central to the story (In terms of Sci-fi, it's a near future type of Sci-fi, so it really isn't about science-fiction if that's what you're looking for). This same idea reminds me of that book. All the analysts had a particular form of Autism.
The audio version is quite good. I actually didn't read the book, but just listened to its full audio version.