Or, you might order a cheap drill press like I did a few months back, and never have anything show up at all. Fortunately it was a "ship-to-store" situation where I would have paid at the store, but after calling the store twice to see if it had arrived only to be told "it didn't come in with this week's restock, try next Thursday", I ended up buying a press elsewhere. To this date I still haven't received a phone call, e-mail, or any other communications from them. You'd think they'd have wanted a several-hundred-dollar sale, but I guess not.
It's really not that bad, although 6502 assembly was (for me, anyway) more challenging than 68K because the 6502 didn't have many registers to work with. You just have to decompose the problem down another level, and as long as you're paying reasonable attention to detail, it's really not that much worse than writing something in C.
Seriously? 6502's and punched-cards together? What a wretched anachronism.
FTA: “DOS was written on punch cards. I would actually hand-write the code on 80-column punch card sheets. A guy at Shepardson named Mike Peters would take those sheets and punch the cards. The punch cards would then be read into a National Semiconductor IMP-16 and assembled, and a paper tape produced. The paper tape was read into the Apple II by a plug-in card made by Wozniak, and I would proceed to debug it. As the project got further along and the code was all written, and it was debugging and updating, I would mark up a listing and give it to Mike Peters who would then change whatever was necessary and deliver me a paper tape and I’d start again.”
That's part of why I liked OS/2 (2.0 and later) - if something needed DOS 2.1 to run properly, you just booted a 2.1 image in another window and you were good to go.
Could be worse. I interviewed a lady for a SE position several months back that, when asked about whether she ever did any programming at home, fondly recalled programming on her C64 way back when, and how much she missed seeing that amber "C:\" prompt. The interview didn't go much further.
Ooh then I could dig up the old 5 1/2 diskettes (made double-sided with a hole punch) with my pirated (Yes, I was 13 for a year,) copy of Karetika on it, and take that for a spin again.
Back then I thought it was so cool that Karateka played with an inverted screen if you flipped the floppy over.
I agree with part of your statement, and there are definitely those who more or less have money dropped into their lap by heredity or circumstance, but I do believe hard work is a major contributor to wealth in many if not most cases. The trick is to know where to apply that effort - there are people that break their back for their employer, but almost no one gets rich working for someone else. I suppose that falls under "doing the right thing at the right time", but I personally know two millionaires that started out as average Joes, and without the ridiculous amount of effort both put into their businesses, they'd still be writing code for someone else.
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway.
The HUD doesn't give the pilot any information he can't already get from his other instruments. It's there so the pilot doesn't have to look down, away from whatever he's looking at through the canopy.
You think it's bad in the U.S.? Look at Australia's plethora of time zones, and then consider that they don't all switch from standard time to summer time on the same days.
I think probably what's happening is that it's cost-prohibitive for a provider to train their staff to maintain all of the different packages that would be required to offer such a service, and a provider that offers VoIP generally has to have more quite a bit more infrastructure in place to offer any kind of reasonable service. The closest thing to what the submitter is asking for is probably a managed server provider, and there's no shortage of those out there, at varying quality/price points.
I had mentioned three circumstances, which I think is where my confusion set in - I'm guessing you were treating "explicit transfer of copyright" and "explicitly stating a work for hire" as a single one. I had interpreted what you had written to mean that whatever was being written was being combined with other code the company owned (and thus would be under their copyright), whether it had actually existed at the time or not. Regardless, it sounds like we're on the same page at the end of the day.
Also, for employed programmers, it works the same way, essentially you agree in your employment contract that you assign the copyright to your employer; if the employment contract has no such clause, the copyright belongs to you.
Speaking strictly for the US, whether or not the employment contract has such a clause doesn't matter, because everything you do for them is a work for hire. The relevant section of federal law lists "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" as one of the satisfying conditions as a work for hire.
Unless you specify that you own the things you produce on your clients dime (and they sign of on it) it belongs to THEM. I'm sorry but that's just the way it is.
I'm sorry, but in the United States, federal law clearly says otherwise.
it is a work for hire if and only if it meets the legal definition, which software development only does under the two circumstances you mentioned, plus the one where you're hired to write new code that is a module to be combined with others and cannot function on its own.
I did also say "or is a contribution to an existing project that the company already holds the copyright on".:-)
the company who contracts always owns the copyright in a work-for-hire and thus can do with it however they want
No, that's not how "work for hire" works. If he was an *employee* of the company, it would apply. If he was an independent contractor, however, he would retain the copyright unless the contract explicitly transfers copyright to his client, explicitly states that it's a work for hire, or is a contribution to an existing project that the company already holds the copyright on. See 17 USC 101 for details.
Not a lawyer, not legal advice, etc., but have been doing contract development for more than a couple of years.
And the kicker is that the first formal assertion of the state secrets doctrine ( US v. Reynolds) to prevent disclosure of evidence was proven to be a nothing but a sham when the "highly sensitive" documents in the case were finally declassified. If the executive was comfortable lying to the courts 60 years ago, who in their right mind would think that anything's changed now?
they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.
Even beyond that, they'll be damned if anybody uses it for free without *them* making something off of it, even when it's a legacy product that has no marketing potential whatsoever. This is part of why copyright law is so screwed up right now - lots of companies work very hard to ensure that nothing they produce ever becomes public domain where it could be freely used by others, which was the entire point of copyright to begin with.
I'm on my third smartphone (seventh phone overall), and I've removed the battery from all of them at one time or another. I replaced a dead battery in two of them, and have had to do a battery pull on all of the smartphones at one time or another due to them being locked up and not responding to the power button. Another anecdote.
(Because when a piece of hardware costs $10,000 and up, and the software which connects to it is utterly useless without that expensive hardware - because it's basically just a dial showing a readout - of course a practical use of programer time is to add an extra pointless $1 anti-piracy hardware component to stop the millions of free copies which will soon flood the intertubes. Sigh.)
Back when I was writing software for industrial laser markers, I had this same discussion with the engineering VP. He wanted to start requiring dongles to run the software, and my reply was, "you mean this $150,000 machine isn't enough of a dongle for you?" I guess he just hadn't thought of it in those terms.
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Or, you might order a cheap drill press like I did a few months back, and never have anything show up at all. Fortunately it was a "ship-to-store" situation where I would have paid at the store, but after calling the store twice to see if it had arrived only to be told "it didn't come in with this week's restock, try next Thursday", I ended up buying a press elsewhere. To this date I still haven't received a phone call, e-mail, or any other communications from them. You'd think they'd have wanted a several-hundred-dollar sale, but I guess not.
It's really not that bad, although 6502 assembly was (for me, anyway) more challenging than 68K because the 6502 didn't have many registers to work with. You just have to decompose the problem down another level, and as long as you're paying reasonable attention to detail, it's really not that much worse than writing something in C.
Seriously? 6502's and punched-cards together? What a wretched anachronism.
FTA: “DOS was written on punch cards. I would actually hand-write the code on 80-column punch card sheets. A guy at Shepardson named Mike Peters would take those sheets and punch the cards. The punch cards would then be read into a National Semiconductor IMP-16 and assembled, and a paper tape produced. The paper tape was read into the Apple II by a plug-in card made by Wozniak, and I would proceed to debug it. As the project got further along and the code was all written, and it was debugging and updating, I would mark up a listing and give it to Mike Peters who would then change whatever was necessary and deliver me a paper tape and I’d start again.”
That's part of why I liked OS/2 (2.0 and later) - if something needed DOS 2.1 to run properly, you just booted a 2.1 image in another window and you were good to go.
Could be worse. I interviewed a lady for a SE position several months back that, when asked about whether she ever did any programming at home, fondly recalled programming on her C64 way back when, and how much she missed seeing that amber "C:\" prompt. The interview didn't go much further.
Ooh then I could dig up the old 5 1/2 diskettes (made double-sided with a hole punch) with my pirated (Yes, I was 13 for a year,) copy of Karetika on it, and take that for a spin again.
Back then I thought it was so cool that Karateka played with an inverted screen if you flipped the floppy over.
In fact, Apple II monitor code had a nifty reverse assembler built in.
:-)
I'm sure there are a lot of us that remember "CALL -151"...
Hard work has little, if anything, to do with it.
I agree with part of your statement, and there are definitely those who more or less have money dropped into their lap by heredity or circumstance, but I do believe hard work is a major contributor to wealth in many if not most cases. The trick is to know where to apply that effort - there are people that break their back for their employer, but almost no one gets rich working for someone else. I suppose that falls under "doing the right thing at the right time", but I personally know two millionaires that started out as average Joes, and without the ridiculous amount of effort both put into their businesses, they'd still be writing code for someone else.
Evil creatures, people who own them really don't understand that the cat is the smartest animal in the home.
Perhaps, but I wish I had a dime for every time my dumbass has smacked herself in the face with her tail.
Sounds like someone's been reading "Childhood's End".
Why do modern military planes even have a canopy anymore? The vast majority of interesting visual information gets presented to the pilot via HUD anyway.
The HUD doesn't give the pilot any information he can't already get from his other instruments. It's there so the pilot doesn't have to look down, away from whatever he's looking at through the canopy.
You think it's bad in the U.S.? Look at Australia's plethora of time zones, and then consider that they don't all switch from standard time to summer time on the same days.
I think probably what's happening is that it's cost-prohibitive for a provider to train their staff to maintain all of the different packages that would be required to offer such a service, and a provider that offers VoIP generally has to have more quite a bit more infrastructure in place to offer any kind of reasonable service. The closest thing to what the submitter is asking for is probably a managed server provider, and there's no shortage of those out there, at varying quality/price points.
I had mentioned three circumstances, which I think is where my confusion set in - I'm guessing you were treating "explicit transfer of copyright" and "explicitly stating a work for hire" as a single one. I had interpreted what you had written to mean that whatever was being written was being combined with other code the company owned (and thus would be under their copyright), whether it had actually existed at the time or not. Regardless, it sounds like we're on the same page at the end of the day.
Also, for employed programmers, it works the same way, essentially you agree in your employment contract that you assign the copyright to your employer; if the employment contract has no such clause, the copyright belongs to you.
Speaking strictly for the US, whether or not the employment contract has such a clause doesn't matter, because everything you do for them is a work for hire. The relevant section of federal law lists "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" as one of the satisfying conditions as a work for hire.
Unless you specify that you own the things you produce on your clients dime (and they sign of on it) it belongs to THEM. I'm sorry but that's just the way it is.
I'm sorry, but in the United States, federal law clearly says otherwise.
it is a work for hire if and only if it meets the legal definition, which software development only does under the two circumstances you mentioned, plus the one where you're hired to write new code that is a module to be combined with others and cannot function on its own.
:-)
I did also say "or is a contribution to an existing project that the company already holds the copyright on".
Unless you happen to be programming for yourself, the code is owned by however payed you to make it
Not if you were working as an IC, unless the contract specifically transfers copyright or specifies it's a work for hire.
the company who contracts always owns the copyright in a work-for-hire and thus can do with it however they want
No, that's not how "work for hire" works. If he was an *employee* of the company, it would apply. If he was an independent contractor, however, he would retain the copyright unless the contract explicitly transfers copyright to his client, explicitly states that it's a work for hire, or is a contribution to an existing project that the company already holds the copyright on. See 17 USC 101 for details.
Not a lawyer, not legal advice, etc., but have been doing contract development for more than a couple of years.
And the kicker is that the first formal assertion of the state secrets doctrine ( US v. Reynolds) to prevent disclosure of evidence was proven to be a nothing but a sham when the "highly sensitive" documents in the case were finally declassified. If the executive was comfortable lying to the courts 60 years ago, who in their right mind would think that anything's changed now?
Huh. Carolyn McCarthy told me it was a shoulder thing that went up.
they would rather something die out than let anybody possibly make a single cent off of it.
Even beyond that, they'll be damned if anybody uses it for free without *them* making something off of it, even when it's a legacy product that has no marketing potential whatsoever. This is part of why copyright law is so screwed up right now - lots of companies work very hard to ensure that nothing they produce ever becomes public domain where it could be freely used by others, which was the entire point of copyright to begin with.
If you have growing users/day, the VC pitch will be much easier.
Or even better, may be able to sidestep the need for VC altogether.
I'm on my third smartphone (seventh phone overall), and I've removed the battery from all of them at one time or another. I replaced a dead battery in two of them, and have had to do a battery pull on all of the smartphones at one time or another due to them being locked up and not responding to the power button. Another anecdote.
(Because when a piece of hardware costs $10,000 and up, and the software which connects to it is utterly useless without that expensive hardware - because it's basically just a dial showing a readout - of course a practical use of programer time is to add an extra pointless $1 anti-piracy hardware component to stop the millions of free copies which will soon flood the intertubes. Sigh.)
Back when I was writing software for industrial laser markers, I had this same discussion with the engineering VP. He wanted to start requiring dongles to run the software, and my reply was, "you mean this $150,000 machine isn't enough of a dongle for you?" I guess he just hadn't thought of it in those terms.