Submarine patents are patents that take such a long time to get through the patent office, that entire industries pop up in the mean time. An example would be single-chip microprocessors. The person applied for the patent in the 1970s, the patent office kept sending the paperwork back to the inventor for clarifications and revisions for almost 20 years. Eventually the patents were issued, meantime Intel, Motorola, Fujitsu and others had turned single-chip microprocessors into a multi billion dollar industry. Was it fair to Intel (and others) to have to drop and bend over and cough up hundreds of millions of dollars? Was it fair to the inventor who came up with the idea, making him wait so long to get the patent?
Did the inventor take several years to get around to sueing Microsoft? Or did they spend a couple of years in pointless un-negotiations? Many corporations will pretend to be negotiating while sending their legal beagles trying to break the patent instead. Some companies would rather spend $10,000,000 to break a patent that the inventor only wants $500,000 for. Some inventors want to stiff companies for $100,000,000 when their invention is worth $100,000. One can find cases to support any position you want. Which is what legal briefs are supposed to do.
Maybe the folks who overflashify websites will get a clue that they need to do something else. I sure don't want that garbage when I browse the web. Floating adverts that have no close button, and are so loud that I have to browse with the sound turned completely off. The result of this suit means they are going away? Say it isn't so! Oh, please do not throw me in that briar patch.
Publicity of so-called "Animal Rights" Terrorists is no where near as massive as the publicity AlQeda gets. Destroying a restaurant in California is not as sexy as destroying Bagdad, so it gets missed by the 6 o'clock news.
I also worked at a Bank before 9/11. There was massive surveillance of its employees. Ebay? You're fired. Talk about looking for another job? You're fired. Using Hotmail or Yahoo for personal email? You're fired. That bank lost a major lawsuit for videotaping the bathrooms in that West Palm Beach headquarters. They still videotape it: the "winners" of the lawsuit also got fired. They had a security department devoted to listening to phone calls, watching your email and snooping your web tracks. Being hired to develop software with Visual Studio, my first task was to hack the locked down NT boxes (wow, padlocks on the floppy drives! C2 is a joke) because Visual Studio was not on the approved software list. And of course, after a few months, the software audit showed unapproved software on the computer, so I was fired. LMAO.
Background checks for employees probably got a big boost after the tylenol tampering case. I am sure that some disgruntled employees have flicked boogers into the medicine before it gets bottled or tabletized. I am sure you have seen the "real tv" shows with the surveillance footage of some guy urinating into a coffee pot at the office. Could your company afford to make 100,000,000,000 pills with urine in them?
Occupational licenses were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prevent negroes from getting employment. Various bogus excuses are used to keep those licenses going, primarily the excuses are a combination of: 1) an agency gets a source of income, 2) the people in the profession get a barrier to entry to prevent newcomers that they do not approve of and 3) consumer protection advocates think the licensing laws are effective at protecting people. Would you trust an unlicensed X? Having a license does not meant that person is skilled, knowledgable nor low risk.
Another reason that occupational licenses for developers will never happen is that would put a serious damper on the ongoing offshoring movement. The window of opportunity to get software developers covered by some licensing requirements has passed.
The software industry has chosen to buy legislation absolving them of all liability in their actions. First part of the backlash will be the repeal of that legislation. The backlash will be there, and only the lawyers will win in the nasty lawsuits to come.
When the shuttle was originally planned, there were going to be several different models. The first would be a small capacity, pick up truck type. Followed by 2 larger models and 1 huge lifter. Due to politicking by the military, the first model to get built had a much larger model, and also had to glide back to the continental US in the event it was carrying some spy satellite (not even UK was trusted back then). The NRO decided not to use the shuttles for the KH series anyway.
Because the shuttle had to be made far larger than the first one planned, too much new technology had to be invented to make it fly. If the planned progression happened as planned, the shuttles would have cost $200,000,000 rather than costing $2,200,000,000 each.
I predict that the progression of craft will not happen.
There is a story from several oral traditions, about a man sentenced to death by the king. The man claimed that he could teach the horse/dog to speak/dance/fly in 1 year. When asked (by some bystander) how could he do the impossible after the king allowed this to happen, the guy replies, "In one year many things can happen: I can die, the king can die, [the animal] can die or I can make [the animal] perform."
Basically, Microsoft is hoping that the king will die in the next year. And that the MS addicts will remain addicts and forget that there are alternatives.
Perhaps you ought to read about Curious Yellow and Curious Blue. The windows update service need only be co-opted once to spread viruses and worms like this. Or, someone need only fool a few DNS servers to defeat the the purpose of compelling updates. Can you guarantee that cache poisoning and DNS spoofing cannot happen? If you compel everyone to get updates without their consent, and cannot guarantee the safety of those compelled updates, you have merely opened a new backdoor into their systems. The person who controls what software is installed on your computer owns it.
Microsoft is producing defective products. The fantasy that the EULA prevents them from being taken to court is all that keeps them from being held responsible for the faulty products they sell. They will stop making defective products when they start having to pay up in legal actions from the bugs and crashes that people endure. Why do people think that an EULA is some magical spell that protects the vendor from the consequences of their actions?
Microsoft also has a history of producing service packs which install more bugs than they fixed. Remember the rule of thumb about even numbered service packs suck? That rule of thumb came from NT4. It holds so strongly that MS won't produce SP2, just things like SP1a.
The real issue is that all these viruses and worms are caused by the operating system monoculture we are stuck with.
Look at the old issues of Wired. It was a reporter for the NY Times that was nailed by the drive reformat. M$ support said it was a cracked copy, reporter got story on the front page. M$ quickly appologized and removed the misfeature.
In California, the power companies got the legislation that they wrote. Claiming that it was halfbaked or that people do not understand what deregulation is about is disingenuous. California points the way that deregulation will head if the power companies hand the legislators "model legislation."
In California's case, generating companies conspired to shut down for maintainence at the same time to produce shortages that they could then soak the public for. Instead of agreeing to rotate the shutdowns to minimize the effect to the end user, they shutdown multilple plants simultaneously.
Blackouts of this magnitude hit New England every 15 years or so. Load balancing in the power system is rather complicated over the distances in the USA. Better understanding of how the power system works would do wonders for people understanding how the Enrons are screwing the public. Deregulation of the power industry will make major failures like this happen more often. Companies like Enron are more of a threat to the powersystem than any herd of Al Qedas: the enrons are removing the ability of the system to recover from and defend against kamakaze squirrels, which are still more of a threat than hostile humans.
So, who has an online copy of the source code that Diebold left publicly available? All the mirrors seem to have been taken down since the story originally broke months ago.
US crimes are categorized into 3 levels of severity based upon punishment.
Infraction: punishible by no more than a fine. Misdemeanor: punishible by no more than 1 year in jail. Felony: punishible by more than 1 year in prison.
To add to the self referential nature of punishment, a jail is a facility at the county (shire) or city level, and one cannot be kept there for more than 1 year at a time. A prison is a facilty at the state or federal level, and is primarily meant for terms of incarceration of 1 year or more.
I worked for a small business that shipped 40-200 packages per day. The paperwork for international shipping was more hassle than the owner's wife was willing to put up with (OMG! 3 photocopies of the invoice for some countries! Those nasty bureaucrats demand too much!). If she was handling the shipping that day, and something for any other country came through, it sat in the shipping department for another day (or usually till Monday or Friday, since she would not work those days). In general, if UPS did not deliver there, and it took more than the regular paperwork to process, it did not get shipped. It did not matter who you were, nor how much money you waved in front of them.
If the paperwork was filled out carelessly, the recipient could pay anything from 0% to 200% duties on the products received. In general, we were returning their product repaired, so it should have 0% duties on it.
The music I like to listen to does not get played on many radio stations. As a result I had to rummage through online systems like napster to find music I enjoyed. During 1999 and 2000, I would buy 5-20 CDs per month because I could find stuff I enjoyed on napster and x-radio.com. Now that napster and x-radio.com (and others like them) are gone, I have almost no way of discovering what new music I would be buying. I bought around 150 albums in 2000, I bought 1 album in 2002. Could I have saved some money and kept only the mp3s? Yes. Did I? No. I have about 2000 albums in my collection. Do I need to ever buy any more in my life? Maybe, I don't know. Will I find them listening to the junk on mainstream radio stations? Definitely not. I know for certain that the record industry does not want me to find new music. I can imagine them sitting around devising schemes to force people to have to pay 25 to $1 per listen/preview to try to find new music. Kazaa comes with so much garbage on it that to successfully remove the payloadware, one has to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch.
If the book publishing industry had the political power and muscle that the recording industry has, libraries would be outlawed. After all, the arguments that riaa uses to defame p2p and music swapping would be the same reasons for making libraries guilty of high treason to the record industry's business plan.
4) I wrote it for companyA, and now I work for companyB. The code I wrote for companyA belongs to them now. In order to write the code for companyB, I have to reinvent the wheel.
5) In general, I do usually find matches for something related to the company's needs browsing the research literature, but I tend to get in trouble a lot for browsing the web or reading magazines or books on company time. So call this one the look busy factor.
I have not really seen where the word quantum comes in, except as a buzzword. Since I have been looking for a decent, expandable, well written state machine, I picked this book. Perhaps some code bigots will criticize the code, but for my uses, it is good enough. I am tired of having to re-invent the wheel everytime I change employers.
Most other programmers I meet in the workplace have a hard time understanding state machines. All of those programmers are self taught or picked up "learn programming in 21 days" type of books.
The origination of occupational licensing was made deliberatly to keep black people from being gainfully employed. People currently use all sorts of rationalizations to explain why it is still done. These occupational licenses have had required written tests, discriminating against people who frequently did not read or write. You also needed (and still do) references, who are currently licensed, who have worked with you and are knowledgable of your skills and performance. Read chapter 2 of http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822325837/
Why do hair dressers require cosmetology licenses? Will your hair fall off if not cut correctly? No. Occupational licensing measures your ability to pass a test. It does not measure whether you know how to do your job. It cannot guarantee that the house a licensed builder will stand up. It does not guarantee that an unlicensed builder's house will fall down. It does give legal sanction to discriminating agains the unlicensed builder, or hair dresser, or shoe-shiner. Why are taxis regulated and jitneys banned? Who benefits from this?
All engineers are supposed to have a piece of paper that lets them legally call themselves engineers. Or at a lower level, engineers are required to get some piece of paper allowing them to become employed. Pretty much all civil and chemical engineers are licensed. On the other hand, very few electrical engineers are licensed. Do you want your computers designed by someone who lacks a license by some government agency blessing them? Do you care? Does the management in the company building those computers care?
All that said, I am in favor of some occupational licensing, like for physicians. The fear I have is that in the future, it will be necessary to have a license to hold any job. In the early 1990s, it was looking like programmers (or software engineers, if you will) were going to need to be licensed as well. It fell apart, but I predict it will surface again like a cheap monster returning in sequel after sequel. All it would take is some nasty scandal to errupt over sloppy programming that blows up all over the news. Do you think big business wants another Y2K crisis? Do you have a 4 year degree in programming? Something close? Could you get written recommendations by 3-5 other licensed professionals who have worked with you in the past and are knowledgable of your job skills?
A few years ago, I left a company I had worked at for a long time. I was the person who built the computers, I was the person who pulled the wiring. I was the person that wrote the code. I also did a lot of other work around the place: fixing car radios (the business the company was in) and running the inventory. When I left, they made me keep the key to the building, and the code to the alarm. As they needed more computers made (too cheap to buy store bought ones), and run wiring, I would get a call to come by and make it so. When they moved, I got a new key and a code to the new alarm. I made a few hundred bucks a month. Life was good.
After the next move, I declined the new key and the code to the new alarm. When they had a new place built to their specs, I said it would take me 2 weeks to run the wiring (I wanted to do it before the sheetrock went up) and put in the plug-panels we all know and love so well (all the previous places were pretty much temporary, so all the wiring was thrown across the ceiling tiles). When I got the request to run new wiring the weekend before the physical move, I was certain the end of the relationship was close at hand. When the server died, and I had to play games with getting the correct parts to do the job correctly, I decided it was over. I let one of the managers know that it was over, the president refused to believe it. From that day on, I never returned their calls nor answered mail nor e-mail from them.
How many of you, after leaving your employer still have keys to the building and the codes to the alarm 2 years after you leave? When they move, do they give you the new key and codes?
My moral? Be nice to the folks who laid you off, but send them a bill. Don't get too carried away with sticking it to them. The folks who deserve that will get it.
There were an enormous number of electrolytic capacitors that went boom in Car audio systems. Surprisingly, it was only the capacitors made by Nichicon and almost always the 7mm high capacitors. Pity, nichicon was the low bidder on almost everything, and they were the only supplier in the world of 7mm high axial electrolytics.
A previous employer of mine made somewhere near $10,000,000 in repair costs (both in-warranty and out of warranty) because of these capacitors. Radio went poof? $250 repair please. Bose Amp squeals like a siren and pops like a canon? $200 please.
Ford could not believe that our repair shop needed as many capacitors as we were using, and sent out auditors and engineers to get a grip on what they were convinced was out of line repair expenses (or maybe outright fraud). When we showed them radio after radio, and Bose amplifier after another with exactly the same failure mode, they started waking up. We even gave them boxes of ruined circuit boards for them to analyse. The real kicker was the Bose amp used in Chevy Caprices: the board is mounted so that the capacitors are suspended from the board, the electrolyte boils and spurts out of the base of the caps so hard that it splatters all over the board. Once they saw these, and learned how they are mounted in the vehicle, they went after nichicon.
Because of the size of the part, and that nichicon has a stranglehold on the market, we had to order parts directly from them. When you need 2,000 to 4,000 per month, you use them far faster than the US car makers ordered for replacement parts. However, instead of ordering the 65C rated parts, like the OEMs used, we ordered the 105C parts. Still took 12-20 weeks to send the boxes from Japan to Florida. That is real fun committing your employer to buying stuff for a year at a time and having to wait months for each delivery.
Because of heat and humidity issues, the south florida climate accelerates the aging process for these parts. What fails in 2-3 years down here, may take take much longer for you folks who live with frost. Heck, car batteries only last 2 years before they need to be replaced.
1 - Make it cheap. $99 will get you a lot of customers, Free will get you a lot of customers. There will be a lot of overlap in those customers, but a lot less than you think. Almost every developer will be able to afford $99, it is enough that it can come out of a workers weekly allowance without too much trouble, yet it is not too cheap that someone will drop it if it is too hard to use. If you really want to sell it for more, make a $99 version that has a lot of the features (not all, but enough to show it is a worthwile tool). I cannot get the boss to buy a $3k tool, it takes 6 months of paperwork to do so. I can and have opened my wallet and charged $99 tools, many became shelfware, but it was low enough that I did not feel screwed shelling out my bucks.
2 - Lots of code samples. MSDN and IBM DeveloperWorks are like that. Maybe the code has lousy comments, but enough that someone can look at it and see a use that you may not have. Lots of MSDN samples get used for prototypes in my shop.
3 - Good web access. Nothing worse that trying to look up API_call_839901232434 and being unable to find it. Or taking half an hour to find it.
4 - Leave out the booth babes. We want to write code. If we wanted to fantasize about booth babes, we would be looking somewhere else.
5 - Leave out the content free marketing. MS should do that. Instead of showing what I can make with your development tools, they show me some guy with his feet up on a table, or some orange page with buzzwords.
6 - Why should I use your tool rather than another one? Answers please. Logical ones, not the crap marketing departments love to put together.
7 - Consistant help files. MSDN loses here. I keep the MSDN library disks going back to 1994. Much gets omitted intentionally from the documentation when they want you to use some new api call that exists only in WinXP rather than some decent version that was there in Win32 for the last 7 years.
8 - Licensing games. Sure you can make some nitziffic licensing scheme that guarantees that every installation is a paid installation, but you forget developers tend to have 3-8 machines at any given time. Several at work, several at home, and 1 or more being built at any given time. Don't play license cop. If folks are going to pay, let them. If folks want to use one copy for several machines, don't stop them. If you try to stop them, you will lose. You want evengelists for your tool, not folks in straightjackets.
9 - T-shirts and toys. Forget them. When I get them, I toss them. I won't wear a t-shirt, and my life is too cluttered for tchotchkies.
If you independantly discover what others kept a trade secret, by patenting it, the holders of the trade secret lose their rights to the invention. That is the risk you play by keeping trade secrets.
Having read the documentation of much of the dribble from the lackeys of Hollywood, I have uncovered a way to cripple this new technology. Since each "sink device" (playing unit) has a public key certificate, it would be merely necessary to make a.wav,.mp3 (or similar) sound file that appears on your web site (or your signature for message boards?) containing a revocation certificate for sink devices. Essentially, you destroy this technology in a way that it can never recover from. How many computers will Intel have to pay to replace, before they stop making this technology? They should learn the legal doctrine of "constructive nuisance." Get to work folks....
Let's see, if some one steals my driver's license, I can get another.
If someone steals my credit card number, I can get a new number.
If someone steals my biometric information, where can I get new fingers and eyes?
Most people cannot understand that using biometric information for validation is like holding up photographs to a camera. When you can explain it to them like that, they immediately understand the failures in the system and how to defeat such defective technology.
Alas, it will take years for the mentally crippled to get cleaned out of political office. Until then, we have nonsense like this to deal with.
I did this same sort of thing for a company with under 20 computers. Everytime the boss wanted a new one, I built a new one. Everytime one broke, I fixed it. If you start doing this, you will quickly learn the benefits of standard hardware and standard software installations.
I am glad I do not work there anymore and would never do the same again.
Having once worked in a place where all the desktop PCs were of 3 models (all Compaq), hardware maintainence was a breeze. Personally, I would try to sell the boss on picking up last year's models from E-Bay. Compaq has a policy of not accepting returns from distibutors, so distributors tend to have stacks of last year's models. Get a great deal on something never used, and still quite suitable for smaller businesses.
I do not work for Compaq, and I think their home systems are no where as reliable as their office products.
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Did the inventor take several years to get around to sueing Microsoft? Or did they spend a couple of years in pointless un-negotiations? Many corporations will pretend to be negotiating while sending their legal beagles trying to break the patent instead. Some companies would rather spend $10,000,000 to break a patent that the inventor only wants $500,000 for. Some inventors want to stiff companies for $100,000,000 when their invention is worth $100,000. One can find cases to support any position you want. Which is what legal briefs are supposed to do.
Maybe the folks who overflashify websites will get a clue that they need to do something else. I sure don't want that garbage when I browse the web. Floating adverts that have no close button, and are so loud that I have to browse with the sound turned completely off. The result of this suit means they are going away? Say it isn't so! Oh, please do not throw me in that briar patch.
I also worked at a Bank before 9/11. There was massive surveillance of its employees. Ebay? You're fired. Talk about looking for another job? You're fired. Using Hotmail or Yahoo for personal email? You're fired. That bank lost a major lawsuit for videotaping the bathrooms in that West Palm Beach headquarters. They still videotape it: the "winners" of the lawsuit also got fired. They had a security department devoted to listening to phone calls, watching your email and snooping your web tracks. Being hired to develop software with Visual Studio, my first task was to hack the locked down NT boxes (wow, padlocks on the floppy drives! C2 is a joke) because Visual Studio was not on the approved software list. And of course, after a few months, the software audit showed unapproved software on the computer, so I was fired. LMAO.
Background checks for employees probably got a big boost after the tylenol tampering case. I am sure that some disgruntled employees have flicked boogers into the medicine before it gets bottled or tabletized. I am sure you have seen the "real tv" shows with the surveillance footage of some guy urinating into a coffee pot at the office. Could your company afford to make 100,000,000,000 pills with urine in them?
1) an agency gets a source of income,
2) the people in the profession get a barrier to entry to prevent newcomers that they do not approve of and
3) consumer protection advocates think the licensing laws are effective at protecting people. Would you trust an unlicensed X? Having a license does not meant that person is skilled, knowledgable nor low risk.
Another reason that occupational licenses for developers will never happen is that would put a serious damper on the ongoing offshoring movement. The window of opportunity to get software developers covered by some licensing requirements has passed.
The software industry has chosen to buy legislation absolving them of all liability in their actions. First part of the backlash will be the repeal of that legislation. The backlash will be there, and only the lawyers will win in the nasty lawsuits to come.
Because the shuttle had to be made far larger than the first one planned, too much new technology had to be invented to make it fly. If the planned progression happened as planned, the shuttles would have cost $200,000,000 rather than costing $2,200,000,000 each.
I predict that the progression of craft will not happen.
Basically, Microsoft is hoping that the king will die in the next year. And that the MS addicts will remain addicts and forget that there are alternatives.
Microsoft is producing defective products. The fantasy that the EULA prevents them from being taken to court is all that keeps them from being held responsible for the faulty products they sell. They will stop making defective products when they start having to pay up in legal actions from the bugs and crashes that people endure. Why do people think that an EULA is some magical spell that protects the vendor from the consequences of their actions?
Microsoft also has a history of producing service packs which install more bugs than they fixed. Remember the rule of thumb about even numbered service packs suck? That rule of thumb came from NT4. It holds so strongly that MS won't produce SP2, just things like SP1a.
The real issue is that all these viruses and worms are caused by the operating system monoculture we are stuck with.
Look at the old issues of Wired. It was a reporter for the NY Times that was nailed by the drive reformat. M$ support said it was a cracked copy, reporter got story on the front page. M$ quickly appologized and removed the misfeature.
In California's case, generating companies conspired to shut down for maintainence at the same time to produce shortages that they could then soak the public for. Instead of agreeing to rotate the shutdowns to minimize the effect to the end user, they shutdown multilple plants simultaneously.
Blackouts of this magnitude hit New England every 15 years or so. Load balancing in the power system is rather complicated over the distances in the USA. Better understanding of how the power system works would do wonders for people understanding how the Enrons are screwing the public. Deregulation of the power industry will make major failures like this happen more often. Companies like Enron are more of a threat to the powersystem than any herd of Al Qedas: the enrons are removing the ability of the system to recover from and defend against kamakaze squirrels, which are still more of a threat than hostile humans.
So, who has an online copy of the source code that Diebold left publicly available? All the mirrors seem to have been taken down since the story originally broke months ago.
Infraction: punishible by no more than a fine.
Misdemeanor: punishible by no more than 1 year in jail.
Felony: punishible by more than 1 year in prison.
To add to the self referential nature of punishment, a jail is a facility at the county (shire) or city level, and one cannot be kept there for more than 1 year at a time. A prison is a facilty at the state or federal level, and is primarily meant for terms of incarceration of 1 year or more.
If the paperwork was filled out carelessly, the recipient could pay anything from 0% to 200% duties on the products received. In general, we were returning their product repaired, so it should have 0% duties on it.
The music I like to listen to does not get played on many radio stations. As a result I had to rummage through online systems like napster to find music I enjoyed. During 1999 and 2000, I would buy 5-20 CDs per month because I could find stuff I enjoyed on napster and x-radio.com. Now that napster and x-radio.com (and others like them) are gone, I have almost no way of discovering what new music I would be buying. I bought around 150 albums in 2000, I bought 1 album in 2002. Could I have saved some money and kept only the mp3s? Yes. Did I? No. I have about 2000 albums in my collection. Do I need to ever buy any more in my life? Maybe, I don't know. Will I find them listening to the junk on mainstream radio stations? Definitely not. I know for certain that the record industry does not want me to find new music. I can imagine them sitting around devising schemes to force people to have to pay 25 to $1 per listen/preview to try to find new music. Kazaa comes with so much garbage on it that to successfully remove the payloadware, one has to wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch.
If the book publishing industry had the political power and muscle that the recording industry has, libraries would be outlawed. After all, the arguments that riaa uses to defame p2p and music swapping would be the same reasons for making libraries guilty of high treason to the record industry's business plan.
5) In general, I do usually find matches for something related to the company's needs browsing the research literature, but I tend to get in trouble a lot for browsing the web or reading magazines or books on company time. So call this one the look busy factor.
Most other programmers I meet in the workplace have a hard time understanding state machines. All of those programmers are self taught or picked up "learn programming in 21 days" type of books.
I recommend this book.
Why do hair dressers require cosmetology licenses? Will your hair fall off if not cut correctly? No. Occupational licensing measures your ability to pass a test. It does not measure whether you know how to do your job. It cannot guarantee that the house a licensed builder will stand up. It does not guarantee that an unlicensed builder's house will fall down. It does give legal sanction to discriminating agains the unlicensed builder, or hair dresser, or shoe-shiner. Why are taxis regulated and jitneys banned? Who benefits from this?
All engineers are supposed to have a piece of paper that lets them legally call themselves engineers. Or at a lower level, engineers are required to get some piece of paper allowing them to become employed. Pretty much all civil and chemical engineers are licensed. On the other hand, very few electrical engineers are licensed. Do you want your computers designed by someone who lacks a license by some government agency blessing them? Do you care? Does the management in the company building those computers care?
All that said, I am in favor of some occupational licensing, like for physicians. The fear I have is that in the future, it will be necessary to have a license to hold any job. In the early 1990s, it was looking like programmers (or software engineers, if you will) were going to need to be licensed as well. It fell apart, but I predict it will surface again like a cheap monster returning in sequel after sequel. All it would take is some nasty scandal to errupt over sloppy programming that blows up all over the news. Do you think big business wants another Y2K crisis? Do you have a 4 year degree in programming? Something close? Could you get written recommendations by 3-5 other licensed professionals who have worked with you in the past and are knowledgable of your job skills?
After the next move, I declined the new key and the code to the new alarm. When they had a new place built to their specs, I said it would take me 2 weeks to run the wiring (I wanted to do it before the sheetrock went up) and put in the plug-panels we all know and love so well (all the previous places were pretty much temporary, so all the wiring was thrown across the ceiling tiles). When I got the request to run new wiring the weekend before the physical move, I was certain the end of the relationship was close at hand. When the server died, and I had to play games with getting the correct parts to do the job correctly, I decided it was over. I let one of the managers know that it was over, the president refused to believe it. From that day on, I never returned their calls nor answered mail nor e-mail from them.
How many of you, after leaving your employer still have keys to the building and the codes to the alarm 2 years after you leave? When they move, do they give you the new key and codes?
My moral? Be nice to the folks who laid you off, but send them a bill. Don't get too carried away with sticking it to them. The folks who deserve that will get it.
A previous employer of mine made somewhere near $10,000,000 in repair costs (both in-warranty and out of warranty) because of these capacitors. Radio went poof? $250 repair please. Bose Amp squeals like a siren and pops like a canon? $200 please.
Ford could not believe that our repair shop needed as many capacitors as we were using, and sent out auditors and engineers to get a grip on what they were convinced was out of line repair expenses (or maybe outright fraud). When we showed them radio after radio, and Bose amplifier after another with exactly the same failure mode, they started waking up. We even gave them boxes of ruined circuit boards for them to analyse. The real kicker was the Bose amp used in Chevy Caprices: the board is mounted so that the capacitors are suspended from the board, the electrolyte boils and spurts out of the base of the caps so hard that it splatters all over the board. Once they saw these, and learned how they are mounted in the vehicle, they went after nichicon.
Because of the size of the part, and that nichicon has a stranglehold on the market, we had to order parts directly from them. When you need 2,000 to 4,000 per month, you use them far faster than the US car makers ordered for replacement parts. However, instead of ordering the 65C rated parts, like the OEMs used, we ordered the 105C parts. Still took 12-20 weeks to send the boxes from Japan to Florida. That is real fun committing your employer to buying stuff for a year at a time and having to wait months for each delivery.
Because of heat and humidity issues, the south florida climate accelerates the aging process for these parts. What fails in 2-3 years down here, may take take much longer for you folks who live with frost. Heck, car batteries only last 2 years before they need to be replaced.
1 - Make it cheap. $99 will get you a lot of customers, Free will get you a lot of customers. There will be a lot of overlap in those customers, but a lot less than you think. Almost every developer will be able to afford $99, it is enough that it can come out of a workers weekly allowance without too much trouble, yet it is not too cheap that someone will drop it if it is too hard to use. If you really want to sell it for more, make a $99 version that has a lot of the features (not all, but enough to show it is a worthwile tool). I cannot get the boss to buy a $3k tool, it takes 6 months of paperwork to do so. I can and have opened my wallet and charged $99 tools, many became shelfware, but it was low enough that I did not feel screwed shelling out my bucks.
2 - Lots of code samples. MSDN and IBM DeveloperWorks are like that. Maybe the code has lousy comments, but enough that someone can look at it and see a use that you may not have. Lots of MSDN samples get used for prototypes in my shop.
3 - Good web access. Nothing worse that trying to look up API_call_839901232434 and being unable to find it. Or taking half an hour to find it.
4 - Leave out the booth babes. We want to write code. If we wanted to fantasize about booth babes, we would be looking somewhere else.
5 - Leave out the content free marketing. MS should do that. Instead of showing what I can make with your development tools, they show me some guy with his feet up on a table, or some orange page with buzzwords.
6 - Why should I use your tool rather than another one? Answers please. Logical ones, not the crap marketing departments love to put together.
7 - Consistant help files. MSDN loses here. I keep the MSDN library disks going back to 1994. Much gets omitted intentionally from the documentation when they want you to use some new api call that exists only in WinXP rather than some decent version that was there in Win32 for the last 7 years.
8 - Licensing games. Sure you can make some nitziffic licensing scheme that guarantees that every installation is a paid installation, but you forget developers tend to have 3-8 machines at any given time. Several at work, several at home, and 1 or more being built at any given time. Don't play license cop. If folks are going to pay, let them. If folks want to use one copy for several machines, don't stop them. If you try to stop them, you will lose. You want evengelists for your tool, not folks in straightjackets.
9 - T-shirts and toys. Forget them. When I get them, I toss them. I won't wear a t-shirt, and my life is too cluttered for tchotchkies.
If you independantly discover what others kept a trade secret, by patenting it, the holders of the trade secret lose their rights to the invention. That is the risk you play by keeping trade secrets.
Having read the documentation of much of the dribble from the lackeys of Hollywood, I have uncovered a way to cripple this new technology. Since each "sink device" (playing unit) has a public key certificate, it would be merely necessary to make a .wav, .mp3 (or similar) sound file that appears on your web site (or your signature for message boards?) containing a revocation certificate for sink devices. Essentially, you destroy this technology in a way that it can never recover from. How many computers will Intel have to pay to replace, before they stop making this technology? They should learn the legal doctrine of "constructive nuisance."
Get to work folks....
If someone steals my credit card number, I can get a new number.
If someone steals my biometric information, where can I get new fingers and eyes?
Most people cannot understand that using biometric information for validation is like holding up photographs to a camera. When you can explain it to them like that, they immediately understand the failures in the system and how to defeat such defective technology.
Alas, it will take years for the mentally crippled to get cleaned out of political office. Until then, we have nonsense like this to deal with.
I am glad I do not work there anymore and would never do the same again.
Having once worked in a place where all the desktop PCs were of 3 models (all Compaq), hardware maintainence was a breeze. Personally, I would try to sell the boss on picking up last year's models from E-Bay. Compaq has a policy of not accepting returns from distibutors, so distributors tend to have stacks of last year's models. Get a great deal on something never used, and still quite suitable for smaller businesses.
I do not work for Compaq, and I think their home systems are no where as reliable as their office products.