After I started freelancing, I wrote up a contract specifying what I would do, how payments were to be handled, how project termination would be handled, my responsibilities, my client's responsibilities, etc. I then paid a contract lawyer to draft a formal contract based on my terms (he charged me $150). He told me my draft was so well done that he needed to make only small changes. Nonetheless, I thought it was worth the money. Fortunately, I didn't have any problems with my first client, so I didn't need the contract there. For all other jobs, though, I require the client to sign the contract. It boils down to a few points:
1) I get paid by the hour (to the nearest 15-minutes), whether I'm programming, traveling, talking on the phone, etc. If it's related the the project, I get paid for it.
2) We can both terminate at any time with written notice through certified mail. The client is responsible for my charges up to the postal time stamp. Outstanding payment is due upon cancellation.
3) I provide weekly updates in screenshot form, and/or working application (as feasible).
4) The client agrees that its only legal recourse for dissatisfaction is the cancellation of our contract, and all legal costs beyond that are the responsibility of the client. Additional wording stipulates that if the client sues me, the client must pay my legal expenses.
5) The client gets the binaries and source code. I retain the copyright on the code, but the client gets the right to make unlimited derivatives and copies.
That's all I can remember off-hand.
I used Qt 3 for my first freelance job, and required that the client accept the terms of the GPL before I would do the project. For the client's practical purposes, it allows him to treat the program as proprietary since he doesn't redistribute (and neither do I). It also allowed me to avoid paying a huge chunk of my income to Trolltech. Trolltech's butchered transition from Qt 3 to Qt 4, though, has prompted me to do all my future freelance work in Java.
The client was thrilled when I explained what that meant (no vendor [me] lock-in), and it did no harm to my repeat business. Once a client has invested that much time and money in a vendor, it's very painful to switch.
"What you should actually be asking yourself is, what is the problem I'm trying to solve, not what is the os I can use."
That's a fine attitude to have, but it only applies after the separate options have been learned. The original poster wants to learn to do programming in Linux, so his questions about how to proceed under Linux are perfectly fine. He's not looking for advice on which operating system to use. He's already made that decision.
Having done programming in Linux since 1993, here are my suggestions for getting started:
1) Start with C and/or C++ (whichever you're comfortable with) if you want to learn how to make use of Linux's POSIX interfaces and the wealth of 3rd-party libraries available. Use either CMake or qmake (the latter comes with Qt, and is usable for non-Qt projects) to generate your make files until/unless you want to manage them manually (which I don't recommend, is totally unnecessary, and is a total pain in the ass).
2) Use Java and Netbeans if you want the path of least resistance to just get something user-accessible running with minimal effort. Some people will recommend Eclipse, but Netbeans has a far more advanced GUI builder that is standard equipment.
3) You're not going to cover even a tiny fraction of the options available to you, in a day. The developer options provided by Linux are staggering. Have fun with each step, and don't rush to judgment.
"One of the network's frustrations with [Battlestar Galactica] has been its dark and increasingly complex mythology."
If *that's* why the network was frustrated by the show, then the network is run by morons. The dark, complicated mythology is part of what made the show so good. Multidimensional characters with complex motivations were a great added bonus to high quality, space-based visual effects.
The frustrations that *should* have been keeping network executives up at night involved huge downtime between seasons. That, above all else, is what caused viewership to decline. People simply lost interest in a show that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be canceled every year. People were actually surprised when the next season began, and had already decided to watch something else.
Granted, season 3 lost a lot of credibility when the space opera turned soap opera (that season sucked really bad), but the main problems came from scheduling mismanagement by the network.
"From the outside it sounds a lot like the story about the RSDL scheduler - completely snubbed because it stepped on the toes of one kernel dev and his pet project."
ReiserFS v4 wasn't included in the mainline kernel because Hans was being an even greater prick than usual to the kernel maintainers who asked him to fix his bugs and adhere to kernel coding conventions.
RSDL wasn't included in the mainline kernel because Linus considered Con to be unreliable, and wanted to have a scheduler with a developer he could count on to maintain the code and fix bugs.
"Is there some reporting and analysis of this matter from a more impartial source than Groklaw?"
It's hard to find a site more impartial than Groklaw. PJ did *not* say that Microsoft's patent portfolio is now worthless. That piece of brain damage was invented in the article summary. PJ said that Microsoft's patent portfolio became a little less worrisome. The article summary completely butchered what actually came from Groklaw.
"If you don't search, you've got a lot more room to maneuver in court."
More importantly: if you are sued for patent infringement, and it comes out that you did a patent search, you will likely be sued for triple damages. You MAY be able to survive a court loss for normal damages, but you're far less likely to be able to survive a court loss for triple damages.
"What you're saying is a little like saying you want to use the whole road for yourself at the maximum rate possible. After all, your taxes pay for your access to it."
That's a nonsensical comparison. Governments go to great efforts to make us aware of the limits of public road use. If our governments went to great pains to tell us, "Our roads are faster than anyone else's! Unlimited road usage! Drive 200 MPH! Drift around hair-pin turns!" and then hauled us into jail for doing those things, we would be rightfully pissed off.
When broadband providers advertise their top network speeds as the norm, along with unlimited access, people rightfully expect to be able to leave the network throttle wide open in perpetuity as long as they are paying what they agreed to pay. Anything less is rightfully false advertising.
"So a person who spends time working on an OSS project might now think I need to do things that will bring me short term value (ie money) so I don't starve and might either work of other things or start demanding money (or food) for their time and effort. "
This has at least one major logical fault, and that is the premise that FOSS developers are going to be laid off disproportionately. FOSS developers have diverse employment across the globe, and are not substantially more likely to be eliminated than any other employed population. Given this great diversity, FOSS development is *at least* as likely to survive an economic downturn/recession as the largest proprietary software shop. A global catastrophe would be the only thing that could stop FOSS development.
I'm FAR more worried about proprietary suppliers going belly up than FOSS.
But we are the United States of America. We tell other countries what to do, but we do not allow other countries to tell us what to do. What cave have you been living in? The WTO is only authoritative to the extent that they make other sovereign nations conform to United States requirements.
It's been a while since I looked this up (about five years), so the tax laws may have changed. Back then, though, you could deduct from your taxes as much as you earned with your hobby. So if your regular job grossed $40,000, and your hobby grossed you $500, you could deduct up to $500 of hobby revenue in addition to whatever other tax deductions you claimed.
Since I run my own mail server, if I were subject to this, I would write a script that generates 20 million email addresses, and register them all at once:
I would do this for each and every domain name I own. The registry would have 100 million registered email addresses for me alone. Hell, I would register a few extra domains just out of spite (they're cheap).
"Well, you're correct that if somebody is attracted to children they will likely always be attracted to children. "
When I was a child between 13 and 17, I was attracted to children and young adults. When I got to a certain point in my adulthood, I was no longer attracted to children (attraction to 17 year-olds does not magically switch off at 18, the point of legal adulthood, but carries on well afterwards). So your claim is patently false. It is a natural part of human growth to be attracted to what the law arbitrarily defines as a "child" for some duration of our lives.
The abuse of sex offender laws is diluting the entire point behind sex offender laws: to protect the public. An increasing number of registered sex "offenders" have had their lives ruined for trivial, insignificant acts demonized by excruciatingly paranoid and stupid people. Real sex offenders (who do actual harm) are being overshadowed by the mass of good people who got caught up in paranoid hysteria.
"So join an open source project and do some real world programming."
When I applied for my current job after getting my BS degree, the listed requirements were way above my qualifications, which was exactly what I was looking for. I needed to defer my student loans for another 6 months so I could keep working on my Open Source project, and I needed one more job rejection to qualify for the deferment. I sent my resume in, and got the rejection notice a few days later. The day after that, I got a call from the same place asking me to come in for an interview.
During the interview, the interviewers were particularly interested in all my personal Open Source projects I listed as programming experience. Those projects are what got me the job offer. Never underestimate the usefulness of Open Source experience.
"He found that, despite the admonition of the computer science establishment to construct programs top down, experts build them bottom-up."
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It took me approximately two years in the late 80's to come to the inescapable conclusion that pure top-down programming is a bad joke. It seems perfectly logical from a broad perspective, but we don't program in broad strokes. We program in excruciating detail, which is perfectly matched with bottom-up programming.
Top-down programming isn't impossible, obviously, but it's very badly suited for the task. It requires you to make an enormous number of assumptions very early in the software life-cycle that tend to have devastating effects when shown to be wrong. And assumptions made early in a project, any project, are almost always wrong. Bottom-up projects tend to expose these bad assumption much earlier.
I get a 20% improvement in mileage (kilometerage?:P ) with an occasional tune-up. You may now start sending me money to compensate me for my effort in bringing you this innovative new technique (please ignore the prior art behind the curtain).
If a judge is insane enough to decide in favor of Jones Day, the World Wide Web in all countries which recognize trademarks would come to a screeching halt. Google, MSN, and Yahoo would cease to exist almost overnight as their stock price plummeted to zero instantly.
"Install Linux on a Pentium II and host your domain and e-mail yourself with exim with greylisting enabled. I do."
I second that. I've done the same (but with Postfix) for about two and half years now, and I've never had better service. And my data are not on someone else's machine to be held for ransom when they need more money.
1) Any software project which can be written in a week by "any competent developer" is not going to be worth anything, so you may as well spill the beans on your idea.
2) No competent developer is going to blindly agree to a project that falls into (1) above.
3) Any project that falls into (1) has probably already been done a billion times, so you may as well spill the beans so someone can tell you where to get the software that already implements your idea. It will save you a lot of time.
I am a computer programmer, and rest assured that the manner in which the machine handles the calibration test doesn't necessarily indicate how it handles the breath test. Both tests likely have different entry points to the core functions which do the measurements, meaning that there is more than one way for the machine to screw up. There is also no way to be sure that the machine is using the same code to do the measurements. For all we know, the calibration code and the breath test code use completely different paths. Perhaps even a copy/paste/alteration job which introduced (un)detected errors.
Simply put, there is no way to know that the firmware is accurate without verifying its source code. Observing its effects under controlled conditions may simply be exercising a different code path than the device uses in the actual tests. All we have is the manufacturer's assurance, and being stuck with proprietary software will teach you how worthless that is.
"The US education system needs to teach critical thinking and you can not teach critical thinking by ignoring or banning things you disagree with."
I agree. Creationism should be taught in critical thinking classes. It should be held up as the gold standard of something that is so ridiculous as to be discarded without a second thought. The first step in critical thinking is to require some at least remotely miniscule residue of evidence before proclaiming something as plausible. Creationism fails every "shred of evidence" test ever conceived.
Slashdot Mirror
After I started freelancing, I wrote up a contract specifying what I would do, how payments were to be handled, how project termination would be handled, my responsibilities, my client's responsibilities, etc. I then paid a contract lawyer to draft a formal contract based on my terms (he charged me $150). He told me my draft was so well done that he needed to make only small changes. Nonetheless, I thought it was worth the money. Fortunately, I didn't have any problems with my first client, so I didn't need the contract there. For all other jobs, though, I require the client to sign the contract. It boils down to a few points:
1) I get paid by the hour (to the nearest 15-minutes), whether I'm programming, traveling, talking on the phone, etc. If it's related the the project, I get paid for it.
2) We can both terminate at any time with written notice through certified mail. The client is responsible for my charges up to the postal time stamp. Outstanding payment is due upon cancellation.
3) I provide weekly updates in screenshot form, and/or working application (as feasible).
4) The client agrees that its only legal recourse for dissatisfaction is the cancellation of our contract, and all legal costs beyond that are the responsibility of the client. Additional wording stipulates that if the client sues me, the client must pay my legal expenses.
5) The client gets the binaries and source code. I retain the copyright on the code, but the client gets the right to make unlimited derivatives and copies.
That's all I can remember off-hand.
I used Qt 3 for my first freelance job, and required that the client accept the terms of the GPL before I would do the project. For the client's practical purposes, it allows him to treat the program as proprietary since he doesn't redistribute (and neither do I). It also allowed me to avoid paying a huge chunk of my income to Trolltech. Trolltech's butchered transition from Qt 3 to Qt 4, though, has prompted me to do all my future freelance work in Java.
The client was thrilled when I explained what that meant (no vendor [me] lock-in), and it did no harm to my repeat business. Once a client has invested that much time and money in a vendor, it's very painful to switch.
"What you should actually be asking yourself is, what is the problem I'm trying to solve, not what is the os I can use."
That's a fine attitude to have, but it only applies after the separate options have been learned. The original poster wants to learn to do programming in Linux, so his questions about how to proceed under Linux are perfectly fine. He's not looking for advice on which operating system to use. He's already made that decision.
Having done programming in Linux since 1993, here are my suggestions for getting started:
1) Start with C and/or C++ (whichever you're comfortable with) if you want to learn how to make use of Linux's POSIX interfaces and the wealth of 3rd-party libraries available. Use either CMake or qmake (the latter comes with Qt, and is usable for non-Qt projects) to generate your make files until/unless you want to manage them manually (which I don't recommend, is totally unnecessary, and is a total pain in the ass).
2) Use Java and Netbeans if you want the path of least resistance to just get something user-accessible running with minimal effort. Some people will recommend Eclipse, but Netbeans has a far more advanced GUI builder that is standard equipment.
3) You're not going to cover even a tiny fraction of the options available to you, in a day. The developer options provided by Linux are staggering. Have fun with each step, and don't rush to judgment.
"One of the network's frustrations with [Battlestar Galactica] has been its dark and increasingly complex mythology."
If *that's* why the network was frustrated by the show, then the network is run by morons. The dark, complicated mythology is part of what made the show so good. Multidimensional characters with complex motivations were a great added bonus to high quality, space-based visual effects.
The frustrations that *should* have been keeping network executives up at night involved huge downtime between seasons. That, above all else, is what caused viewership to decline. People simply lost interest in a show that appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be canceled every year. People were actually surprised when the next season began, and had already decided to watch something else.
Granted, season 3 lost a lot of credibility when the space opera turned soap opera (that season sucked really bad), but the main problems came from scheduling mismanagement by the network.
"From the outside it sounds a lot like the story about the RSDL scheduler - completely snubbed because it stepped on the toes of one kernel dev and his pet project."
ReiserFS v4 wasn't included in the mainline kernel because Hans was being an even greater prick than usual to the kernel maintainers who asked him to fix his bugs and adhere to kernel coding conventions.
RSDL wasn't included in the mainline kernel because Linus considered Con to be unreliable, and wanted to have a scheduler with a developer he could count on to maintain the code and fix bugs.
"Is there some reporting and analysis of this matter from a more impartial source than Groklaw?"
It's hard to find a site more impartial than Groklaw. PJ did *not* say that Microsoft's patent portfolio is now worthless. That piece of brain damage was invented in the article summary. PJ said that Microsoft's patent portfolio became a little less worrisome. The article summary completely butchered what actually came from Groklaw.
"If you don't search, you've got a lot more room to maneuver in court."
More importantly: if you are sued for patent infringement, and it comes out that you did a patent search, you will likely be sued for triple damages. You MAY be able to survive a court loss for normal damages, but you're far less likely to be able to survive a court loss for triple damages.
"If you were to go to McDonalds and buy a Big Mac would you be paying an Big Mac tax?"
Yes, but with his health instead of his money.
"Its either that, or the naked people!"
You say that like it's a bad thing.
"What you're saying is a little like saying you want to use the whole road for yourself at the maximum rate possible. After all, your taxes pay for your access to it."
That's a nonsensical comparison. Governments go to great efforts to make us aware of the limits of public road use. If our governments went to great pains to tell us, "Our roads are faster than anyone else's! Unlimited road usage! Drive 200 MPH! Drift around hair-pin turns!" and then hauled us into jail for doing those things, we would be rightfully pissed off.
When broadband providers advertise their top network speeds as the norm, along with unlimited access, people rightfully expect to be able to leave the network throttle wide open in perpetuity as long as they are paying what they agreed to pay. Anything less is rightfully false advertising.
"So a person who spends time working on an OSS project might now think I need to do things that will bring me short term value (ie money) so I don't starve and might either work of other things or start demanding money (or food) for their time and effort. "
This has at least one major logical fault, and that is the premise that FOSS developers are going to be laid off disproportionately. FOSS developers have diverse employment across the globe, and are not substantially more likely to be eliminated than any other employed population. Given this great diversity, FOSS development is *at least* as likely to survive an economic downturn/recession as the largest proprietary software shop. A global catastrophe would be the only thing that could stop FOSS development.
I'm FAR more worried about proprietary suppliers going belly up than FOSS.
But we are the United States of America. We tell other countries what to do, but we do not allow other countries to tell us what to do. What cave have you been living in? The WTO is only authoritative to the extent that they make other sovereign nations conform to United States requirements.
"And you can't write off expenses of a hobby."
It's been a while since I looked this up (about five years), so the tax laws may have changed. Back then, though, you could deduct from your taxes as much as you earned with your hobby. So if your regular job grossed $40,000, and your hobby grossed you $500, you could deduct up to $500 of hobby revenue in addition to whatever other tax deductions you claimed.
Since I run my own mail server, if I were subject to this, I would write a script that generates 20 million email addresses, and register them all at once:
xzcve546dc@[mydomain]
hjghjedf43@[mydomain]
.
.
.
nbmbttyrtt@[mydomain]
I would do this for each and every domain name I own. The registry would have 100 million registered email addresses for me alone. Hell, I would register a few extra domains just out of spite (they're cheap).
"Well, you're correct that if somebody is attracted to children they will likely always be attracted to children. "
When I was a child between 13 and 17, I was attracted to children and young adults. When I got to a certain point in my adulthood, I was no longer attracted to children (attraction to 17 year-olds does not magically switch off at 18, the point of legal adulthood, but carries on well afterwards). So your claim is patently false. It is a natural part of human growth to be attracted to what the law arbitrarily defines as a "child" for some duration of our lives.
The abuse of sex offender laws is diluting the entire point behind sex offender laws: to protect the public. An increasing number of registered sex "offenders" have had their lives ruined for trivial, insignificant acts demonized by excruciatingly paranoid and stupid people. Real sex offenders (who do actual harm) are being overshadowed by the mass of good people who got caught up in paranoid hysteria.
"So join an open source project and do some real world programming."
When I applied for my current job after getting my BS degree, the listed requirements were way above my qualifications, which was exactly what I was looking for. I needed to defer my student loans for another 6 months so I could keep working on my Open Source project, and I needed one more job rejection to qualify for the deferment. I sent my resume in, and got the rejection notice a few days later. The day after that, I got a call from the same place asking me to come in for an interview.
During the interview, the interviewers were particularly interested in all my personal Open Source projects I listed as programming experience. Those projects are what got me the job offer. Never underestimate the usefulness of Open Source experience.
From the paper:
"He found that, despite the admonition of the computer science establishment to construct
programs top down, experts build them bottom-up."
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It took me approximately two years in the late 80's to come to the inescapable conclusion that pure top-down programming is a bad joke. It seems perfectly logical from a broad perspective, but we don't program in broad strokes. We program in excruciating detail, which is perfectly matched with bottom-up programming.
Top-down programming isn't impossible, obviously, but it's very badly suited for the task. It requires you to make an enormous number of assumptions very early in the software life-cycle that tend to have devastating effects when shown to be wrong. And assumptions made early in a project, any project, are almost always wrong. Bottom-up projects tend to expose these bad assumption much earlier.
I get a 20% improvement in mileage (kilometerage? :P ) with an occasional tune-up. You may now start sending me money to compensate me for my effort in bringing you this innovative new technique (please ignore the prior art behind the curtain).
If a judge is insane enough to decide in favor of Jones Day, the World Wide Web in all countries which recognize trademarks would come to a screeching halt. Google, MSN, and Yahoo would cease to exist almost overnight as their stock price plummeted to zero instantly.
"Install Linux on a Pentium II and host your domain and e-mail yourself with exim with greylisting enabled. I do."
I second that. I've done the same (but with Postfix) for about two and half years now, and I've never had better service. And my data are not on someone else's machine to be held for ransom when they need more money.
"Assuming he means Emacs, then this is the way God intended it to be."
Don't you mean GNU/God?
1) Any software project which can be written in a week by "any competent developer" is not going to be worth anything, so you may as well spill the beans on your idea.
2) No competent developer is going to blindly agree to a project that falls into (1) above.
3) Any project that falls into (1) has probably already been done a billion times, so you may as well spill the beans so someone can tell you where to get the software that already implements your idea. It will save you a lot of time.
"INAL, but I was convicted of a DWI."
I am a computer programmer, and rest assured that the manner in which the machine handles the calibration test doesn't necessarily indicate how it handles the breath test. Both tests likely have different entry points to the core functions which do the measurements, meaning that there is more than one way for the machine to screw up. There is also no way to be sure that the machine is using the same code to do the measurements. For all we know, the calibration code and the breath test code use completely different paths. Perhaps even a copy/paste/alteration job which introduced (un)detected errors.
Simply put, there is no way to know that the firmware is accurate without verifying its source code. Observing its effects under controlled conditions may simply be exercising a different code path than the device uses in the actual tests. All we have is the manufacturer's assurance, and being stuck with proprietary software will teach you how worthless that is.
"Just wondering if they used a trojan to gain access. "
No, but CERN had the foresight to build a 27KM-long generic condom to prevent spawning unwanted black holes.
"I'm glad I can now scientifically justify why I like a little junk in the trunk."
There should be a moderation option, "-1, Too Much Information".
"The US education system needs to teach critical thinking and you can not teach critical thinking by ignoring or banning things you disagree with."
I agree. Creationism should be taught in critical thinking classes. It should be held up as the gold standard of something that is so ridiculous as to be discarded without a second thought. The first step in critical thinking is to require some at least remotely miniscule residue of evidence before proclaiming something as plausible. Creationism fails every "shred of evidence" test ever conceived.