Well it would take a competitor out of the market and they would have a huge list of exclusive titles to the PlayBox/XStation which might make their sales competitive with Nintendo. If it went through there is a lot of potential. Of course, knowing Sony they'd screw it up somehow.
Re:Can't decide if it's embarrassing or impressive
on
Decade Old KDE Bug Fixed
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· Score: 5, Informative
After RTFA (I know, broke the rules), it appears it wasn't a documented or tracked bug. It was noticed and fixed more than a decade after it was created. Pretty much non-news. If no one ever noticed or cared that their cookies were getting lost on a kde restart then how can you expect it to get fixed? If no one calls it a bug, is it actually a bug?
I've had a similar experience. I was working with a system and found a bug that had been around since the initial system (>3 years), and jumping into the old source control (I had to crack open visual source safe since that's what they were using originally..blech..moved to hg after I started and bitched that even cvs would be better). Basics of it were: request sent, response received but ignored/not read, retry sent, original message response used. It kicked into a retry sequence even try despite having a response. Eventually this caused issues communicating to a certain device. Put the sniffer on and voila, see double requests despite getting an immediate response. No one ever noticed because it didn't cause issues with any other devices. Yes, extra traffic on the bus, but there was plenty of bandwidth and most of the devices handled it fine. It should have been caught in original testing. When writing your own protocol to talk over serial you'd assume they'd do a little more testing than a sniff test ("oh.. looks like it's working. Good enough for production! Let's ship it!"). I spent most of my time fixing bugs and most were that old but that's the only one I can remember that you would think would have been noticed earlier.
I know a few americans working in Canada now. If you have a job offer apparently it's easy. Without you can still get a work permit if you can prove you have enough funds. The basics are: you need to prove a good skill set (generally a degree is the easiest way to prove that) and that you are broke and going to leach off the system.
Cost of living is pretty high though depending on area. The most desirable areas (e.g. Vancouver) have some of the highest living costs in the world (when compared to income). Think San Diego housing costs with slightly lower wages (one of my friends just moved to SD.. he said avg family home was slightly cheaper in SD, but something well renovated in a good area would be slightly more.. very comparable though). You can find cheap regions, but you have to like winter sports. Right now I have green grass and a house that costs twice the price of a comparable in an area with a foot of snow. In the US you can have warm and cheap depending on which state you are willing to live in.
Oh yeah.. income tax is higher. So that is part of why the medical fees appear low. You can try out your expected wage in this calc.
Anyhow.. this is way off topic now. Feel free to email me (stephen at arcane innovations dot com) if you have any questions. If you are in software/engineering I can help with job searching resources (on the west coast at least).
Yeah. That would be my main reason. Socialized healthcare that works (and actually costs the government less per capita than the US privatized care does/did). It's not actually free (as a contractor you have to pay your MSP fees yourself, which employers generally pay in addition to "extended medical"), but it's affordable. Under a certain income I think it is free, I think. Most of the time if you have a significant other with family coverage, your base MSP fees are covered as well.
I was actually looking into this recently as I'm looking to hire employees (three categories of monthly rate: Single - $60.50, Family of 2 - $109, Family of 3 or more: $121). For extended medical/dental/optical it looks like around $265/month for an employee (depending on claim history). That gets you a lower deductible on prescriptions, cheap or free dental visits (most I've paid is $50 for a filling) and free eye checkups and money towards glasses every X years (varies on plan, some suck some are good). Often extended will let you double up if you have multiple plans (e.g. both wife and husband have plans). Your primary plans covers the initial amount, then the secondary often covers the rest.
I recently broke an arm which required surgery. I checked into how much it would be if you weren't covered (e.g. out of country visitor).. >$12K. I paid nothing. It was an accident, and I'd assume they'd collect from the insurance company (since it was the other driver's fault.. and his insurance should pay not government dollars), but that's all opaque to me since it's handled within the system. Even if broke it mountain biking I wouldn't have had to pay. I was out of pocket $40 for my second cast (which extended would probably cover if it wasn't a vehicle accident.. vehicle insurer is deemed primary in accidents).
The main thing is you're not going to die if you don't have extended health care and you aren't going to go bankrupt from cancer or a complicated pregnancy or a heart condition etc.
There are of course compromises. E.g. if you could use knee surgery but are "lower prioriy" (older, doesn't affect ability to work etc) you'll be at the end of a long waiting list. You can travel elsewhere and pay to have it done sooner, or wait. I've heard of people with a broken bone (that requires fixation) waiting a week in a cast before going in for surgery. Mine was bad enough that it had to be done asap. As long as you are drugged well enough and it's not dire, I guess waiting is ok, but it's definitely not fun.
No silver bullet. But I think it works better for the poor up to middle income people (maybe even upper middle). Straight private definitely favours the rich. I think we're trying to figure out a mixed system so that people can pay for private care and get quicker care (in Country), but doesn't pull doctors from public care and result in longer waiting lists. Basically you don't want to change the existing so that people can pay to jump the line (which is what can happen if a surgeon works in both private and public practices).
One more reason I don't choose to live in the US. Some of the laws get twisted a little. E.g. I heard about someone going to court because he was fired for smoking weed on the job. Labour code prohibits being intoxicated on the job (or anything illegal), but he still got his day in court. He didn't win of course, but it's a PITA for the employer. All-in-all though, I think it's better. It just forces employers to think carefully about who they hire (and whether they keep them beyond probation). You can fire at will when the employee is in probation, but after than you need documented cause (either a history of small offenses or something that is considered a fire-able offense).
In software it makes employers think carefully about whether they need a contractor or employee. Though I've seen that sway towards hiring contractors when in fact employees were needed (to not risk long term costs associated with employees). You need long term employees vested in your software for it to last long term. There's pros and cons to both sides, but I think the pros are in favour of society on strong labour laws (whereas it's businesses that win on weak ones).
So, while we might admire his "initiative"....I, for one, would NEVER hire this guy.
I'd hire him to manage outsourcing. He's obviously more successful than most at it.
Yes, his resume is most likely misleading (as it wasn't him), but not totally as he was the one who implemented those result (albeit not directly which is a lie). My question is: why is he doing this? If I were him I'd be running a consulting business, but maybe where he is that wouldn't work?
My experience with consulting agencies that put cheap foreign labour on your project is that they suck. Maybe this was all some far reaching plan to get caught so he gets tons of publicity for his "outsourcing that doesn't suck". I was talking to some software people from a big insurance company somewhere in SoCal (national company they told me.. and he was astonished I had never heard of them). They said their trick to outsourcing was same time zone (i.e. mexico) and was super proud of their "low" 20% rework. The outsourced workers only produced code 80% of their local counterparts, but that was considered "good" because it was still cheaper to do the rework. Different time zone added other issues and they were getting much lower quality from overseas).
I could have argued that there's a lot more than money to cost (are you still hitting deadlines with 20% rework?!), but the fact that they'll settle for 80% because it saves them 25% in up front dev costs (I really doubt they had any total cost analysis and the guy didn't seem to understand long term software costs).
I, like many in software, have a negative view of outsourcing. It's hard enough to communicate between staff in the same room, let alone across continents, time zones and differing cultures. That's my bias, and that's the kind of bias this guy has to fight against to work this way legitimately. Once you have a few successful project under your belt it's easier, but getting people to take the risk in the first place is difficult.
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not. I've been both a consultant and an employee and there are far more differences than just security. Contractors are external, employees are internal so doing it this way you end up as a mole on the inside. There's no right or wrong to it, as an employer I can chose to hire an employee or a contractor with different pros and cons, but if I hire one and get the other then you're fundamentally misrepresenting yourself.
That's a good point but I think there's a little more grey/gray to it than just black and white. When I hire a contractor it means no benefits and generally short term (at a higher rate per hour and generally higher than total hourly cost of having an employee). With an employee it's long term relationship (I can't ditch them whenever I want like a contractor.. at least not in my jurisdiction) and I'm expected to provide benefits etc (though apparent hourly rate is lower). I pay whatever I hire (employee/contractor) to do a particular job at a particular level for their pay grade (there are expectations that go with the pay level).
An individual, say John Smith, can be a business. In my jurisdiction you can act as a sole proprietorship under your own name. So if I hire John Smith I can actually be hiring the company called John Smith. John has full liability for his actions (as he is not a corporation of limited liability) as you would expect from an individual. So my (weak) argument is that a person can be (or rather is) a company.
If corporations can be treated as individual entities, why not people as companies? The law where I live supports it.
I'm quite sure you are right and he misrepresented himself, but I'm curious how clear you have to be. I'd have to ask my lawyer what she thinks would happen here if you tried to fire someone for doing this locally. Is it actually a breach of contract? Any employment agreement I've signed has not stated that I was the sole supplier of the work, just my responsibilities, benefits etc. Actually it would breach the NDAs I've signed and that's most likely an offense you can fire over (despite the employee sided labour legislation).
On a side note: I had a great contractor under me. Couldn't be happier with his work (great code, better than mine.. easy to read and maintain, super clean). If I later found out it wasn't him actually doing the work I wouldn't have given a shit. I hired him and it was under the understanding it was him who would be doing the work, but in the end all I care about is results. If he was able to find someone that put out that level of code (especially if he was unable to do so himself) and was able to translate my requests so clearly.. fucking kudos to him. I got what I wanted at the fair going rate.
A contractor or consulting company would do this no problem. That's a b2b relationship though. Employees are supposed to be subservient, "Yes mastah, whatever you need mastah."
If we ignore any issues with security it's really hard to fault the guy. The point as an employee is to do your job and do it well. The code he (had) produced was apparently commendable. He did his job well though not by the traditional solution (working hard and doing it yourself). Does that make it the wrong solution?
The biggest issue is the company "got tricked" into paying more for a cheap worker. Of course had they done the outsourcing themselves they'd probably have one or more of the worst producing low quality coders that require tons of rework (the normal reality of outsourcing).
VPN is not really the problem, since VPN access tends to be quite limited in scope.
And my experience says the opposite. Whatever you'd have access to locally as a user you'd have over VPN. How would you do your job otherwise? The point of VPN is to make it a secure connection so you can have access to whatever you'd have access to locally.
If the company has an NDA, is ISO registered, has to follow any government security protocol (I worked at a private Canadian company that followed US security regulations in order to sell to US gov) etc.. this could lead to trouble. Of course sweeping it under the rug would have been better than advertising it if that's the case.
I agree on the kudos. Finding good people is tough enough locally. Outsourcing is hell. In a contracting type situation (as long as it didn't have a no substitution clause) this would have been perfectly ok (if not better than ok since it appears good code was actually written). The interesting part is whether the company would have paid the same had they known. They were quite willing to pay a wage of X when they thought it was the local guy producing the code, but my guess is they'd want to pay a small % of X for the Chinese worker even with this guy managing him. In reality, since he was producing the best code in the company, he should have been getting the biggest wage (reward your stars and all that).
Depends on what continent model you follow. Most english speaking countries (and many other regions) are taught the 7 continent model which splits "america" into North America and South America. According to wikipedia China, India and Western Europe are taught this model as well.
The 6 continent model with a combined America is apparently taught in "Spanish-speaking countries and in some parts of Eastern Europe including Greece".
Stating one model is wrong when there are multiple accepted models is simple ignorance.
Just because the new guy is disagreeing and less experienced, doesn't make him wrong. Yes, 9 times out of 10, the new, less experienced guy will be wrong, but that 1 time out of 10, makes it worth giving the other 9 times a fair hearing as well.
I honestly don't think "experience" has anything to do with it. How long you've sat in front of a computer monitor doesn't directly translate to your understanding of software development. I've worked with a few guys with 15+ years experience. One created more work than he produced over 6 months (we were cleaning up shit from him a year after he was canned), another whom I bitched about in the last question really had no fucking clue how to structure code. He'd write stuff that "worked", but basically misused every concept in computer science. No one could follow his code and there was no clean way to cut it out. I also know plenty of CSc and S.Eng. student that never learned how to code in school. I mean, yeah, they passed assignments that required coding but never really got a grasp on writing software.
On the flipside I've worked with people straight out of school that were as good as experts with plenty of years behind them. The big thing I've seen is there tends to be two groups: people who understand software development and those that don't. People who don't understand can write working code and even create big projects.. but they are hell to maintain and even hell for that person to write. For people that understand, it's a lot more fluid. We all start at the ignorant stage and some get beyond it quicker than others, some never make it out.
I honestly didn't learn to code (as in really code) until late in my degree, but I buckled down and got over the learning curve.. then it all became a lot easier and way more fun. More practice and the fog cleared even more. I think I still have quite a ways to go (as I'm able to recognize those that are much clearer than I), but that's ok as long as I'm dedicated to moving forward and can recognize others are more cognizant and clear and lean on them when I can. Some areas I might be better than others and if they are good they lean on me for that. It feels great to work in an environment like that. Life is hell when you're trying to fix some clueless code.
One other observation I've had is that people that understand tend to code throughout their career. Those that don't quickly move onto non-coding positions (analyst, management etc) and drop coding as quickly as possible.
Absolutely. Experience (as in year doing software) doesn't mean shit. I had a co-op student under me (who I hired when I started my own company) that could code circles around everyone at the company. He understood software, something some developers just never get. I'm not a bad developer by any means (people jump into my code, understand, modify etc no problem), but he'd usually come up with something more elegant and cleaner. It was give and take as I'd come up with some good suggestions for improvement or ways to solve a problems he hadn't considered (which was partially due to experience, partially due to having a different perspective).
First step is to understand that young or old, lot's of experience or little, a person can have valuable contributions. For a good team you have to put ego aside. Sounds like there is ego on both sides of the equation in this particular issue. Listen carefully to what he thinks is wrong and he should listen back about the design decisions etc.
My experience tends to make me think that there are serious issues with the codebase. Depending on language, 50K lines isn't much and could be rewritten by a couple smart people in a matter of months. Obviously the product works, but how long are bug fix turnarounds? How extensible is it? How quickly can you add new features? Do new features ever break other parts of the code (i.e. coupling issues)? You can be proud of what you achieved, but also be honest. I've written some code myself I wasn't proud of (I'm sure we all have). A good developer isn't the same coder as they were 6 months ago, because it's a continual learning process.
If this jr has valid input, good ideas for restructuring (once you look at your code honestly, "Yeah, there was a better way to solve the issue..") then why not let him lead the dev for the next gen product? If you are honest about the code and he's just an egotistical little shit not willing to discuss things like an adult (some back and forth and actually listen to you and others).. get rid of him. Seriously. It's not going to help your team at all and he's going to cause problems anywhere he goes. If he's right and you're all wrong, then he's better off elsewhere anyhow (though if he's bullheaded and egotistical I doubt that's the case).
On a side note, I really wanted to vent about that guy because I had a nightmare about him last night (which I confided to someone who used to work with him as well). We had a good laugh about it.
In the dream I was sitting at a table with some other devs making a sarcastic rant about some anti-pattern, "Here's a really good system design.. < insert some silly anti-pattern or short sighted design >"
The guy across from me proudly states, "I just designed a system like that an am using it now!" Then goes into detail about his entirely stupid short-sighted design**.
I look across the table and just then notice it's HIM. The lilypadding complicator I thought I had left behind.. "Noooooooooooo!"
**Being a dream it didn't really make sense, but I remember something about a POS system for a bowling alley.
What I am mostly hearing here is that the company lacks things like basic code reviews or any kind standards. I cannot imagine how this guys boss is ok with checkins like what the poster is describing. This sort of thing would be caught at any half way decent company.
Not necessarily. I worked with someone that directly fit this description. I've never seen OOP abused so badly in my life (inheritance and polymorphism that was either the product of a genius obfuscating their code.. or an idiot that knows of such ideas, insists on using them, but has no clue as to the right time and place to use them). He was able to sneak by most code reviews because he was often working solo on products that were borderline legacy. With few bugs apparent at the user level his slow progress was put up with for the mostly "reliable" code. Then once some other people got pulled (such as myself) he got put under a microscope by his manager. This actually resulted in yelling matches. The code was truly horrible. At one point he had read that a function/method shouldn't have more than a few lines code. I found a method 9 calls deep, each method adding another argument that resulted in a call to a native API that could have been done at the top level (well excepting side effects along the way that did god knows what). We also coined the term "lilypadding" for some of his solutions. It was obvious he's jump directly into a problem without any real vision of the end goal or result. He'd eventually get to the end, but only after making many many jumps, often in the wrong direction (open file, read all of file, find line you need, read part of the file based on that line again despite having just read the entire file, do select * on a table in a loop while filtering in code, etc). It almost seemed he came upon a working solution by happenstance. I think part of it was the false ideal: if you aren't coding you aren't working. A 5 day solution for him would be 2 days planning and 1 coding for anyone else.
In the end his code was not maintainable or extensible. He refused to listen to the suggestions of his manager and change his code, insisting it was golden and the correct way to program (despite being provided plenty of evidence to the contrary). The guy would even get pompous when you request he fix his own check-ins (he would often leave his hacked up "testing" library in references, though his special proprietary library was not in the codebase, resulting in a project that would not build).
How'd management fix the issue in the end? They got rid of him. He got decent severance, and help seeking a new position. Part of me feels for the guy (and his family that relied on his wage), but part of me also wonders who's problem he is now.
How was it solved? They got rid of him.
Could he have been trained to be better? Maybe, but he didn't act willing to change and wasn't a good fit to the team or company attitude-wise. He'd do things like hang up on a customer because "it was his lunch time" even after being reprimanded for doing that previously. He claimed in "his culture" that's how they do things. When a bug is escalated directly to the responsible programmer from a customer, you put your lunch off for 15 minutes, you don't say, "Oh it's lunch.. bye." And we're not talking a slave driving culture, he was free to take his lunch whenever and any overtime would be balanced by time off. It was simply a matter of treating the customer well in a sensitive situation which he couldn't wrap his thick skull around.
If a company isn't willing to take care of time wasting employees, that don't fit the company culture.. I'd leave. It's not your problem to take care. It's your job to make sure the issues are clear to management, and it's fair for them to request you help guide him/her to being more productive in the company, but it's not your job nor place to try to fix it.
Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
Not to mention Kelvin is SI base unit. Kinda the norm when you are talking about scientific news to a bunch of nerds. Remember the whole "News for nerds, stuff that matters" motto? Or did the spirit of that die when CmdrTaco left?
I don't get the limited sick days thing. I guess it's a way of guaranteeing no one takes advantage of it (and quite objective, i.e. no you have taken x days already). My previous job didn't have a limited amount. They also provided flu shots (to those that wanted them.. they couldn't force them obviously). We had 0 problems with people taking advantage of it. Of course it was a tech company with a group of pretty good workers. If someone was repeatedly "sick" then they'd be asked to provide a doctor's note and it would escalate from there is they suspected someone was taking advantage of the very lenient policy. They did metrics on sick leave and it was on average well under 5 days/person avg (but averaged throughout the company.. someone might legitimately need 10 days). I think I maybe took 3 days off in a year max. Of course I could telecommute as well. So if I didn't feel well I could sleep in and then just work a little later into the evening.
I think that when you set a limit people feel obligated to take advantage of them (especially if your vacation time is as poor as your allowed sick time). "Oh it's almost end of the year and I haven't taken any sick time, better take a few days off." If the policy is instead, "If you are sick, take time off." then there is no magical number of "owed" days someone feel obligated to use. The issue is also companies that don't provide proper vacation time. People need mental leave from work. The Canadian company I was working at recently got an American (US) CEO. When hiring someone he complained to me that what they wanted for vacation time was a little excessive. They asked for 3 weeks/year. That's what everyone prior to his arrival at the company started at (secretaries, shipper.. everyone). I'm pretty sure that's the minimum any tech company in the area offers. 2 weeks is basically the legal minimum (4% of wage) and you'd be silly to insist on that for even a college grad as they can just go elsewhere with better benefits. Competitive companies offer more and other industries get even more (my wife currently has >4 weeks/year with only 5 years in the job.. that's not including statutory holidays or anything tricky like that to artificially increase the number). I also banked all overtime to take off later (albeit only recovering it at straight time, where most industries get 1.5 time for overtime work). If you don't overwork your employees they are more productive and also get sick less often. I really don't get this crack the whip mentality. It doesn't improve productivity.
There is still a big feature phone market out there. One option would be cutting back everything but feature phones and be profitable in that market. From what I remember Nokia made some rock solid feature phones.
The total liability cap kind of makes the total liability a moot point, but one thing to clarify is that court costs are decided by the court and don't cover full legal fees. Full filing fees, disbursements etc are, but the rate for a lawyer's time and what is considered a billable increment is controlled and to my knowledge pretty much never covers the cost of a real lawyer going to court.
Back on topic.. My hope is that this way of dealing with infringement pushes big media into actually providing easier and more convenient access to digital media. I was just discussing with a friend how absurd blu-ray is to our generation. We don't want/need media for something we are going to watch once. We just want a quick DL with good quality (which really doesn't need the space available on a BR disc). For TV I'm happy with 720P and for movies a decently encoded 1080P video. I can get that on bittorrent. If I was able to get it from the source as fast or faster with as good or better quality.. I'd pay as would many others. If these laws make suing filesharing into nonexistence infeasible maybe monetizing on digital distribution becomes appetizing. Maybe some of those companies holding out will finally license for Netflix Canada or start their own distribution in Canada.
The lack of access raises another question: what are actual damages of a "legal" digital copy is not available in Canada? I downloaded some movie and it's not available as a pay-for download in Canada. Still infringement, obviously, but what are the actual damages? If it's available on iTunes for $5.99, that's easy, it's $5.99. If it isn't available will the courts decide what a comparable value is or will they deem it as having no value. With the other media verdicts in Canada I can't see it being deemed to be worth the max allowable. That's what will be claimed, but that's not the precedent that's going to be set. I'm hoping some brave level headed judge decides not having it available digitally means no value. That will basically force the media giants into figuring out digital distribution in Canada (though the pessimist in me thinks they would make them available at higher cost than media purchases so they can drag their dinosaur feet a little longer).
Have a paid for version and a "community" version that only has public forums associated with it. Make it blatantly clear that paid for includes support (for X time period), but a community supported free version is available. If they want phone support they have to upgrade to the paid version. "Sorry, our community edition doesn't include phone support."
This can be done with the exact same codebase for both, but it also gives you the opportunity to fork (in marketing speak: differentiate the product). E.g. New features go to the paid version first and get released in to the community later. Or, do it the other way and make your free users beta test. I recommend having at least a different splash screen and the registration info available from within the program on the paid version.
Bottom line is you can't allow your free customers to have any expectation of live support. When they go to download your product they are explicitly deciding between paid and free and know what they are losing by going free.
This absolutely affects these commercial companies' bottom line, and they have every legal right to protect the investments they've made in R & D. I have a commercial 3D printer myself and I just went out of maintenance partially because a brand new Replicator 2 is possibly better and costs the same as one year's maintenance. This is an absolutely clear textbook case of what patents are supposed to be for.
Is it though? If we look at something like the Robertson screw head, the patent allowed them a monopoly on that product which allowed them to recoup initial r&d, machine costs etc over their patent life. Fair enough. Don't want a big screw company that does Torx or Phillips to retool then blow you out of the water with lower pricing because they already have their machinery paid for.
But in modern systems when advancement is so quick do we need these long patent lives? It's basically artificially slowing the race to the bottom. It prevents competition more than the situation of destroying another company. I mean we are talking complex systems that aren't a direct copy, than in themselves take much R&D to create what is being called a rip-off. It's not a rip-off it's riffing on a theme. Of course the patents are for the end technology to prevent that from being copied wholesale, it's on small, but necessary pieces of the equation. Sometimes these are legitimate hurdles that need to some kind of protection to recoup R&D costs, but it seems most often these days it's simply a stop gap to prevent competition. I'm fine with companies requiring time to recoup expenses investing in inventing something. That makes sense as it encourages innovation, "We can only go ahead with investing this R&D money if we can get a guarantee we have exclusivity to it for some time so we can recoup." Sounds good. But now we are seeing stuff with basically no R&D being patented. In software patents they are patenting ideas basically.
I personally think time and money put into (or that will need to be put into something) should be what validates a patent. The most recent person I knew to apply for a patent definitely needed it. They were working on a new fuel (that would work in a normal gas/petrol ICE). They had an initial formula and some initial promising test results, but it would take a few years of testing, jumping through hoops and working on a way to produce on commercial scales (i.e. money) to make it into a product. They needed a patent. Do I need a patent for a solution to a problem that was created beginning to end in a day, week, month? I could go out and patent using a piezoelectric element on the printing surface of a 3d printer for calibrating the z-axis. It's a trivial (and possible lame, but I'm just shooting from the hip) solution. Piezo on the printing surface, wired to A2D on microcontroller, print head slowly depresses over piezo while we poll the A2D. Assuming no prior art etc.. do I deserve a patent for that? I mean I can write it up and send it in to the patent office. Once I file fees regardless of it being new or unique I'll probably get the patent, but what for? I don't need to recoup anything.
Regardless of my poor made up example I think my point is somewhat clear. The current US patent system is full of patents that weren't needed to recoup any kind of expense or to encourage innovation. They are simply road blocks. No matter what you try to create these days it seems you'll run into some obscure patent on some seemingly obvious solution. And that patent holder will come with one hand out asking for money and a hammer in the other hand. To me that doesn't seem in the spirit of the patent system.
Actually.. selling vinyl as well would be pretty cool. Video store / record store. I'd hit that up in a second. I buy vinyl (there are a few successful vinyl shops in town) and I might be tempted to rent a physical disc if I was out record shopping.
Depends on market entirely. The store I was referring to is in Victoria (I'm assuming you are from Vancouver). I'd think in the right area of Vancouver it could work. Would it work in Surrey, Langley, Ladner, PoCo? Doubtful. You need to be in a cool area with people who are into that sort of thing.
I think part of the success of Pic-a-flic is location (Cook St Village). Plenty of University students and artsy types in that area. It's also how long they have been around, so they already had a big client base and didn't have to start from nothing getting their name out there.
It's definitely not a business I'd get into. They had a combination of factors that have kept them alive (for now), but I think even their days must be numbered.
Slashdot Mirror
And, would Sony want to even if they could??
Well it would take a competitor out of the market and they would have a huge list of exclusive titles to the PlayBox/XStation which might make their sales competitive with Nintendo. If it went through there is a lot of potential. Of course, knowing Sony they'd screw it up somehow.
What, did you just start reading today?
Obviously his first time since Dice took over.
How could anyone forget: How To Use a Linux Virtual Private Server?
After RTFA (I know, broke the rules), it appears it wasn't a documented or tracked bug. It was noticed and fixed more than a decade after it was created. Pretty much non-news. If no one ever noticed or cared that their cookies were getting lost on a kde restart then how can you expect it to get fixed? If no one calls it a bug, is it actually a bug?
..moved to hg after I started and bitched that even cvs would be better). Basics of it were: request sent, response received but ignored/not read, retry sent, original message response used. It kicked into a retry sequence even try despite having a response. Eventually this caused issues communicating to a certain device. Put the sniffer on and voila, see double requests despite getting an immediate response. No one ever noticed because it didn't cause issues with any other devices. Yes, extra traffic on the bus, but there was plenty of bandwidth and most of the devices handled it fine. It should have been caught in original testing. When writing your own protocol to talk over serial you'd assume they'd do a little more testing than a sniff test ("oh.. looks like it's working. Good enough for production! Let's ship it!"). I spent most of my time fixing bugs and most were that old but that's the only one I can remember that you would think would have been noticed earlier.
I've had a similar experience. I was working with a system and found a bug that had been around since the initial system (>3 years), and jumping into the old source control (I had to crack open visual source safe since that's what they were using originally..blech
I know a few americans working in Canada now. If you have a job offer apparently it's easy. Without you can still get a work permit if you can prove you have enough funds. The basics are: you need to prove a good skill set (generally a degree is the easiest way to prove that) and that you are broke and going to leach off the system.
Here's a self test to see if you are eligible to work in Canada. And more info on working in Canada.
Cost of living is pretty high though depending on area. The most desirable areas (e.g. Vancouver) have some of the highest living costs in the world (when compared to income). Think San Diego housing costs with slightly lower wages (one of my friends just moved to SD.. he said avg family home was slightly cheaper in SD, but something well renovated in a good area would be slightly more.. very comparable though). You can find cheap regions, but you have to like winter sports. Right now I have green grass and a house that costs twice the price of a comparable in an area with a foot of snow. In the US you can have warm and cheap depending on which state you are willing to live in.
Oh yeah.. income tax is higher. So that is part of why the medical fees appear low. You can try out your expected wage in this calc. Anyhow.. this is way off topic now. Feel free to email me (stephen at arcane innovations dot com) if you have any questions. If you are in software/engineering I can help with job searching resources (on the west coast at least).
Yeah. That would be my main reason. Socialized healthcare that works (and actually costs the government less per capita than the US privatized care does/did). It's not actually free (as a contractor you have to pay your MSP fees yourself, which employers generally pay in addition to "extended medical"), but it's affordable. Under a certain income I think it is free, I think. Most of the time if you have a significant other with family coverage, your base MSP fees are covered as well.
I was actually looking into this recently as I'm looking to hire employees (three categories of monthly rate: Single - $60.50, Family of 2 - $109, Family of 3 or more: $121). For extended medical/dental/optical it looks like around $265/month for an employee (depending on claim history). That gets you a lower deductible on prescriptions, cheap or free dental visits (most I've paid is $50 for a filling) and free eye checkups and money towards glasses every X years (varies on plan, some suck some are good). Often extended will let you double up if you have multiple plans (e.g. both wife and husband have plans). Your primary plans covers the initial amount, then the secondary often covers the rest.
I recently broke an arm which required surgery. I checked into how much it would be if you weren't covered (e.g. out of country visitor).. >$12K. I paid nothing. It was an accident, and I'd assume they'd collect from the insurance company (since it was the other driver's fault.. and his insurance should pay not government dollars), but that's all opaque to me since it's handled within the system. Even if broke it mountain biking I wouldn't have had to pay. I was out of pocket $40 for my second cast (which extended would probably cover if it wasn't a vehicle accident.. vehicle insurer is deemed primary in accidents).
The main thing is you're not going to die if you don't have extended health care and you aren't going to go bankrupt from cancer or a complicated pregnancy or a heart condition etc.
There are of course compromises. E.g. if you could use knee surgery but are "lower prioriy" (older, doesn't affect ability to work etc) you'll be at the end of a long waiting list. You can travel elsewhere and pay to have it done sooner, or wait. I've heard of people with a broken bone (that requires fixation) waiting a week in a cast before going in for surgery. Mine was bad enough that it had to be done asap. As long as you are drugged well enough and it's not dire, I guess waiting is ok, but it's definitely not fun.
No silver bullet. But I think it works better for the poor up to middle income people (maybe even upper middle). Straight private definitely favours the rich. I think we're trying to figure out a mixed system so that people can pay for private care and get quicker care (in Country), but doesn't pull doctors from public care and result in longer waiting lists. Basically you don't want to change the existing so that people can pay to jump the line (which is what can happen if a surgeon works in both private and public practices).
One more reason I don't choose to live in the US. Some of the laws get twisted a little. E.g. I heard about someone going to court because he was fired for smoking weed on the job. Labour code prohibits being intoxicated on the job (or anything illegal), but he still got his day in court. He didn't win of course, but it's a PITA for the employer. All-in-all though, I think it's better. It just forces employers to think carefully about who they hire (and whether they keep them beyond probation). You can fire at will when the employee is in probation, but after than you need documented cause (either a history of small offenses or something that is considered a fire-able offense).
In software it makes employers think carefully about whether they need a contractor or employee. Though I've seen that sway towards hiring contractors when in fact employees were needed (to not risk long term costs associated with employees). You need long term employees vested in your software for it to last long term. There's pros and cons to both sides, but I think the pros are in favour of society on strong labour laws (whereas it's businesses that win on weak ones).
So, while we might admire his "initiative"....I, for one, would NEVER hire this guy.
I'd hire him to manage outsourcing. He's obviously more successful than most at it.
Yes, his resume is most likely misleading (as it wasn't him), but not totally as he was the one who implemented those result (albeit not directly which is a lie). My question is: why is he doing this? If I were him I'd be running a consulting business, but maybe where he is that wouldn't work?
My experience with consulting agencies that put cheap foreign labour on your project is that they suck. Maybe this was all some far reaching plan to get caught so he gets tons of publicity for his "outsourcing that doesn't suck". I was talking to some software people from a big insurance company somewhere in SoCal (national company they told me.. and he was astonished I had never heard of them). They said their trick to outsourcing was same time zone (i.e. mexico) and was super proud of their "low" 20% rework. The outsourced workers only produced code 80% of their local counterparts, but that was considered "good" because it was still cheaper to do the rework. Different time zone added other issues and they were getting much lower quality from overseas).
I could have argued that there's a lot more than money to cost (are you still hitting deadlines with 20% rework?!), but the fact that they'll settle for 80% because it saves them 25% in up front dev costs (I really doubt they had any total cost analysis and the guy didn't seem to understand long term software costs).
I, like many in software, have a negative view of outsourcing. It's hard enough to communicate between staff in the same room, let alone across continents, time zones and differing cultures. That's my bias, and that's the kind of bias this guy has to fight against to work this way legitimately. Once you have a few successful project under your belt it's easier, but getting people to take the risk in the first place is difficult.
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not. I've been both a consultant and an employee and there are far more differences than just security. Contractors are external, employees are internal so doing it this way you end up as a mole on the inside. There's no right or wrong to it, as an employer I can chose to hire an employee or a contractor with different pros and cons, but if I hire one and get the other then you're fundamentally misrepresenting yourself.
That's a good point but I think there's a little more grey/gray to it than just black and white. When I hire a contractor it means no benefits and generally short term (at a higher rate per hour and generally higher than total hourly cost of having an employee). With an employee it's long term relationship (I can't ditch them whenever I want like a contractor.. at least not in my jurisdiction) and I'm expected to provide benefits etc (though apparent hourly rate is lower). I pay whatever I hire (employee/contractor) to do a particular job at a particular level for their pay grade (there are expectations that go with the pay level).
An individual, say John Smith, can be a business. In my jurisdiction you can act as a sole proprietorship under your own name. So if I hire John Smith I can actually be hiring the company called John Smith. John has full liability for his actions (as he is not a corporation of limited liability) as you would expect from an individual. So my (weak) argument is that a person can be (or rather is) a company.
If corporations can be treated as individual entities, why not people as companies? The law where I live supports it.
I'm quite sure you are right and he misrepresented himself, but I'm curious how clear you have to be. I'd have to ask my lawyer what she thinks would happen here if you tried to fire someone for doing this locally. Is it actually a breach of contract? Any employment agreement I've signed has not stated that I was the sole supplier of the work, just my responsibilities, benefits etc. Actually it would breach the NDAs I've signed and that's most likely an offense you can fire over (despite the employee sided labour legislation).
On a side note: I had a great contractor under me. Couldn't be happier with his work (great code, better than mine.. easy to read and maintain, super clean). If I later found out it wasn't him actually doing the work I wouldn't have given a shit. I hired him and it was under the understanding it was him who would be doing the work, but in the end all I care about is results. If he was able to find someone that put out that level of code (especially if he was unable to do so himself) and was able to translate my requests so clearly.. fucking kudos to him. I got what I wanted at the fair going rate.
This.
A contractor or consulting company would do this no problem. That's a b2b relationship though. Employees are supposed to be subservient, "Yes mastah, whatever you need mastah."
If we ignore any issues with security it's really hard to fault the guy. The point as an employee is to do your job and do it well. The code he (had) produced was apparently commendable. He did his job well though not by the traditional solution (working hard and doing it yourself). Does that make it the wrong solution?
The biggest issue is the company "got tricked" into paying more for a cheap worker. Of course had they done the outsourcing themselves they'd probably have one or more of the worst producing low quality coders that require tons of rework (the normal reality of outsourcing).
VPN is not really the problem, since VPN access tends to be quite limited in scope.
And my experience says the opposite. Whatever you'd have access to locally as a user you'd have over VPN. How would you do your job otherwise? The point of VPN is to make it a secure connection so you can have access to whatever you'd have access to locally.
If the company has an NDA, is ISO registered, has to follow any government security protocol (I worked at a private Canadian company that followed US security regulations in order to sell to US gov) etc.. this could lead to trouble. Of course sweeping it under the rug would have been better than advertising it if that's the case.
I agree on the kudos. Finding good people is tough enough locally. Outsourcing is hell. In a contracting type situation (as long as it didn't have a no substitution clause) this would have been perfectly ok (if not better than ok since it appears good code was actually written). The interesting part is whether the company would have paid the same had they known. They were quite willing to pay a wage of X when they thought it was the local guy producing the code, but my guess is they'd want to pay a small % of X for the Chinese worker even with this guy managing him. In reality, since he was producing the best code in the company, he should have been getting the biggest wage (reward your stars and all that).
Depends on what continent model you follow. Most english speaking countries (and many other regions) are taught the 7 continent model which splits "america" into North America and South America. According to wikipedia China, India and Western Europe are taught this model as well.
The 6 continent model with a combined America is apparently taught in "Spanish-speaking countries and in some parts of Eastern Europe including Greece".
Stating one model is wrong when there are multiple accepted models is simple ignorance.
This. 50K lines code in a modern language is a pretty small project. If that's 50K including lines of test code, it's tiny.
Just because the new guy is disagreeing and less experienced, doesn't make him wrong. Yes, 9 times out of 10, the new, less experienced guy will be wrong, but that 1 time out of 10, makes it worth giving the other 9 times a fair hearing as well.
I honestly don't think "experience" has anything to do with it. How long you've sat in front of a computer monitor doesn't directly translate to your understanding of software development. I've worked with a few guys with 15+ years experience. One created more work than he produced over 6 months (we were cleaning up shit from him a year after he was canned), another whom I bitched about in the last question really had no fucking clue how to structure code. He'd write stuff that "worked", but basically misused every concept in computer science. No one could follow his code and there was no clean way to cut it out. I also know plenty of CSc and S.Eng. student that never learned how to code in school. I mean, yeah, they passed assignments that required coding but never really got a grasp on writing software.
On the flipside I've worked with people straight out of school that were as good as experts with plenty of years behind them. The big thing I've seen is there tends to be two groups: people who understand software development and those that don't. People who don't understand can write working code and even create big projects.. but they are hell to maintain and even hell for that person to write. For people that understand, it's a lot more fluid. We all start at the ignorant stage and some get beyond it quicker than others, some never make it out.
I honestly didn't learn to code (as in really code) until late in my degree, but I buckled down and got over the learning curve.. then it all became a lot easier and way more fun. More practice and the fog cleared even more. I think I still have quite a ways to go (as I'm able to recognize those that are much clearer than I), but that's ok as long as I'm dedicated to moving forward and can recognize others are more cognizant and clear and lean on them when I can. Some areas I might be better than others and if they are good they lean on me for that. It feels great to work in an environment like that. Life is hell when you're trying to fix some clueless code.
One other observation I've had is that people that understand tend to code throughout their career. Those that don't quickly move onto non-coding positions (analyst, management etc) and drop coding as quickly as possible.
Absolutely. Experience (as in year doing software) doesn't mean shit. I had a co-op student under me (who I hired when I started my own company) that could code circles around everyone at the company. He understood software, something some developers just never get. I'm not a bad developer by any means (people jump into my code, understand, modify etc no problem), but he'd usually come up with something more elegant and cleaner. It was give and take as I'd come up with some good suggestions for improvement or ways to solve a problems he hadn't considered (which was partially due to experience, partially due to having a different perspective).
First step is to understand that young or old, lot's of experience or little, a person can have valuable contributions. For a good team you have to put ego aside. Sounds like there is ego on both sides of the equation in this particular issue. Listen carefully to what he thinks is wrong and he should listen back about the design decisions etc.
My experience tends to make me think that there are serious issues with the codebase. Depending on language, 50K lines isn't much and could be rewritten by a couple smart people in a matter of months. Obviously the product works, but how long are bug fix turnarounds? How extensible is it? How quickly can you add new features? Do new features ever break other parts of the code (i.e. coupling issues)? You can be proud of what you achieved, but also be honest. I've written some code myself I wasn't proud of (I'm sure we all have). A good developer isn't the same coder as they were 6 months ago, because it's a continual learning process.
If this jr has valid input, good ideas for restructuring (once you look at your code honestly, "Yeah, there was a better way to solve the issue..") then why not let him lead the dev for the next gen product? If you are honest about the code and he's just an egotistical little shit not willing to discuss things like an adult (some back and forth and actually listen to you and others).. get rid of him. Seriously. It's not going to help your team at all and he's going to cause problems anywhere he goes. If he's right and you're all wrong, then he's better off elsewhere anyhow (though if he's bullheaded and egotistical I doubt that's the case).
On a side note, I really wanted to vent about that guy because I had a nightmare about him last night (which I confided to someone who used to work with him as well). We had a good laugh about it.
In the dream I was sitting at a table with some other devs making a sarcastic rant about some anti-pattern, "Here's a really good system design.. < insert some silly anti-pattern or short sighted design >"
The guy across from me proudly states, "I just designed a system like that an am using it now!" Then goes into detail about his entirely stupid short-sighted design**.
I look across the table and just then notice it's HIM. The lilypadding complicator I thought I had left behind.. "Noooooooooooo!"
**Being a dream it didn't really make sense, but I remember something about a POS system for a bowling alley.
What I am mostly hearing here is that the company lacks things like basic code reviews or any kind standards. I cannot imagine how this guys boss is ok with checkins like what the poster is describing. This sort of thing would be caught at any half way decent company.
Not necessarily. I worked with someone that directly fit this description. I've never seen OOP abused so badly in my life (inheritance and polymorphism that was either the product of a genius obfuscating their code.. or an idiot that knows of such ideas, insists on using them, but has no clue as to the right time and place to use them). He was able to sneak by most code reviews because he was often working solo on products that were borderline legacy. With few bugs apparent at the user level his slow progress was put up with for the mostly "reliable" code. Then once some other people got pulled (such as myself) he got put under a microscope by his manager. This actually resulted in yelling matches. The code was truly horrible. At one point he had read that a function/method shouldn't have more than a few lines code. I found a method 9 calls deep, each method adding another argument that resulted in a call to a native API that could have been done at the top level (well excepting side effects along the way that did god knows what). We also coined the term "lilypadding" for some of his solutions. It was obvious he's jump directly into a problem without any real vision of the end goal or result. He'd eventually get to the end, but only after making many many jumps, often in the wrong direction (open file, read all of file, find line you need, read part of the file based on that line again despite having just read the entire file, do select * on a table in a loop while filtering in code, etc). It almost seemed he came upon a working solution by happenstance. I think part of it was the false ideal: if you aren't coding you aren't working. A 5 day solution for him would be 2 days planning and 1 coding for anyone else.
In the end his code was not maintainable or extensible. He refused to listen to the suggestions of his manager and change his code, insisting it was golden and the correct way to program (despite being provided plenty of evidence to the contrary). The guy would even get pompous when you request he fix his own check-ins (he would often leave his hacked up "testing" library in references, though his special proprietary library was not in the codebase, resulting in a project that would not build).
How'd management fix the issue in the end? They got rid of him. He got decent severance, and help seeking a new position. Part of me feels for the guy (and his family that relied on his wage), but part of me also wonders who's problem he is now.
How was it solved? They got rid of him.
Could he have been trained to be better? Maybe, but he didn't act willing to change and wasn't a good fit to the team or company attitude-wise. He'd do things like hang up on a customer because "it was his lunch time" even after being reprimanded for doing that previously. He claimed in "his culture" that's how they do things. When a bug is escalated directly to the responsible programmer from a customer, you put your lunch off for 15 minutes, you don't say, "Oh it's lunch.. bye." And we're not talking a slave driving culture, he was free to take his lunch whenever and any overtime would be balanced by time off. It was simply a matter of treating the customer well in a sensitive situation which he couldn't wrap his thick skull around.
If a company isn't willing to take care of time wasting employees, that don't fit the company culture.. I'd leave. It's not your problem to take care. It's your job to make sure the issues are clear to management, and it's fair for them to request you help guide him/her to being more productive in the company, but it's not your job nor place to try to fix it.
Essentially, they had 4 systems to choose from (Kelvin would be ideal), and they picked the very worst choice!
Not to mention Kelvin is SI base unit. Kinda the norm when you are talking about scientific news to a bunch of nerds. Remember the whole "News for nerds, stuff that matters" motto? Or did the spirit of that die when CmdrTaco left?
I don't get the limited sick days thing. I guess it's a way of guaranteeing no one takes advantage of it (and quite objective, i.e. no you have taken x days already). My previous job didn't have a limited amount. They also provided flu shots (to those that wanted them.. they couldn't force them obviously). We had 0 problems with people taking advantage of it. Of course it was a tech company with a group of pretty good workers. If someone was repeatedly "sick" then they'd be asked to provide a doctor's note and it would escalate from there is they suspected someone was taking advantage of the very lenient policy. They did metrics on sick leave and it was on average well under 5 days/person avg (but averaged throughout the company.. someone might legitimately need 10 days). I think I maybe took 3 days off in a year max. Of course I could telecommute as well. So if I didn't feel well I could sleep in and then just work a little later into the evening.
I think that when you set a limit people feel obligated to take advantage of them (especially if your vacation time is as poor as your allowed sick time). "Oh it's almost end of the year and I haven't taken any sick time, better take a few days off." If the policy is instead, "If you are sick, take time off." then there is no magical number of "owed" days someone feel obligated to use. The issue is also companies that don't provide proper vacation time. People need mental leave from work. The Canadian company I was working at recently got an American (US) CEO. When hiring someone he complained to me that what they wanted for vacation time was a little excessive. They asked for 3 weeks/year. That's what everyone prior to his arrival at the company started at (secretaries, shipper.. everyone). I'm pretty sure that's the minimum any tech company in the area offers. 2 weeks is basically the legal minimum (4% of wage) and you'd be silly to insist on that for even a college grad as they can just go elsewhere with better benefits. Competitive companies offer more and other industries get even more (my wife currently has >4 weeks/year with only 5 years in the job.. that's not including statutory holidays or anything tricky like that to artificially increase the number). I also banked all overtime to take off later (albeit only recovering it at straight time, where most industries get 1.5 time for overtime work). If you don't overwork your employees they are more productive and also get sick less often. I really don't get this crack the whip mentality. It doesn't improve productivity.
There is still a big feature phone market out there. One option would be cutting back everything but feature phones and be profitable in that market. From what I remember Nokia made some rock solid feature phones.
The total liability cap kind of makes the total liability a moot point, but one thing to clarify is that court costs are decided by the court and don't cover full legal fees. Full filing fees, disbursements etc are, but the rate for a lawyer's time and what is considered a billable increment is controlled and to my knowledge pretty much never covers the cost of a real lawyer going to court.
Back on topic.. My hope is that this way of dealing with infringement pushes big media into actually providing easier and more convenient access to digital media. I was just discussing with a friend how absurd blu-ray is to our generation. We don't want/need media for something we are going to watch once. We just want a quick DL with good quality (which really doesn't need the space available on a BR disc). For TV I'm happy with 720P and for movies a decently encoded 1080P video. I can get that on bittorrent. If I was able to get it from the source as fast or faster with as good or better quality.. I'd pay as would many others. If these laws make suing filesharing into nonexistence infeasible maybe monetizing on digital distribution becomes appetizing. Maybe some of those companies holding out will finally license for Netflix Canada or start their own distribution in Canada.
The lack of access raises another question: what are actual damages of a "legal" digital copy is not available in Canada? I downloaded some movie and it's not available as a pay-for download in Canada. Still infringement, obviously, but what are the actual damages? If it's available on iTunes for $5.99, that's easy, it's $5.99. If it isn't available will the courts decide what a comparable value is or will they deem it as having no value. With the other media verdicts in Canada I can't see it being deemed to be worth the max allowable. That's what will be claimed, but that's not the precedent that's going to be set. I'm hoping some brave level headed judge decides not having it available digitally means no value. That will basically force the media giants into figuring out digital distribution in Canada (though the pessimist in me thinks they would make them available at higher cost than media purchases so they can drag their dinosaur feet a little longer).
With the December 7th release date maybe they should continue the bad taste on the drop date and call it the WWii.
This.
Have a paid for version and a "community" version that only has public forums associated with it. Make it blatantly clear that paid for includes support (for X time period), but a community supported free version is available. If they want phone support they have to upgrade to the paid version. "Sorry, our community edition doesn't include phone support."
This can be done with the exact same codebase for both, but it also gives you the opportunity to fork (in marketing speak: differentiate the product). E.g. New features go to the paid version first and get released in to the community later. Or, do it the other way and make your free users beta test. I recommend having at least a different splash screen and the registration info available from within the program on the paid version.
Bottom line is you can't allow your free customers to have any expectation of live support. When they go to download your product they are explicitly deciding between paid and free and know what they are losing by going free.
This absolutely affects these commercial companies' bottom line, and they have every legal right to protect the investments they've made in R & D. I have a commercial 3D printer myself and I just went out of maintenance partially because a brand new Replicator 2 is possibly better and costs the same as one year's maintenance. This is an absolutely clear textbook case of what patents are supposed to be for.
Is it though? If we look at something like the Robertson screw head, the patent allowed them a monopoly on that product which allowed them to recoup initial r&d, machine costs etc over their patent life. Fair enough. Don't want a big screw company that does Torx or Phillips to retool then blow you out of the water with lower pricing because they already have their machinery paid for.
But in modern systems when advancement is so quick do we need these long patent lives? It's basically artificially slowing the race to the bottom. It prevents competition more than the situation of destroying another company. I mean we are talking complex systems that aren't a direct copy, than in themselves take much R&D to create what is being called a rip-off. It's not a rip-off it's riffing on a theme. Of course the patents are for the end technology to prevent that from being copied wholesale, it's on small, but necessary pieces of the equation. Sometimes these are legitimate hurdles that need to some kind of protection to recoup R&D costs, but it seems most often these days it's simply a stop gap to prevent competition. I'm fine with companies requiring time to recoup expenses investing in inventing something. That makes sense as it encourages innovation, "We can only go ahead with investing this R&D money if we can get a guarantee we have exclusivity to it for some time so we can recoup." Sounds good. But now we are seeing stuff with basically no R&D being patented. In software patents they are patenting ideas basically.
I personally think time and money put into (or that will need to be put into something) should be what validates a patent. The most recent person I knew to apply for a patent definitely needed it. They were working on a new fuel (that would work in a normal gas/petrol ICE). They had an initial formula and some initial promising test results, but it would take a few years of testing, jumping through hoops and working on a way to produce on commercial scales (i.e. money) to make it into a product. They needed a patent. Do I need a patent for a solution to a problem that was created beginning to end in a day, week, month? I could go out and patent using a piezoelectric element on the printing surface of a 3d printer for calibrating the z-axis. It's a trivial (and possible lame, but I'm just shooting from the hip) solution. Piezo on the printing surface, wired to A2D on microcontroller, print head slowly depresses over piezo while we poll the A2D. Assuming no prior art etc.. do I deserve a patent for that? I mean I can write it up and send it in to the patent office. Once I file fees regardless of it being new or unique I'll probably get the patent, but what for? I don't need to recoup anything.
Regardless of my poor made up example I think my point is somewhat clear. The current US patent system is full of patents that weren't needed to recoup any kind of expense or to encourage innovation. They are simply road blocks. No matter what you try to create these days it seems you'll run into some obscure patent on some seemingly obvious solution. And that patent holder will come with one hand out asking for money and a hammer in the other hand. To me that doesn't seem in the spirit of the patent system.
Actually.. selling vinyl as well would be pretty cool. Video store / record store. I'd hit that up in a second. I buy vinyl (there are a few successful vinyl shops in town) and I might be tempted to rent a physical disc if I was out record shopping.
Depends on market entirely. The store I was referring to is in Victoria (I'm assuming you are from Vancouver). I'd think in the right area of Vancouver it could work. Would it work in Surrey, Langley, Ladner, PoCo? Doubtful. You need to be in a cool area with people who are into that sort of thing.
I think part of the success of Pic-a-flic is location (Cook St Village). Plenty of University students and artsy types in that area. It's also how long they have been around, so they already had a big client base and didn't have to start from nothing getting their name out there.
It's definitely not a business I'd get into. They had a combination of factors that have kept them alive (for now), but I think even their days must be numbered.