Flash came on my Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003. Also, Flash MX comes with a special template for creating a flash app for use on a Pocket PC or mobile device.
I think the EULA is just to cover all bases. So you can sue for anything, and defend against any suit. Same reason you get a Patent.
You must be an employee somewhere. Consultants and business owners like letters after their names.
I want my employees to have A+ or INet+ after their names so when I advertise, I can say that all my employees are properly certified.
The general public reads that as a security statement. They are in good, qualified, hands with our company.
Consultants put the letters after their name because a normal person in the world will call a certified tech with the same price as a non-certified tech around 9 times out of 10 (not proven, learned from experience).
If you work for a company, and someone comes on board who is certified, and you are not, and they hold that over your head, sure - it means nothing. But it may have gotten that person the job over the non-certified guy they were competing against.
Very true, and it's crazy to say a Poker bot is a winning machine. I'll "bet" that if I ran the bot on my computer, it would lose all night long - while I slept.
That is exactly what I am upset about. When the majority of our population are people NOT in the tech sector, they tend to take this information as fact, they don't know any better.
The news has a responsibility to the general public to be truthful. It seems like it's more important to put out a story every 15 minutes than to do thorough research on a topic and then portray both sides correctly.
Now that our RSS feeds update contiually, all day long with Google Destop as my sidebar, and the news writer's ads aren't showing, just headlines, they will be more likely to create headlines that entice clicks than to simply report the news.
I find it insulting to say that Google has drained the market of talent. Not to sound too self-centered, and I think I speak for a number of non-Google employed friends of mine when I say, "I am pretty damn talented too."
I also have experience funding and operating start-ups, and frankly, talent comes out of the woodwork as soon as I place a simple classified ad. Sometimes, people are too talented for what I am willing to pay, but they are more than willing to work for my salary anyway.
There is always someone who is excited about what you are doing as a startup who will gladly work for what you are paying.
Let Google get too big too fast and join the rest of our legal-entangled-money-hungry-hated-corporate-giant s. I am sick of this ra ra for Google we've been singing for so long now. Can we just start nit-picking and complaining about everything they do yet or what?
Unfortunately, if StarOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office, that is StarOffice's problem. If you're going to go Pro, you better know how to play in the big leagues. -- but read on please...
As for your browser based idea, here are my thoughts from someone who's working with offices and web based systems daily (particularly real estate - though you might be too, and have had completely different experiences).
Web applications are difficult in office environments where time is a serious factor, and security is even more important.
First, have you ever seen anyone submit a document online that they just spent 2 hours writing, only to have a session time out, an internet connection fail, or the website fail to respond? A smart tech would do a quick select-all/copy of the document before submitting, but most people simply don't, and hours of work are lost in an instant. (Happens in webmail environments and online real estate forms all the time)
So now you have to bloat the web form right? Add some JavaScript to copy the text to a clipboard before submitting, or maybe do the whole thing in a Java applet that can check its connection before submitting...or...or... Now you're just bloating and you don't have a choice.
Now your office screams - we want spreadsheets - we want to create fliers - we need macros!! That's a slightly more complicated web application.
I've written several web based applications, and many times, the customer asks - make it simple. I've never seen a project finish with the simplicity everyone had in mind when we began. Every time you turn around, someone needs a level of functionality you didn't think you'd ever need.
Don't get me wrong though, I've used options like OpenOffice in many situations where someone can't afford the $250 MS product, but needs to do a PowerPoint style presentation in a short period of time, or they have to open an MS Word document (which, more often than not, the word document contains tables and text boxes that don't come up correctly).
It is frustrating to work in an OpenOffice/StarOffice product in an MS Office world. I feel their pain - yet you cannot discount these OS products and StarOffice completely.
P.S. I'm copying this document to the clipboard before submitting because I've lost many posts on Slashdot (damn low wireless signal)
I couldn't agree more. It appears that if something has always been done in the real world, as soon as it can be done in a software program, someone can patent the age-old idea and own it.
When I come back to my desk after lunch and see an important file sitting on my chair - instead of say, on my desk where it would get burried and lost - I then take careful note of this file and try not to lose it.
So now, when I do this in software, where you can send an instant message to someone with a flag saying, "Stay on Top" of all other windows, I guess that this idea can be patented as well.
I want to know the answer as to what exactly needs to be done in the USA to get rid of software patents? What is the process? Who do I talk to to find out what we have to do? What kind of lobbying must be done? How many letters have to be written? Any thoughts?
I release source under the BSD license - anyone can take that code and sell it as-is or with any improvements or modifications, and they never have to release their code, nor do they have to open source anything they create with my code. All they have to do is put my copyright notice on their product. Correct? I can also sell my code separately as closed source, on its own or part of another program, right?
I release my source under the GPL. Here's where I get confused.
If someone else uses my code, any changes or additions they make must also be open sourced under the GPL, right?
You can sell code released under the GPL, but you also have to make the source available for what they purchased.
Anyone can sell the GPL'd code I wrote under a commercial license if the buyer of the commercial product also receives the source code. However, that company doesn't have to release their code for changes, improvements, etc, if they pay that fee. ???
I guess I don't understand how RedHat and MySQL make money selling these commercial licenses of GPL'd code.
If I buy a commercial license of MySQL, I can make any changes I want, and I don't have to release my source, correct? Or I can include MySQL in my commercial product without my custom source code.
Most of my customers use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords generates about 20x the click throughs, and costs more than triple that of Yahoo Search Marketing.
However, the ROI through Yahoo is consistently better. My clients are dropping Google left and right, and I strongly feel that this is due to the nature of adsense.
Ads provided by Google on affiliate websites are typically text based and appear to be designed to trick customers into clicking the ads, thinking they are part of the site they are currently on, and then the surfer just hits the back button because they never intended to leave the site they were on anyway.
My proof of this is in the stats. When someone comes to one of my customers' websites from Yahoo, their typical page views are 2-4 pages. When they come from Google, the page views are typically 1 (or just the homepage).
I don't feel that it is a click fraud issue for some of these smaller companies using adwords, rather it is Google banking on surfer error through the adsense program.
I would like to see the Google Adsense program more clearly render their ads on other websites so people know that they are actually clicking on ads. Yes, I know there is a tiny Google mark on the ads, but when is the last time you saw a surfer read everything on a web page?
Come on now, ever ordered food at McDonalds and been offered "fries with that". You can't patent this!! So, what's the deal now - everything that can be done in real life, then done again on the computer can be patented?
We used to have to write letters, now we type them. Why not patent the process of pushing a key on a keyboard?
Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter in 1868 (reference) - though dead, his family could get very very rich soon, as long as the USPTO can keeps this act going.
I like the simple idea of a thread attached to each newly submitted patent at the pto website so people can simply post a little "Here's the prior art..." - if even to direct the the pto when beginning their search.
My personal problem with patents is that it prevents free trade and stops competition, which I thought was a constitutional right we have in the U.S.
To say that anyone owns an idea is insane. If I create something out of my own mind, never having heard of, or seen, the competition or the patent itself, I am just as entitled to the patent as the original submitter.
But the world doesn't care nor does it work that way. Wow. I'm just bitchy today.
I've seen many comments in this thread about feeling guilty when charging a lot for support. Don't feel guilty!
My son clogged our toilet with a Spiderman toy and we had to call a plumber. The guy came out with a 10 foot ogger-deal to clean up the problem. $80 for 2 minutes, but I was happy to pay because I had to "go". No regrets, ever.
So, when I charge $65 to come in, right click where they should have left clicked, it's still $65, and they are hug me when I take their money - basically, because they had to "go".
It's like the old story goes:
A farmer's tractor broke down. He had a whole field of crop to tend to. He called in the repair man. The repair man looked at the tractor, pulled out his hammer and tapped it gently on the engine - the tractor started right up again.
The farmer asked, "how much for the repair", the repair man said, $150. The farmer was irate!! "$150 to tap the tractor, I won't pay it. I want a detailed invoice on what you did on my desk by tomorrow morning explaining exactly why I owe you $150 for tapping my tractor!"
The next morning, the repair man put the following invoice on the farmer's desk:
$1 - hit tractor with hammer $149 - knowing where to hit.
Your time and knowledge are valuable, don't be afraid to charge what you are worth!
I go from office to office, week after week as a tech, and I see the icons for Firefox on the desktops, so yes, they are downloading, but 99.99% of the time the user has IE open as if they never even tried the program.
Measuring the success of Firefox by download count is creating false hope.
I've personally removed Symantec products from several computers, even ones where it came pre-installed, for just this reason - It's become a bloated piece of JUNK. Some computers can barely run with it installed, others have major problems in Outlook sending messages, then there are those that can never shut down their computer properly because ccApp never ends.
I'm embarrassed that I made it my main recommendation for so many years.
I've had good luck with GRISoft.com both free for home and paid commercial versions.
It was an accident. I said that in the original post. It was a dot com, and they are actually still around and (believe it or not) profitable. There were no VCs, share-holders, etc, and the only backup we had was a mirroring RAID for the file system.
It was MSSQL, and our backup system for this was actually a second server with MSSQL where we ran an ASP script to simply delete/re-insert records from one DB to the other. To do this it tool almost all night which is why it had happened over 6 weeks prior and not regularly. At the time I joined the company there were only a few fresh-out-of-college programmers there. No DB Admins, no networking smarts at all.
When you are in a company like this, sometimes money is scarce, so you stick to what you can do with what you have. Heck, what we did is similar to backing up an MySQL server with table dumps, so we felt like it was an OK solution. The logistics to how we would do it more often was the problem. Plus our solution made it pretty easy to recover small portions of data, or to easily lookup a persons old account who had changed something in 1 record in 1 table.
I left the company shortly after this happened because I didn't like the way things were run. (Not just because of the backup system). But I did hear that I was replaced with a networking guy instead of a programmer.
I worked for an Internet company that had over 100000 products for sale in a database for over 24000 customers. One day, someone accidentally through in a DELETE FROM products WHERE nID > 00000 instead of 100000.
Noone fessed up, but the guy who was red as a damn chili with sweat beading down his face *might* have been the guy.
Everything you could possibly want is online for PHP. The only reason to purchase the book for PHP would be if it covered GTK and some far less saturated PHP topics.
So, how do you get tickets for Comdex? Do you pay at the door? Their site says nothing about this from what I can find.
I don't care what anyone says. It sounds fun, and I'll be there.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash came on my Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003. Also, Flash MX comes with a special template for creating a flash app for use on a Pocket PC or mobile device.
I think the EULA is just to cover all bases. So you can sue for anything, and defend against any suit. Same reason you get a Patent.
You must be an employee somewhere. Consultants and business owners like letters after their names.
I want my employees to have A+ or INet+ after their names so when I advertise, I can say that all my employees are properly certified.
The general public reads that as a security statement. They are in good, qualified, hands with our company.
Consultants put the letters after their name because a normal person in the world will call a certified tech with the same price as a non-certified tech around 9 times out of 10 (not proven, learned from experience).
If you work for a company, and someone comes on board who is certified, and you are not, and they hold that over your head, sure - it means nothing. But it may have gotten that person the job over the non-certified guy they were competing against.
Very true, and it's crazy to say a Poker bot is a winning machine. I'll "bet" that if I ran the bot on my computer, it would lose all night long - while I slept.
That is exactly what I am upset about. When the majority of our population are people NOT in the tech sector, they tend to take this information as fact, they don't know any better.
The news has a responsibility to the general public to be truthful. It seems like it's more important to put out a story every 15 minutes than to do thorough research on a topic and then portray both sides correctly.
Now that our RSS feeds update contiually, all day long with Google Destop as my sidebar, and the news writer's ads aren't showing, just headlines, they will be more likely to create headlines that entice clicks than to simply report the news.
I find it insulting to say that Google has drained the market of talent. Not to sound too self-centered, and I think I speak for a number of non-Google employed friends of mine when I say, "I am pretty damn talented too."
t s. I am sick of this ra ra for Google we've been singing for so long now. Can we just start nit-picking and complaining about everything they do yet or what?
I also have experience funding and operating start-ups, and frankly, talent comes out of the woodwork as soon as I place a simple classified ad. Sometimes, people are too talented for what I am willing to pay, but they are more than willing to work for my salary anyway.
There is always someone who is excited about what you are doing as a startup who will gladly work for what you are paying.
Let Google get too big too fast and join the rest of our legal-entangled-money-hungry-hated-corporate-gian
or let .xxx go live. in about 2 or 3 years, the gov will shut it down in one big blast. goodbye .xxx. it would be like dropping a nuke on porn.
Unfortunately, if StarOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office, that is StarOffice's problem. If you're going to go Pro, you better know how to play in the big leagues. -- but read on please...
As for your browser based idea, here are my thoughts from someone who's working with offices and web based systems daily (particularly real estate - though you might be too, and have had completely different experiences).
Web applications are difficult in office environments where time is a serious factor, and security is even more important.
First, have you ever seen anyone submit a document online that they just spent 2 hours writing, only to have a session time out, an internet connection fail, or the website fail to respond? A smart tech would do a quick select-all/copy of the document before submitting, but most people simply don't, and hours of work are lost in an instant. (Happens in webmail environments and online real estate forms all the time)
So now you have to bloat the web form right? Add some JavaScript to copy the text to a clipboard before submitting, or maybe do the whole thing in a Java applet that can check its connection before submitting...or...or... Now you're just bloating and you don't have a choice.
Now your office screams - we want spreadsheets - we want to create fliers - we need macros!! That's a slightly more complicated web application.
I've written several web based applications, and many times, the customer asks - make it simple. I've never seen a project finish with the simplicity everyone had in mind when we began. Every time you turn around, someone needs a level of functionality you didn't think you'd ever need.
Don't get me wrong though, I've used options like OpenOffice in many situations where someone can't afford the $250 MS product, but needs to do a PowerPoint style presentation in a short period of time, or they have to open an MS Word document (which, more often than not, the word document contains tables and text boxes that don't come up correctly).
It is frustrating to work in an OpenOffice/StarOffice product in an MS Office world. I feel their pain - yet you cannot discount these OS products and StarOffice completely.
P.S. I'm copying this document to the clipboard before submitting because I've lost many posts on Slashdot (damn low wireless signal)
Yes, exactly http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/
I couldn't agree more. It appears that if something has always been done in the real world, as soon as it can be done in a software program, someone can patent the age-old idea and own it.
When I come back to my desk after lunch and see an important file sitting on my chair - instead of say, on my desk where it would get burried and lost - I then take careful note of this file and try not to lose it.
So now, when I do this in software, where you can send an instant message to someone with a flag saying, "Stay on Top" of all other windows, I guess that this idea can be patented as well.
I want to know the answer as to what exactly needs to be done in the USA to get rid of software patents? What is the process? Who do I talk to to find out what we have to do? What kind of lobbying must be done? How many letters have to be written? Any thoughts?
I release source under the BSD license - anyone can take that code and sell it as-is or with any improvements or modifications, and they never have to release their code, nor do they have to open source anything they create with my code. All they have to do is put my copyright notice on their product. Correct? I can also sell my code separately as closed source, on its own or part of another program, right?
I release my source under the GPL.
Here's where I get confused.
If someone else uses my code, any changes or additions they make must also be open sourced under the GPL, right?
You can sell code released under the GPL, but you also have to make the source available for what they purchased.
Anyone can sell the GPL'd code I wrote under a commercial license if the buyer of the commercial product also receives the source code. However, that company doesn't have to release their code for changes, improvements, etc, if they pay that fee. ???
I guess I don't understand how RedHat and MySQL make money selling these commercial licenses of GPL'd code.
If I buy a commercial license of MySQL, I can make any changes I want, and I don't have to release my source, correct? Or I can include MySQL in my commercial product without my custom source code.
Am I even close?
One day and we implemented this real estate search using the Google API:
www.realtywebmaps.com/cbnwgrp/map_static.php
I love this new API, and it can only get better.
www.seltice.com to contact us about any details
Most of my customers use Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Adwords generates about 20x the click throughs, and costs more than triple that of Yahoo Search Marketing.
However, the ROI through Yahoo is consistently better. My clients are dropping Google left and right, and I strongly feel that this is due to the nature of adsense.
Ads provided by Google on affiliate websites are typically text based and appear to be designed to trick customers into clicking the ads, thinking they are part of the site they are currently on, and then the surfer just hits the back button because they never intended to leave the site they were on anyway.
My proof of this is in the stats. When someone comes to one of my customers' websites from Yahoo, their typical page views are 2-4 pages. When they come from Google, the page views are typically 1 (or just the homepage).
I don't feel that it is a click fraud issue for some of these smaller companies using adwords, rather it is Google banking on surfer error through the adsense program.
I would like to see the Google Adsense program more clearly render their ads on other websites so people know that they are actually clicking on ads. Yes, I know there is a tiny Google mark on the ads, but when is the last time you saw a surfer read everything on a web page?
Come on now, ever ordered food at McDonalds and been offered "fries with that". You can't patent this!! So, what's the deal now - everything that can be done in real life, then done again on the computer can be patented?
We used to have to write letters, now we type them. Why not patent the process of pushing a key on a keyboard?
Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter in 1868 (reference) - though dead, his family could get very very rich soon, as long as the USPTO can keeps this act going.
"Only victims make excuses" - Bob Dunwoody
I like the simple idea of a thread attached to each newly submitted patent at the pto website so people can simply post a little "Here's the prior art ..." - if even to direct the the pto when beginning their search.
My personal problem with patents is that it prevents free trade and stops competition, which I thought was a constitutional right we have in the U.S.
To say that anyone owns an idea is insane. If I create something out of my own mind, never having heard of, or seen, the competition or the patent itself, I am just as entitled to the patent as the original submitter.
But the world doesn't care nor does it work that way. Wow. I'm just bitchy today.
I've seen many comments in this thread about feeling guilty when charging a lot for support. Don't feel guilty!
My son clogged our toilet with a Spiderman toy and we had to call a plumber. The guy came out with a 10 foot ogger-deal to clean up the problem. $80 for 2 minutes, but I was happy to pay because I had to "go". No regrets, ever.
So, when I charge $65 to come in, right click where they should have left clicked, it's still $65, and they are hug me when I take their money - basically, because they had to "go".
It's like the old story goes:
A farmer's tractor broke down. He had a whole field of crop to tend to. He called in the repair man. The repair man looked at the tractor, pulled out his hammer and tapped it gently on the engine - the tractor started right up again.
The farmer asked, "how much for the repair", the repair man said, $150. The farmer was irate!! "$150 to tap the tractor, I won't pay it. I want a detailed invoice on what you did on my desk by tomorrow morning explaining exactly why I owe you $150 for tapping my tractor!"
The next morning, the repair man put the following invoice on the farmer's desk:
$1 - hit tractor with hammer
$149 - knowing where to hit.
Your time and knowledge are valuable, don't be afraid to charge what you are worth!
I go from office to office, week after week as a tech, and I see the icons for Firefox on the desktops, so yes, they are downloading, but 99.99% of the time the user has IE open as if they never even tried the program.
Measuring the success of Firefox by download count is creating false hope.
I've personally removed Symantec products from several computers, even ones where it came pre-installed, for just this reason - It's become a bloated piece of JUNK. Some computers can barely run with it installed, others have major problems in Outlook sending messages, then there are those that can never shut down their computer properly because ccApp never ends.
I'm embarrassed that I made it my main recommendation for so many years.
I've had good luck with GRISoft.com both free for home and paid commercial versions.
I use MySQL for everything. No need - even for smart apps.
It was an accident. I said that in the original post. It was a dot com, and they are actually still around and (believe it or not) profitable. There were no VCs, share-holders, etc, and the only backup we had was a mirroring RAID for the file system.
It was MSSQL, and our backup system for this was actually a second server with MSSQL where we ran an ASP script to simply delete/re-insert records from one DB to the other. To do this it tool almost all night which is why it had happened over 6 weeks prior and not regularly. At the time I joined the company there were only a few fresh-out-of-college programmers there. No DB Admins, no networking smarts at all.
When you are in a company like this, sometimes money is scarce, so you stick to what you can do with what you have. Heck, what we did is similar to backing up an MySQL server with table dumps, so we felt like it was an OK solution. The logistics to how we would do it more often was the problem. Plus our solution made it pretty easy to recover small portions of data, or to easily lookup a persons old account who had changed something in 1 record in 1 table.
I left the company shortly after this happened because I didn't like the way things were run. (Not just because of the backup system). But I did hear that I was replaced with a networking guy instead of a programmer.
I worked for an Internet company that had over 100000 products for sale in a database for over 24000 customers. One day, someone accidentally through in a DELETE FROM products WHERE nID > 00000 instead of 100000.
Noone fessed up, but the guy who was red as a damn chili with sweat beading down his face *might* have been the guy.
P.S.
Backup was 1.5 months old.
Revolutionary eye surgery to make the blind see, and we get a BLACK AND WHITE picture??? Is it safe to call BS on this story yet?
Everything you could possibly want is online for PHP. The only reason to purchase the book for PHP would be if it covered GTK and some far less saturated PHP topics.
So, how do you get tickets for Comdex? Do you pay at the door? Their site says nothing about this from what I can find. I don't care what anyone says. It sounds fun, and I'll be there.
We are all alone folks. Earth is the only planet in the universe with intelligent life.
Oh....how brilliant
(1) Amazon.com web services
No kidding? A publisher giving kudos to one of his largest outlets? What a suprise.
(2) BARWN
Wireless. The NEXT big thing? I thought this was the LAST big thing?
(3) Hardware hackers
Interesting. And what a pisser this will be.
(4) online gaming communities
Seriously, has this guy been awake for the last 2 years?