I've found that to be incredibly untrue in the larger corporations I've been involved with. Typically they have overly bureaucratic lists of rules and regulations and while individual managers are keen on various buzzwords and bits of glitzy technology, they typically have to present this to even more higher-ups who will then typically do the thumbs down since their COBOL system (or whatever) is already working okay, supposedly:)
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Yawn, troll. The numbers of people making money are way smaller than with other technologies, that's for sure, but top Rails developers make pretty serious money ($100 an hour is the typical rate I see amongst the Rails developers I'm working with - and a rate I've earned myself for a few months when I was contracting.) Okay, it's not going to blow Java's top, but you can make money in the Rails community. The real money, however, is in developing your own stuff and then selling it on as a going concern. Rails can make this process a lot quicker if you're a developer.
My MP takes 48% of the vote with a majority of 10,000. But, yes, I'd certainly do what you suggest if I supported any of the other candidates, because what you say makes sense. That said, I'm not a supporter of democracy, so have resigned myself to not getting involved in any significant way (a bit like not going to church really) unless a party that'll transition us to technocracy arrives!
Back to democracy though, I dare say that getting Proportional Representation implemented would drive up those turnouts since every vote would count, but what party with a chance at winning First Past The Post is going to support that?:)
In England, you can, as a Member of Parliament, actually hold the same seat indefinitely. There's no maximum term, no maximum number of times you can be elected, so if you have a constituency where the majority of people support you, you can be in power forever. This is certainly the case where I live where the local MP has been in control since the mid 1960s. This is why I do not vote as he is unbeatable since he gets voted in by most of the over 60s (as well as others, since there's no good competition as you'd never win against him.)
Man, if you assume the world can / could be perfect all of the time, you must be disappointed a lot. Why is this even a relevant question? The world is not perfect and will never be perfect. No service is perfect. Things can and do break. Things will always break, at some level or another.
I wouldn't personally classify someone who only ever worked under direction a "super star" programmer though. A "super star" is going to be someone who excels, and is unlikely to get authorization for all of his / her ideas, and will have been forced to publicly release their own code at some point down the line. Someone who's a great coder under direction but isn't particularly imaginative or ambitious is still a great coder, but not "super star" level IMHO.
If a developer is truly a "super star" there will be a trace of that on their public record. They'll have built code that they've sold, built a business, built up a successful blog, contributed to or started an open source project, written a book, any of those sorts of things. If you're hiring from Monster or Dice, you will rarely find anyone with a single one of these qualities.. so that's how to start. Find developers who've written books in the field(s) you cover.. find popular open source projects and look at who's contributing.. it's not hard, and so few employers actually bother to take this route. I don't know why though, since this is how you find the best people and, most importantly, the best contributors and communicators.
So.. books, projects, blogs, open source.. investigate all those in your field.
But I think it's fair to at least ask why it is we've chosen not to tax copyrighted works.
I'd be more inclined to ask why the United States taxes property in the first place. It's not a concept I'm familiar with in Europe. If you own something, you should own it. If you fail to pay other taxes, then your property can be sold so that your outstanding taxes can be paid, but taxing someone for the mere concept of owning a property strikes me as very odd.
In Europe it is more common to pay a sort of "residency" tax, which you pay whether you own the property you live in or not. This is fair, since the money is generally used to pay for the police force, local improvements, and so forth. Applying this to intellectual property is basically a usage tax, and we already have usage taxes that apply to intellectual property. If you write some music, then sell copies of that music, sales tax may be due, as well as income tax on what you profit from it. This is entirely fair. To tax something that is not producing money is wholly unfair on those without monetary capital. Big companies like Microsoft would LOVE to have this "intellectual property tax" since they can afford to keep all sorts of useless technology wrapped up for years regardless. It's the smaller inventors who would lose out.
Y'know, it's people coming up with ideas like the one you've just raised that will either a) continue to be ignored, thank God; or b) cause significant damage to the progress of science.
Making it a legal requirement to sell something for a certain value is one of the worst things you can do in an economy. This has been proven time and time again and leads to extreme inefficiency. Thankfully the only instances of this in the modern day Westernized countries is land purchases by the government, and even that's shady.
In trying to reduce the damage large companies can cause with their IP, it seems people coming up with ideas like yours are actually trying to help the big companies and sabotage the smaller inventors who aren't able to pay gigantic "property taxes" on their mere ideas. Shame on all of you.
There is a giant leap between "kids have a right to privacy" and "kids need to be monitored 24/7." Kids have a right not to be under constant interrogation and inspection by their parents, but not a right to privacy when the parent thinks it's necessary to inspect what the child has been doing. That's just parenting common sense.
I think you heavily underestimate human progress. 500-1000 years to "Data's head?" 500-1000 years ago life was pretty much unrecognizable for those of us in the West today. Technology has not only flourished in that time, but effectively been created (even 400 years ago we had no automation, no motorized transport, no significant infrastructure, no electricity, and Galileo was arguing with the Pope about the Earth being flat!)
If you compare the last 500 years with the last 50 years, say, the amount of progress that has occurred in that mere tenth is significantly higher than in the other 90%. There's plenty of reason to believe that development and progress will continue to advance at even faster rates, meaning that technology in 50 years' time is going to seem not only alien to a human of 2008, but rather unfathomable.
Admittedly, I can only see the summary because the site has been Slashdotted, but it seems to imply that $61m of SMSes cost about $1 to actually deliver.
Given that people in the UK send, in total, about 50 billion SMS per year, and pay approximately 12 cents per message (we'll forget the freebies, let's go really conservative to see how silly the summary of the article is), for about a total market of $6bn. So, if $61m of charged SMSes cost $1 to deliver.. $6bn / $61m = $98. So.. the cost, to the providers, of delivering 50 billion text messages in the United Kingdom is $98? I'm not buying it.
ICANN has put in a request to the US government, asking to be freed from ties to the United States.
Yeah, like that's going to happen. The United Nations is supposedly meant to be independent from the US, but in reality is just a puppet organization held up by the US. Even organizations that aren't based in the US are inevitably tied to the goings-ons of the US from economic, trade, or cultural points of view, such as, say, the Bank of England. Given the US owns the largest swathes of IP address space, I can't see any official or semi-official ties (whether legal or cultural) with the US being cut any time soon.
A company called Bezerk had a bunch of ad-supported games about 8 - 10 years ago, I believe they did You Don't Know Jack. My favourite was called Acrophobia.
The games took over the entire screen (as usual) and in between every other round (rounds lasted several minutes) you'd get an ad for a minute. It was really well done and fitted into the whole "game show" type feel to the games. The ads were reasonably enjoyable although there were only a few in rotation so it got boring once you'd seen them all a few times.
I'm convinced this is a long-term workable model, however, because advertising really isn't that bad. People rant and rave about it for some reason, but it helps keep the things we like going (TV shows, movie theaters, etc) and if it's well produced it isn't that bad to watch. Ultimately, ideally targeted advertising is just useful information.
Thousand million. No-one has seriously used billion to mean "million million" in perhaps the last 25 years here in the UK. Usage of billion to mean thousand million was certainly common on TV news by at least the early 90s.
Y'know, for a few minutes here and there I've actually thought the same thing. I find it pretty darn creepy that people who are so religious (synonym: irrational) are pumping out programming languages.. but then I realized that perhaps an ounce of fantasy and irrationality are REQUIRED to be able to make a good programming language. After all, you're going to be slogging and working night after night for DECADES to get a language to the point where it'll stick, and that takes blind faith, not rationality. So.. I'll stick to using the products of religious men, simply because they're usually the only ones crazy enough to see such craziness through.
Yeah, it's pretty fun, but I poke fun at idiots on the left/and/ right. I'm not political and don't vote. Of course, I am sure there is a stereotype for that too, but taking fun at anyone who finds politics (or religion) vaguely interesting is good enough for me!
On the plus side, this is a good form of idiot tax. This might not make sense to non-British readers but the Mail has, let's say, a certain reputation in the UK for its readership being most of Britain's jumpy, middle class, alarmist, conservative, "immigration is evil and all non-white immigrants should be castrated" type readers.
The stupid thing is that they've given a name to a feature OS X has had for ages.. mounting remote CD drives over the network. I can do that on all my Apple gear already and install stuff. I think the only addition they've made here is that it's "built in" so it'll work for OS installs, and not just once the OS is up.
Slashdot Mirror
I've found that to be incredibly untrue in the larger corporations I've been involved with. Typically they have overly bureaucratic lists of rules and regulations and while individual managers are keen on various buzzwords and bits of glitzy technology, they typically have to present this to even more higher-ups who will then typically do the thumbs down since their COBOL system (or whatever) is already working okay, supposedly :)
Yawn, troll. The numbers of people making money are way smaller than with other technologies, that's for sure, but top Rails developers make pretty serious money ($100 an hour is the typical rate I see amongst the Rails developers I'm working with - and a rate I've earned myself for a few months when I was contracting.) Okay, it's not going to blow Java's top, but you can make money in the Rails community. The real money, however, is in developing your own stuff and then selling it on as a going concern. Rails can make this process a lot quicker if you're a developer.
My MP takes 48% of the vote with a majority of 10,000. But, yes, I'd certainly do what you suggest if I supported any of the other candidates, because what you say makes sense. That said, I'm not a supporter of democracy, so have resigned myself to not getting involved in any significant way (a bit like not going to church really) unless a party that'll transition us to technocracy arrives!
:)
Back to democracy though, I dare say that getting Proportional Representation implemented would drive up those turnouts since every vote would count, but what party with a chance at winning First Past The Post is going to support that?
In England, you can, as a Member of Parliament, actually hold the same seat indefinitely. There's no maximum term, no maximum number of times you can be elected, so if you have a constituency where the majority of people support you, you can be in power forever. This is certainly the case where I live where the local MP has been in control since the mid 1960s. This is why I do not vote as he is unbeatable since he gets voted in by most of the over 60s (as well as others, since there's no good competition as you'd never win against him.)
The EULA for OS X says:
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.
It's quite easy to label a home-built computer with an Apple sticker.
That it does, but it's not as good as this one.
Man, if you assume the world can / could be perfect all of the time, you must be disappointed a lot. Why is this even a relevant question? The world is not perfect and will never be perfect. No service is perfect. Things can and do break. Things will always break, at some level or another.
I wouldn't personally classify someone who only ever worked under direction a "super star" programmer though. A "super star" is going to be someone who excels, and is unlikely to get authorization for all of his / her ideas, and will have been forced to publicly release their own code at some point down the line. Someone who's a great coder under direction but isn't particularly imaginative or ambitious is still a great coder, but not "super star" level IMHO.
If a developer is truly a "super star" there will be a trace of that on their public record. They'll have built code that they've sold, built a business, built up a successful blog, contributed to or started an open source project, written a book, any of those sorts of things. If you're hiring from Monster or Dice, you will rarely find anyone with a single one of these qualities.. so that's how to start. Find developers who've written books in the field(s) you cover.. find popular open source projects and look at who's contributing.. it's not hard, and so few employers actually bother to take this route. I don't know why though, since this is how you find the best people and, most importantly, the best contributors and communicators.
So.. books, projects, blogs, open source.. investigate all those in your field.
But I think it's fair to at least ask why it is we've chosen not to tax copyrighted works.
I'd be more inclined to ask why the United States taxes property in the first place. It's not a concept I'm familiar with in Europe. If you own something, you should own it. If you fail to pay other taxes, then your property can be sold so that your outstanding taxes can be paid, but taxing someone for the mere concept of owning a property strikes me as very odd.
In Europe it is more common to pay a sort of "residency" tax, which you pay whether you own the property you live in or not. This is fair, since the money is generally used to pay for the police force, local improvements, and so forth. Applying this to intellectual property is basically a usage tax, and we already have usage taxes that apply to intellectual property. If you write some music, then sell copies of that music, sales tax may be due, as well as income tax on what you profit from it. This is entirely fair. To tax something that is not producing money is wholly unfair on those without monetary capital. Big companies like Microsoft would LOVE to have this "intellectual property tax" since they can afford to keep all sorts of useless technology wrapped up for years regardless. It's the smaller inventors who would lose out.
Y'know, it's people coming up with ideas like the one you've just raised that will either a) continue to be ignored, thank God; or b) cause significant damage to the progress of science.
Making it a legal requirement to sell something for a certain value is one of the worst things you can do in an economy. This has been proven time and time again and leads to extreme inefficiency. Thankfully the only instances of this in the modern day Westernized countries is land purchases by the government, and even that's shady.
In trying to reduce the damage large companies can cause with their IP, it seems people coming up with ideas like yours are actually trying to help the big companies and sabotage the smaller inventors who aren't able to pay gigantic "property taxes" on their mere ideas. Shame on all of you.
There is a giant leap between "kids have a right to privacy" and "kids need to be monitored 24/7." Kids have a right not to be under constant interrogation and inspection by their parents, but not a right to privacy when the parent thinks it's necessary to inspect what the child has been doing. That's just parenting common sense.
I think you heavily underestimate human progress. 500-1000 years to "Data's head?" 500-1000 years ago life was pretty much unrecognizable for those of us in the West today. Technology has not only flourished in that time, but effectively been created (even 400 years ago we had no automation, no motorized transport, no significant infrastructure, no electricity, and Galileo was arguing with the Pope about the Earth being flat!)
If you compare the last 500 years with the last 50 years, say, the amount of progress that has occurred in that mere tenth is significantly higher than in the other 90%. There's plenty of reason to believe that development and progress will continue to advance at even faster rates, meaning that technology in 50 years' time is going to seem not only alien to a human of 2008, but rather unfathomable.
Curling makes as much sense as bowling. That's really what curling is.. ice bowling.
Software can cause death. A military helicopter crashed and software faults were one of the main causes.
Admittedly, I can only see the summary because the site has been Slashdotted, but it seems to imply that $61m of SMSes cost about $1 to actually deliver.
Given that people in the UK send, in total, about 50 billion SMS per year, and pay approximately 12 cents per message (we'll forget the freebies, let's go really conservative to see how silly the summary of the article is), for about a total market of $6bn. So, if $61m of charged SMSes cost $1 to deliver.. $6bn / $61m = $98. So.. the cost, to the providers, of delivering 50 billion text messages in the United Kingdom is $98? I'm not buying it.
Anyone else notice he's put "WiMax" as the operator identifier on his iPhone / iPod Touch? Seems a bit weird.
ICANN has put in a request to the US government, asking to be freed from ties to the United States.
Yeah, like that's going to happen. The United Nations is supposedly meant to be independent from the US, but in reality is just a puppet organization held up by the US. Even organizations that aren't based in the US are inevitably tied to the goings-ons of the US from economic, trade, or cultural points of view, such as, say, the Bank of England. Given the US owns the largest swathes of IP address space, I can't see any official or semi-official ties (whether legal or cultural) with the US being cut any time soon.
A company called Bezerk had a bunch of ad-supported games about 8 - 10 years ago, I believe they did You Don't Know Jack. My favourite was called Acrophobia.
The games took over the entire screen (as usual) and in between every other round (rounds lasted several minutes) you'd get an ad for a minute. It was really well done and fitted into the whole "game show" type feel to the games. The ads were reasonably enjoyable although there were only a few in rotation so it got boring once you'd seen them all a few times.
I'm convinced this is a long-term workable model, however, because advertising really isn't that bad. People rant and rave about it for some reason, but it helps keep the things we like going (TV shows, movie theaters, etc) and if it's well produced it isn't that bad to watch. Ultimately, ideally targeted advertising is just useful information.
Thousand million. No-one has seriously used billion to mean "million million" in perhaps the last 25 years here in the UK. Usage of billion to mean thousand million was certainly common on TV news by at least the early 90s.
Y'know, for a few minutes here and there I've actually thought the same thing. I find it pretty darn creepy that people who are so religious (synonym: irrational) are pumping out programming languages.. but then I realized that perhaps an ounce of fantasy and irrationality are REQUIRED to be able to make a good programming language. After all, you're going to be slogging and working night after night for DECADES to get a language to the point where it'll stick, and that takes blind faith, not rationality. So.. I'll stick to using the products of religious men, simply because they're usually the only ones crazy enough to see such craziness through.
Yeah, it's pretty fun, but I poke fun at idiots on the left /and/ right. I'm not political and don't vote. Of course, I am sure there is a stereotype for that too, but taking fun at anyone who finds politics (or religion) vaguely interesting is good enough for me!
On the plus side, this is a good form of idiot tax. This might not make sense to non-British readers but the Mail has, let's say, a certain reputation in the UK for its readership being most of Britain's jumpy, middle class, alarmist, conservative, "immigration is evil and all non-white immigrants should be castrated" type readers.
The stupid thing is that they've given a name to a feature OS X has had for ages.. mounting remote CD drives over the network. I can do that on all my Apple gear already and install stuff. I think the only addition they've made here is that it's "built in" so it'll work for OS installs, and not just once the OS is up.
And here I was thinking this site was "news for nerds" and not "news for wannabe Dance Dance Revolution type games experts."
Perhaps if they released Code Code Revolution where you design UIs in time to a beat or something, but Rock Band?