Colbert has had several episodes now about this: "Get up from your couch, and sit down at your computer chair - and make your opponents wish they had NEVER visited your blog."
The #1 thing nerds can do to make a difference this election year is get out of the house. Go to places where nerds congregate and register people to vote. Go to places where environmental nerds congregate like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods or net neutrality nerds like OsCon etc and register people to vote. Go door to door with your party's kit (they both offer them, they're free, and it works). But above all leave the house!
I'm not looking to make money off of them - I'm looking to make things right. A class-action suit would force them to comply.
But I'd be equally happy just posting the numbers somewhere where the FCC turns their attention to Time Warner. So how do I go about gathering these numbers?
Why oh why is Time Warner not in trouble for this same thing yet? Their BitTorrent throttling is much worse. Basically any torrent upload traffic whatsoever causes ALL internet traffic - even something as simple as Instant Messaging - to come to a halt. It cycles repeatedly about once per minute for as long as upload traffic is attempted.
How can I put Time Warner in their place? What data do I need to collect? Are there law firms I should contact with the data who would be likely to pursue a class action lawsuit? Paying to be abused like this is outrageous.
It sucks that Comcast of all companies is the one getting dragged out into the street by the FCC for BitTorrent traffic shaping. Back in Boston, Comcast was my ISP savior from RCN - what a nightmare they pulled me out of! Their customer service was always excellent in Massachusetts, and although it took 3 technicians to do it, they pulled off a miracle when I moved to Northern California (they basically had to redo a lot of hidden, shoddy work done by the people who built the place).
Comcast doesn't deserve this crappy customer service reputation. I'm forced to use Time Warner now and comparatively speaking they are abysmal! Just getting the internet took a full 3 months because I had a non-local cell phone (area code was Boston), and their BitTorrent traffic shaping is far more blatant and abusive - it kills EVERYTHING, even chat and basic web connections, over and over once a minute as long as there's any BitTorrent traffic detected. Where's the FCC on that? At least with Comcast it would just slow BitTorrent only, and you could work around it in 2 seconds by enabling encryption.
Yes, I use 3 levels of redundancy for my home business:
1) Cable modem
2) EVDO over my phone as a modem (Sprint). If the power is out, there's a good chance it's localized (apartment, complex, or block) and at least one cell tower is up. Note that this requires a charged laptop and eventually a UPS or other battery... or
3) Starbucks. Wifi is cheap (I have an OLPC T-Mobile plan), and they have outlets.
Note that plans 2 and 3 assume your work is on a laptop - if you've been working on a desktop while things are fine, you're pretty screwed when they aren't.
Microsoft deserves this reputation, but.Net is an exception because of the Mono team. The Mono team has already shown in several cases that regardless of the direction Microsoft goes with.Net, if it doesn't help Mono's open source goals, they go their own way and are really unaffected by Microsoft's lesser decisions. At the same time they absolutely gain where Microsoft makes beneficial decisions, including in the creation of.Net itself.
At this point the.Net box is open and there's no turning that train around, even with the lowest actions Microsoft could (and may) consider.
I'm not a lawyer and I suspect you aren't either, but the important part of the law here is this:
"intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message"
If all they're doing is watching cellphones walk by and notice that there's a signal moving along this vector, triggering antennae bit by bit as they pass, and another moving along another vector, then they're certainly steering clear of this law.
But if they're reading the contents of the signal, they're probably violating it. How they read them will matter, and since the word "intent" is there, that's gonna get complicated. They might be able to argue they aren't trying to identify the user (the Sender), just monitor a cellphone's travels for the purpose of tracking its position over time. The cellphone is a device rather than a person, so that might avoid the definition of "sender" if they manage to show a sender is the human holding the phone.
And they might be able to play other tricks to avoid it all. For example they might be using irregularities in the way each cell broadcasts to uniquely identify each one, without any reading of the contents at all. If that's how they do it they're much more likely to dodge this or at least confuse a judge or jury so thoroughly that they get away with it.
The best way to say "No" to a client is to explore how their idea could be built in a reasonable way, then come back to them with a cost estimate.
In this case there are 2 issues:
* Security: There is the risk that malware on their machine(s) gets write access to your database, or a rogue employee does, or if there are tables they shouldn't see, that they may gain access to them.
* Performance: Direct SQL access could lead to slowing the DB for everyone - one bad query from them and all your clients are impacted, a risk you can't take.
Outline a solution to this problem (maybe a web service that accepts their sql and limits their usage/reach/etc) and come back to them with the cost to build it.
If they say "OK," you've successfully sold additional services. More revenue in the door and you might be able to offer the results as additional services to other clients.
If they say "That's too much," you just said No the proper way.
Hire someone to assess the cost of building the application on a modern platform. That's your due diligence - finding out the time and cost of the conversion.
Whatever estimate you get in terms of time, triple that then ask yourself, can we survive feature-freezing our app for that long while we spend money converting it to the new platform? If the answer is yes, do it. If not, then you've got to struggle on.
It would really help to know what platform this is though.
It's been said several times here that Java keeps making pointless sacrifices for backwards compatibility. Some progress requires a breaking change, and a major point release is a perfect place to make that kind of change. Java introduced Generics, but still returns Object from Generic Collections for backwards compatibility. Is anyone actually benefitting? No. Java authors worried about compatibility are still using Java 1.3, while those working with the newer JVM never fully gain the benefits of Generics.
Issues like the non-unified string implementation in Python are perfect for moving forward. Bravo Python.
So the answer to your question is, neither. The question is, how long before somebody gets Java out of its pointless rut?
No, the incentive is barely there at best. I throw a bunch of ideas at a wall and patent them all. Then I have 2 options:
1) Develop them all at great cost to me, taking massive financial risk, and hoping one of them works out as a business model (most businesses fail, most ideas fall short in execution).
OR
2) Sit on them all and wait for somebody else to take all the risk, develop something close enough to something in my pile of patents, and then sue for massive profits.
Where's that incentive again?
Patents were originally envisioned as something very different from the way they're treated today. If a blacksmith, in his daily work, came upon a method that he felt was superior to the conventional methods in his industry, he could patent it. The trade being made here was:
1) The blacksmith benefits because he now has a limited-time protection on his method, allowing him to protect his competitive advantage legally;
2) The public benefits because his superior method is now documented and publicly available. Other members of the industry can learn from it and once the patent runs out, the entire industry can incorporate his superior method.
This is not at all what patent trolls are doing; it's hardly possible for the above intended system to work today, with the way that intellectual property protections now work internationally (poorly/not at all). I've had several inventors tell me that if you actually intend to build something, patenting should NOT be on your todo list, because you're just documenting your idea for others to steal before you build it - you're better off just building it and doing your best to stay ahead of the copycats. The only real use for patents today is trolling like this case, and general defense like Amazon's one-click patent (they arguably patented it before some troll got to it first).
If we want patents to have any legitimate public benefit again, we need to add a "must develop within X timeline" requirement to the law or trolling will continue to be their main use.
Um.. electric cars weren't a competitor to gas before or after Bush came to power. And the Tesla Roadster continues to be developed with Bush in power.
As for the conspiracy theories, listen - I hate Bush too, but the explanation is more often stupidity, or just people with differing opinions and priorities. "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity" applies to conspiracies above all. GM introduced the EV1 in California only to avoid being banned from the market by a new state law requiring all dealers to offer a 0 emissions option. They did so at great cost and were losing piles of money on a car whose range was miserable. The law was overturned and GM decided to stop losing money - including on the maintenance. They ended the car's life in a stupid way, but it's not a conspiracy. It's a poorly written law's brief existence and a big company's panicked reaction.
So stop blaming Bush for conspiracies - you make people like me who hate Bush for real things he's done look like lunatics.
You can use Netflix's same service on Windows XP with no drawbacks or disabled features - no Vista required - and XP doesn't have this "you don't get what you paid for" feature. Why oh why does anyone use Vista?
I don't think Netflix deserves the blame here. If they do it's 10% them, 70% Microsoft, and 20% for the user for upgrading to the worst OS since Microsoft Bob.
Maybe - but what happens if I allow Flash ads on my application? It's one thing to say that you shouldn't be able to email a user a Flash animation. It's another thing to say that if you want to be secure, you have to lock Flash out of absolutely every webpage that involves a user's cookie. I don't think Adobe wants that kind of Flash lock-out as ad-driven web apps spread.
Strongly disagree. Ubuntu is doing a lot of things right, and the recent commercial end-user available machines rallying around Ubuntu/Gnome shows it. If anything other projects should speed up to keep pace with Ubuntu.
The regular release cycle helps contributing developers to enjoy their work - they can count on finished new features to be out in less than 6mos, rather than less than a year, which can be pretty exciting. And it aids iterative development - a year between releases can encourage hail mary style development where you go big and failures are crushing.
One major issue with Flash is its ability to insert scripts into the actual page.
Say I want to read your email. I send you an email with a Flash animation in it. You read it and your webmail verifies there's no dangerous scripts in my email - but it's much harder to verify my Flash I sent you is safe. Which I'm counting on because I've put code in that creates a script tag in the webpage, downloads my dangerous script, and sends me your cookies. Now I can read your email.
Flash has been getting a free pass on security for a long time. Time for things to tighten up on the web viewer more widely installed than Internet Explorer.
.Net apps don't REALLY use the PE format - every Windows XP-targeted.Net app (yes it can target other platforms - and be built to things other than.exe) is packaged in PE but only as a little loader stub. The only thing actually in this format is this same PE stub as used in every other.Net exe - after that it's all.Net bytecode, which you can read with Mono or any other.Net-compatible VM, ignoring the little stub.
Going through all the trouble of implementing PE is a waste of time if all you want to do is run.Net apps - just focus on Mono/getting libraries drawing nicely to OSX if that's what you want.
I think an earlier post here about EFI being based in PE is the right answer about this. But it is possible they're planning to support Win32 as a "Legacy format" - if they treat it like it's a compatibility layer for old apps, it might really work in their favor. You make a good point about the risk that some companies will never bother with a native Mac version, but I think it would help Apple more than hurt them. When Google opened up forwarding, IMAP and POP3 on Gmail, they were scared people would just stop using Gmail itself. That never came to fruition, and instead the compatibility drove users to move to Gmail. So while some software makers might stop bothering with Mac-specific binaries, I think Apple would gain so many users it could mostly benefit them. If they implement Win32 with security first, just think of the ad:
"Now, run your legacy Windows apps without all the security fears of Windows."
That's Sprint's fault. It doesn't work on my Verizon XV6700 either, and that's because Verizon is taking the extra effort to block tower information from my phone. How thoughtful of them. I asked at Verizon and they'll unblock it for an extra $15/mo. I rather switch away to a provider that doesn't go out of their way to remove services. That's disappointing to hear Sprint has it blocked too; I suspect it's blocked in the phone OS so replacing the OS with the base ROM might fix it.
Verizon sued the FCC after the FCC agreed to 2 out of Google's 4 openness policies for the 700Mhz spectrum. If they're announcing they're opening up their current network (is this even an announcement, or an announcement that they plan to make an announcement?), it's almost surely just for show. Their business model does not allow for open devices.
Right now I've got a Verizon phone with no cell tower information on it. Why? Because Verizon blocks that information, charging $15/mo extra to get at something they go out of their way to disable. I could write software that figures out my location with it (this tower means I'm home, etc), but they've put up a wall and a fee. That's happening today. Doesn't sound very open to me.
You are a book freak but it's good you recognize it - otherwise you could've meandered into "get off my lawn territory." Although to you "real book" is defined as "wonderful physicality," in a short time many's definition of "real book" will sound like this:
1) I can store nearly infinitely many, and access any of them nearly anywhere. They used to have to buy shelves fo these? And pick just one or 2 for trips!?
2) I can search them. People would pay for physical bookmarks? Wow. An Index was a section where I'd have to go find the listed page number and only some terms were in there? That sounds awful.
3) Further down the road: Peer-reviewed text must have been terrible before links; it must have been easy to publish lies before I could download Wiki Annotations that warn me of baseless statements. Reading big epics must have been less interesting before I could read it with the author's annotations, and Wiki ones about subtle popular references.
You're defining "familiar book to me" more than "real book," and for many that definition is shifting.
Yes. But the right answer isn't to just say no. You and your company need to take steps to fix this problem.
You: It sounds like you have a lot of panicked patches going out. Improve your tests, expand your test coverage, consider creating custom test tools to better capture edge cases. Try to define an area or category of the app that usually leads to this situation, and consider Test Driven Development for it.
You do need to ask those within your company demanding the patch to allow you the time to get a proper fix done, not a hack job.
Your company: There are people in the world who can speak with a customer or contact a group of customers, admit it brokèand leave the customer feeling happy and well taken care of. You need to find and hire at least one such person, possibly many, and have them handle these situations.
A 1 year break then back to the same is a pretty bad argument for making everyone learn a new OS.
I've always wondered if this is exactly what would happen if people managed to switch to Linux beyond say, 50% even. The eye-rolling RTFM attitude the Linux community is sometimes known for could actually be worse than the overall situation with Windows - because now you have novice users buying a Linux PC at Walmart that are not only unpatched, but there's no auto-update running on their OS, no Windows Defender-like app cutting off obvious ways to sneak in, and worst, no one interested in helping them.
But maybe it's just a narrow slice of the community earning that reputation, and at 50% there would be as many helpful Linux geeks as there are helpful Windows geeks now. Still no Linux Defender though - and it DOES have ways to sneak in!
The ROM is broken down into parts. Even if you screw up everything in the very large portion you can mess with, there's still enough smarts to respond to USB/ActiveSync from Windows XP and put a new ROM in there. Trust me - I've bricked it! And was very pleased to see very unbrickable it was.
Slashdot Mirror
Colbert has had several episodes now about this: "Get up from your couch, and sit down at your computer chair - and make your opponents wish they had NEVER visited your blog."
The #1 thing nerds can do to make a difference this election year is get out of the house. Go to places where nerds congregate and register people to vote. Go to places where environmental nerds congregate like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods or net neutrality nerds like OsCon etc and register people to vote. Go door to door with your party's kit (they both offer them, they're free, and it works). But above all leave the house!
Because the current model works like a gym membership: Infinite free classes! Use the gym infinitely! ...we're counting on the fact you won't!
I'm not looking to make money off of them - I'm looking to make things right. A class-action suit would force them to comply.
But I'd be equally happy just posting the numbers somewhere where the FCC turns their attention to Time Warner. So how do I go about gathering these numbers?
How can I put Time Warner in their place? What data do I need to collect? Are there law firms I should contact with the data who would be likely to pursue a class action lawsuit? Paying to be abused like this is outrageous.
It sucks that Comcast of all companies is the one getting dragged out into the street by the FCC for BitTorrent traffic shaping. Back in Boston, Comcast was my ISP savior from RCN - what a nightmare they pulled me out of! Their customer service was always excellent in Massachusetts, and although it took 3 technicians to do it, they pulled off a miracle when I moved to Northern California (they basically had to redo a lot of hidden, shoddy work done by the people who built the place).
Comcast doesn't deserve this crappy customer service reputation. I'm forced to use Time Warner now and comparatively speaking they are abysmal! Just getting the internet took a full 3 months because I had a non-local cell phone (area code was Boston), and their BitTorrent traffic shaping is far more blatant and abusive - it kills EVERYTHING, even chat and basic web connections, over and over once a minute as long as there's any BitTorrent traffic detected. Where's the FCC on that? At least with Comcast it would just slow BitTorrent only, and you could work around it in 2 seconds by enabling encryption.
Yes, I use 3 levels of redundancy for my home business:
1) Cable modem
2) EVDO over my phone as a modem (Sprint). If the power is out, there's a good chance it's localized (apartment, complex, or block) and at least one cell tower is up. Note that this requires a charged laptop and eventually a UPS or other battery... or
3) Starbucks. Wifi is cheap (I have an OLPC T-Mobile plan), and they have outlets.
Note that plans 2 and 3 assume your work is on a laptop - if you've been working on a desktop while things are fine, you're pretty screwed when they aren't.
Not in this case.
.Net is an exception because of the Mono team. The Mono team has already shown in several cases that regardless of the direction Microsoft goes with .Net, if it doesn't help Mono's open source goals, they go their own way and are really unaffected by Microsoft's lesser decisions. At the same time they absolutely gain where Microsoft makes beneficial decisions, including in the creation of .Net itself.
.Net box is open and there's no turning that train around, even with the lowest actions Microsoft could (and may) consider.
Microsoft deserves this reputation, but
At this point the
I'm not a lawyer and I suspect you aren't either, but the important part of the law here is this:
"intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message"
If all they're doing is watching cellphones walk by and notice that there's a signal moving along this vector, triggering antennae bit by bit as they pass, and another moving along another vector, then they're certainly steering clear of this law.
But if they're reading the contents of the signal, they're probably violating it. How they read them will matter, and since the word "intent" is there, that's gonna get complicated. They might be able to argue they aren't trying to identify the user (the Sender), just monitor a cellphone's travels for the purpose of tracking its position over time. The cellphone is a device rather than a person, so that might avoid the definition of "sender" if they manage to show a sender is the human holding the phone.
And they might be able to play other tricks to avoid it all. For example they might be using irregularities in the way each cell broadcasts to uniquely identify each one, without any reading of the contents at all. If that's how they do it they're much more likely to dodge this or at least confuse a judge or jury so thoroughly that they get away with it.
The best way to say "No" to a client is to explore how their idea could be built in a reasonable way, then come back to them with a cost estimate.
In this case there are 2 issues:
* Security: There is the risk that malware on their machine(s) gets write access to your database, or a rogue employee does, or if there are tables they shouldn't see, that they may gain access to them.
* Performance: Direct SQL access could lead to slowing the DB for everyone - one bad query from them and all your clients are impacted, a risk you can't take.
Outline a solution to this problem (maybe a web service that accepts their sql and limits their usage/reach/etc) and come back to them with the cost to build it.
If they say "OK," you've successfully sold additional services. More revenue in the door and you might be able to offer the results as additional services to other clients.
If they say "That's too much," you just said No the proper way.
Hire someone to assess the cost of building the application on a modern platform. That's your due diligence - finding out the time and cost of the conversion.
Whatever estimate you get in terms of time, triple that then ask yourself, can we survive feature-freezing our app for that long while we spend money converting it to the new platform? If the answer is yes, do it. If not, then you've got to struggle on.
It would really help to know what platform this is though.
It's been said several times here that Java keeps making pointless sacrifices for backwards compatibility. Some progress requires a breaking change, and a major point release is a perfect place to make that kind of change. Java introduced Generics, but still returns Object from Generic Collections for backwards compatibility. Is anyone actually benefitting? No. Java authors worried about compatibility are still using Java 1.3, while those working with the newer JVM never fully gain the benefits of Generics.
Issues like the non-unified string implementation in Python are perfect for moving forward. Bravo Python.
So the answer to your question is, neither. The question is, how long before somebody gets Java out of its pointless rut?
No, the incentive is barely there at best. I throw a bunch of ideas at a wall and patent them all. Then I have 2 options:
1) Develop them all at great cost to me, taking massive financial risk, and hoping one of them works out as a business model (most businesses fail, most ideas fall short in execution).
OR
2) Sit on them all and wait for somebody else to take all the risk, develop something close enough to something in my pile of patents, and then sue for massive profits.
Where's that incentive again?
Patents were originally envisioned as something very different from the way they're treated today. If a blacksmith, in his daily work, came upon a method that he felt was superior to the conventional methods in his industry, he could patent it. The trade being made here was:
1) The blacksmith benefits because he now has a limited-time protection on his method, allowing him to protect his competitive advantage legally;
2) The public benefits because his superior method is now documented and publicly available. Other members of the industry can learn from it and once the patent runs out, the entire industry can incorporate his superior method.
This is not at all what patent trolls are doing; it's hardly possible for the above intended system to work today, with the way that intellectual property protections now work internationally (poorly/not at all). I've had several inventors tell me that if you actually intend to build something, patenting should NOT be on your todo list, because you're just documenting your idea for others to steal before you build it - you're better off just building it and doing your best to stay ahead of the copycats. The only real use for patents today is trolling like this case, and general defense like Amazon's one-click patent (they arguably patented it before some troll got to it first).
If we want patents to have any legitimate public benefit again, we need to add a "must develop within X timeline" requirement to the law or trolling will continue to be their main use.
Um.. electric cars weren't a competitor to gas before or after Bush came to power. And the Tesla Roadster continues to be developed with Bush in power.
As for the conspiracy theories, listen - I hate Bush too, but the explanation is more often stupidity, or just people with differing opinions and priorities. "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity" applies to conspiracies above all. GM introduced the EV1 in California only to avoid being banned from the market by a new state law requiring all dealers to offer a 0 emissions option. They did so at great cost and were losing piles of money on a car whose range was miserable. The law was overturned and GM decided to stop losing money - including on the maintenance. They ended the car's life in a stupid way, but it's not a conspiracy. It's a poorly written law's brief existence and a big company's panicked reaction.
So stop blaming Bush for conspiracies - you make people like me who hate Bush for real things he's done look like lunatics.
You can use Netflix's same service on Windows XP with no drawbacks or disabled features - no Vista required - and XP doesn't have this "you don't get what you paid for" feature. Why oh why does anyone use Vista?
I don't think Netflix deserves the blame here. If they do it's 10% them, 70% Microsoft, and 20% for the user for upgrading to the worst OS since Microsoft Bob.
Maybe - but what happens if I allow Flash ads on my application? It's one thing to say that you shouldn't be able to email a user a Flash animation. It's another thing to say that if you want to be secure, you have to lock Flash out of absolutely every webpage that involves a user's cookie. I don't think Adobe wants that kind of Flash lock-out as ad-driven web apps spread.
Strongly disagree. Ubuntu is doing a lot of things right, and the recent commercial end-user available machines rallying around Ubuntu/Gnome shows it. If anything other projects should speed up to keep pace with Ubuntu.
The regular release cycle helps contributing developers to enjoy their work - they can count on finished new features to be out in less than 6mos, rather than less than a year, which can be pretty exciting. And it aids iterative development - a year between releases can encourage hail mary style development where you go big and failures are crushing.
One major issue with Flash is its ability to insert scripts into the actual page.
Say I want to read your email. I send you an email with a Flash animation in it. You read it and your webmail verifies there's no dangerous scripts in my email - but it's much harder to verify my Flash I sent you is safe. Which I'm counting on because I've put code in that creates a script tag in the webpage, downloads my dangerous script, and sends me your cookies. Now I can read your email.
Flash has been getting a free pass on security for a long time. Time for things to tighten up on the web viewer more widely installed than Internet Explorer.
Mod parent up as Informative; if the question gets a 4 it seems silly the answer should get a 1... .
.Net apps don't REALLY use the PE format - every Windows XP-targeted .Net app (yes it can target other platforms - and be built to things other than .exe) is packaged in PE but only as a little loader stub. The only thing actually in this format is this same PE stub as used in every other .Net exe - after that it's all .Net bytecode, which you can read with Mono or any other .Net-compatible VM, ignoring the little stub.
.Net apps - just focus on Mono/getting libraries drawing nicely to OSX if that's what you want.
Going through all the trouble of implementing PE is a waste of time if all you want to do is run
I think an earlier post here about EFI being based in PE is the right answer about this. But it is possible they're planning to support Win32 as a "Legacy format" - if they treat it like it's a compatibility layer for old apps, it might really work in their favor. You make a good point about the risk that some companies will never bother with a native Mac version, but I think it would help Apple more than hurt them. When Google opened up forwarding, IMAP and POP3 on Gmail, they were scared people would just stop using Gmail itself. That never came to fruition, and instead the compatibility drove users to move to Gmail. So while some software makers might stop bothering with Mac-specific binaries, I think Apple would gain so many users it could mostly benefit them. If they implement Win32 with security first, just think of the ad:
"Now, run your legacy Windows apps without all the security fears of Windows."
That's Sprint's fault. It doesn't work on my Verizon XV6700 either, and that's because Verizon is taking the extra effort to block tower information from my phone. How thoughtful of them. I asked at Verizon and they'll unblock it for an extra $15/mo. I rather switch away to a provider that doesn't go out of their way to remove services. That's disappointing to hear Sprint has it blocked too; I suspect it's blocked in the phone OS so replacing the OS with the base ROM might fix it.
Verizon sued the FCC after the FCC agreed to 2 out of Google's 4 openness policies for the 700Mhz spectrum. If they're announcing they're opening up their current network (is this even an announcement, or an announcement that they plan to make an announcement?), it's almost surely just for show. Their business model does not allow for open devices.
Right now I've got a Verizon phone with no cell tower information on it. Why? Because Verizon blocks that information, charging $15/mo extra to get at something they go out of their way to disable. I could write software that figures out my location with it (this tower means I'm home, etc), but they've put up a wall and a fee. That's happening today. Doesn't sound very open to me.
You are a book freak but it's good you recognize it - otherwise you could've meandered into "get off my lawn territory." Although to you "real book" is defined as "wonderful physicality," in a short time many's definition of "real book" will sound like this:
1) I can store nearly infinitely many, and access any of them nearly anywhere. They used to have to buy shelves fo these? And pick just one or 2 for trips!?
2) I can search them. People would pay for physical bookmarks? Wow. An Index was a section where I'd have to go find the listed page number and only some terms were in there? That sounds awful.
3) Further down the road: Peer-reviewed text must have been terrible before links; it must have been easy to publish lies before I could download Wiki Annotations that warn me of baseless statements. Reading big epics must have been less interesting before I could read it with the author's annotations, and Wiki ones about subtle popular references.
You're defining "familiar book to me" more than "real book," and for many that definition is shifting.
Yes. But the right answer isn't to just say no. You and your company need to take steps to fix this problem.
You: It sounds like you have a lot of panicked patches going out. Improve your tests, expand your test coverage, consider creating custom test tools to better capture edge cases. Try to define an area or category of the app that usually leads to this situation, and consider Test Driven Development for it.
You do need to ask those within your company demanding the patch to allow you the time to get a proper fix done, not a hack job.
Your company: There are people in the world who can speak with a customer or contact a group of customers, admit it brokèand leave the customer feeling happy and well taken care of. You need to find and hire at least one such person, possibly many, and have them handle these situations.
A 1 year break then back to the same is a pretty bad argument for making everyone learn a new OS.
I've always wondered if this is exactly what would happen if people managed to switch to Linux beyond say, 50% even. The eye-rolling RTFM attitude the Linux community is sometimes known for could actually be worse than the overall situation with Windows - because now you have novice users buying a Linux PC at Walmart that are not only unpatched, but there's no auto-update running on their OS, no Windows Defender-like app cutting off obvious ways to sneak in, and worst, no one interested in helping them.
But maybe it's just a narrow slice of the community earning that reputation, and at 50% there would be as many helpful Linux geeks as there are helpful Windows geeks now. Still no Linux Defender though - and it DOES have ways to sneak in!
The T-Mobile MDA is unbrickable.
The ROM is broken down into parts. Even if you screw up everything in the very large portion you can mess with, there's still enough smarts to respond to USB/ActiveSync from Windows XP and put a new ROM in there. Trust me - I've bricked it! And was very pleased to see very unbrickable it was.
It's really a very simple thing to do.