And yeah, I've been looking into taking some business courses myself for a while, actually. Haven't yet gotten around to it, though I'm currently in meetings with some like-minded geeks about starting a software company partnership. One of them (the main guy with the idea) apparently really liked a presentation I put together for one of my college courses (about a theoretical business based around my own open source software offering). We'll see how that turns out.
Somewhat off topic, but does anyone here still use Winamp, and like it? I know I do, and I don't really have any reason to switch at the moment...
Maybe some day when I'm bored I'll take a look at iTunes, but for now, I just need a fast, sleek player that lets me control my playlist. Winamp fits that for me.
That's one of the things I see often in a lot of these companies that praise "motivational techniques" in their HR departments; they don't ACTUALLY consider their employees valuable. I think this causes a vicious cycle as well: turnover increases due to the fact that employees don't feel important, and the managers then don't see employees as being important because they'll probably be gone in a month anyway. So they try to place the blame elsewhere, on "bad attitudes", not having enough "fun" on the job, etc., where the real problem is that the employees just aren't being respected as individuals by their superiors.
I found this to be worst when I was working at a call center; I swear, upper and middle management treated people there like children more than respected employees. Immediate supervisors were often easy to deal with, but when the problem starts from the top, it's nearly impossible to stop.
IMHO, this is a great compromise that protects the validity of Wikipedia while still allowing edits by anyone on the large majority of articles, and edits by 99% of people on even controversial ones.
In fact, it looks like they've taken a page from the Slashdot moderation system, which only takes something like the earliest 90% of accounts as possible moderators. This system (with certain exceptions, e.g., +1, Funny) has always worked pretty well for me, and I'm confident this one (with tweaking) will as well.
About five seconds after I posted the original comment, I knew someone would say that.
Problem is, I haven't heard of anyone using J# in at least a few years. Perhaps I just haven't been looking. Or perhaps it's because Microsoft's JVM has been sued out of existance and discontinued? Who knows...
Holy shit, I wish I had you back in high school. My Java course(s) would have been SO much more useful (not that they weren't already, but it really sounds like you knew what you were doing, whereas my teacher was actively researching the language as he taught).
Ah, but I wasn't arguing against confidentiality clauses (in fact, I said that those are one of the few exceptions that should be valid), only clauses that in effect start a new contract that begins after the employment terminates. Think about it; a confidentiality clause comes into effect once employment begins, whereas a non-compete clause comes into effect once an employment ends.
If your employee goes to your competitor a week before your release, and they subsequently (and quickly) release a product remarkably similar to your own, sue the hell out of the competitor and the employee for breaking the confidentiality clause; don't try to restrict the ability of your employees to earn a living once they leave your company.
An NDA is usually a separate contract anyway, the consideration of which is the ability to view the source code you already have.
At least, on a basic level. Personally, I'd say if you're aiming for broadness on your resume, Java will get you a lot further than C#. But then, it really depends on the type of company you're aiming at.
That is interesting, and I'd go as far as to say that Immigration was right to let them in in these circumstances. I hadn't heard about this before. Great post.
No, they are valid in many areas... but IMHO, should not be. The end of a contract should be exactly that: the end of the rights and responsibilities of the terms of the contract for both parties. There are some things, of course, that need to survive expiration (confidentiality, for example), but clauses like these in effect begin a new contract with the former employee upon their leaving the company, one that is beneficial ONLY to the company, and holds no consideration to the employee. This, by definition, is unenforceable (there must be a consideration in effect for both parties).
One may argue that the employment itself is the consideration, but in my view, once the employment ends, there shouldn't be any additional terms that come into effect.
Disclaimer: I don't (and have never) used a Mac, so I don't know entirely what the software is like. But you'd think that they'd have something similar to Thunderbird, where one can mark messages as Personal, Work, etc., and you'd think that Spotlight would respect that, or at least have an option for relegating your search to a certain class of emails. If this is not the case, that's definitely a feature that should be put in.
Cause, y'know, the immigration officer is so likely to believe that you're a refugee from the US. Even with the amount of civil liberties Americans are losing, they're not even close enough for it to be considered that they would be actively prosecuted upon their return (at least, not without them having broken laws equivalent to Canadian laws, which would then stop them from being able to enter in the first place).
If you want to see how hard it is to immigrate to Canada, check the forums at Road To Canada. It can often take a year or more to obtain Permanent Residency (our equivalent of your Green Card, and people are flat out refused all the time), then another three years before one can sit the Citizenship exam.
My girlfriend lives in the US, and I have carefully examined the different possibilities of Canadian immigration. I'm likely going to sponsor her as a member of the Family Class. Trust me when I say that if it were that easy to move up here, we already would have considered it.
These companies try to develop the best DRM technology because they know that the media companies are heavily, heavily lobbying on making DRM required in everything you see, hear, or experience. If their system becomes the one legislatively mandated, well then, you've got yourself a government-supported monopoly there, and a steady income from the licensing of the DRM technology, for which you can charge whatever you want.
Of course, if DRM becomes law, I'll be among the first to break it.
Because the majority of the shareholders are usually on the Board of Directors, who usually stand to profit as much as the CEO.
You're right though; I've never seen a merger that resulted in a company that was better than the sum of its parts, and 95% of the time it's resulted in something much worse.
A bit off-topic, but you can find many women on the internet today, and a lot of them are into gaming. The thing is, a lot of games are simply not designed to appeal to the majority of women, having testosterone-fueled themes like tons of violence and not a lot of social contact. Go into an online game like Puzzle Pirates, where team (crew)-based pillaging and working together is the way to make POE (money), and socio-political contact is the only way to truly advance within one's crew, and you'll see an almost even split of the sexes. It also helps that it's a puzzle game mostly, and has methods of play for both the casual gamer and someone looking for an exciting hours-long affair.
I met my girlfriend in that game, and many, many other people have done the same (I swear, last spring the game could have been renamed to Yohoho! Dating Pirates). It's all in where the game is targetted, and most games, sadly, are still targetted almost exclusively at males.
Yeah, the one thing about getting my laptop finally back in working order and using it over the desktop that I didn't like was that my laptop didn't have a number pad, which meant either playing NetHack (which I was currently addicted to) with the INCREDIBLY odd HJKL movement or not playing until I got a decent keyboard. To this day I still have a save file down in Gehennom waiting to be finished.
...what conclusion would YOU draw, when the brand new machine that you've had for 4 days, suddenly has a CD-Drive failure...
That it was dead on arrival, or at least, heavily damaged during shipping such that you didn't notice it until then. I did tech support for two years, and that's a much more likely conclusion than copy protection software causing the fault. Anyway, if you had called me, I would have sent you out a new drive in about ten minutes.
You just lost my respect. They're ALREADY flooding the network with bad and incomplete files.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe they should, y'know, embrace the internet and actually find a business model that works with the digital age? People want the song they just heard on the radio, and maybe that one from the other day, and maybe they'll take that other one their friend has. They don't want to have to go through the hassle of buying individual tracks when they can, through whatever effort, get them for free elsewhere.
Now, I've stated this countless times before here, but I'll say it again: An all-you-can-eat subscription model, with no DRM, fast downloads, and elegant searching and metadata (user ratings, lyrics, maybe liner notes with the files, etc.; I have a feeling this could be done with an extension to ID3), would have people flocking to use the service. Ease of use is a very valuable commodity if done right (as evidenced by iTunes, which is still an imperfect solution).
The thing is, the record companies don't see this and aren't prepared to take any risks; they make their money from artist-strangling contracts anyway, they'd rather things just stayed the same.
But they can't for the following reasons:
An MP3 file is NOT A PHYSICAL OBJECT.
And I'm not talking strictly about the MP3 format here either, I'm talking about any media file. You can't attempt to control how and where they are copied because it's just a series of ones and zeroes: If I wanted to, I could make 5,000 copies of an MP3 on my HDD and nobody would know. This brings us to the next reason, which is
DRM is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED.
DRM attempts to make a file behave like a physical object, when no matter what you do to those ones and zeroes, they're still ones and zeroes. Burn it to a CD, and you have a CD... with ones and zeroes on it, which can then be copied anywhere else. DRM attempts to artificially limit an advance in technology the impact of which the world has not seen since the printing press. People KNOW this. People WANT to be able to use their own technology. And that is why there will always be groups of people decoding and unencrypting DRM methods because they want to be able to use their OWN technology on what is, once they've purchased the rights to a media, their OWN FILE.
Even if you wrote the song, you can't control what I do with it on my hard drive.
By hook, crook, or payment, I will get the song in the format I want. Which would you rather it was? And I, like many others, are willing to pay a decent amount in order to get these files, but if you don't offer them to us, we'll get them on our own time, cutting you out of the loop on your own music. And the sad thing is, we know you, the artist, are an important part of that process, and we want to keep you making the songs (or videos, or other content) we like. But your business, be it by your own fault or the fault of your recording company, is not responding to the demand of the market, and in this case, the market is cutting out the middleman, because the market can now manufacture ITS OWN supply from the supply IT ALREADY HAS. This brings me to my next point:
Recording companies are UNNECESSARY.
In the age of the internet, artists can publish a file by copying it to a drive to which the internet has access, and telling people that it's there. In my ideal service, this drive would be full of open, high quality MP3 files available to those who paid the subscription fee, which could be run by a non-profit industry organization of some type (and I know there are tons of those in the music industry). Nowhere in here is it necessary for anyone to control how, where, and for how much an artist can publish his / her music; if they need software, they can buy it; if they need recording studios, they can rent them out. Anything else is artificial control over the industry and an attempt to dic
This is a much better email than the original, though I'm sure his / her heart was in the right place. Personally, I would casually mention the possibility of being liable for your customers actions near the end somewhere but I wouldn't be nearly as direct. I haven't looked at the laws recently but I would probably quote something from common carrier doctrine (I'm sure there's something that applies).
This is definitely something I was thinking about when I wrote my original comment -- where does "safety" stop and "control" begin? IMHO I think that blocking *outgoing* ports is quite a different action than limiting incoming traffic; it's essentially telling the customer that they *cannot* do something on the network. You may be right, it's definitely something to think about. I know I wouldn't want to have them as my ISP, however.
BTW, they weren't just blocking the BitTorrent common ports, they were actively filtering packets (per the grandparent). Again, there's a line that in my mind they have crossed when they start doing that; what if they start searching for certain phrases to block, certain domains, certain sites? They're then deciding where you can go and what you can say, which makes them de facto responsible for your actions (because if they are actively controlling them, they are no longer a common carrier).
This is how I understand it. IANAL so take my comments strictly as my own thoughts and with a grain of salt.
I feel really sorry for you. Switch ISPs now. Seriously. And while you're at it, publicize the fact that Cox Cable is censoring their traffic, and therefore no longer deserves the title of common carrier, and therefore is liable for the actions of their users.
Ironically, if you think about it, they're putting themselves in danger of getting a lawsuit from the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
Great post.
And yeah, I've been looking into taking some business courses myself for a while, actually. Haven't yet gotten around to it, though I'm currently in meetings with some like-minded geeks about starting a software company partnership. One of them (the main guy with the idea) apparently really liked a presentation I put together for one of my college courses (about a theoretical business based around my own open source software offering). We'll see how that turns out.
Somewhat off topic, but does anyone here still use Winamp, and like it? I know I do, and I don't really have any reason to switch at the moment...
Maybe some day when I'm bored I'll take a look at iTunes, but for now, I just need a fast, sleek player that lets me control my playlist. Winamp fits that for me.
That's one of the things I see often in a lot of these companies that praise "motivational techniques" in their HR departments; they don't ACTUALLY consider their employees valuable. I think this causes a vicious cycle as well: turnover increases due to the fact that employees don't feel important, and the managers then don't see employees as being important because they'll probably be gone in a month anyway. So they try to place the blame elsewhere, on "bad attitudes", not having enough "fun" on the job, etc., where the real problem is that the employees just aren't being respected as individuals by their superiors.
I found this to be worst when I was working at a call center; I swear, upper and middle management treated people there like children more than respected employees. Immediate supervisors were often easy to deal with, but when the problem starts from the top, it's nearly impossible to stop.
IMHO, this is a great compromise that protects the validity of Wikipedia while still allowing edits by anyone on the large majority of articles, and edits by 99% of people on even controversial ones.
In fact, it looks like they've taken a page from the Slashdot moderation system, which only takes something like the earliest 90% of accounts as possible moderators. This system (with certain exceptions, e.g., +1, Funny) has always worked pretty well for me, and I'm confident this one (with tweaking) will as well.
About five seconds after I posted the original comment, I knew someone would say that.
Problem is, I haven't heard of anyone using J# in at least a few years. Perhaps I just haven't been looking. Or perhaps it's because Microsoft's JVM has been sued out of existance and discontinued? Who knows...
Holy shit, I wish I had you back in high school. My Java course(s) would have been SO much more useful (not that they weren't already, but it really sounds like you knew what you were doing, whereas my teacher was actively researching the language as he taught).
Love means never asking your partner to prove it.
Ah, but I wasn't arguing against confidentiality clauses (in fact, I said that those are one of the few exceptions that should be valid), only clauses that in effect start a new contract that begins after the employment terminates. Think about it; a confidentiality clause comes into effect once employment begins, whereas a non-compete clause comes into effect once an employment ends.
If your employee goes to your competitor a week before your release, and they subsequently (and quickly) release a product remarkably similar to your own, sue the hell out of the competitor and the employee for breaking the confidentiality clause; don't try to restrict the ability of your employees to earn a living once they leave your company.
An NDA is usually a separate contract anyway, the consideration of which is the ability to view the source code you already have.
C# == MS Java.
At least, on a basic level. Personally, I'd say if you're aiming for broadness on your resume, Java will get you a lot further than C#. But then, it really depends on the type of company you're aiming at.
To clarify: You would have no problem with getting strip searched yourself?
(BTW, thankfully, this doesn't happen that much, and I have never been subject to it. I fly every month or so.)
That is interesting, and I'd go as far as to say that Immigration was right to let them in in these circumstances. I hadn't heard about this before. Great post.
No, they are valid in many areas... but IMHO, should not be. The end of a contract should be exactly that: the end of the rights and responsibilities of the terms of the contract for both parties. There are some things, of course, that need to survive expiration (confidentiality, for example), but clauses like these in effect begin a new contract with the former employee upon their leaving the company, one that is beneficial ONLY to the company, and holds no consideration to the employee. This, by definition, is unenforceable (there must be a consideration in effect for both parties).
One may argue that the employment itself is the consideration, but in my view, once the employment ends, there shouldn't be any additional terms that come into effect.
Disclaimer: I don't (and have never) used a Mac, so I don't know entirely what the software is like. But you'd think that they'd have something similar to Thunderbird, where one can mark messages as Personal, Work, etc., and you'd think that Spotlight would respect that, or at least have an option for relegating your search to a certain class of emails. If this is not the case, that's definitely a feature that should be put in.
Cause, y'know, the immigration officer is so likely to believe that you're a refugee from the US. Even with the amount of civil liberties Americans are losing, they're not even close enough for it to be considered that they would be actively prosecuted upon their return (at least, not without them having broken laws equivalent to Canadian laws, which would then stop them from being able to enter in the first place).
If you want to see how hard it is to immigrate to Canada, check the forums at Road To Canada. It can often take a year or more to obtain Permanent Residency (our equivalent of your Green Card, and people are flat out refused all the time), then another three years before one can sit the Citizenship exam.
My girlfriend lives in the US, and I have carefully examined the different possibilities of Canadian immigration. I'm likely going to sponsor her as a member of the Family Class. Trust me when I say that if it were that easy to move up here, we already would have considered it.
Oh, and if you're looking for an example...
These companies try to develop the best DRM technology because they know that the media companies are heavily, heavily lobbying on making DRM required in everything you see, hear, or experience. If their system becomes the one legislatively mandated, well then, you've got yourself a government-supported monopoly there, and a steady income from the licensing of the DRM technology, for which you can charge whatever you want.
Of course, if DRM becomes law, I'll be among the first to break it.
I do not know why shareholders allow it.
Because the majority of the shareholders are usually on the Board of Directors, who usually stand to profit as much as the CEO.
You're right though; I've never seen a merger that resulted in a company that was better than the sum of its parts, and 95% of the time it's resulted in something much worse.
A bit off-topic, but you can find many women on the internet today, and a lot of them are into gaming. The thing is, a lot of games are simply not designed to appeal to the majority of women, having testosterone-fueled themes like tons of violence and not a lot of social contact. Go into an online game like Puzzle Pirates, where team (crew)-based pillaging and working together is the way to make POE (money), and socio-political contact is the only way to truly advance within one's crew, and you'll see an almost even split of the sexes. It also helps that it's a puzzle game mostly, and has methods of play for both the casual gamer and someone looking for an exciting hours-long affair.
I met my girlfriend in that game, and many, many other people have done the same (I swear, last spring the game could have been renamed to Yohoho! Dating Pirates). It's all in where the game is targetted, and most games, sadly, are still targetted almost exclusively at males.
Yeah, the one thing about getting my laptop finally back in working order and using it over the desktop that I didn't like was that my laptop didn't have a number pad, which meant either playing NetHack (which I was currently addicted to) with the INCREDIBLY odd HJKL movement or not playing until I got a decent keyboard. To this day I still have a save file down in Gehennom waiting to be finished.
It dual boots?
...what conclusion would YOU draw, when the brand new machine that you've had for 4 days, suddenly has a CD-Drive failure...
That it was dead on arrival, or at least, heavily damaged during shipping such that you didn't notice it until then. I did tech support for two years, and that's a much more likely conclusion than copy protection software causing the fault. Anyway, if you had called me, I would have sent you out a new drive in about ten minutes.
Maybe if they flood the networks...
You just lost my respect. They're ALREADY flooding the network with bad and incomplete files.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe they should, y'know, embrace the internet and actually find a business model that works with the digital age? People want the song they just heard on the radio, and maybe that one from the other day, and maybe they'll take that other one their friend has. They don't want to have to go through the hassle of buying individual tracks when they can, through whatever effort, get them for free elsewhere.
Now, I've stated this countless times before here, but I'll say it again: An all-you-can-eat subscription model, with no DRM, fast downloads, and elegant searching and metadata (user ratings, lyrics, maybe liner notes with the files, etc.; I have a feeling this could be done with an extension to ID3), would have people flocking to use the service. Ease of use is a very valuable commodity if done right (as evidenced by iTunes, which is still an imperfect solution).
The thing is, the record companies don't see this and aren't prepared to take any risks; they make their money from artist-strangling contracts anyway, they'd rather things just stayed the same.
But they can't for the following reasons:
An MP3 file is NOT A PHYSICAL OBJECT.
And I'm not talking strictly about the MP3 format here either, I'm talking about any media file. You can't attempt to control how and where they are copied because it's just a series of ones and zeroes: If I wanted to, I could make 5,000 copies of an MP3 on my HDD and nobody would know. This brings us to the next reason, which is
DRM is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED.
DRM attempts to make a file behave like a physical object, when no matter what you do to those ones and zeroes, they're still ones and zeroes. Burn it to a CD, and you have a CD... with ones and zeroes on it, which can then be copied anywhere else. DRM attempts to artificially limit an advance in technology the impact of which the world has not seen since the printing press. People KNOW this. People WANT to be able to use their own technology. And that is why there will always be groups of people decoding and unencrypting DRM methods because they want to be able to use their OWN technology on what is, once they've purchased the rights to a media, their OWN FILE.
Even if you wrote the song, you can't control what I do with it on my hard drive.
By hook, crook, or payment, I will get the song in the format I want. Which would you rather it was? And I, like many others, are willing to pay a decent amount in order to get these files, but if you don't offer them to us, we'll get them on our own time, cutting you out of the loop on your own music. And the sad thing is, we know you, the artist, are an important part of that process, and we want to keep you making the songs (or videos, or other content) we like. But your business, be it by your own fault or the fault of your recording company, is not responding to the demand of the market, and in this case, the market is cutting out the middleman, because the market can now manufacture ITS OWN supply from the supply IT ALREADY HAS. This brings me to my next point:
Recording companies are UNNECESSARY.
In the age of the internet, artists can publish a file by copying it to a drive to which the internet has access, and telling people that it's there. In my ideal service, this drive would be full of open, high quality MP3 files available to those who paid the subscription fee, which could be run by a non-profit industry organization of some type (and I know there are tons of those in the music industry). Nowhere in here is it necessary for anyone to control how, where, and for how much an artist can publish his / her music; if they need software, they can buy it; if they need recording studios, they can rent them out. Anything else is artificial control over the industry and an attempt to dic
This is a much better email than the original, though I'm sure his / her heart was in the right place. Personally, I would casually mention the possibility of being liable for your customers actions near the end somewhere but I wouldn't be nearly as direct. I haven't looked at the laws recently but I would probably quote something from common carrier doctrine (I'm sure there's something that applies).
This is definitely something I was thinking about when I wrote my original comment -- where does "safety" stop and "control" begin? IMHO I think that blocking *outgoing* ports is quite a different action than limiting incoming traffic; it's essentially telling the customer that they *cannot* do something on the network. You may be right, it's definitely something to think about. I know I wouldn't want to have them as my ISP, however.
BTW, they weren't just blocking the BitTorrent common ports, they were actively filtering packets (per the grandparent). Again, there's a line that in my mind they have crossed when they start doing that; what if they start searching for certain phrases to block, certain domains, certain sites? They're then deciding where you can go and what you can say, which makes them de facto responsible for your actions (because if they are actively controlling them, they are no longer a common carrier).
This is how I understand it. IANAL so take my comments strictly as my own thoughts and with a grain of salt.
I feel really sorry for you. Switch ISPs now. Seriously. And while you're at it, publicize the fact that Cox Cable is censoring their traffic, and therefore no longer deserves the title of common carrier, and therefore is liable for the actions of their users.
Ironically, if you think about it, they're putting themselves in danger of getting a lawsuit from the RIAA.