If your code is very valuable, it will almost certainly end up available to the whole world, even if you aren't the one who distributes it.
Bullshit. Especially in the web development world. You put it behind a server and let people run it but not see the code. No distribution happens and therefore there's no need to reveal your code.
Technically it's the responsibility of the person who stated the comments to prove truth, not the other way around.
That said, I agree with the other posts here: if the comment was stated as the summary says it was, it's an opinion, not a statement of fact, and thus can't be considered defamation.
FYI, I used to use Eclipse until RSE started having weird bugs; now I'm using plain ole gedit, which actually works really well (it has code highlighting built in for practically every language, and because it's one of the Gnome core apps, works well with GVFS).
A lot of people say vi is the best tool to use... I have used it a few times and haven't really found it all that great.
That's not a problem with computers in schools, that's a problem with the teaching syllabus.
Amen. Even here in Canada, I remember getting teachers for a "multimedia" course in high school that barely knew what they were talking about, and freaked out when I used a version of the software higher than what the school had.
Computers are necessary in that some of the students may want to learn how to do things on them, and in any case, they are a tool used in practically every business today. Kids will need to know how to use them, and not having them in schools will give those families who are too poor to afford them at home a disadvantage.
Fix the problem of the teachers, don't just say "there aren't any good classes on computers, thus we shouldn't have them at all". It's a similar argument used to defend the current private healthcare system in the United States -- and it doesn't hold water.
Agreed, and honestly, Linux is better for development, especially web development. SVN was built for *nix. Perl is native to *nix. Apache is native to *nix. PHP is native to *nix. MySQL is native to *nix. GVFS lets you edit files on a remote server directly. OpenOffice can output Word / Excel documents, though for Word docs I usually send both a.doc and a.pdf for nigh-guaranteed compatibility.
Ultimately though, work in the OS on which you're comfortable. All these things can be achieved through third party apps on Windows (even the FTP thing... look into WebDrive). If you have the time to try something new, though, install Ubuntu and give it a spin. I know my productivity is up because of it.
5) paypal will do for invoicing and billing. get a premier/business account and you'll be fine
Except you should never use PayPal if you can avoid it. Not only do they take 2.5% but they can and will freeze your account at any of over 100 fraud triggers, and sometimes will refuse to let you access your money for months at a time.
Guru.com is the best freelancing site I've seen so far. They seem to genuinely respect both sides of the equation, the clients and the freelancers. Compare that to, say, Elance, which seems to treat us like interchangeable cogs. And the built-in escrow is also very nice.
Brush up on your English. A well-written bid makes you stand out among the rest, especially when the rest come from east Europe, for example. This isn't to say that all businesses there are bad, but some most definitely lack decent writing skills, and if your bid is easier to read, it makes you look more professional, and thus makes the client more likely to choose you.
Bill by the hour on all but the smallest projects until you are actually running a business where it's more than just yourself and you have an idea of how much things will end up costing in the long run. Legitimate companies won't take this as a bad thing if you provide an estimate at the same time.
Build payment times into your contract. If at all possible, get all your pay up front in escrow, but if that's not possible, make sure you state something like Net 30 days as your payment terms in the initial contract. If not, you could get shafted really easily when a client takes three months to pay you.
Encourage repeat business. Get into a discussion with your clients about their business, and suggest areas where you could help them achieve their aims. A versatile web developer can do many things for a business.
Place what you'll do into the contract. I don't think you need a lawyer like some of the sibling posts here as long as you're specific. Scope creep can really, really suck if you let it happen.
Oh, and if you happen to need any help with PHP development, give me a shout.;^)
I disagree. I think you should estimate as best you can for larger projects, but quote a per-hour rate as your binding price. Try to stay as close within your estimate as possible, of course, but I believe the grandparent is correct: if you quote a binding fixed price, people will increase the scope over, and over, and over, and won't pay you until you've done way beyond what the initial contract states.
Quoting a per-hour rate makes things easy and puts forward a message that you will do things as quickly as possible, but that the client will pay for any work that you do. This attracts honest clients who are willing to pay for quality.
That's ultimately what I meant, though I think the quickest fix is to grant karma to funny mods. I don't agree that funny comments are somehow less valuable than others.
I strongly get the feeling that the Slashdot and/or Slashcode developers are succumbing to feature creep, and adding things to the system just for the sake of adding them, even when the system works fine. This seems to have started after the CSS redesign.
Slashdot isn't perfect. However, it's a damn sight better than a lot of other discussion sites out there, especially the moderation system.
Please don't fuck with it when it's not broken. There are things in it that are obviously broken, such as the fact that Funny mods don't grant karma. However, fundamentally changing a system that previously worked fine is, well, stupid.
Someone in the development chain seems to have the notion that metamoderation was too hard. It wasn't. The reason for this is that the people doing metamod are already committed to making Slashdot better. They will deal with the compexities involved because due the system's limits on who can access mod / metamod, they're already used to them.
Making it "easier" by removing features simply doesn't make sense.
The law allows anyone to do this, reformat it into something else and publish it.
You were right until you said "and publish it". Copyright protects the right to republish something. Creating a copy in a new media type is usually protected by fair use exemptions, but you don't have the right to republish it unless explicitly granted.
I think it makes sense to have a transition website. Calling it an "Office" is simply semantics, and I don't think he means to imply any sort of authority (note that he's repeatedly said that he respects the current administration's control until the inauguration).
Posting his communications on the campaign website wouldn't make much sense because it's no longer a campaign.
Not having a website at all would be completely at odds with the need to communicate with the people.
*Is* the Office of the President Elect a part of the federal government, though? AFAIK it's being run by the Obama-Biden Transition Project, which certainly isn't a federal office, regardless of it being hosted on a.gov domain.
I dunno, after taking an architecture class and learning an assembly language, I really, really prefer C for most things. Assembly is much lower level.
The PHP developer job looks very interesting. Unfortunately for now I'll have to wait until I'm done school (or at least the summer) to apply... and also until I get my US visa, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually taking a year off soon; depending on how things work I may look at that. Thanks for the suggestion :^)
Technically I already have a college diploma (Computer Programming from the community college here), but it would be nice to actually have the degree.
Goddammit... *hires a lawyer for the impending lawsuit*
Please explain, because I've read GPLv3 several times and haven't found a section stating that use translates to distribution.
Holy shit, that article is talking about me.
(And I'm not boasting here, I was in a gifted program in elementary and early high school, then shortly burned out midway through high school.)
I'm not good at studying and it's catching up with me now in university. Hmm... maybe this is an Ask Slashdot...
Bullshit. Especially in the web development world. You put it behind a server and let people run it but not see the code. No distribution happens and therefore there's no need to reveal your code.
Technically it's the responsibility of the person who stated the comments to prove truth, not the other way around.
That said, I agree with the other posts here: if the comment was stated as the summary says it was, it's an opinion, not a statement of fact, and thus can't be considered defamation.
FYI, I used to use Eclipse until RSE started having weird bugs; now I'm using plain ole gedit, which actually works really well (it has code highlighting built in for practically every language, and because it's one of the Gnome core apps, works well with GVFS).
A lot of people say vi is the best tool to use... I have used it a few times and haven't really found it all that great.
Amen. Even here in Canada, I remember getting teachers for a "multimedia" course in high school that barely knew what they were talking about, and freaked out when I used a version of the software higher than what the school had.
Computers are necessary in that some of the students may want to learn how to do things on them, and in any case, they are a tool used in practically every business today. Kids will need to know how to use them, and not having them in schools will give those families who are too poor to afford them at home a disadvantage.
Fix the problem of the teachers, don't just say "there aren't any good classes on computers, thus we shouldn't have them at all". It's a similar argument used to defend the current private healthcare system in the United States -- and it doesn't hold water.
Agreed, and honestly, Linux is better for development, especially web development. SVN was built for *nix. Perl is native to *nix. Apache is native to *nix. PHP is native to *nix. MySQL is native to *nix. GVFS lets you edit files on a remote server directly. OpenOffice can output Word / Excel documents, though for Word docs I usually send both a .doc and a .pdf for nigh-guaranteed compatibility.
Ultimately though, work in the OS on which you're comfortable. All these things can be achieved through third party apps on Windows (even the FTP thing... look into WebDrive). If you have the time to try something new, though, install Ubuntu and give it a spin. I know my productivity is up because of it.
Except you should never use PayPal if you can avoid it. Not only do they take 2.5% but they can and will freeze your account at any of over 100 fraud triggers, and sometimes will refuse to let you access your money for months at a time.
Cheques are good, wire transfers are better.
(Which, don't get me wrong, would be awesome. But don't discount Flash, the app... it's had a lot of time to evolve to meet the needs of animators.)
Guru.com is the best freelancing site I've seen so far. They seem to genuinely respect both sides of the equation, the clients and the freelancers. Compare that to, say, Elance, which seems to treat us like interchangeable cogs. And the built-in escrow is also very nice.
Brush up on your English. A well-written bid makes you stand out among the rest, especially when the rest come from east Europe, for example. This isn't to say that all businesses there are bad, but some most definitely lack decent writing skills, and if your bid is easier to read, it makes you look more professional, and thus makes the client more likely to choose you.
Bill by the hour on all but the smallest projects until you are actually running a business where it's more than just yourself and you have an idea of how much things will end up costing in the long run. Legitimate companies won't take this as a bad thing if you provide an estimate at the same time.
Build payment times into your contract. If at all possible, get all your pay up front in escrow, but if that's not possible, make sure you state something like Net 30 days as your payment terms in the initial contract. If not, you could get shafted really easily when a client takes three months to pay you.
Encourage repeat business. Get into a discussion with your clients about their business, and suggest areas where you could help them achieve their aims. A versatile web developer can do many things for a business.
Place what you'll do into the contract. I don't think you need a lawyer like some of the sibling posts here as long as you're specific. Scope creep can really, really suck if you let it happen.
Oh, and if you happen to need any help with PHP development, give me a shout. ;^)
I disagree. I think you should estimate as best you can for larger projects, but quote a per-hour rate as your binding price. Try to stay as close within your estimate as possible, of course, but I believe the grandparent is correct: if you quote a binding fixed price, people will increase the scope over, and over, and over, and won't pay you until you've done way beyond what the initial contract states.
Quoting a per-hour rate makes things easy and puts forward a message that you will do things as quickly as possible, but that the client will pay for any work that you do. This attracts honest clients who are willing to pay for quality.
Yeah, you go DO that. In the meanWHILE, I'm getting a sandwich.
And here I was thinking that GOTO was a bad thing.
That's ultimately what I meant, though I think the quickest fix is to grant karma to funny mods. I don't agree that funny comments are somehow less valuable than others.
I strongly get the feeling that the Slashdot and/or Slashcode developers are succumbing to feature creep, and adding things to the system just for the sake of adding them, even when the system works fine. This seems to have started after the CSS redesign.
Slashdot isn't perfect. However, it's a damn sight better than a lot of other discussion sites out there, especially the moderation system.
Please don't fuck with it when it's not broken. There are things in it that are obviously broken, such as the fact that Funny mods don't grant karma. However, fundamentally changing a system that previously worked fine is, well, stupid.
Someone in the development chain seems to have the notion that metamoderation was too hard. It wasn't. The reason for this is that the people doing metamod are already committed to making Slashdot better. They will deal with the compexities involved because due the system's limits on who can access mod / metamod, they're already used to them.
Making it "easier" by removing features simply doesn't make sense.
You were right until you said "and publish it". Copyright protects the right to republish something. Creating a copy in a new media type is usually protected by fair use exemptions, but you don't have the right to republish it unless explicitly granted.
I think it makes sense to have a transition website. Calling it an "Office" is simply semantics, and I don't think he means to imply any sort of authority (note that he's repeatedly said that he respects the current administration's control until the inauguration).
Posting his communications on the campaign website wouldn't make much sense because it's no longer a campaign.
Not having a website at all would be completely at odds with the need to communicate with the people.
What would you suggest he do?
*Is* the Office of the President Elect a part of the federal government, though? AFAIK it's being run by the Obama-Biden Transition Project, which certainly isn't a federal office, regardless of it being hosted on a .gov domain.
That said, Obama et al have responded to Lessig just a little while ago in making Change.gov licensed under CC-BY, rather than just a straight copyright. (You can also view the Change.gov copyright policy page.) Once again, I'm surprised and kinda shocked by how quickly they will respond to people. It's almost like they're responsible to the people or something.
Qbasic or shenanigans.
I dunno, after taking an architecture class and learning an assembly language, I really, really prefer C for most things. Assembly is much lower level.
(And yes, I realize the parent was a joke.)
MySQL:
PostgreSQL: <post><gress><Q><L>
These are correct because they are how I pronounce them, and I am always right. Always.
Eh.
Fun does not necessarily mean "relegated to idle".
I like my Slashdot to be varied.
The PHP developer job looks very interesting. Unfortunately for now I'll have to wait until I'm done school (or at least the summer) to apply... and also until I get my US visa, I suppose.