Recently, however, I have begun to realize that for the past two years they haven't really done much for me, yet they still get a commission for every hour I work.
First and foremost, learn to question your assumptions. You say "they haven't done much for me" but they still get money for your work. Thing is, you HAVE work -- you seem to think that striking out on your own would also include full-time occupation, and I can tell you right off, that's almost certainly not true. The reason so many consultants ask $75 or even $100 per hour is because they're lucky, especially now, to find 6 months of full time work per year. So, have something lined up before you quit!
Also, be careful about what you decide to take. You may have signed something with your consulting firm promising not to compete or poach customers for a year after your contract; their client (where you work) almost certainly signed a similar document promising only to hire you through them. See if any friends or family can help you out with something, anything small. That's your advantage, IMO, as a completely independent dude: you can take any job, even 40 hours over 3 weeks for 2-3 grand, that a bigger firm wouldn't consider. Capitalize on this.
Don't quit even when you line something up! Try to do whatever work it is, after hours and on weekends, or scale back your day job duties by 5-10 hours per week. But your firm is a great way to make contacts, so don't dump it until you're SURE you're ready. How will you know? If you don't know, it's not time.
That said, I would seriously recommend taking steps towards being independent. I've been independent all year now, and there have been a couple of scary months, but it's been fun and I've learned a LOT. The way I work is this: I formed a LLC in my home state of Michigan at the advice of an accountant (oh yeah - get a good one of those, too) because of the way it helps with taxes. Now, since I'm a software consultant, all of my computer equipment is bought before taxes. I get to deduct car expenses for time spent driving to work. I can start my own Keough retirement plan, and my health insurance (while minimal) is 70% tax deductible. There's too many advantages to mention. Just email me if you want to talk about it.
But definitely be careful and don't piss off any connections that might do you well later. And DON'T go behind your agency's back and ask one of their clients to illegally break the agreement -- you'll just look like a slimeball who can't deal with the real world.
Sometimes. Sometimes less. I actually ran into this problem with my old DsL connection; I couldn't reach the "My Yahoo" series of sites, of all places. I don't know about a full-blown academic paper on the subject, but here are a couple of references you might find useful if you're on PPPoE and you find sites mysteriously unreachable:
Basically, what you do is ratchet down the MTU until you can see the sites you weren't able to before. It might only need to be reduced to 1492; maybe lower, though.
These were both near the top of the google list for their respective searches; dozens more are obviously available through the same proceedure.
Well, I was talking about the old school Sun mice that were *supposed* to require a grid-based mousepad. With no modification at all, a lot of them worked on any old surface.
Hence, I was expressing surprise that this one could apparently NOT accomplish a similar feat.
At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology, the description of this thing makes it sound a bit kludgy. It appears to basically be an optical-mouse element tracking a regular ballpoint pen.
Of course the ability to digitally record your penstrokes is super cool (and I wonder how much memory is in there? How long could I write before I had to dump it?), but requiring the digital paper to go along with it... well, that smacks of Gillette's approach to razorblades.
Initially, I thought it was going to be some kind of system for actually tracking the literal ball that does the writing. THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot. Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad, so I wonder if there's a chance this would work on regular paper...
Um... I did say "per metro area"... let's face it, the topic is travel and most people who travel (and need dialup on the road) are going to cities for business. My point was that you don't need to have zillions of numbers, as long as they're well-distributed to AVOID ld charges.
I though AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS...
Precisely. In fact, the first experience I had with AOL was when some guy was touting it as "way better" than the local BBS's we were all dialing up to. We thought he was a freak for paying for access. Oh, how times change.
The article goes on to make the excellent point that this was always the real point of AOL, until it got taken over by MBAs in the mid-late 90s and they started implementing the "herd of eyeballs for sale" mentality In fact, this might be the *real* root cause of AOL's problems: a shift of focus from custom to advertiser, a plummet in the ad rates, and no corresponding reason to stick around.
Ultimately I think AOL will be doomed even if they can turn it around and create an excellent customer experience, because as much as it's "a halfway house" between people and the internet, it's a full-service one: it takes a lot of resources to maintain community features people like. As they shift to lower-margin broadband connections, I think they'll just be squeezed out. Unless broadband wholesale prices are regulated *way* down.
As much as I hate to draw the parallel, sites like SlashDot are actually starting to fill the need that AOL used to in this regard, albeit on a smaller scale. Especially with the new friend/foe system and the journaling, all we need is "/.IM" for this to be a full-featured nerd community a-la AOL forums. Of course, slashdot isn't immune from the need to make a profit, and I'm not entirely clear on how they're proceeding towards that end. Guess time will tell. But it seems like AOL might not be a significant part of the picture for much longer.
Yes, but for the mephistophelian price of installing AOL 6 (or 7 or 8 or whatever) and letting it take over all of your network connections.
The "most access numbers" statistic is sort of a chimera; you really only need 1 or 2 per metro area, it's the *traffic* on those numbers that's important. That said, I've had excellent experience dialing up to EarthLink in almost every (US) location I've ever been to, and I can almost always get a line by the 2nd call, while my brother across the room tries to dial the local AOL number for half an hour.
Also, as a plus over some of the "local + roaming" others are mentioning in this thread, I don't think EarthLink costs more depending on where you are. I've used a corporate account at several locations and had no complaints from the accounting department about charges.
I'm not a salesperson for EarthLink, but it just seems way preferable to AOL even if they technically have "more" dial up numbers.
Just for the record, though, this means "x86 systems," not "pure Intel-with-a-sticker" systems. So Athlons aren't excluded; I'd wager that a good portion of production servers actually are vulnerable. Sure, there's apache on solaris, but apache on x86 is pretty damn popular.
Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic?
Ah, but I think that's kind of the point: when something seems to be wrong with my car, me not being a leet car haxor, I take it to the shop and explain to the technician the problem I'm having.
I have never, for instance, been tempted to stuff the engine with padding to make a rattling noise stop, or tear out all the wires in the rear so I can attach a new engine "so it'll work the way I want it to." That's the point that's hilarious for me; some of these users are so clueless without realizing they're clueless.
Re:I've got your challange right here...
on
Haiku vs Spam
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· Score: 2
Right on. The *real* problem with this system is that it assumes all mail is spam unless it has their special "watermark" -- really just another header. This would require pretty much everyone on the internet to use the special headers, or be counted as a spammer.
It is kind of smart, adding a copyrighted/trademarked tag to an email that says "I am not spam" -- then you have the prerogative to sue the spammers who steal it. However, I think it's kind of a catch-22: such a system can only work if it's proprietary and has a company to back it up with, let's face it, gazillions of lawsuits against violating spammers. However, this same "feature" pretty much ensures that it won't find its way into very popular usage.
All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place..
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
"Your honor, the basis of our complaint is that MS used dirty tricks to get everyone to buy their stuff, and now the underhanded bastards are working to maintain market share by pleasing their customers! C'mon, make 'em stop!"
The only bad business practices MS used to establish their monopoly were the artificial incompatibility with PC-DOS, and the way they dumped OS/2 like a poisoned turd in favor of the win32 API (both detailed at this page).
But, IBM was still shipping OS/2; were the enhanced features of windows 95 perhaps offered to compete with the only genuine alternative at the time?
And AIDS is less dangerous to society functioning normally because it's less panic-inducing, since you can't get it from breathing the air near a sick person or corpse.
Um... I might take issue with that. I mean, obviously AIDS isn't communicated by air, but it is going to be extremely disruptive to several African nations over the next couple of decades. Here's why.
First of all, AIDS is communicated sexually, which means it is spread most rapidly among people aged 15-30 or so, which is the most sexually active time in your life, and also the prime working age for people in those cultures. So, yes, it might "only" be 10-20% of people there who die, but it will probably be the tenth-to-a-fifth of the most productive people in the culture.
Furthermore, there is SO much disinformation about AIDS in many African nations that it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. It's often viewed as a curse that can be absolved by praying and as such, not contagious by any kind of human transmission. Some cultures even believe that you can "un-AIDS" yourself by - get this - having sex with a virgin.
So, no, you can't get AIDS by breathing the same air as someone who has it. But that doesn't make it un-disruptive to a society. At all.
Never abandon an interface convention!
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's the best peice of software design advice I've ever received. It came up during a discussion of windows 95, back when that was new, when we noticed that you can still click on the upper left corner of a windows app and get the window menu, or double-click there and close a window, just like you've been able to since windows 3. Really - try it!
Unfortunately, that's about the only prominent example of MS following that advice. After years of working on windows NT 4, for instance, I finally convinced myself to leap to win2k because the amount of supported hardware was just so much better. And I had NO idea how to administrate my machine! Just trying to partition my drives was a huge hassle; I used to be able to open up the disk management node in the control panel and now... well, I found it; it's in "administrative tools -> computer management."
Which is fine, but it was somewhere else for so LONG. Would it REALLY have hurt to leave a link to that program from its old place? And the sad thing is, MS isn't really the worst offender. I'm thoroughly confused every time I get a new version of KDE; in some ways, I'd be just peachy on using KDE 1 just because I remember how to configure it so well (and I would, except that the mail client sucks prior to version 2.2).
In all, I think there needs to be a good deal more attention paid to interface design before the FIRST release. Because, for better or worse, the first interface you give someone is the one they're going to expect from your product. If it sucks, you're just going to be pressured to maintain a sucky interface, or frustrate your customers when you discard what they're familiar with.
A good tactic is to ask for a real world problem they are facing right now, and give them your 30 second "from the tip of my tongue" solution. If the person interviewing comes away from it with a couple new ideas it will help get you in the door.
Hey, that's quite a good interview question! One of my main problems is that I can never think of any and walk away looking like a dunce.
Okay, I'm going to blow my mod priviledges in this thread to ask you a followup question:
#1 - Accept the fact you'll most likely make less money than your last position.
#2 - Don't accept less money than you're worth. With #1 being said, don't short sell yourself either.
How do we, as developers, get a good hold on this? Should we put any stock at all in those online "salary comparisons" that say a person with job X in market Y makes $Z?
Part of my problem is that I'm relocating to a new market with a significantly higher cost of living than my old place. So I don't know if I should be asking for about the SAME as my last position, figuring that the market difference will make that "lower," or go even LOWER than my old salary and live like a peon.
That, and how does the salary requirement influence you? Do you require it on resumes/monster searches, and just toss out the ones that have unreal demands? Personally, I'd rather just interview and then discuss what a reasonable salary would be if it seems like a good fit.
Re:This could be done today...
on
P2P Television?
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· Score: 1
I have a Pentium 2 400 machine in my bedroom. It has a Hauppage WinTV card ($49, $99 for stereo) and the PicVideo Motion JPEG Codec.
Hey! Kinda offtopic here, but what OS do you use? I want to get a TV card but I refuse to use win98 or ME... anything that works with win2k or linux would be super.
"Today Ralph Nader and I wrote U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels to ask the federal government to use its power as a big consumer to address competition issues in the market for PC client software.
Um... okay, but is it really the perogative of the OMB to "use its power" that way? According to the OMB's own site, it "evaluates the effectiveness of agency programs, policies, and procedures, assesses competing funding demands among agencies, and sets funding priorities." In other words, it's an executive agency designed to ensure that the US taxpayers get the most bang for their buck, efficiency-wise, not to make political statements about reforming corporate behavior. That said,
These are some of the practices we want OMB to examine: OMB is asked to provide information on federal expenditures for Microsoft products, determine if a software "monoculture" makes the federal government more vulnerable to computer viruses or unauthorized access to federal computers,
... this is still a good idea. Seems like the OMB would be entirely interested in making sure that computers and software bought with fed dollars aren't going to be easily hacked.
and to consider a number of strategies to use the US government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft behave;
But this, no no no. This is still a judicial matter, and any penalty against MS is going to be determined in court. An executive agency would be way overstepping its bounds here.
OMB is asked to consider if Microsoft should be required (as a matter of procurement policy) to fully disclose the file formats of its office productivity and multimedia programs, so that the data created in such programs could be reliably read by non-Microsoft software
Yargh! But THIS is another good idea. Again, it's in the financial interest of the country to make sure we're not "locked in" to certain contractors who could then baloon their prices. Not that that ever happens...
So basically, I think there are some good ideas here with regard to protecting the federal government's investment in software and making sure they're not going down any paths simply because MS wants them to, but trying to wreck the monopoly just isn't in the charter of the OMB. Sorry.
Ha! Buy your own show!
on
Homogenized Music
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If you wanted your own daily radio show, Clear Channel would sell you the time for about $1,200 an hour.
Wow! That's really sad and kind of cool at the same time. It shows that a lot of their stuff really is basically extended commercial time, but it's also a chance for something else to slip in the lineup.
Think about it. For about $300 grand (yes I KNOW that's a lot), pretty much anyone could have his own show for an hour a day on weekdays, all year long. Now they probably wouldn't let you do anything "subversive" like rant on about corporate radio sucking, BUT: why not get a coalition of several dozen smaller labels together to get a show?
Clearchannel stations are by nature large-market ones, and if you picked a slot at like 3 or 4 pm, you would get kids after school and it would be before the "rush hour" slot that's so valuable. Say 50 labels chipped in, they could each get at least a couple songs on per week, and take some time to promote local shows, websites, band interviews, and all that.
And since the labels themselves are putting together the shows, rights shouldn't be an issue. I'm sure I'm missing a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but it SOUNDS so neat... *sigh*
Often the recording software shuts down at points where I paused recording because it somehow thinks Macrovision is active. It's really annoying.
Hi, would you do me a favor and type that up, with a little more detail, and submit it here? It would probably be one of the most pertinent comments to date.
Is it only piracy if you rip copyrighted material that has made its way to DVD?
Well... sort of. As far as I'm concerned. I used to tape the reruns off TV, is that piracy, too? All I'm doing is filling holes in my collection. I already bought the season 1 DVDs, and will most likely get season 2 as soon as it comes out.
If you think that a 40 or 50M mpeg is anything like a replacement for DVD-quality audio and video (and therefore an excuse to not buy the DVD), you must not have watched one.
I'm assuming users that download this file must specifically execute it. If this is true, then IMHO any person who downloads an unknown.exe from a P2P network and runs it without at least scanning it, deservers what they get.
Oh come on, cut some slack. You know as well as everyone that non-exe files are associated with an app based on extension, and double clicking (for example) an mp3 file opens it in WinAmp. So if this thing gets downloaded and aliased as "Simpsons Theme.mp3", you should be able to forgive people for double-clicking on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, however, I have begun to realize that for the past two years they haven't really done much for me, yet they still get a commission for every hour I work.
First and foremost, learn to question your assumptions. You say "they haven't done much for me" but they still get money for your work. Thing is, you HAVE work -- you seem to think that striking out on your own would also include full-time occupation, and I can tell you right off, that's almost certainly not true. The reason so many consultants ask $75 or even $100 per hour is because they're lucky, especially now, to find 6 months of full time work per year. So, have something lined up before you quit!
Also, be careful about what you decide to take. You may have signed something with your consulting firm promising not to compete or poach customers for a year after your contract; their client (where you work) almost certainly signed a similar document promising only to hire you through them. See if any friends or family can help you out with something, anything small. That's your advantage, IMO, as a completely independent dude: you can take any job, even 40 hours over 3 weeks for 2-3 grand, that a bigger firm wouldn't consider. Capitalize on this.
Don't quit even when you line something up! Try to do whatever work it is, after hours and on weekends, or scale back your day job duties by 5-10 hours per week. But your firm is a great way to make contacts, so don't dump it until you're SURE you're ready. How will you know? If you don't know, it's not time.
That said, I would seriously recommend taking steps towards being independent. I've been independent all year now, and there have been a couple of scary months, but it's been fun and I've learned a LOT. The way I work is this: I formed a LLC in my home state of Michigan at the advice of an accountant (oh yeah - get a good one of those, too) because of the way it helps with taxes. Now, since I'm a software consultant, all of my computer equipment is bought before taxes. I get to deduct car expenses for time spent driving to work. I can start my own Keough retirement plan, and my health insurance (while minimal) is 70% tax deductible. There's too many advantages to mention. Just email me if you want to talk about it.
But definitely be careful and don't piss off any connections that might do you well later. And DON'T go behind your agency's back and ask one of their clients to illegally break the agreement -- you'll just look like a slimeball who can't deal with the real world.
but i think they should also add an "idiot" classification. that way you can mod down people who say assinine stuff but aren't trying to be dicks.
If that's the real motivation, then how about "Uninformed" or "Incorrect" rather than something generally taken as a value judgement, like "idiot"?
If they could sell it at $45 and make a profit, then their costs are less than $45, so the margin is ($300-$45)/$45 = 567% by my count.
It's been hashed out extensively in this thread what profit margin is; what you're referring to is called Return On Investment. Just FYI.
In THEORY. Communism works, in THEORY.
For PPPoE links this should be set to 1492.
4 /
u r_Modem_with_MTU_and_MRU.html
Sometimes. Sometimes less. I actually ran into this problem with my old DsL connection; I couldn't reach the "My Yahoo" series of sites, of all places. I don't know about a full-blown academic paper on the subject, but here are a couple of references you might find useful if you're on PPPoE and you find sites mysteriously unreachable:
windows : http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/110
Linux: http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/Modems/Tweaking_Yo
Basically, what you do is ratchet down the MTU until you can see the sites you weren't able to before. It might only need to be reduced to 1492; maybe lower, though.
These were both near the top of the google list for their respective searches; dozens more are obviously available through the same proceedure.
Well, I was talking about the old school Sun mice that were *supposed* to require a grid-based mousepad. With no modification at all, a lot of them worked on any old surface.
Hence, I was expressing surprise that this one could apparently NOT accomplish a similar feat.
At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology, the description of this thing makes it sound a bit kludgy. It appears to basically be an optical-mouse element tracking a regular ballpoint pen.
Of course the ability to digitally record your penstrokes is super cool (and I wonder how much memory is in there? How long could I write before I had to dump it?), but requiring the digital paper to go along with it... well, that smacks of Gillette's approach to razorblades.
Initially, I thought it was going to be some kind of system for actually tracking the literal ball that does the writing. THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot. Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad, so I wonder if there's a chance this would work on regular paper...
Um... I did say "per metro area"... let's face it, the topic is travel and most people who travel (and need dialup on the road) are going to cities for business. My point was that you don't need to have zillions of numbers, as long as they're well-distributed to AVOID ld charges.
I though AOL was based on the idea of a super-BBS...
Precisely. In fact, the first experience I had with AOL was when some guy was touting it as "way better" than the local BBS's we were all dialing up to. We thought he was a freak for paying for access. Oh, how times change.
The article goes on to make the excellent point that this was always the real point of AOL, until it got taken over by MBAs in the mid-late 90s and they started implementing the "herd of eyeballs for sale" mentality In fact, this might be the *real* root cause of AOL's problems: a shift of focus from custom to advertiser, a plummet in the ad rates, and no corresponding reason to stick around.
Ultimately I think AOL will be doomed even if they can turn it around and create an excellent customer experience, because as much as it's "a halfway house" between people and the internet, it's a full-service one: it takes a lot of resources to maintain community features people like. As they shift to lower-margin broadband connections, I think they'll just be squeezed out. Unless broadband wholesale prices are regulated *way* down.
As much as I hate to draw the parallel, sites like SlashDot are actually starting to fill the need that AOL used to in this regard, albeit on a smaller scale. Especially with the new friend/foe system and the journaling, all we need is "/.IM" for this to be a full-featured nerd community a-la AOL forums. Of course, slashdot isn't immune from the need to make a profit, and I'm not entirely clear on how they're proceeding towards that end. Guess time will tell. But it seems like AOL might not be a significant part of the picture for much longer.
Yes, but for the mephistophelian price of installing AOL 6 (or 7 or 8 or whatever) and letting it take over all of your network connections.
The "most access numbers" statistic is sort of a chimera; you really only need 1 or 2 per metro area, it's the *traffic* on those numbers that's important. That said, I've had excellent experience dialing up to EarthLink in almost every (US) location I've ever been to, and I can almost always get a line by the 2nd call, while my brother across the room tries to dial the local AOL number for half an hour.
Also, as a plus over some of the "local + roaming" others are mentioning in this thread, I don't think EarthLink costs more depending on where you are. I've used a corporate account at several locations and had no complaints from the accounting department about charges.
I'm not a salesperson for EarthLink, but it just seems way preferable to AOL even if they technically have "more" dial up numbers.
Just for the record, though, this means "x86 systems," not "pure Intel-with-a-sticker" systems. So Athlons aren't excluded; I'd wager that a good portion of production servers actually are vulnerable. Sure, there's apache on solaris, but apache on x86 is pretty damn popular.
Can you fix your car every time something goes wrong, or do you take it into a mechanic?
Ah, but I think that's kind of the point: when something seems to be wrong with my car, me not being a leet car haxor, I take it to the shop and explain to the technician the problem I'm having.
I have never, for instance, been tempted to stuff the engine with padding to make a rattling noise stop, or tear out all the wires in the rear so I can attach a new engine "so it'll work the way I want it to." That's the point that's hilarious for me; some of these users are so clueless without realizing they're clueless.
Right on. The *real* problem with this system is that it assumes all mail is spam unless it has their special "watermark" -- really just another header. This would require pretty much everyone on the internet to use the special headers, or be counted as a spammer.
It is kind of smart, adding a copyrighted/trademarked tag to an email that says "I am not spam" -- then you have the prerogative to sue the spammers who steal it. However, I think it's kind of a catch-22: such a system can only work if it's proprietary and has a company to back it up with, let's face it, gazillions of lawsuits against violating spammers. However, this same "feature" pretty much ensures that it won't find its way into very popular usage.
All of the features you mention really didn't exist until long AFTER Microsoft had their monopoly firmly in place..
Hm. Adding useful features to please the user *after* a monopoly is already established. How much sense does that make?
"Your honor, the basis of our complaint is that MS used dirty tricks to get everyone to buy their stuff, and now the underhanded bastards are working to maintain market share by pleasing their customers! C'mon, make 'em stop!"
The only bad business practices MS used to establish their monopoly were the artificial incompatibility with PC-DOS, and the way they dumped OS/2 like a poisoned turd in favor of the win32 API (both detailed at this page).
But, IBM was still shipping OS/2; were the enhanced features of windows 95 perhaps offered to compete with the only genuine alternative at the time?
And AIDS is less dangerous to society functioning normally because it's less panic-inducing, since you can't get it from breathing the air near a sick person or corpse.
Um... I might take issue with that. I mean, obviously AIDS isn't communicated by air, but it is going to be extremely disruptive to several African nations over the next couple of decades. Here's why.
First of all, AIDS is communicated sexually, which means it is spread most rapidly among people aged 15-30 or so, which is the most sexually active time in your life, and also the prime working age for people in those cultures. So, yes, it might "only" be 10-20% of people there who die, but it will probably be the tenth-to-a-fifth of the most productive people in the culture.
Furthermore, there is SO much disinformation about AIDS in many African nations that it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. It's often viewed as a curse that can be absolved by praying and as such, not contagious by any kind of human transmission. Some cultures even believe that you can "un-AIDS" yourself by - get this - having sex with a virgin.
So, no, you can't get AIDS by breathing the same air as someone who has it. But that doesn't make it un-disruptive to a society. At all.
That's the best peice of software design advice I've ever received. It came up during a discussion of windows 95, back when that was new, when we noticed that you can still click on the upper left corner of a windows app and get the window menu, or double-click there and close a window, just like you've been able to since windows 3. Really - try it!
Unfortunately, that's about the only prominent example of MS following that advice. After years of working on windows NT 4, for instance, I finally convinced myself to leap to win2k because the amount of supported hardware was just so much better. And I had NO idea how to administrate my machine! Just trying to partition my drives was a huge hassle; I used to be able to open up the disk management node in the control panel and now... well, I found it; it's in "administrative tools -> computer management."
Which is fine, but it was somewhere else for so LONG. Would it REALLY have hurt to leave a link to that program from its old place? And the sad thing is, MS isn't really the worst offender. I'm thoroughly confused every time I get a new version of KDE; in some ways, I'd be just peachy on using KDE 1 just because I remember how to configure it so well (and I would, except that the mail client sucks prior to version 2.2).
In all, I think there needs to be a good deal more attention paid to interface design before the FIRST release. Because, for better or worse, the first interface you give someone is the one they're going to expect from your product. If it sucks, you're just going to be pressured to maintain a sucky interface, or frustrate your customers when you discard what they're familiar with.
A good tactic is to ask for a real world problem they are facing right now, and give them your 30 second "from the tip of my tongue" solution. If the person interviewing comes away from it with a couple new ideas it will help get you in the door.
Hey, that's quite a good interview question! One of my main problems is that I can never think of any and walk away looking like a dunce.
Thanks for your informative response...
Okay, I'm going to blow my mod priviledges in this thread to ask you a followup question:
#1 - Accept the fact you'll most likely make less money than your last position.
#2 - Don't accept less money than you're worth. With #1 being said, don't short sell yourself either.
How do we, as developers, get a good hold on this? Should we put any stock at all in those online "salary comparisons" that say a person with job X in market Y makes $Z?
Part of my problem is that I'm relocating to a new market with a significantly higher cost of living than my old place. So I don't know if I should be asking for about the SAME as my last position, figuring that the market difference will make that "lower," or go even LOWER than my old salary and live like a peon.
That, and how does the salary requirement influence you? Do you require it on resumes/monster searches, and just toss out the ones that have unreal demands? Personally, I'd rather just interview and then discuss what a reasonable salary would be if it seems like a good fit.
I have a Pentium 2 400 machine in my bedroom. It has a Hauppage WinTV card ($49, $99 for stereo) and the PicVideo Motion JPEG Codec.
Hey! Kinda offtopic here, but what OS do you use? I want to get a TV card but I refuse to use win98 or ME... anything that works with win2k or linux would be super.
"Today Ralph Nader and I wrote U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels to ask the federal government to use its power as a big consumer to address competition issues in the market for PC client software.
Um... okay, but is it really the perogative of the OMB to "use its power" that way? According to the OMB's own site, it "evaluates the effectiveness of agency programs, policies, and procedures, assesses competing funding demands among agencies, and sets funding priorities." In other words, it's an executive agency designed to ensure that the US taxpayers get the most bang for their buck, efficiency-wise, not to make political statements about reforming corporate behavior. That said,
These are some of the practices we want OMB to examine: OMB is asked to provide information on federal expenditures for Microsoft products, determine if a software "monoculture" makes the federal government more vulnerable to computer viruses or unauthorized access to federal computers,
... this is still a good idea. Seems like the OMB would be entirely interested in making sure that computers and software bought with fed dollars aren't going to be easily hacked.
and to consider a number of strategies to use the US government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft behave;
But this, no no no. This is still a judicial matter, and any penalty against MS is going to be determined in court. An executive agency would be way overstepping its bounds here.
OMB is asked to consider if Microsoft should be required (as a matter of procurement policy) to fully disclose the file formats of its office productivity and multimedia programs, so that the data created in such programs could be reliably read by non-Microsoft software
Yargh! But THIS is another good idea. Again, it's in the financial interest of the country to make sure we're not "locked in" to certain contractors who could then baloon their prices. Not that that ever happens...
So basically, I think there are some good ideas here with regard to protecting the federal government's investment in software and making sure they're not going down any paths simply because MS wants them to, but trying to wreck the monopoly just isn't in the charter of the OMB. Sorry.
If you wanted your own daily radio show, Clear Channel would sell you the time for about $1,200 an hour.
Wow! That's really sad and kind of cool at the same time. It shows that a lot of their stuff really is basically extended commercial time, but it's also a chance for something else to slip in the lineup.
Think about it. For about $300 grand (yes I KNOW that's a lot), pretty much anyone could have his own show for an hour a day on weekdays, all year long. Now they probably wouldn't let you do anything "subversive" like rant on about corporate radio sucking, BUT: why not get a coalition of several dozen smaller labels together to get a show?
Clearchannel stations are by nature large-market ones, and if you picked a slot at like 3 or 4 pm, you would get kids after school and it would be before the "rush hour" slot that's so valuable. Say 50 labels chipped in, they could each get at least a couple songs on per week, and take some time to promote local shows, websites, band interviews, and all that.
And since the labels themselves are putting together the shows, rights shouldn't be an issue. I'm sure I'm missing a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but it SOUNDS so neat... *sigh*
Man, everyone in the theater laughed when that started. And it's pretty much the best part of the movie, so don't bother going at this point.
Often the recording software shuts down at points where I paused recording because it somehow thinks Macrovision is active. It's really annoying.
Hi, would you do me a favor and type that up, with a little more detail, and submit it here? It would probably be one of the most pertinent comments to date.
Thanks!
Is it only piracy if you rip copyrighted material that has made its way to DVD?
Well... sort of. As far as I'm concerned. I used to tape the reruns off TV, is that piracy, too? All I'm doing is filling holes in my collection. I already bought the season 1 DVDs, and will most likely get season 2 as soon as it comes out.
If you think that a 40 or 50M mpeg is anything like a replacement for DVD-quality audio and video (and therefore an excuse to not buy the DVD), you must not have watched one.
I'm assuming users that download this file must specifically execute it. If this is true, then IMHO any person who downloads an unknown .exe from a P2P network and runs it without at least scanning it, deservers what they get.
Oh come on, cut some slack. You know as well as everyone that non-exe files are associated with an app based on extension, and double clicking (for example) an mp3 file opens it in WinAmp. So if this thing gets downloaded and aliased as "Simpsons Theme.mp3", you should be able to forgive people for double-clicking on it.