By the Miami map, Milk isn't pseudo-intellectual, it's a clear marker of high gay population in the zip code. Interestingly, it seems that even the straights in the gay neighborhoods were renting it.
Unless you actually have nothing to hide... I know, unlikely in a large organization, but if you really do run a clean ship, they've got nothing unless they lie, and if you catch them in a lie, treble damages for all expenses incurred should be an easy win.
Nope. Even if you're 100% legal, BSA just makes stuff up. Remember, they don't consider possession of the original media (even at a 1:1 ratio of media to installations) as sufficient to indicate that a copy is legal. Nor do the little hologram stickers for Windows mean anything. No; they want the original purchase receipt, with the same company name and address and everything. (if your company bought another company... sorry bud, BSA won't consider the copies acquired from the company you bought to be legal, receipt or no)
Of course, black letter copyright law does not back them up at all on this. But they've got that $150,000 nuclear option if you lose in court, so, you feel lucky, punk?
As crappy as all this is, it truly is just the cost of doing business with this particular group of "security agents." Larger organizations will just pay an annual "protection fee" (subscription agreement, whatever) to them which acts as a "don't hassle me, I just paid up" notice.
At the end of the day, if you're running a business with 20-30 employees, carrying over $1M/year in payroll, forking out $20K/year in licensing fees to stay clean may just be cheaper than wrestling with the pigs (remember, you will both get muddy, but the pig will enjoy it.)
I think the point is that when you sign on the dotted line to get a bulk license, lowering your average cost from $1000 per workstation to maybe $400 per workstation for the full suite of OS/Office, scattered Adobe apps, etc., you also sign consent for these audits.
Hell, if you read your clickwrap for a standard piece of software there might also be audit clauses in there from some vendors. So, when you tell them to go away, they may very well come back with court authorization to search - if they're good negotiators, they'll make you believe that the search will be much more painful if they have to get the court ordered authorization - there might even be clauses in the shrink wrap obliging you to pay for their costs in obtaining the court order, which could be a profit center in itself for them ($250/hr legal fees add up fast.)
So, I guess the thing I really like about GPL is that, even though it's long winded and complex, it's a standard that once you understand, you don't have to think about it again, until the next version comes out. Once upon a time AT&T told me they had the right to raise my long distance rates without prior notification (in point of fact, they tripled them between billing cycles.) I told their billing department to find the agreement I signed that said they could do that. 3 years later they mailed me an amended term of service giving them just that right - to post current rates on their website, subject to change at any time, all I had to do was pay my current bill to accept the agreement. I haven't used AT&T home phone services in over 15 years now, and I dropped them when they bought out my wireless carrier. Sad part of software vendors for the customer is that there usually isn't a simple choice based on terms of service.
Oh, definitely preferred to let them proceed with the prescriptive court order, and do your own audit while they are out getting it. And, having done your own audit, you are better able to make a case against them if they attempt to "plant" anything while auditing your systems.
Audits are part of the cost of doing business, very common in lots of areas besides software licenses, but they are costly and if you have an audit-free alternative it certainly becomes that much more attractive.
What they want is for you to run your own internal self-audits, so just the very fear of them makes you do their job for them... Personally, I have found free software to be adequate to run most business functions (except for interfacing with businesses that don't use free software...) and if these clowns keep up the strong-arm tactics, they will push more and more organizations to discover that free software is better for them, too.
The long and short of it is that account theft is a big problem, both for Blizzard and for people who play WoW. Not everyone has a locked-down system, and phishers are using tactics formerly reserved for actual banks to try to get account info. Players have to deal with having their account possibly stolen, Blizzard has to deal with perpetual requests (some possibly fraudulent!) to restore characters/items, and the game as a whole suffers from the RMT that goes on.
I have never had a WOW account, but some nefarious character registered one of my e-mail addresses as owning one - not much of a problem for me, but interesting that they managed to link my address to the account without an authentication reply from me... (and, yes, I have since changed my password.)
The company that says "go fish, assholes" MIGHT see them again with a court order in hand, but it's not likely. The company that says "uuuuuh....okay, come on in" finds themselves in a few weeks threatened with a huge lawsuit, or a "settlement" calculated to be just below what the company could possibly afford...
Unless you actually have nothing to hide... I know, unlikely in a large organization, but if you really do run a clean ship, they've got nothing unless they lie, and if you catch them in a lie, treble damages for all expenses incurred should be an easy win.
Yes, it (far reaching brace pairs) is code smell, unfortunately if the smelly code works, there are usually more important things to fix. Now, if the smelly code needs to be changed significantly for some reason, that's when refactoring is in order.
In my example case, initCam is a wrapper for the OpenCV cvInitCamera function, with just enough support to make it work in my app - same for grabFrame() - so, I could reproduce the library documentation in my code, or just rely on the next programmer to see the cv calls in the function and look it up himself.
Your copious examples are more or less what I referred to as "something deeper".
One routine I have written a couple of times that NEEDS comments is a cubic spline interpolation, the algebra is thick, and if you do it well, your code skips about 80% of the steps due to zero values in the variables. Even with the zeroing, there are about a half dozen intermediate variables computed and it is all too easy to make a mistake along the way.
When your public method is named something like initCamera( int camID ), or grabFrame(), I'm not altogether certain what's gained by spelling that out in a comment... maybe if there's something deeper going on, but if it is as simple as it looks, why pollute it with additional words to read that convey the exact same meaning?
I lived in a house in Miami for 10 years, the first 6 years the power NEVER went out, then we had a minor hurricane, the brigade of fix-it men came in and we had power back in about 12 hours, but they jury-rigged it somehow, power went out every time a pelican sneezed for years after that.
Diesel prices fluctuate - but one thing remains constant - diesel packs more energy per gallon than gasoline, so that explains a small part of the fuel economy.
If we all drove diesel cars, gasoline would get very very cheap....there's not too much flexibility to the ratio of diesel/gasoline that comes from a given barrel of crude.
Latest energy mining trends in the US suggest that we should be looking for LNG (methane) burning cars in the not too distant future.
LiIon may be scary, but 20 gallons of gasoline vapor mixed just right with air can give you a Hollywood style explosion - at about the same probability as catastrophic failure of modern LiIon packs (in other words - very very rare.)
utterly beyond belief that a good CEO can make deals with other bigwigs and boost the company's bottom line at least 200x as much as an average worker can.
Not utterly beyond belief, but, appropriately to the discussion at hand, actual performance is highly de-coupled from compensation.
I wouldn't mind paying CEOs obscene amounts of money, maybe even up to 1% of net corporate profits, IF they are taking on personal risk in the process.
Chicks for free - good for the economy, money for nothing - only good for the recipient and whoever they "trickle it down upon."
No worker in America has pay which is "proportional to productivity".
I think it's a perverse twist on supply and demand. If there are a lot of whatever the job description is, they must be low paid regardless of their value (think: teachers, nurses, police, etc.) As job descriptions get rarer (design instead of manufacturing, for example), the pay goes up because it can - you can afford to pay a single designer engineer a high rate, but not the 20 manufacturing engineers who are closer to the actual work of building a design. When you get to the rarified levels of pro-sports, rock-stars and CEOs, the sky's the limit - if you're CEO of a 1000 person company, giving yourself a 1M/yr raise is the same as 1K/yr for all employees.
So, unfortunately, there's usually need for a bunch of programmers, and guess what? We can't pay them all $375K/yr, now, can we?
And about the 10x productivity thing - life's not fair, never has been, and won't likely become so before I die.
If you really are 10x more productive than your colleagues, my suggestion is that you spend 1/3 of your time coding so that you're merely 3x as productive as they are, spend another 1/3 of your time working a second job to increase your income, and the final 33% you might pursue unpaid interests that ultimately might lead you to a career more lucrative and interesting than code-monkey.
I'm probably a better coder than Bill Gates ever was (as for a business-man, not so much).
BG is an extreme example of "right place, right time." I give him credit for being exceptionally ruthless in monopolizing his domain, but other than that, any average guy in his spot could have pulled off Microsoft - and fully half of them could have done it "better" in some significant ways - but it was his opportunity, not yours or mine.
Bait taken, I say that I have a USB external drive that serves my semi-annual optical disc reading needs. I'd rather not carry the hardware with me the rest of the time.
It's not the cost of the raw material, it's the cost of processing it - casting plastic is much cheaper than aluminum. It is also very possible to make a flimsy box out of aluminum. My last aluminum notebook had GPU overheating issues that made it an annoying piece of junk, oh, and since aluminum conducts heat better than plastic, it's more efficient at transferring that heat to human skin.... I think ASUS made some nicer looking eees, still plastic though.
I've got 13.1 inches in my lap right now, and it's just about the right size for me. Where I have been disappointed with netbooks to-date has been their pixel counts 1366x768 is what I would call "sufficient" for doing "real work" - I'd rather get 1080 rows...
The other thing netbooks rock at is battery life and low operating temperatures, I take my eee places ordinary notebooks just wouldn't go due to heat and longevity issues.
Depends on what industry you're talking about - there's a whole layer of "the industry" that works for less than $20 per hour, and they do tend toward the open source tools.
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By the Miami map, Milk isn't pseudo-intellectual, it's a clear marker of high gay population in the zip code. Interestingly, it seems that even the straights in the gay neighborhoods were renting it.
Nope. Even if you're 100% legal, BSA just makes stuff up. Remember, they don't consider possession of the original media (even at a 1:1 ratio of media to installations) as sufficient to indicate that a copy is legal. Nor do the little hologram stickers for Windows mean anything. No; they want the original purchase receipt, with the same company name and address and everything. (if your company bought another company... sorry bud, BSA won't consider the copies acquired from the company you bought to be legal, receipt or no)
Of course, black letter copyright law does not back them up at all on this. But they've got that $150,000 nuclear option if you lose in court, so, you feel lucky, punk?
As crappy as all this is, it truly is just the cost of doing business with this particular group of "security agents." Larger organizations will just pay an annual "protection fee" (subscription agreement, whatever) to them which acts as a "don't hassle me, I just paid up" notice.
At the end of the day, if you're running a business with 20-30 employees, carrying over $1M/year in payroll, forking out $20K/year in licensing fees to stay clean may just be cheaper than wrestling with the pigs (remember, you will both get muddy, but the pig will enjoy it.)
I think the point is that when you sign on the dotted line to get a bulk license, lowering your average cost from $1000 per workstation to maybe $400 per workstation for the full suite of OS/Office, scattered Adobe apps, etc., you also sign consent for these audits.
Hell, if you read your clickwrap for a standard piece of software there might also be audit clauses in there from some vendors. So, when you tell them to go away, they may very well come back with court authorization to search - if they're good negotiators, they'll make you believe that the search will be much more painful if they have to get the court ordered authorization - there might even be clauses in the shrink wrap obliging you to pay for their costs in obtaining the court order, which could be a profit center in itself for them ($250/hr legal fees add up fast.)
So, I guess the thing I really like about GPL is that, even though it's long winded and complex, it's a standard that once you understand, you don't have to think about it again, until the next version comes out. Once upon a time AT&T told me they had the right to raise my long distance rates without prior notification (in point of fact, they tripled them between billing cycles.) I told their billing department to find the agreement I signed that said they could do that. 3 years later they mailed me an amended term of service giving them just that right - to post current rates on their website, subject to change at any time, all I had to do was pay my current bill to accept the agreement. I haven't used AT&T home phone services in over 15 years now, and I dropped them when they bought out my wireless carrier. Sad part of software vendors for the customer is that there usually isn't a simple choice based on terms of service.
Oh, definitely preferred to let them proceed with the prescriptive court order, and do your own audit while they are out getting it. And, having done your own audit, you are better able to make a case against them if they attempt to "plant" anything while auditing your systems.
Audits are part of the cost of doing business, very common in lots of areas besides software licenses, but they are costly and if you have an audit-free alternative it certainly becomes that much more attractive.
What they want is for you to run your own internal self-audits, so just the very fear of them makes you do their job for them... Personally, I have found free software to be adequate to run most business functions (except for interfacing with businesses that don't use free software...) and if these clowns keep up the strong-arm tactics, they will push more and more organizations to discover that free software is better for them, too.
The long and short of it is that account theft is a big problem, both for Blizzard and for people who play WoW. Not everyone has a locked-down system, and phishers are using tactics formerly reserved for actual banks to try to get account info. Players have to deal with having their account possibly stolen, Blizzard has to deal with perpetual requests (some possibly fraudulent!) to restore characters/items, and the game as a whole suffers from the RMT that goes on.
I have never had a WOW account, but some nefarious character registered one of my e-mail addresses as owning one - not much of a problem for me, but interesting that they managed to link my address to the account without an authentication reply from me... (and, yes, I have since changed my password.)
The company that says "go fish, assholes" MIGHT see them again with a court order in hand, but it's not likely. The company that says "uuuuuh....okay, come on in" finds themselves in a few weeks threatened with a huge lawsuit, or a "settlement" calculated to be just below what the company could possibly afford...
Unless you actually have nothing to hide... I know, unlikely in a large organization, but if you really do run a clean ship, they've got nothing unless they lie, and if you catch them in a lie, treble damages for all expenses incurred should be an easy win.
Yes, it (far reaching brace pairs) is code smell, unfortunately if the smelly code works, there are usually more important things to fix. Now, if the smelly code needs to be changed significantly for some reason, that's when refactoring is in order.
In my example case, initCam is a wrapper for the OpenCV cvInitCamera function, with just enough support to make it work in my app - same for grabFrame() - so, I could reproduce the library documentation in my code, or just rely on the next programmer to see the cv calls in the function and look it up himself.
Your copious examples are more or less what I referred to as "something deeper".
One routine I have written a couple of times that NEEDS comments is a cubic spline interpolation, the algebra is thick, and if you do it well, your code skips about 80% of the steps due to zero values in the variables. Even with the zeroing, there are about a half dozen intermediate variables computed and it is all too easy to make a mistake along the way.
When your public method is named something like initCamera( int camID ), or grabFrame(), I'm not altogether certain what's gained by spelling that out in a comment... maybe if there's something deeper going on, but if it is as simple as it looks, why pollute it with additional words to read that convey the exact same meaning?
You know, I do those close brace comments, but usually with a copy of whatever opened them:
// if ( dome )
}
Yes, the smart editor will highlight the block for me, but many times (especially in code I didn't write) the block is bigger than the page....
I lived in a house in Miami for 10 years, the first 6 years the power NEVER went out, then we had a minor hurricane, the brigade of fix-it men came in and we had power back in about 12 hours, but they jury-rigged it somehow, power went out every time a pelican sneezed for years after that.
Diesel prices fluctuate - but one thing remains constant - diesel packs more energy per gallon than gasoline, so that explains a small part of the fuel economy.
If we all drove diesel cars, gasoline would get very very cheap....there's not too much flexibility to the ratio of diesel/gasoline that comes from a given barrel of crude.
Latest energy mining trends in the US suggest that we should be looking for LNG (methane) burning cars in the not too distant future.
LiIon may be scary, but 20 gallons of gasoline vapor mixed just right with air can give you a Hollywood style explosion - at about the same probability as catastrophic failure of modern LiIon packs (in other words - very very rare.)
utterly beyond belief that a good CEO can make deals with other bigwigs and boost the company's bottom line at least 200x as much as an average worker can.
Not utterly beyond belief, but, appropriately to the discussion at hand, actual performance is highly de-coupled from compensation.
I wouldn't mind paying CEOs obscene amounts of money, maybe even up to 1% of net corporate profits, IF they are taking on personal risk in the process.
Chicks for free - good for the economy, money for nothing - only good for the recipient and whoever they "trickle it down upon."
No worker in America has pay which is "proportional to productivity".
I think it's a perverse twist on supply and demand. If there are a lot of whatever the job description is, they must be low paid regardless of their value (think: teachers, nurses, police, etc.) As job descriptions get rarer (design instead of manufacturing, for example), the pay goes up because it can - you can afford to pay a single designer engineer a high rate, but not the 20 manufacturing engineers who are closer to the actual work of building a design. When you get to the rarified levels of pro-sports, rock-stars and CEOs, the sky's the limit - if you're CEO of a 1000 person company, giving yourself a 1M/yr raise is the same as 1K/yr for all employees.
So, unfortunately, there's usually need for a bunch of programmers, and guess what? We can't pay them all $375K/yr, now, can we?
And about the 10x productivity thing - life's not fair, never has been, and won't likely become so before I die.
If you really are 10x more productive than your colleagues, my suggestion is that you spend 1/3 of your time coding so that you're merely 3x as productive as they are, spend another 1/3 of your time working a second job to increase your income, and the final 33% you might pursue unpaid interests that ultimately might lead you to a career more lucrative and interesting than code-monkey.
I'm probably a better coder than Bill Gates ever was (as for a business-man, not so much).
BG is an extreme example of "right place, right time." I give him credit for being exceptionally ruthless in monopolizing his domain, but other than that, any average guy in his spot could have pulled off Microsoft - and fully half of them could have done it "better" in some significant ways - but it was his opportunity, not yours or mine.
I kinda like having 160GB rotating instead of 16GB SSD for the same price... 160GB SSD would be sweet, but then so would a lotto win.
Bait taken, I say that I have a USB external drive that serves my semi-annual optical disc reading needs. I'd rather not carry the hardware with me the rest of the time.
It's not the cost of the raw material, it's the cost of processing it - casting plastic is much cheaper than aluminum. It is also very possible to make a flimsy box out of aluminum. My last aluminum notebook had GPU overheating issues that made it an annoying piece of junk, oh, and since aluminum conducts heat better than plastic, it's more efficient at transferring that heat to human skin.... I think ASUS made some nicer looking eees, still plastic though.
If the ION / 330 runs as cool as the original 270 based eees, then having that in a 12" is not a bad thing at all - I hate getting laptop thigh burn.
I've got 13.1 inches in my lap right now, and it's just about the right size for me. Where I have been disappointed with netbooks to-date has been their pixel counts 1366x768 is what I would call "sufficient" for doing "real work" - I'd rather get 1080 rows...
The other thing netbooks rock at is battery life and low operating temperatures, I take my eee places ordinary notebooks just wouldn't go due to heat and longevity issues.
Depends on what industry you're talking about - there's a whole layer of "the industry" that works for less than $20 per hour, and they do tend toward the open source tools.
Actually, I'd argue Java is also only in theory.
Insert Qt plug here.