The long and short of it is that non-compete contracts are a form of indentured servitude. Up until recently, I have had the ability to get companies to strike them from any contract I signed. Now, everyone wants me to commit the rest of my career to them. Between that and the whole craziness of patenting everything that moves, after 25+ years in the industry I am leaving software development behind. I wish all of you that continue on nothing but good, too bad I don't think you'll actually receive it.
I sad to hear that. But I know where you are coming from. Im a second generation software developer(my Dad coded mainframes back in the day... burroughs, unisys, IBM.. when men were real men and coded in asm:) ). I learnt to write in Z80 asm when I was 10. C(well small C on a CPM system) when I was 12. These days I work in R&D and their focus is patents. The best I can do is say I dont want my name on any patents produced. Ill produce the code and ideas(even if I dont think they should be patented) but thats it. Hypocritical I know.. but there aint too much I can do.
Take care. Hope you are happy and satisfied with whatever you choose to do. Its sad to see so much experience leave the industry. I can hold it for now, still love designing and coding. But these days I can see a day when Ill be tired of the nonsense. Maybe move to Brasil... they seem a lot more sensible... if a little corrupt.
Im sorry. Which decade are you living in? lifetime employment expectations... maybe 30 years ago. If a company trains up their employees and the first thing they want to do is jump ship then I would respectfully suggest that there is something wrong with that company. I always thought that *investment* in the training of your permanent employees was an investment with their furture career... with that company... jumping ship straight away after youve gains some skill is generally in my experience a sign that that company is not a good place to work(ie someone has joined... realised the company sucks and takes the first chance to get the hell out of a sinking ship)
Were would they be without us developers to mess up their environments. Theyd just sit around doing nuthin all day cept for the occasional security patch or upgrade. Salaries would plumite, the sysadmin sector would become devoid of fat, bearded, long haired hippies droning on about their bash scripts:)
Hey dont get me wrong here. My situation is that I am a contractor with my own company. When I enter into a contract of whatever period I do it as a professional whose company is providing a service to another company. I try to add value to both my employer and my own company. When people are reasonable and sensible things generally work out for the good. Everyone wins. I provide a service that adds value, my company makes money and hopefully I had fun, met some good people and learnt something new(always an added bonus). I have on the other hand works for/with companies that automatically view me as a liabilty. Or at least some of the perm employees do. So far I havnt had too many bad experiences... just the occasional one.
I dont act as a transient. I try to act as a professional architect/developer that is there to add value. If Im not adding value then I should not be there. I am of the opinion that permies should start to take on a bit of this attitude also. Be loyal to a company only if they are loyal to you. Otherwise look for something else.
Indeed. What I find frustrating about todays world is that business(especially large business) wants to have its cake and eat it also. It wants a highly mobile workforce so that when economic situations change they can shift their workforce to cheaper areas. But when this come back to bit them(ie valuable employees being given a better offer and shifting easily) its all lawsuit this and lawsuit that. If Im a valued employee, dont sue me, pay me what you think I am worth. If someone else values my skills more then Im gonna go with them. Its not personal... its just businesss.
Exactly. And some of the interesting jobs are even outside the IT field. I recently went to an interview at a bioinformatics startup. It was fascinating. The actual gig was developing some robotics control software, but there were these great biologist dudes(from Cambridge) going on about the bioinformatic algorithms and stuff... it was a truely a great interview, I loved learning all this stuff about biology and how searching and sorting algorithms are being used in the field. Shame they had some budget problems.
I think a more important question is "How many hours world wide to permie employees work over time for no pay". Some companies(actually losta companies) are like that, screw as much as they can for free out of employees and still treat them like crap.
Well this probably isnt all that representative, but Ive worked in a major (conservative) financial services company(world wide approx 50K employees) and they did. Every user had easy dial up and broadband access to the corporate network 24/7(VPNed of course). People did and were expected to be online after hours quite a lot. They didnt need no web access for the email... Notes talked directly to the servers and everything.
On the other hand, how many employees surf the web for non work purposes while at work? Probably the vast majority.
Lots probably. Whats generally really wrong with that tho? How many office employees drink far more than their fair share of free coffee? If it doesnt interfer with their work then why should anyone care? I grow a bit tired of this micro managment of employees time and how it affects the bottom line attitude. People arent machines. I admit that there are lazy bastards out there... but if there wasnt the interenet then theyd be procratinating some other way. What exactly is the problem with someone taking a five min break at work these days? I do it when my brains getting tired on a coding problem. It actually helps productivity. Has there been any studies on weather this so called "time wasted" related to any kind of real world monetary lost, other than this inanely simplistic calculations done in these "studies"?
Oh, one other thing: I have owned exactly one Mac in the last 10 years. A Powerbook 5300 CS. Many people tell me it was the worst thing Apple ever made.
So like I said, it's probably just coincidence, but I'm going to have to take your "there is no real reason to ever shut down a Mac" with a grain of salt.
The close all windows and reboot try Control-Command-Eject. Heres a neat page with some more.
As to rebooting Macs. I havent rebooted my power book in a long time. In fact thinking about it... Ive hard rebooted twice in the last like... it has to be 8 odd months. The reboots were due to security updates.
OK. THe orginal was a joke... but it makes me think of another point. I like in London. The news sources I use are primary the BBC, reuters and occasionally CNN. I can no longer stand most American news sorces any more. They go crazy bat shit everytime some 18 year old gets kidnapped but dont really seem to report that much when another bomb goes of in Basra.
I was surfing around the place on the 7th and watching BBC as many Londoners where. Occasionally Id read or watch a stream of american versions of the London Bombs. Its was like bum ba dum bum... with trumpets and serious handsome men and women with great hair saying stupid things about how London and Londoners would react. It was all "Its the UKs 9/11". Its was just stupid(Londons been thru a shit load worse than this), repeative and mostly, wrong. The BBC etc(hell even Sky news) were informative and for the most part reflected reality. American stations take these occasional trips to neverland.
I think so. I also have a question regarding this statment.
This memo shows that Mr. Davidson's e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations.
Why were they investigating direct copys then? Surely doing a direct copy search is as easy as doing a diff on the source trees and going thru the results.
Yep. When I was 10/11 I learnt z80 asm on a homebrew machine that me and my dad made(actually I broke it more cause I was a crap solderer:) I got better). Then learned basic using MBASIC and CBASIC under CPM. Then got Turbo Pascal 3.0 and learnt that. Started coding in Hendrixs Small C compiler at about 12/13 ish I think. Learnt 6502 asm on an apple 2 at school. Soes this make me a genius? I wish.
(gasp... just realised Ive been coding in C for approx 20 years. I suddenly feel old... youd think Id stop with the accidentally dropping breaks from switch statments by now).
Possibly. This thread is, however, an excellent case demonstrating why geeks dont rule the world. If we spent just half the time we spend having arguments about the exact definition of words or acusing each other of not being true anime fans cause we havent learnt Japanese to truely appriciate Neon Genesis we'd control everything.
In 2002, a popular rap artist, Mario, remade Biz Markie's 1989 hit "Just a Friend". Mario's remake was fairly popular -- I heard it on the radio and I saw the music video on TV. According to a 2002 television interview with Mario that I saw, the guy had no idea that Biz Markie's hit song was actually a remake of Freddie Scott's 1968 hit "You Got What I Need"! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
In the words of Douglas Adams, this sort of thing is going on all the time. Just the other day I was waiting in line at a pub in London and two young women in front of me were talking about a song that just came on the PA. It was Tears for Fears "Mad World". One turned to the other and asked her friend "Hey, is this a cover of that Christmas song?". For those that dont know Gary Jules did a cover of Mad World and it made it to number one in the UK, it was the last song sung on the movie Donnie Darko. That conversation made me feel old(remembers when the original came out). I was going to remark to them... but why bother:)
No. But perhaps some of them should. Particularly ones related to downloading files such as FTP and HTTP ad perhaps now(considering its growing popularity) BT.
And after a couple of days off to recover, I'll often realize that particular problems I was brute-forcing my way through could have been solved much more efficiently.
I agree with this 100%. Especially for programmers. Here is a little experiment for the next time you have a bug/problem you *really* need to fix. Weve all been there. Its late, youre tired and for some reason you just *cant* see why the code is misbehaving. You get frustrated. A little angry. Occasionally you thupped the stupid machine. Try going to bed. Forget about the problem. Have a beer or two and get a good nights sleep. The number of times Ive woken up the next morning thinking : "Wait a sec... I see where the problem is... its bloody obvious... what the hell was I smoking last night".
Which is why most sites go for "duress codes are your pin with one added to it". There are, in Australia at least, three offical(as in defined by the govt offical) grades of security : 1, 2 and 3. The funny thing is that everyone says they want a grade 1 site when they dont really. Grade 1 is a *massive* pain in the arse and is only really necessary when you are guarding nuclear weapons or something. In grade one you need to install panels that have load balanced terminations to detect tampering, you cannot ignore isolates etc. An isolate is when you tell an input to stop reporting and is usually done if there is a fault on the device(for example if a reed switch or PIR goes loopy they have a disturbing tendancy to switch between alarm and normal about 100 times a second, generating useless traffic that distracts from any real alarms). Most site that get grade 1 installed tend to ring back about a month later and ask to be downgraded to grade 2:)
Slashdot Mirror
The long and short of it is that non-compete contracts are a form of indentured servitude. Up until recently, I have had the ability to get companies to strike them from any contract I signed. Now, everyone wants me to commit the rest of my career to them. Between that and the whole craziness of patenting everything that moves, after 25+ years in the industry I am leaving software development behind. I wish all of you that continue on nothing but good, too bad I don't think you'll actually receive it.
:) ). I learnt to write in Z80 asm when I was 10. C(well small C on a CPM system) when I was 12. These days I work in R&D and their focus is patents. The best I can do is say I dont want my name on any patents produced. Ill produce the code and ideas(even if I dont think they should be patented) but thats it. Hypocritical I know.. but there aint too much I can do.
I sad to hear that. But I know where you are coming from. Im a second generation software developer(my Dad coded mainframes back in the day... burroughs, unisys, IBM.. when men were real men and coded in asm
Take care. Hope you are happy and satisfied with whatever you choose to do. Its sad to see so much experience leave the industry. I can hold it for now, still love designing and coding. But these days I can see a day when Ill be tired of the nonsense. Maybe move to Brasil... they seem a lot more sensible... if a little corrupt.
Im sorry. Which decade are you living in? lifetime employment expectations... maybe 30 years ago. If a company trains up their employees and the first thing they want to do is jump ship then I would respectfully suggest that there is something wrong with that company. I always thought that *investment* in the training of your permanent employees was an investment with their furture career... with that company... jumping ship straight away after youve gains some skill is generally in my experience a sign that that company is not a good place to work(ie someone has joined... realised the company sucks and takes the first chance to get the hell out of a sinking ship)
Were would they be without us developers to mess up their environments. Theyd just sit around doing nuthin all day cept for the occasional security patch or upgrade. Salaries would plumite, the sysadmin sector would become devoid of fat, bearded, long haired hippies droning on about their bash scripts :)
This is a good point. Has anyone with cross browser compatible web apps done any testing on IE7b1? Does it break anything fundamental?
Hey dont get me wrong here. My situation is that I am a contractor with my own company. When I enter into a contract of whatever period I do it as a professional whose company is providing a service to another company. I try to add value to both my employer and my own company. When people are reasonable and sensible things generally work out for the good. Everyone wins. I provide a service that adds value, my company makes money and hopefully I had fun, met some good people and learnt something new(always an added bonus). I have on the other hand works for/with companies that automatically view me as a liabilty. Or at least some of the perm employees do. So far I havnt had too many bad experiences... just the occasional one.
I dont act as a transient. I try to act as a professional architect/developer that is there to add value. If Im not adding value then I should not be there. I am of the opinion that permies should start to take on a bit of this attitude also. Be loyal to a company only if they are loyal to you. Otherwise look for something else.
Indeed. What I find frustrating about todays world is that business(especially large business) wants to have its cake and eat it also. It wants a highly mobile workforce so that when economic situations change they can shift their workforce to cheaper areas. But when this come back to bit them(ie valuable employees being given a better offer and shifting easily) its all lawsuit this and lawsuit that. If Im a valued employee, dont sue me, pay me what you think I am worth. If someone else values my skills more then Im gonna go with them. Its not personal... its just businesss.
So will you be voting for Joe Jackson? Or Jack Johnson? I personnaly dont think JJs stance on titanium prices goes quite far enough.
Exactly. And some of the interesting jobs are even outside the IT field. I recently went to an interview at a bioinformatics startup. It was fascinating. The actual gig was developing some robotics control software, but there were these great biologist dudes(from Cambridge) going on about the bioinformatic algorithms and stuff... it was a truely a great interview, I loved learning all this stuff about biology and how searching and sorting algorithms are being used in the field. Shame they had some budget problems.
I think a more important question is "How many hours world wide to permie employees work over time for no pay". Some companies(actually losta companies) are like that, screw as much as they can for free out of employees and still treat them like crap.
Well this probably isnt all that representative, but Ive worked in a major (conservative) financial services company(world wide approx 50K employees) and they did. Every user had easy dial up and broadband access to the corporate network 24/7(VPNed of course). People did and were expected to be online after hours quite a lot. They didnt need no web access for the email... Notes talked directly to the servers and everything.
On the other hand, how many employees surf the web for non work purposes while at work? Probably the vast majority.
Lots probably. Whats generally really wrong with that tho? How many office employees drink far more than their fair share of free coffee? If it doesnt interfer with their work then why should anyone care? I grow a bit tired of this micro managment of employees time and how it affects the bottom line attitude. People arent machines. I admit that there are lazy bastards out there... but if there wasnt the interenet then theyd be procratinating some other way. What exactly is the problem with someone taking a five min break at work these days? I do it when my brains getting tired on a coding problem. It actually helps productivity. Has there been any studies on weather this so called "time wasted" related to any kind of real world monetary lost, other than this inanely simplistic calculations done in these "studies"?
Oh, one other thing: I have owned exactly one Mac in the last 10 years. A Powerbook 5300 CS. Many people tell me it was the worst thing Apple ever made.
So like I said, it's probably just coincidence, but I'm going to have to take your "there is no real reason to ever shut down a Mac" with a grain of salt.
The close all windows and reboot try Control-Command-Eject. Heres a neat page with some more.
As to rebooting Macs. I havent rebooted my power book in a long time. In fact thinking about it... Ive hard rebooted twice in the last like... it has to be 8 odd months. The reboots were due to security updates.
OK. THe orginal was a joke... but it makes me think of another point. I like in London. The news sources I use are primary the BBC, reuters and occasionally CNN. I can no longer stand most American news sorces any more. They go crazy bat shit everytime some 18 year old gets kidnapped but dont really seem to report that much when another bomb goes of in Basra.
I was surfing around the place on the 7th and watching BBC as many Londoners where. Occasionally Id read or watch a stream of american versions of the London Bombs. Its was like bum ba dum bum... with trumpets and serious handsome men and women with great hair saying stupid things about how London and Londoners would react. It was all "Its the UKs 9/11". Its was just stupid(Londons been thru a shit load worse than this), repeative and mostly, wrong. The BBC etc(hell even Sky news) were informative and for the most part reflected reality. American stations take these occasional trips to neverland.
I think so. I also have a question regarding this statment.
This memo shows that Mr. Davidson's e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations.
Why were they investigating direct copys then? Surely doing a direct copy search is as easy as doing a diff on the source trees and going thru the results.
Already happening. Try accessing MSNBC.com's free video content with anything but Windows IE - won't work.
You say that like its a bd thing.
Yep. When I was 10/11 I learnt z80 asm on a homebrew machine that me and my dad made(actually I broke it more cause I was a crap solderer :) I got better). Then learned basic using MBASIC and CBASIC under CPM. Then got Turbo Pascal 3.0 and learnt that. Started coding in Hendrixs Small C compiler at about 12/13 ish I think. Learnt 6502 asm on an apple 2 at school. Soes this make me a genius? I wish.
(gasp... just realised Ive been coding in C for approx 20 years. I suddenly feel old... youd think Id stop with the accidentally dropping breaks from switch statments by now).
Possibly. This thread is, however, an excellent case demonstrating why geeks dont rule the world. If we spent just half the time we spend having arguments about the exact definition of words or acusing each other of not being true anime fans cause we havent learnt Japanese to truely appriciate Neon Genesis we'd control everything.
To give credit where credit is due. It comes from the second episode of Futurama.
I'm looking for a job as a Chief Software Imagineer - anyone hiring?
Do you have a degree in fungeneering?
That sounds more like a crash to me -- and not all crashes are accidental.
No. A crash would be an "unanticpated and sudden reduction in kinetic energy".
Only on slashdot do you find people arguing the sematics of what you should call the US on a thread about terroist bombings.
:)
It kind of makes me proud of my fellow geeks in a funny way
In 2002, a popular rap artist, Mario, remade Biz Markie's 1989 hit "Just a Friend". Mario's remake was fairly popular -- I heard it on the radio and I saw the music video on TV. According to a 2002 television interview with Mario that I saw, the guy had no idea that Biz Markie's hit song was actually a remake of Freddie Scott's 1968 hit "You Got What I Need"! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
:)
In the words of Douglas Adams, this sort of thing is going on all the time. Just the other day I was waiting in line at a pub in London and two young women in front of me were talking about a song that just came on the PA. It was Tears for Fears "Mad World". One turned to the other and asked her friend "Hey, is this a cover of that Christmas song?". For those that dont know Gary Jules did a cover of Mad World and it made it to number one in the UK, it was the last song sung on the movie Donnie Darko. That conversation made me feel old(remembers when the original came out). I was going to remark to them... but why bother
If the language is undefined then you can always write your own. Cause you see in Xiarans Hoopy language you just write
:)
A B;
To exchange variables. The actual details as to how its done is left to the implementers
No. But perhaps some of them should. Particularly ones related to downloading files such as FTP and HTTP ad perhaps now(considering its growing popularity) BT.
And after a couple of days off to recover, I'll often realize that particular problems I was brute-forcing my way through could have been solved much more efficiently.
I agree with this 100%. Especially for programmers. Here is a little experiment for the next time you have a bug/problem you *really* need to fix. Weve all been there. Its late, youre tired and for some reason you just *cant* see why the code is misbehaving. You get frustrated. A little angry. Occasionally you thupped the stupid machine. Try going to bed. Forget about the problem. Have a beer or two and get a good nights sleep. The number of times Ive woken up the next morning thinking : "Wait a sec... I see where the problem is... its bloody obvious... what the hell was I smoking last night".
Which is why most sites go for "duress codes are your pin with one added to it". There are, in Australia at least, three offical(as in defined by the govt offical) grades of security : 1, 2 and 3. The funny thing is that everyone says they want a grade 1 site when they dont really. Grade 1 is a *massive* pain in the arse and is only really necessary when you are guarding nuclear weapons or something. In grade one you need to install panels that have load balanced terminations to detect tampering, you cannot ignore isolates etc. An isolate is when you tell an input to stop reporting and is usually done if there is a fault on the device(for example if a reed switch or PIR goes loopy they have a disturbing tendancy to switch between alarm and normal about 100 times a second, generating useless traffic that distracts from any real alarms). Most site that get grade 1 installed tend to ring back about a month later and ask to be downgraded to grade 2 :)