The fact is that most management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices
I believe it's because the management bonus/incentive/promotion system is primarily focused on:
1. Deciding on the right product to build
2. Making more money off the product than the cost to build it
Notice that "building a quality product" is not in that list.
Many companies can't claim success on #1 and #2 more than 20% of the time, so that gets the majority of management focus.
This is because a manager doesn't get a bonus on a super well-engineered product that no one wants to buy.
Engineering quality often doesn't get noticed/rewarded until AFTER the product is a success. Which often is less than 20% of the time.
Many families can easily watch 3 movies on a weekend. Split over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three movies isn't that many, especially if you don't have cable TV. Multiply that by 4 to 5 weekends in a month, and you have 12-15 rentals per month, which netflix considers to be a "heavy user". Shouldn't people who pay for "3 movies at a time" be able to watch three movies a week?
That said, the 3 movies at a time plan is a great value, if only for convenience. If netflix is losing money with a 3 movies a week usage pattern, perhaps they should charge more, rather than throttling. I think legitimate users would be willing to pay a little more. The problem is, the "three at a time" plan is the best plan neflix offers.
What if the patent office had a link on each patent's web page that would allow members of the comunity to submit prior art, triggering a formal review? (Is this possible now?)
I can think of a few benefits of this: 1. The patent office could focus their formal review efforts, gaining efficiency. 2. Avoids hiring a lawyer every time you find a patent that obviously should be invalid. 3. In the proposed IEEE system, having a lot of prior art patents would make it easier to point out prior art.
C# is very similar to Java. The main difference is not C# vs. Java but.NET vs. Java.
What makes.NET more attractive?
1..NET works with more languages than just C#. Here's a list of languages supported by.NET: http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In contrast, Java only supports... well, Java.
2. Some people find.NET's libararies (FCL) easier to use than Java's libraries.
It looks like you missed copying the last sentence of the paragraph you copied from the executive order, which reads:
"Members of the Board appointed under Section 3(a) of this Order shall serve without compensation."
Or was this sentence intentionally left out because it contradicts your claim that the board is "yet another cronyist bunch given very nice salaries" ?
Does an architect have to guarantee that every house he designs is secure against breakins? Why should a software engineer have to provide this same security guarantee?
The level of security is a feature like any other feature.
If you are paying the architect to design "fort knox", then it should be secure to top security standards, otherwise top security can not be expected; because sometimes people just want a cheap place to live with doors that have locks.
Do we expect every piece of software written, every house built, every vault designed, etc. to meet the highest security standards? In a word, no. Because, at some point, the cost of security becomes so high that we decide that the security is "good enough".
The US military wasn't even able to secure the pentagon from an attack, and we're worried about suing joe blow software developer for some bugs?
_Federal_ copyright law (Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 105) states that:
"Copyright protection... is not available for any work of the US government..."
That means you can do anything you want with US government works, regardless of whether or not what you do with the work would be considered a fair use. You can even profit from your use of the work.
Evidently MTA is a city agency... Does anyone know if federal copyright protection also does not apply to works of the NYC government?
If you are a contractor hired to do work, it is work done for hire and all belongs to the client.
I'm afraid this is not true (sources below). The copyright goes to the contractor by default. "Work for hire" as defined in copyright law actually means "work by employee". When you "hire" a contractor, they are not an employee (usually). (As a sidenote, I'm not clear if the original poster is a contractor or an employee, which can be difficult to determine.)
One common place where this "work for hire" situation takes place is in web design. If you contract a company to design a website for you, you do not hold the copyright to it unless they sign over the copyright to you. Beware!
Wouldn't the costs of consumable items like paper and toner be better allocated to their respective departments? Those departments likely will be more attentive to how much they are spending/printing when the money comes out of their own budget. Plus it saves IT from a situation like, "How many full color large format blueprints will the architects be printing this year?" and then being responsible for that cost.
Fair use does not permit a business to make a fair use on the behalf of individual users. Fair use does not allow a business to generate copies of large amounts of copyrighted content and make it available in the event that an individual might be able to make a fair use out of it. A fair use must be made by an individual. This is what you are doing when you request a page and it goes into your browser's cache.. you, as an individual, are selecting a particular site to cache on your personal computer, and you are not making it publicly available.
You make a good point with ISP's having a valid reason to keep proxy caches. However, ISP caches are different from google cache for a few reasons. First, someone has to request the content for it to be cached, an ISP proxy is not automatically downloading random internet content. Second, the contents of ISP proxy caches are not made publicly available on the same scale as google's cache. Third, ISP caches are transparent to the user and are not used to draw traffic and interest to a website like google or internet archive for commercial purposes.
On the note of "businesses can not make a fair use on behalf of individual users", remember my.mp3.com, the service that ripped tons of cds and made them available to users as long as the users could prove they owned the actual cd?
Here's what the court had to say about that:
Copyright, however, is not designed to afford consumer protection or convenience but, rather, to protect the copyrightholders' property interests.... Stripped to its essence, defendant's "consumer protection" argument amounts to nothing more than a bald claim that defendant should be able to misappropriate plaintiffs' property simply because there is a consumer demand for it.
This law is about search engines making copyrighted material available (probably google cache, for example). It is not about preventing websites from being found by searching on google. What right do google cache and the internet archive have to reproduce my copyrighted content? Copyright law prohibits reproduction without permission. What right do they have to use my content to draw interest and traffic to their site? Hosting of copies of my copyrighted material on google is not required for people to find me with their search engine.
Do you believe that it is legal for me to create a website that "archives" all the current books, newspaper articles, movies, and music? I could provide a "search" functionality that allows people to search through them. Just because the archived websites are freely accessible doesn't justify archiving either... or maybe I should create my own website that mirrors CNN.com... and put my own advertisements on it too!
1. If your friends have already read the book, they can lend the book to you. The publisher has lost a sale.
2. If your friends have already read the book, they can tell you what happened, if it's any good or not, and you may decide not to buy it. The publisher might lose a sale.
So, if you think it's going to take 3 hours to fix, just go out and buy a new computer.
By purchasing a new computer, they're not necessarily avoiding the service costs. Even if they purchase a new computer, the target market for these services would still require someone to come to their house to install the printer, install all their software, copy data over from the old computer to the new computer, put it on the network, set up wireless access, install antivirus, download windows updates, etc.
Ask not what your employer can do for you, but what you can do for him.
Seriously, with no job experience you will be not able to provide your employer much value in a senior developer position.
Look at your skills and decide if they are worth your desired salary to a given employer. Looking in the terms of "what value can I offer my employer?" is a useful perspective. Would you hire yourself for that position when you could instead hire developers with years of experience?
Don't get too hung up on how high of a position you take. Look for jobs that will build your skills. They will provide you with the most benefit in the long run.
I'm surprised that Java and Servlet hosting isn't as popular as PHP.
This is not true at least for those who choose a programming language based on employment prospects....On monster.com there are usually 2 to 6 times as many job openings for jsp than php. Any insights on what indication this might have on a language's popularity?
Isn't it possible that Tiger Direct couldn't have complained earlier since Apple hasn't been using "Tiger" in commerce?
If Tiger Direct's trademark wasn't violated until Apple used Tiger in commerce, then Tiger Direct's complaint timing would be appropriate since OS Tiger currently is being released.
Tiger Direct is alleging that "Tiger" is "confusingly similar" to their trademarks "Tiger Direct" on a particular class of goods. Much like why Google sent a cease and desist to Booble because Google claimed Booble was "confusingly similar".
A separate issue is which site comes up on Google when searching a trademarked name. This can be referred to as potential "initial interest confusion". Initial interest confusion, however, is not a prerequisite for the "confusingly similar" test.
It's unlikely that Apple will be able to use the sports team Tiger mark since a trademark is for a particular class of goods. Kind of like how Apple (computer) and Apple (record label) have argued in the past when apple started iTunes.
What's the fastest way to get a server running again after a disk crash? With rsync, if I backup/home and/etc, I still have to install and configure the OS and other software. That could take a significant amount of time (possibly days). Not to mention the time spent answering the phone (is the server down? when will it be back up?)
But if I have a drive image, I could just put it on a spare server and be back up and running almost immediately. That would require an identical spare server though.
What do the big enterprises who can't afford downtime do to handle this?
Software.
Software.
Software.
The economics of hardware (eg. powerful mass produced cpus for low prices) in modern embedded systems nowadays are such that most if not all of the customization is in the software. We no longer need to have highly optimized circuits for embedded systems. Embedded systems nowadays? XBox is just a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that most management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices
I believe it's because the management bonus/incentive/promotion system is primarily focused on:
1. Deciding on the right product to build
2. Making more money off the product than the cost to build it
Notice that "building a quality product" is not in that list.
Many companies can't claim success on #1 and #2 more than 20% of the time, so that gets the majority of management focus.
This is because a manager doesn't get a bonus on a super well-engineered product that no one wants to buy.
Engineering quality often doesn't get noticed/rewarded until AFTER the product is a success. Which often is less than 20% of the time.
Many families can easily watch 3 movies on a weekend. Split over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, three movies isn't that many, especially if you don't have cable TV. Multiply that by 4 to 5 weekends in a month, and you have 12-15 rentals per month, which netflix considers to be a "heavy user". Shouldn't people who pay for "3 movies at a time" be able to watch three movies a week?
That said, the 3 movies at a time plan is a great value, if only for convenience. If netflix is losing money with a 3 movies a week usage pattern, perhaps they should charge more, rather than throttling. I think legitimate users would be willing to pay a little more. The problem is, the "three at a time" plan is the best plan neflix offers.
What if the patent office had a link on each patent's web page that would allow members of the comunity to submit prior art, triggering a formal review? (Is this possible now?)
I can think of a few benefits of this:
1. The patent office could focus their formal review efforts, gaining efficiency.
2. Avoids hiring a lawyer every time you find a patent that obviously should be invalid.
3. In the proposed IEEE system, having a lot of prior art patents would make it easier to point out prior art.
I stand corrected.
It strikes me as strange that Sun isn't marketing Java's language independence as well as Microsoft is marketing
C# is very similar to Java. The main difference is not C# vs. Java but .NET vs. Java.
.NET more attractive?
.NET works with more languages than just C#. Here's a list of languages supported by .NET: http://www.dotnetpowered.com/languages.aspx/. In contrast, Java only supports... well, Java.
.NET's libararies (FCL) easier to use than Java's libraries.
What makes
1.
2. Some people find
It looks like you missed copying the last sentence of the paragraph you copied from the executive order, which reads:
"Members of the Board appointed under Section 3(a) of this Order shall serve without compensation."
Or was this sentence intentionally left out because it contradicts your claim that the board is "yet another cronyist bunch given very nice salaries" ?
Does an architect have to guarantee that every house he designs is secure against breakins?
Why should a software engineer have to provide this same security guarantee?
The level of security is a feature like any other feature.
If you are paying the architect to design "fort knox", then it should be secure to top security standards, otherwise top security can not be expected; because sometimes people just want a cheap place to live with doors that have locks.
Do we expect every piece of software written, every house built, every vault designed, etc. to meet the highest security standards? In a word, no. Because, at some point, the cost of security becomes so high that we decide that the security is "good enough".
The US military wasn't even able to secure the pentagon from an attack, and we're worried about suing joe blow software developer for some bugs?
_Federal_ copyright law (Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 105) states that:
"Copyright protection... is not available for any work of the US government..."
That means you can do anything you want with US government works, regardless of whether or not what you do with the work would be considered a fair use. You can even profit from your use of the work.
Evidently MTA is a city agency... Does anyone know if federal copyright protection also does not apply to works of the NYC government?
I'm afraid this is not true (sources below). The copyright goes to the contractor by default.
"Work for hire" as defined in copyright law actually means "work by employee". When you "hire" a contractor, they are not an employee (usually). (As a sidenote, I'm not clear if the original poster is a contractor or an employee, which can be difficult to determine.)
One common place where this "work for hire" situation takes place is in web design. If you contract a company to design a website for you, you do not hold the copyright to it unless they sign over the copyright to you. Beware!
Sources
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-for-hire
http://copylaw.com/new_articles/wfh.html
Has anyone pointed out that FSF holds the trademark to GNU ?
Wouldn't the costs of consumable items like paper and toner be better allocated to their respective departments? Those departments likely will be more attentive to how much they are spending/printing when the money comes out of their own budget. Plus it saves IT from a situation like, "How many full color large format blueprints will the architects be printing this year?" and then being responsible for that cost.
Fair use does not permit a business to make a fair use on the behalf of individual users. Fair use does not allow a business to generate copies of large amounts of copyrighted content and make it available in the event that an individual might be able to make a fair use out of it. A fair use must be made by an individual. This is what you are doing when you request a page and it goes into your browser's cache.. you, as an individual, are selecting a particular site to cache on your personal computer, and you are not making it publicly available.
You make a good point with ISP's having a valid reason to keep proxy caches. However, ISP caches are different from google cache for a few reasons. First, someone has to request the content for it to be cached, an ISP proxy is not automatically downloading random internet content. Second, the contents of ISP proxy caches are not made publicly available on the same scale as google's cache. Third, ISP caches are transparent to the user and are not used to draw traffic and interest to a website like google or internet archive for commercial purposes.
On the note of "businesses can not make a fair use on behalf of individual users", remember my.mp3.com, the service that ripped tons of cds and made them available to users as long as the users could prove they owned the actual cd?
Here's what the court had to say about that: http://www.riaa.com/news/filings/pdf/mp3board/cou
This law is about search engines making copyrighted material available (probably google cache, for example). It is not about preventing websites from being found by searching on google. What right do google cache and the internet archive have to reproduce my copyrighted content? Copyright law prohibits reproduction without permission. What right do they have to use my content to draw interest and traffic to their site? Hosting of copies of my copyrighted material on google is not required for people to find me with their search engine.
Do you believe that it is legal for me to create a website that "archives" all the current books, newspaper articles, movies, and music? I could provide a "search" functionality that allows people to search through them. Just because the archived websites are freely accessible doesn't justify archiving either... or maybe I should create my own website that mirrors CNN.com... and put my own advertisements on it too!
1. If your friends have already read the book, they can lend the book to you. The publisher has lost a sale.
2. If your friends have already read the book, they can tell you what happened, if it's any good or not, and you may decide not to buy it. The publisher might lose a sale.
By purchasing a new computer, they're not necessarily avoiding the service costs. Even if they purchase a new computer, the target market for these services would still require someone to come to their house to install the printer, install all their software, copy data over from the old computer to the new computer, put it on the network, set up wireless access, install antivirus, download windows updates, etc.
Ask not what your employer can do for you, but what you can do for him.
Seriously, with no job experience you will be not able to provide your employer much value in a senior developer position.
Look at your skills and decide if they are worth your desired salary to a given employer. Looking in the terms of "what value can I offer my employer?" is a useful perspective. Would you hire yourself for that position when you could instead hire developers with years of experience?
Don't get too hung up on how high of a position you take. Look for jobs that will build your skills. They will provide you with the most benefit in the long run.
What keeps people buying new cars year after year?
Isn't it possible that Tiger Direct couldn't have complained earlier since Apple hasn't been using "Tiger" in commerce?
If Tiger Direct's trademark wasn't violated until Apple used Tiger in commerce, then Tiger Direct's complaint timing would be appropriate since OS Tiger currently is being released.
Tiger Direct is alleging that "Tiger" is "confusingly similar" to their trademarks "Tiger Direct" on a particular class of goods. Much like why Google sent a cease and desist to Booble because Google claimed Booble was "confusingly similar".
A separate issue is which site comes up on Google when searching a trademarked name. This can be referred to as potential "initial interest confusion". Initial interest confusion, however, is not a prerequisite for the "confusingly similar" test.
It's unlikely that Apple will be able to use the sports team Tiger mark since a trademark is for a particular class of goods. Kind of like how Apple (computer) and Apple (record label) have argued in the past when apple started iTunes.
What's the fastest way to get a server running again after a disk crash? With rsync, if I backup /home and /etc, I still have to install and configure the OS and other software. That could take a significant amount of time (possibly days). Not to mention the time spent answering the phone (is the server down? when will it be back up?)
But if I have a drive image, I could just put it on a spare server and be back up and running almost immediately. That would require an identical spare server though.
What do the big enterprises who can't afford downtime do to handle this?
So if it's just the design that's done here, it's as easy to outsource as software, right?
Software engineering salaries are higher than hardware engineering salaries:
(from bls.gov)
Hardware: $72,150
Software: $74,040
Software. Software. Software. The economics of hardware (eg. powerful mass produced cpus for low prices) in modern embedded systems nowadays are such that most if not all of the customization is in the software. We no longer need to have highly optimized circuits for embedded systems. Embedded systems nowadays? XBox is just a PC.