I've been a Sprint Customer for 6 years, starting with a very basic plan (40 minutes per month: 20 nights/weekends + 20 anytime) to what I've got now (more on that later).
I live in NYC so my main usage is here. I've traveled with my phone to Houston, Philly, different areas of Upstate NY, Cleveland, Long Island, Pokonos, etc, and it has worked great everywhere - although I have to point out that a key to getting great service is having a great phone. The Sanyo 4920 does the job, although the second line, an LG-350 is nice too.
Why do I love Sprint?
1. They're the most affordable, right off the bat. This makes a huge difference. If the bill is say $20 per month lower, that's $240 a year right there. A thousand bucks saved every 4 years, not bad!
2. The above is right off the bat, and it gets much better. Sprint actually takes care of their good customers. I have a ton of extra 'gift' features that I've acquired through the years. I will list them here to make everyone drool:
2 Lines
750 Anytime Minutes
Free PCS-to-PCS
Unlimited nights and Weekends
Nights start at 7pm
500 text messages per month (not sure if per line or total)
50 included roaming minutes (never gets used!)
Free Vision (internet) on one line.
How much for all that? My bill is usually $47 AFTER taxes. Some of the savings (5%) is due to a volume discount via my job. The rest is amazing deals I've been rewarded with over the years.
3. Customer Support. I admit, there're occasional reps that are TRULLY silly, but most of the time they're good enough. The best thing, they're very liberal with giving you a credit or an extra feature when you're having a problem. Customer satisfaction seems to be an inportant goal. This is the opposite to Verizon (both my ex and the current GF have Verizon, and they both say that the reps are competent but their attitude seems to be "our network kicks ass so we don't have to be nice".) It's impossible to get any concession out of them even if something is clearly Verizon's fault. They're also somehow screwing my GF on her contract now, making it out like one of the lines on her account is supposed to have a longer contract than the main line (wtf?) She's switching as soon as the contract is over.
4. They capped my fee! One day I was using Vision to transfer pictures from one of the phones (the one that doesn't have Vision included). I figured, how expensive could it be? Well, turns out that at 0.03 DOLLARS per KB, transfering 30 megs (the phone's capacity) is about... $900. But my bill for the xfer was $150. Sprint actually STOPPED charging me after that sum. (can you imagine what it might be like recieving $947 bill when you expect $47?). Still, the extra $150 was a shock too. I called Sprint in shock and the rep immediately waved 25% of that $150, and then gave me another $15 credit on top of that. Even though I definately did do the xfer and incurred those charges. Still, it was a very nice thing to do.
So the bottom line here, Sprint is a good enough a deal financially that it would have been worth putting up with ocasionally spotty coverage - but that's BS. Sprint has good coverage in all the areas I've used my phone, the service is perfect. The ONLY time I ever have problems is during events where EVERYONE is using their phone. The first 45 minutes of 2006, I couldn't dial out because I guess everyone was on their phones. The signal is there but the call doesn't go through. This happens rarely enough but it's something I have to mention for full disclosure.
This may be condescendingly simple, and I appologize if so - but why not templorarily disable Hibernate prior to taking an image of the partition. Disabling Hibernate in the Control Panel automaticaly deletes hiberfil.sys
You can enable Hibernation for your Windows (under Control Panel, Power). This essentially dumps the ram to disk, and then reloads from that image on next bootup.
The added benefit is that not only are you back to Windows sooner, your Windows session is exactly where you left off.
I'd just like to point out that the CEO's children weren't caught by RIAA, police, or their ISP. The CEO was simply asked whether his kids ever did this, and he admited that he suspected they did.
It's unfortunate that the writeup nor the linked story mention this (the underlying Reuters story does) because some of the hysterics in this thread are simply nuts. A common theme in this story is try cry along the lines of "some people are more equal than others" which is groundless in this case. Since the kids weren't busted by any authorities, this is no different than any other parent who caught their kids downloading illegal stuff and yelled at them.
I just wanted to point out that you're not giving the EV1 story a fair treatment.
It is true that there were many leasees who were dying to own one outright. However, that doesn't mean that GM would have obviously made money from that. For example, I believe that there're laws requiring car companies to make parts available for some amount of time (maybe 10 years?) after a car is manufactured. That would mean that GM would have to maintain this stock or production just to make the EV1 leasees happy.
This is not to say that GM did not have an ulterior motive - they may have. But to conclude that they were motivated by something other than profit from the fact that they crushed rather than sold their production run is not fair.
I updated Opera on my *Sanyo 4920 last night and I have to say I don't love the new version one bit.
While I've not had a chance to check out the new features, the thing that sticks out is that after any page load, Opera now displays an error screen saying 'The server has closed a connection' or something like that. If I cancel out of the error screen I actually do see the new page loaded. It's weird and annoying and I don't see any reason for such a thing to happen, nor what I can do about it.
I haven't tried the RSS features yet - they may remove the need for most of the browsing in my case - so I am not about to download back to Opera 2.0, but the browsing piece of it definately is flaky. Luckily I have another browser on the phone (the built-in one) so I can experiment.
I never understood why people talk about old hardware like it's a retarded brother or something. You can run a hell of a lot more on a 486 than you could on your cell phone. In fact, I used to have a 468/66 that I'd browse the web on w. Win95. So why not, for example, use one of the browsers that we used back then? IE3 or Netscape 3/4? I am sure as horrid as those browsers seem compared to today's versions, they're much more complete than a cellphone browser.
And as someone else pointed out, Opera itself is very light weight and may run fine anyway.
There are different levels of analysis that can be performed on market data - not all of them as sophisticated as 'stock picking'
For example, you can analyze the price motion of a particular fixed income instrument against some other fixed income instrument (eg some Treasuries.) You may learn that certain bevavior of one is a reliable predictor of the same behavior in the other. Then you could potentially predict a slight movement in the price before it happens, and buy into that security.
You may only win a few pennies per bond here, but if you do this enough and with a large enough pool of money, this can be an earner.
This is actually a complicated subject. As hard as it is to find a tech job, it's equally hard to hire a good tech employee. For example my employeer spends thousands and thousands of dollars scouring college campuses for good software developer tallent. A lot of the people we find are Indians who've come to study in this country as a means of entering the American workforce. We hire a lot of them - not because we want to find H1B type people, but because there're not that many Americans in these CS departments, period.
As a software developer, I hate the extra competition (obviously) but I also see how hard it is to actually find good employees, even as we're prepared to pay well. I am not sure if H1B is the answer or not, but I think the real challenge is that very few Americans are actually interested in pursuing a rigirous CS degree. When they do, it's because that's where their passion lies, and they make amazing developers. But they're few and rare.
My sole point here is that as unpleasant as the "Tech Czar" comments are, there's at least something real behind them.
You make a very educated post but alas your numbers are actually very wrong. Windows and Office are hrdly MSFT's sole revenue streams.
In 2005, MSFT's top 5 product segments were:
1 Client: 12bil 2 Information Worker 11.5bil 3 Server Tools 9.1b 4 Home/Entertainment 3.2b 5 MSN 2.4b
Of these, Server Tools had the largest average 2 year growth period (17%). MSN had the lowers (.33%, quite small. Information Worker went up 9% and Client 8.23%.
I do not know how exactly MSFT segments by product, but it does appear more diversified and that lines other than the two you mentioned, are doing well.
It depends entirely on what you want to do. A lot of very talented developers feel (rightly or not) that they can contribute the most while being responsible for a team. Others just want to code. Knowing what you want is key, my point was not that you should hang out at a job just to make manager, but that there's more than money to consider when switching.
I've hired, fired, and watched succeed or fail at a new job, dozens (probably hundreds, actually) of people over the years so take my advice for what it's worth:
Leave your job when you have nothing to learn and no room to grow. For example, if you are a developer and you could make more money at another job, but if you stay 3 months at this one you'll make manager, you are better off staying. That way if you ever reach your ceiling and decide to move, you'll come in to the new place as a "bigger person." The opportunity to grow is worth more than the extra ten thousand in your paycheck.
In general, you should have a reason better than "More Money" for deciding to jump. When I ask you "Why do you want to switch" at an interview, you better have a good answer. Making more money is implicit, and of course we'll give it to you, but there should be something more to it which is at least remotely true (you can show interest in the new area, you want more responsibility and your current place does not offer it - and you better have a way to prove that it's not because you don't deserve it) etc., whatever.
Manage your risk - improving your lot at the old job beats the unknowns of the new one. If you do not feel like you're being recognized for what you do, ask yourself what the root of that is and how you can address it. Maybe presenting yourself to your management better is a solution to your problem - there's no guarantee that the new place will magically recognize how great you are if your sole means of communication is staring awkwardly into the floor when we ask you a question.
Anyway good luck with that, stick to those jobs and, especially if you work in my department, stop reading this site and get back to work.
I advise students to follow the same education pattern that many successful developers I hired over the years followed:
In school, try to take courses which offer you a chance to learn something you'd never learn otherwise. For example, you will learn Fortran when working for me, no need to learn it at school (that was a joke, by the way Though you will.) On the other hand you will probably not end up learning, oh.. compilers, say, or discrete math, on the job. So take that at school and you'll have an edge over the people who are working with you and didn't.
But that's only half of it. I won't hire you unless I know you're self-sufficient and can work. How do I know that? From your resume. If you have 4-5 part time jobs you've done while in school, and these jobs pertain to the field, I will probably give you a shot: both because I like the people who bust their ass, and because you had probably learned something at those jobs that you didn't learn in school.
And finally, learn to WRITE and SPEAK. Can't stress it enough, the hardest thing to get a programmer to do is give a simple concise STATEMENT OF FACT. This drives me absolutely nuts. I have a few english majors working in the dept (I didn't hire them) and at least these guys can tell me what the problem is. Too bad they can't code.
... to do as they wish with things they own, including to impose conditions when selling those things to others.
For example, say my company would like to use some Open Source code in our product. We can't just do it, there are ramifications to consider. Does using Open Source code mean all of our code is Open Source (This is death for us.) Does it mean we can be sued (This is also death). Clearly we can't just do as we wish because whoever "owns" the rights to the code in the first place decided to place limitations on its use.
I don't think the above is too horrific, do you? So what's the difference here? If a media provider wants you to jump through hoops that you don't want to jump through, don't buy their products. It's their right to place conditions, and it's your right to walk away from the transaction.
Which is what we did with Open Source code, by the way. It's prohibited. We looked at the rules and balked, chosing instead to write things in-house.
As the TV show said, we have the technology. It's a business decision how to deploy it. Can you run your business by having enough capacity for rare peak demand? Probably not. In the 2003 blackout, cellphones failed not because of the electricity outage but because people saturated the network. Such events happen rarely. Presumably those who really need to communicate (ie emergency services) in those situations have the means to do so outside of commercial channels. For private companies, it may not be reasonable or possible to accomodate the event when EVERYONE is dialing at the same time.
This is not limited to natural disasters and other such situations. I have a beach house. When the weather is not so nice, my cellphone works fine there. When it's beautiful, it doesn't work so well because a large amount of people have flooded to the beach and there isn't enough local capacity for them. Why people are yammering away on the beach instead of enjoying themselves is beyond me. Or maybe they just have a boss like me.
First guy left and started a company exactly mirroring one of our product lines. He was one of the first employees of the firm, and started before we really had proper employment contracts. Additionally, he had come up with that line of business in the first place, and now decided to strike out on his own. We couldn't do anything about that, and it didn't feel like we should.
The other guy was actually someone I had hired myself in late '90s. Bright guy but didn't know much about the business. He learned quickly and was running an area of about 80 people when he decided to go to a competitor. We made it clear to him that we'd sue him if he tried: after all this time it was clear he learned everything from us, and now he was going to take the know-how and give it to someone else. We didn't want him working for us either after that.
I followed the story of Google/MS for a while, and I am actually friends with the person at Google who recruited this Lee guy. Still, it seems pretty clear that he did sign a contract with MS promosing not to do exactly what he did. And he wasn't some kid out of college when he did it, either - he knew what he was getting into and he probably had the baragining power to negotiate the terms. He didn't, and now he broke the contract, and it seems that he indeed is going to transfer the know-how to Google. Therefore MS is doing the right thing for its shareholders (which by the way means a vast majority of America's mutual-fund holding public) by defending against this.
To put it in terms you people will understand, it's as if someone who led an open source project decided to work at a company making a closed-source equivalent and brought the source with him, in violation of whatever licence that source is under. In this case Lee isn't bringing over source but he is bringing an equivalent value of insight into MS's research. After all, there are a lot of smart people out there, why did Google target this particular person? The motives are obvious.
I think the question of why people Blog is being begged by this story. I can think of about 4 broad reasons for doing so:
1: Therapy
2: Spreading Information
3: Ego Boos
4: Money
The rise and fall of marketshare is presumably paramount to bloggers motivated by Ego (i.e. having a popular blog) and Money (higher click-through rates and volume). It is less important to those blogging for the first two reasons.
In my case, blogging offers theraupetic qualities which are unaffected by volume. I get to "think out loud" anonymously whether it's read by thousands of people, or none.
I know the information I offer is valuable - but to whom? Mainly to software developers in the corporate world, and to some extent to employees in general, and maybe some management types who want to know how others run their kingdom. These are the only demographic that I care about. It's completely irrelevant that these people may constitute a very small percentage of the general blog readership.
I am sure that most bloggers blog for the same reasons I do, and not for plain ego or money. Therefore it does not really matter what percentage of the total marketshare we get.
I have read Slashdot for a while and never felt the need to comment being that my real insight into technology is nonexistant. Yes, I am a boss just like the one you're talking about.
First thing to realize is that unless your boss is a technical lead who's a developer/tech, he is hired to things which are different from what you're hired to do.
I have no clue how to fix a computer, I don't even know what version of Windows I am writing this on. But I do know how to keep a few hundred developer from programming our company out of business. We have guys whose job it is to keep my PC running. I can't do what they do, and they sure as hell can't do what I do!
Second thing: How does your manager measure success? Since I know I can't develop the whole product myself, the only way I know to succeed is to make sure my developers succeed. That's the only thing I can shoot towards which will produce net gain for the company. If your manager measures himself the same way, you're golden. If he realizes he's not a tech and lets techs do their job, what more can you ask for? Would you preffer a tech manager who was convinced (rightly or wrongly) that he could do the job better than his underlings?
Third: I heard people complain about their bosses this way (I am often the target) Usually its sourgrapes whose root cause has zero to do with management's technical ability. Sometimes the manager's personality clashes with the employees, or the employee is jelous of the status and money. If these are the true causes of your discontent, look within yourself for a resolution.
Fourth: all other things being equal, a good manager who also posesses an understanding of what his people do is more valuable than a manager lacking that understanding. In other words, if you can learn all the non-technical stuff your boss does and he doesn't learn the tech stuff you do, you will soon become more valuable to the firm than he is. If this is your ambition, go for it.
Finally, you'll be better off if you learn what it is that your managers are held accountable for by THEIR bosses. You bet your ass your boss isn't measured by how well he can fix the computer, but only by how many computers you as a department fix in the year (or some metric along the same lines).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a Sprint Customer for 6 years, starting with a very basic plan (40 minutes per month: 20 nights/weekends + 20 anytime) to what I've got now (more on that later).
I live in NYC so my main usage is here. I've traveled with my phone to Houston, Philly, different areas of Upstate NY, Cleveland, Long Island, Pokonos, etc, and it has worked great everywhere - although I have to point out that a key to getting great service is having a great phone. The Sanyo 4920 does the job, although the second line, an LG-350 is nice too.
Why do I love Sprint?
1. They're the most affordable, right off the bat. This makes a huge difference. If the bill is say $20 per month lower, that's $240 a year right there. A thousand bucks saved every 4 years, not bad!
2. The above is right off the bat, and it gets much better. Sprint actually takes care of their good customers. I have a ton of extra 'gift' features that I've acquired through the years. I will list them here to make everyone drool:
2 Lines
750 Anytime Minutes
Free PCS-to-PCS
Unlimited nights and Weekends
Nights start at 7pm
500 text messages per month (not sure if per line or total)
50 included roaming minutes (never gets used!)
Free Vision (internet) on one line.
How much for all that? My bill is usually $47 AFTER taxes. Some of the savings (5%) is due to a volume discount via my job. The rest is amazing deals I've been rewarded with over the years.
3. Customer Support. I admit, there're occasional reps that are TRULLY silly, but most of the time they're good enough. The best thing, they're very liberal with giving you a credit or an extra feature when you're having a problem. Customer satisfaction seems to be an inportant goal. This is the opposite to Verizon (both my ex and the current GF have Verizon, and they both say that the reps are competent but their attitude seems to be "our network kicks ass so we don't have to be nice".) It's impossible to get any concession out of them even if something is clearly Verizon's fault. They're also somehow screwing my GF on her contract now, making it out like one of the lines on her account is supposed to have a longer contract than the main line (wtf?) She's switching as soon as the contract is over.
4. They capped my fee! One day I was using Vision to transfer pictures from one of the phones (the one that doesn't have Vision included). I figured, how expensive could it be? Well, turns out that at 0.03 DOLLARS per KB, transfering 30 megs (the phone's capacity) is about... $900. But my bill for the xfer was $150. Sprint actually STOPPED charging me after that sum. (can you imagine what it might be like recieving $947 bill when you expect $47?). Still, the extra $150 was a shock too. I called Sprint in shock and the rep immediately waved 25% of that $150, and then gave me another $15 credit on top of that. Even though I definately did do the xfer and incurred those charges. Still, it was a very nice thing to do.
So the bottom line here, Sprint is a good enough a deal financially that it would have been worth putting up with ocasionally spotty coverage - but that's BS. Sprint has good coverage in all the areas I've used my phone, the service is perfect. The ONLY time I ever have problems is during events where EVERYONE is using their phone. The first 45 minutes of 2006, I couldn't dial out because I guess everyone was on their phones. The signal is there but the call doesn't go through. This happens rarely enough but it's something I have to mention for full disclosure.
This may be condescendingly simple, and I appologize if so - but why not templorarily disable Hibernate prior to taking an image of the partition. Disabling Hibernate in the Control Panel automaticaly deletes hiberfil.sys
You can enable Hibernation for your Windows (under Control Panel, Power). This essentially dumps the ram to disk, and then reloads from that image on next bootup.
The added benefit is that not only are you back to Windows sooner, your Windows session is exactly where you left off.
I'd just like to point out that the CEO's children weren't caught by RIAA, police, or their ISP. The CEO was simply asked whether his kids ever did this, and he admited that he suspected they did.
It's unfortunate that the writeup nor the linked story mention this (the underlying Reuters story does) because some of the hysterics in this thread are simply nuts. A common theme in this story is try cry along the lines of "some people are more equal than others" which is groundless in this case. Since the kids weren't busted by any authorities, this is no different than any other parent who caught their kids downloading illegal stuff and yelled at them.
I just wanted to point out that you're not giving the EV1 story a fair treatment.
It is true that there were many leasees who were dying to own one outright. However, that doesn't mean that GM would have obviously made money from that. For example, I believe that there're laws requiring car companies to make parts available for some amount of time (maybe 10 years?) after a car is manufactured. That would mean that GM would have to maintain this stock or production just to make the EV1 leasees happy.
This is not to say that GM did not have an ulterior motive - they may have. But to conclude that they were motivated by something other than profit from the fact that they crushed rather than sold their production run is not fair.
I updated Opera on my *Sanyo 4920 last night and I have to say I don't love the new version one bit.
While I've not had a chance to check out the new features, the thing that sticks out is that after any page load, Opera now displays an error screen saying 'The server has closed a connection' or something like that. If I cancel out of the error screen I actually do see the new page loaded. It's weird and annoying and I don't see any reason for such a thing to happen, nor what I can do about it.
I haven't tried the RSS features yet - they may remove the need for most of the browsing in my case - so I am not about to download back to Opera 2.0, but the browsing piece of it definately is flaky. Luckily I have another browser on the phone (the built-in one) so I can experiment.
* Awesome phone
I never understood why people talk about old hardware like it's a retarded brother or something. You can run a hell of a lot more on a 486 than you could on your cell phone. In fact, I used to have a 468/66 that I'd browse the web on w. Win95. So why not, for example, use one of the browsers that we used back then? IE3 or Netscape 3/4? I am sure as horrid as those browsers seem compared to today's versions, they're much more complete than a cellphone browser.
And as someone else pointed out, Opera itself is very light weight and may run fine anyway.
There are different levels of analysis that can be performed on market data - not all of them as sophisticated as 'stock picking'
For example, you can analyze the price motion of a particular fixed income instrument against some other fixed income instrument (eg some Treasuries.) You may learn that certain bevavior of one is a reliable predictor of the same behavior in the other. Then you could potentially predict a slight movement in the price before it happens, and buy into that security.
You may only win a few pennies per bond here, but if you do this enough and with a large enough pool of money, this can be an earner.
As a matter of fact, this is being done today.
This is actually a complicated subject. As hard as it is to find a tech job, it's equally hard to hire a good tech employee. For example my employeer spends thousands and thousands of dollars scouring college campuses for good software developer tallent. A lot of the people we find are Indians who've come to study in this country as a means of entering the American workforce. We hire a lot of them - not because we want to find H1B type people, but because there're not that many Americans in these CS departments, period. As a software developer, I hate the extra competition (obviously) but I also see how hard it is to actually find good employees, even as we're prepared to pay well. I am not sure if H1B is the answer or not, but I think the real challenge is that very few Americans are actually interested in pursuing a rigirous CS degree. When they do, it's because that's where their passion lies, and they make amazing developers. But they're few and rare. My sole point here is that as unpleasant as the "Tech Czar" comments are, there's at least something real behind them.
You make a very educated post but alas your numbers are actually very wrong. Windows and Office are hrdly MSFT's sole revenue streams.
In 2005, MSFT's top 5 product segments were:
1 Client: 12bil
2 Information Worker 11.5bil
3 Server Tools 9.1b
4 Home/Entertainment 3.2b
5 MSN 2.4b
Of these, Server Tools had the largest average 2 year growth period (17%). MSN had the lowers (.33%, quite small. Information Worker went up 9% and Client 8.23%.
I do not know how exactly MSFT segments by product, but it does appear more diversified and that lines other than the two you mentioned, are doing well.
It depends entirely on what you want to do. A lot of very talented developers feel (rightly or not) that they can contribute the most while being responsible for a team. Others just want to code. Knowing what you want is key, my point was not that you should hang out at a job just to make manager, but that there's more than money to consider when switching.
I've hired, fired, and watched succeed or fail at a new job, dozens (probably hundreds, actually) of people over the years so take my advice for what it's worth:
Leave your job when you have nothing to learn and no room to grow. For example, if you are a developer and you could make more money at another job, but if you stay 3 months at this one you'll make manager, you are better off staying. That way if you ever reach your ceiling and decide to move, you'll come in to the new place as a "bigger person." The opportunity to grow is worth more than the extra ten thousand in your paycheck.
In general, you should have a reason better than "More Money" for deciding to jump. When I ask you "Why do you want to switch" at an interview, you better have a good answer. Making more money is implicit, and of course we'll give it to you, but there should be something more to it which is at least remotely true (you can show interest in the new area, you want more responsibility and your current place does not offer it - and you better have a way to prove that it's not because you don't deserve it) etc., whatever.
Manage your risk - improving your lot at the old job beats the unknowns of the new one. If you do not feel like you're being recognized for what you do, ask yourself what the root of that is and how you can address it. Maybe presenting yourself to your management better is a solution to your problem - there's no guarantee that the new place will magically recognize how great you are if your sole means of communication is staring awkwardly into the floor when we ask you a question.
Anyway good luck with that, stick to those jobs and, especially if you work in my department, stop reading this site and get back to work.
I advise students to follow the same education pattern that many successful developers I hired over the years followed:
In school, try to take courses which offer you a chance to learn something you'd never learn otherwise. For example, you will learn Fortran when working for me, no need to learn it at school (that was a joke, by the way Though you will.) On the other hand you will probably not end up learning, oh.. compilers, say, or discrete math, on the job. So take that at school and you'll have an edge over the people who are working with you and didn't.
But that's only half of it. I won't hire you unless I know you're self-sufficient and can work. How do I know that? From your resume. If you have 4-5 part time jobs you've done while in school, and these jobs pertain to the field, I will probably give you a shot: both because I like the people who bust their ass, and because you had probably learned something at those jobs that you didn't learn in school.
And finally, learn to WRITE and SPEAK. Can't stress it enough, the hardest thing to get a programmer to do is give a simple concise STATEMENT OF FACT. This drives me absolutely nuts. I have a few english majors working in the dept (I didn't hire them) and at least these guys can tell me what the problem is. Too bad they can't code.
... to do as they wish with things they own, including to impose conditions when selling those things to others.
For example, say my company would like to use some Open Source code in our product. We can't just do it, there are ramifications to consider. Does using Open Source code mean all of our code is Open Source (This is death for us.) Does it mean we can be sued (This is also death). Clearly we can't just do as we wish because whoever "owns" the rights to the code in the first place decided to place limitations on its use.
I don't think the above is too horrific, do you? So what's the difference here? If a media provider wants you to jump through hoops that you don't want to jump through, don't buy their products. It's their right to place conditions, and it's your right to walk away from the transaction.
Which is what we did with Open Source code, by the way. It's prohibited. We looked at the rules and balked, chosing instead to write things in-house.
As the TV show said, we have the technology. It's a business decision how to deploy it. Can you run your business by having enough capacity for rare peak demand? Probably not. In the 2003 blackout, cellphones failed not because of the electricity outage but because people saturated the network. Such events happen rarely. Presumably those who really need to communicate (ie emergency services) in those situations have the means to do so outside of commercial channels. For private companies, it may not be reasonable or possible to accomodate the event when EVERYONE is dialing at the same time.
This is not limited to natural disasters and other such situations. I have a beach house. When the weather is not so nice, my cellphone works fine there. When it's beautiful, it doesn't work so well because a large amount of people have flooded to the beach and there isn't enough local capacity for them. Why people are yammering away on the beach instead of enjoying themselves is beyond me. Or maybe they just have a boss like me.
And what of it? If they're guilty and you have breached contract to prove it, sue them.
I had this happen twice in my experience.
First guy left and started a company exactly mirroring one of our product lines. He was one of the first employees of the firm, and started before we really had proper employment contracts. Additionally, he had come up with that line of business in the first place, and now decided to strike out on his own. We couldn't do anything about that, and it didn't feel like we should.
The other guy was actually someone I had hired myself in late '90s. Bright guy but didn't know much about the business. He learned quickly and was running an area of about 80 people when he decided to go to a competitor. We made it clear to him that we'd sue him if he tried: after all this time it was clear he learned everything from us, and now he was going to take the know-how and give it to someone else. We didn't want him working for us either after that.
I followed the story of Google/MS for a while, and I am actually friends with the person at Google who recruited this Lee guy. Still, it seems pretty clear that he did sign a contract with MS promosing not to do exactly what he did. And he wasn't some kid out of college when he did it, either - he knew what he was getting into and he probably had the baragining power to negotiate the terms. He didn't, and now he broke the contract, and it seems that he indeed is going to transfer the know-how to Google. Therefore MS is doing the right thing for its shareholders (which by the way means a vast majority of America's mutual-fund holding public) by defending against this.
To put it in terms you people will understand, it's as if someone who led an open source project decided to work at a company making a closed-source equivalent and brought the source with him, in violation of whatever licence that source is under. In this case Lee isn't bringing over source but he is bringing an equivalent value of insight into MS's research. After all, there are a lot of smart people out there, why did Google target this particular person? The motives are obvious.
I think the question of why people Blog is being begged by this story. I can think of about 4 broad reasons for doing so: 1: Therapy 2: Spreading Information 3: Ego Boos 4: Money The rise and fall of marketshare is presumably paramount to bloggers motivated by Ego (i.e. having a popular blog) and Money (higher click-through rates and volume). It is less important to those blogging for the first two reasons. In my case, blogging offers theraupetic qualities which are unaffected by volume. I get to "think out loud" anonymously whether it's read by thousands of people, or none. I know the information I offer is valuable - but to whom? Mainly to software developers in the corporate world, and to some extent to employees in general, and maybe some management types who want to know how others run their kingdom. These are the only demographic that I care about. It's completely irrelevant that these people may constitute a very small percentage of the general blog readership. I am sure that most bloggers blog for the same reasons I do, and not for plain ego or money. Therefore it does not really matter what percentage of the total marketshare we get.
I have read Slashdot for a while and never felt the need to comment being that my real insight into technology is nonexistant. Yes, I am a boss just like the one you're talking about.
First thing to realize is that unless your boss is a technical lead who's a developer/tech, he is hired to things which are different from what you're hired to do.
I have no clue how to fix a computer, I don't even know what version of Windows I am writing this on. But I do know how to keep a few hundred developer from programming our company out of business. We have guys whose job it is to keep my PC running. I can't do what they do, and they sure as hell can't do what I do!
Second thing: How does your manager measure success? Since I know I can't develop the whole product myself, the only way I know to succeed is to make sure my developers succeed. That's the only thing I can shoot towards which will produce net gain for the company. If your manager measures himself the same way, you're golden. If he realizes he's not a tech and lets techs do their job, what more can you ask for? Would you preffer a tech manager who was convinced (rightly or wrongly) that he could do the job better than his underlings?
Third: I heard people complain about their bosses this way (I am often the target) Usually its sourgrapes whose root cause has zero to do with management's technical ability. Sometimes the manager's personality clashes with the employees, or the employee is jelous of the status and money. If these are the true causes of your discontent, look within yourself for a resolution.
Fourth: all other things being equal, a good manager who also posesses an understanding of what his people do is more valuable than a manager lacking that understanding. In other words, if you can learn all the non-technical stuff your boss does and he doesn't learn the tech stuff you do, you will soon become more valuable to the firm than he is. If this is your ambition, go for it.
Finally, you'll be better off if you learn what it is that your managers are held accountable for by THEIR bosses. You bet your ass your boss isn't measured by how well he can fix the computer, but only by how many computers you as a department fix in the year (or some metric along the same lines).