You say 15c/KB like it's a bad thing, yet here in the states we're being charged 20c (or is it 25c now?) for 140B of data if you want to send it to another phone.
Telcos are greedy. This is not news. And please let me assure you that America having "competition" in this arena doesn't make a damned bit of difference for pricing (if anything it's worse - they avoid the monopoly laws, but there are so few of them that collusion is trivially easy and always overlooked by the powers that be). So while Netflix and Blockbuster fight over delivering the lowest pricing for us, Verizon and AT&T work together to fight with their customers, instead of fighting over those customers.
Of course my bit about text messages isn't too relevant in the context of data transfer, and I'm well aware that Oz is notorious for having unfair telcos, but you're not the only people that get screwed. Anyone that has a telco is getting screwed by that telco.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers who play nice with Linux are reaping the benefits of the Linux-running hardware tinkerer's credit cards.
This isn't rocket science... the more places your device can work, the bigger your market. Their spec obfuscation is akin to DRM - it only needs to be broken once for it to become globally worthless, yet if you don't use it in the first place then your loudest users will praise you.
What's there for Broadcom to gain by making it harder to write drivers? Surely it's in their best interest to have Linux support, especially given it's massively widespread use in the embedded devices market.
Seconded on PP. Free, easy to set up, and makes perfect sense for my workflow. I doubt it's the right tool for everyone, but if you want to basically break down massive projects into maintainable checklists, it's the way to go*. Most other organizational programs I found that I'd spend more time organizing the project in the app than actually _doing_ the project, but PP just makes data entry a lot more natural for me. Takes about five minutes to install on any *AMP system, so I'd strongly suggest giving it a quick test if nothing else.
There's also a similar web app, ActiveCollab (paid but fairly cheap) that offers some additional functionality - mobile versions and a couple other things. I believe it's based off of a fork before PP went open-source or something of that nature, if you care.
* At least among PHP-based apps that I could host myself. Not a ton of options, but I do my development on a MAMP install which contains only PHP and not any of the other "P" systems, which ruled out using Trac among other popular apps. That said, I prefer it by far, so the fact that it's one of few things that I could actually install on my local working/dev system was a big plus.
FreshBooks.com is also good for freelancers - I don't use them (I have a desktop app, Billings, Mac-only, which I prefer) but have seen what it can do and it's pretty solid. Free to get started I believe.
On that note, I'd read the hell out of FreelanceSwitch.com. They have lots of great advice and opinions for billing practices, contracts, invoicing, determining your worth, dealing with clients, and all of the stuff that you'd have to deal with by switching to freelance work (surprise!).
I will say that what you charge will drastically change what kind of clients you can get. If you can produce some damn fine work, then don't charge what a high school student with some free time will, because then you'll get stingy clients who are demanding crazy requests.
Learning to say "no" is also a good skill. Don't overdo it, but agreeing to bad terms is setting yourself up to excess stress and failure.
Again, I'd strongly recommend reading freelanceswitch.com. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but have found them to be a great resource in my own freelancing experience.
DHL? The crappy shipping company? I assume you mean DHS - I certainly hope that the idiots that have been known to leave my packages in shrubs have less oversight than the FBI!
Still, a valid point at some level. Intent is a big factor - just as it makes the difference between murder and manslaughter, it (in this situation, and at least in my opinion) makes the difference between larceny and terrorism. If your goal is to make money, then you're a thief; perhaps an unusually douchey thief, but still just a thief. If, on the other hand, your goal is to harm the infrastructure and profiting from the sale of the copper is just a bonus, then terrorism is accurate (at least for certain definitions of terrorism).
If terrorism can be 'for profit' then what exactly distinguishes it from run of the mill crime?
I don't know... maybe terrorism has something to do with causing terror. All of the BS we're throwing around these days generally doesn't fit the proper description of terrorism, which is a crime intended to strike fear into a population.
Of course that's still pretty ambiguous, as fear is often a byproduct of most crimes.
And no cure for cancer in a society with advanced robotics and giant spaceships is preposterous (if all medical ships that could treat cancer were destroyed, I'd say OK, I can buy that, but no cure or even decent treatment is silly and that's the way it was portrayed).
Come on, now. We have some pretty big spaceships and I've seen some pretty damn impressive work done in the field of robotics, yet we're nowhere near the cure for the common cold, let alone cancer. Sure, neither are exactly military-grade today, but with the exception of the FTL drives (which as far as I'm aware violate all laws of existing in this universe) we could have all of Galactica's tech within five to ten years if we focused our efforts on it - the research is mostly done, it's mostly a matter of scalability. How many diseases have been cured (rather than having better treatments) in the last 10 years? 20? 50? Unlike spaceships, viruses and other forms of disease mutate over time, and even as a fixed target are stupidly difficult to address. Space flight is just physics on a very large scale, and robotics is largely programming. While I don't intend to find out firsthand, I expect that programming a heat-sensing camera to aim a gun isn't an exceptionally difficult task, especially when it's not too discerning about its targets.
Look how much progress we made during the space race when we were using slide rules instead of supercompters. And look how not cured cancer is, despite having been around probably nearly as long as life itself. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion about it, but them not having cured cancer is probably the most plausible thing on the show in my eyes.
If you want nothing than context-free explosions, go watch the latest Bond movie. No, they're not in space, but stuff blowing up is stuff blowing up. While I certainly can't speak for anyone else here, I find the moments that aren't just "Oh shit, horde of Cylons coming, where are my grenades?!" usually well-done and engaging. Not all of them, of course, but half of the story would fall apart without the whole Baltar/#6 sub-plot which is typically explosion-free.
But you do have to consider that speech-to-text's strength is transcription, not punctuation. For an engine that's probably had next to no training on the user's voice, it did at least a half-decent job getting the correct word. Given that most perl scripters are too busy fighting over vi and emacs, it's probably OK for the Vista team to ignore this one masochist.
Re:Silly to create the organization
on
Houses With Tails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's only true until this theoretical company that only maintains the wires realizes that all the money is in the content. And while I suppose that having two Comcasts competing with each other is an improvement over the current situation, there's so much collusion in the industry that it really doesn't matter.
In fact having worked in software sales, I'd say that support is probably the determining factor in most sales unless you have a very specialized product. And if that's the case, you're going to need to outstrip your employer's old code by miles since they're the established player in the vertical.
As a developer, you may know that the code sucks. That it just somehow compiles. That it really should be subjected to a rewrite from scratch. That "WTF?!" is present in five more comments than is healthy. And you're probably correct. However, when it comes to actually making money from it, you just need to be better than your competition.
I've fought with coders and with salespeople at the same company, often times over the same issue (it's a hazard of being a sales engineer - you often end up as a moderator). Neither would exist without the other, so stop blaming each other and realize that both of your problems are management's fault:)
Not only am INAL, but I'm in a similar position as the original poster. I'm partly thinking that since I have personal projects that could benefit from the software, I'll keep it to myself until any non-compete expires (even if it's not enforceable) just to stay on the safe side. Which means that development is well underway, for me. It may never make it into the public. It may go out commercially. It may go out as open-source, with some sort of hosting(SAAS)/support-driven business model - right now, the most likely. But until you know that there's no valid case should your ex-employer sue you, I'd keep it as a personal project.
That's not how statutory damages work. Like it or not (and going by your sig, I'll assume "not"), when you willfully commit copyright infringement, the IP holder has every right to come after you regardless of your intentions - and when you knowingly violated the copyright (downloaded a game being an example, as compared to taking an unreasonably long excerpt from an article perhaps), the damages that company can be awarded increase significantly.
Is that what the law should be? That's a matter of opinion, though I'm actually inclined to go with yes. Have we seen unreasonably high damages awarded in many of these cases? Absolutely. Up to $250k + 5 years for copying a movie is beyond insane.
Having said that, there's no way for someone on the prowl for copyright infringement (which I'd argue is a responsibility of any publicly held company, though it certainly shouldn't become their business model as the RIAA have done) to know whether you're downloading their product to sample or to avoid paying for it because you're a cheap-ass. There's next to no harm in the former, and it can indeed help the company - I do it all the time, and buy the product if I'm satisfied, but the latter definitely IS a lost sale, and damages should be awarded if it can be proven. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, but 5-10x the cost of the product isn't unreasonably high yet should serve a sufficient deterrent against future piracy.
To make it clear: I think the RIAA and MPAA's John Doe tactics are unreasonable, mafia-esque, and should be illegal (and may be - apparently someone's finally going after them under RICO), especially with the payouts they're trying to get - often 300x or more of the value of the product, which is absolutely unreasonable. But it doesn't sound like the ESA is using those tactics, especially as the original question doesn't state anything along the lines of "I looked into it and determined that this infringement never occurred."
If your job involves using said computer, then turning the damn thing on is part of your job. And logging in. And opening your email program. That argument is like a plumber claiming that his job is just to use the torch to join pipes, not to get the thing lit up before use. That kind of grade-A bullshit is probably what leads to employers making a huge fuss over five minutes a day (any computer that takes 15 minutes to boot has other problems).
What I'm more interested in is what causes the lost tool bag to be worth $100,000, as reported by the local news. Or, rather, what account the $99,000 worth of not tools is currently padding.
IE-Windows is only harmful to web developers. Windows-All PC Hardware, not so much. While they've taken some legal shit for the former (though moreso with WMP than IE, if memory serves), it's the latter that really got them in trouble.
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You say 15c/KB like it's a bad thing, yet here in the states we're being charged 20c (or is it 25c now?) for 140B of data if you want to send it to another phone.
Telcos are greedy. This is not news. And please let me assure you that America having "competition" in this arena doesn't make a damned bit of difference for pricing (if anything it's worse - they avoid the monopoly laws, but there are so few of them that collusion is trivially easy and always overlooked by the powers that be). So while Netflix and Blockbuster fight over delivering the lowest pricing for us, Verizon and AT&T work together to fight with their customers, instead of fighting over those customers.
Of course my bit about text messages isn't too relevant in the context of data transfer, and I'm well aware that Oz is notorious for having unfair telcos, but you're not the only people that get screwed. Anyone that has a telco is getting screwed by that telco.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers who play nice with Linux are reaping the benefits of the Linux-running hardware tinkerer's credit cards.
This isn't rocket science... the more places your device can work, the bigger your market. Their spec obfuscation is akin to DRM - it only needs to be broken once for it to become globally worthless, yet if you don't use it in the first place then your loudest users will praise you.
What's there for Broadcom to gain by making it harder to write drivers? Surely it's in their best interest to have Linux support, especially given it's massively widespread use in the embedded devices market.
Seconded on PP. Free, easy to set up, and makes perfect sense for my workflow. I doubt it's the right tool for everyone, but if you want to basically break down massive projects into maintainable checklists, it's the way to go*. Most other organizational programs I found that I'd spend more time organizing the project in the app than actually _doing_ the project, but PP just makes data entry a lot more natural for me. Takes about five minutes to install on any *AMP system, so I'd strongly suggest giving it a quick test if nothing else.
There's also a similar web app, ActiveCollab (paid but fairly cheap) that offers some additional functionality - mobile versions and a couple other things. I believe it's based off of a fork before PP went open-source or something of that nature, if you care.
* At least among PHP-based apps that I could host myself. Not a ton of options, but I do my development on a MAMP install which contains only PHP and not any of the other "P" systems, which ruled out using Trac among other popular apps. That said, I prefer it by far, so the fact that it's one of few things that I could actually install on my local working/dev system was a big plus.
FreshBooks.com is also good for freelancers - I don't use them (I have a desktop app, Billings, Mac-only, which I prefer) but have seen what it can do and it's pretty solid. Free to get started I believe.
On that note, I'd read the hell out of FreelanceSwitch.com. They have lots of great advice and opinions for billing practices, contracts, invoicing, determining your worth, dealing with clients, and all of the stuff that you'd have to deal with by switching to freelance work (surprise!).
I will say that what you charge will drastically change what kind of clients you can get. If you can produce some damn fine work, then don't charge what a high school student with some free time will, because then you'll get stingy clients who are demanding crazy requests.
Learning to say "no" is also a good skill. Don't overdo it, but agreeing to bad terms is setting yourself up to excess stress and failure.
Again, I'd strongly recommend reading freelanceswitch.com. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but have found them to be a great resource in my own freelancing experience.
Almost, but the Green Mountain Boys are from our spooning partner to the west, Vermont. /Vermonter stuck in NH due to the job market
Guess that only makes you guilty of third-degree terrorism, rather than the first-degree terrorism we're accustomed to these days.
DHL? The crappy shipping company? I assume you mean DHS - I certainly hope that the idiots that have been known to leave my packages in shrubs have less oversight than the FBI!
Still, a valid point at some level. Intent is a big factor - just as it makes the difference between murder and manslaughter, it (in this situation, and at least in my opinion) makes the difference between larceny and terrorism. If your goal is to make money, then you're a thief; perhaps an unusually douchey thief, but still just a thief. If, on the other hand, your goal is to harm the infrastructure and profiting from the sale of the copper is just a bonus, then terrorism is accurate (at least for certain definitions of terrorism).
I don't know... maybe terrorism has something to do with causing terror. All of the BS we're throwing around these days generally doesn't fit the proper description of terrorism, which is a crime intended to strike fear into a population.
Of course that's still pretty ambiguous, as fear is often a byproduct of most crimes.
I don't look forward to the contract attached to the carrier subsidy for a Rolex phone... though I still like the idea.
Come on, now. We have some pretty big spaceships and I've seen some pretty damn impressive work done in the field of robotics, yet we're nowhere near the cure for the common cold, let alone cancer. Sure, neither are exactly military-grade today, but with the exception of the FTL drives (which as far as I'm aware violate all laws of existing in this universe) we could have all of Galactica's tech within five to ten years if we focused our efforts on it - the research is mostly done, it's mostly a matter of scalability. How many diseases have been cured (rather than having better treatments) in the last 10 years? 20? 50? Unlike spaceships, viruses and other forms of disease mutate over time, and even as a fixed target are stupidly difficult to address. Space flight is just physics on a very large scale, and robotics is largely programming. While I don't intend to find out firsthand, I expect that programming a heat-sensing camera to aim a gun isn't an exceptionally difficult task, especially when it's not too discerning about its targets.
Look how much progress we made during the space race when we were using slide rules instead of supercompters. And look how not cured cancer is, despite having been around probably nearly as long as life itself. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion about it, but them not having cured cancer is probably the most plausible thing on the show in my eyes.
If you want nothing than context-free explosions, go watch the latest Bond movie. No, they're not in space, but stuff blowing up is stuff blowing up. While I certainly can't speak for anyone else here, I find the moments that aren't just "Oh shit, horde of Cylons coming, where are my grenades?!" usually well-done and engaging. Not all of them, of course, but half of the story would fall apart without the whole Baltar/#6 sub-plot which is typically explosion-free.
Hardly. It's possible to make sense out of French!
That was absolutely magical.
But you do have to consider that speech-to-text's strength is transcription, not punctuation. For an engine that's probably had next to no training on the user's voice, it did at least a half-decent job getting the correct word. Given that most perl scripters are too busy fighting over vi and emacs, it's probably OK for the Vista team to ignore this one masochist.
omghowdidyouknowimgettingarestrainingorder!!1
That's only true until this theoretical company that only maintains the wires realizes that all the money is in the content. And while I suppose that having two Comcasts competing with each other is an improvement over the current situation, there's so much collusion in the industry that it really doesn't matter.
We're working on it.
In fact having worked in software sales, I'd say that support is probably the determining factor in most sales unless you have a very specialized product. And if that's the case, you're going to need to outstrip your employer's old code by miles since they're the established player in the vertical.
As a developer, you may know that the code sucks. That it just somehow compiles. That it really should be subjected to a rewrite from scratch. That "WTF?!" is present in five more comments than is healthy. And you're probably correct. However, when it comes to actually making money from it, you just need to be better than your competition.
I've fought with coders and with salespeople at the same company, often times over the same issue (it's a hazard of being a sales engineer - you often end up as a moderator). Neither would exist without the other, so stop blaming each other and realize that both of your problems are management's fault :)
Not only am INAL, but I'm in a similar position as the original poster. I'm partly thinking that since I have personal projects that could benefit from the software, I'll keep it to myself until any non-compete expires (even if it's not enforceable) just to stay on the safe side. Which means that development is well underway, for me. It may never make it into the public. It may go out commercially. It may go out as open-source, with some sort of hosting(SAAS)/support-driven business model - right now, the most likely. But until you know that there's no valid case should your ex-employer sue you, I'd keep it as a personal project.
That's not how statutory damages work. Like it or not (and going by your sig, I'll assume "not"), when you willfully commit copyright infringement, the IP holder has every right to come after you regardless of your intentions - and when you knowingly violated the copyright (downloaded a game being an example, as compared to taking an unreasonably long excerpt from an article perhaps), the damages that company can be awarded increase significantly.
Is that what the law should be? That's a matter of opinion, though I'm actually inclined to go with yes. Have we seen unreasonably high damages awarded in many of these cases? Absolutely. Up to $250k + 5 years for copying a movie is beyond insane.
Having said that, there's no way for someone on the prowl for copyright infringement (which I'd argue is a responsibility of any publicly held company, though it certainly shouldn't become their business model as the RIAA have done) to know whether you're downloading their product to sample or to avoid paying for it because you're a cheap-ass. There's next to no harm in the former, and it can indeed help the company - I do it all the time, and buy the product if I'm satisfied, but the latter definitely IS a lost sale, and damages should be awarded if it can be proven. Not hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, but 5-10x the cost of the product isn't unreasonably high yet should serve a sufficient deterrent against future piracy.
To make it clear: I think the RIAA and MPAA's John Doe tactics are unreasonable, mafia-esque, and should be illegal (and may be - apparently someone's finally going after them under RICO), especially with the payouts they're trying to get - often 300x or more of the value of the product, which is absolutely unreasonable. But it doesn't sound like the ESA is using those tactics, especially as the original question doesn't state anything along the lines of "I looked into it and determined that this infringement never occurred."
Did you read his sig? It's quite correct.
$8 a person? A class-action payout if ever I've seen one.
I think you've confused Facebook with Twitter. I don't know whether Facebook is profitable or not, but they definitely have a business plan.
If your job involves using said computer, then turning the damn thing on is part of your job. And logging in. And opening your email program. That argument is like a plumber claiming that his job is just to use the torch to join pipes, not to get the thing lit up before use. That kind of grade-A bullshit is probably what leads to employers making a huge fuss over five minutes a day (any computer that takes 15 minutes to boot has other problems).
What I'm more interested in is what causes the lost tool bag to be worth $100,000, as reported by the local news. Or, rather, what account the $99,000 worth of not tools is currently padding.
Reach for it - you'll make it.
IE-Windows is only harmful to web developers. Windows-All PC Hardware, not so much. While they've taken some legal shit for the former (though moreso with WMP than IE, if memory serves), it's the latter that really got them in trouble.