Don't worry about that, I read in a catalog recently that due to popular demand they made a few thousand extra, The One, rings in various sizes so you can still be bound by ultimate evil should you be so inclined.
On a more real note, part of the offering of the ring is that you give something of real value to show the commitment and degree of your love, and it is important that its value isn't too arcane. A good grade of gold, and sometimes a chunk of something shiny and of known value like a diamond is something she knows the value of. (to the extent that we can ever get a straight answer about the value of diamonds).
On the material plane, she wants to know you will be a good provider and a demonstration that you can come up with valuable jewelry she recognizes the value of is better normally than something you tell her is rare, unless she is a geek too and digs your explanation about the specialness and rarity of the material.
I don't like the material aspects much, but you can't deny they are part of the equation, unless she is a better earner than you and she is ok with being the breadwinner.
When she shows it to her friends, if she has to or can't explain exactly why it is cool, that's bad.
I have worked on hardware and software that was developed by both the Japanese and the Germans. The firmware documentation was in both. The Japanese was never readable to me, and the german was made up of words longer than 20 characters each. As an American software engineer, I wish the doc were in English. But I know there is a whole world out there of people who speak and think in other languages. Some people think the only real doc is the code, but when the procedure names and function names and data names are in a foreign language, determining the functionality of non-trivial code is problematic, closer to reverse engineering.
They should not be meddling with any of your ports. I think they do some filtering of residential accounts because when I called and complained about troubles sending mail through Apple's.MAC mail server they thought I was residential and blabbed on incoherently about filtering to control viruses and spam or some such. It was obvious the rep hadn't a clue about TCP/IP ports and what they are for. If you haver a business account though, they should not be doing anything to your packets, especially not injecting RST packets and such. If I were you I would get a firewall router that can email you when spurious packets arrive. I have one and it has been educational.
Thank you for the calculations. I have a COMCAST business account that I needed because that is how you get static IP numbers. But I used to be a residential customer. I am a software engineer, and I am constantly downloading software updates from Microsoft and Apple. We have five Apple computers here and two iPhones, plus a number of linux boxes and several Windows machines. They all want to check in and update when they feel like it. I am regularly downloading SDKs from various sources, and the flow of PDF files from the Apple Development Connection is constant. Now and then I download a CD image or less often a DVD image of an operating system distribution disk. I get a fair amount of email, and I do read slashdot. I use youtube lightly. I have been on COMCAST for about two years now, half of which was residential and half of which was business. They never had any problem with my usage. I officially have a 16Mb downward, but it has been running at about 28Mb lately. I don't want to say anything nice about them because when you have problems with them, they are hard to resolve stuff with, but overall things have been working. SInce my only alternative is crippled DSL, I guess I am pretty happy with things the way they are. My usage is not really optional. I must download developer related items when required. I hope they never complain because I have no idea how to resolve the problem if it occurred. I agree the word "Unlimited" is troublesome.
I was mad at the time because it would have been a six month project, and meant a lot to me. It was my first experience with a computer manufacturer deciding what third party software would be allowed on their system. The software being ported was John Draper's Easywriter and Andy was pissed at John about something, and I was collateral damage.
He is the one who cost me $35000 when he witheld the LISA Development system to keep me from porting a popular app. He is a creepy guy with an ego bigger than the universe. The last thing he did that I know of was working on copy protection for Apple ][ floppies.
For the last ten fifteen years, I have been big on debug code writing html pages into the web root so that the developer can locally browse the debug data. Emitting code with links makes it easy to get around. I have used this extensively and it works very nicely.
During the time I was doing contract software development, and while I was working for Autodesk, I often saw language in the employment contracts explicitly requiring you to cooperate in any way necessary with the company as they go about patenting things that you develop as a work for hire.
IF you don't want your stuff patented, do it on your own time and make it open source. If you are going to develop technology for someone on their dime with their equipment, don't be surprised if they think they own it. If you are lucky, you get to put your name on the patent and get a dollar. When my Dad worked for Litton, he patented a method for dimming nixie tubes. He got a dollar, and the respect of his son, for technology, not business sense.
In 1974 I was stationed in Japan and they had a midnight TV show from the public baths where you got to see breasts.
The Japanese have had porn for a while, but they are clever about it. For instance they have porn magazine vending machines on the street, but a cover comes down over the magazines till after 8PM, then you can see what you would be buying. They also have beer vending machines. In some ways they are very advanced.
If I remember correctly, skype was purchased by eBay a year or so ago. I don 't have any illusions about where eBay stands on privacy and degrees of evilness. Intel's new processor chip will have hardware support for the 128-bit encryption AES. Now that would be technology for building secure communications (except for the NSA).
How does this scenario grab you? You use your skype, and the next time you sign onto eBay, they try and sell you things based on words they heard during your phone calls.
My firewall router started complaining about spurious RST packets appearing during web fetches from Akamai servers supporting eBay. So while I was trying to spend money at eBay, C OMCAST was blowing smoke up my ass.
So it is all well and good that people think this is about torrent and p2p, but I have seen the browser experience degraded also. And after enough resets, some things fail. I hate that. I have no other choice but to remain with comcast as the alternative to my 16Mb broadband is lousy DSL at 1.5Mb. Those are my only choices, except for satellite and I cannot do that.
You didn't really address my point. The powers that be don't read and evaluate the quality of the code. Or see the effort you put into quality control. There is no denying the truth that they value people at their desks hard at work. I well know the value of a quiet place with the right equipment and focus, bujt that is not enough to maintain your viability. You are not there to bump elbows with the project managers about projects coming up, or help your co-workers down the hall. Doing the work is not enough to stay viable. I had all the factors you mentioned above, but that wasn't enough.
Let me put it another way... If the work can be telecommuted, it can be outsourced. Not always, but mostly. Working at home was great because I maintained a better development environment there than I have ever been provided by an employer. Better computers, faster printers, better backup methods, more tools. But my position as a highly qualified software engineer with great facilities wasn't enough to compete with dirt cheap overseas labor, outfitted with cheap computers and $3 development kits from Microsoft.
Let me be clear, I am saying telecommuting is dangerous because it is only one step away from outsourcing. Any time I was able to get a client to actually see me facilities, they were blown away and could then understand why my deliverables were so good. No one seems to be clear of the outsourcing danger, and the danger is not just for programmers, but anyone that can do the work off site.
I spent the majority of my career working on contract software engineering projects from my well appointed lab at home. For many years it worked out really well. I had good work ethic and really did my work.
As the outsourcing started, the pay I could get for a well focused hour in my fully appointed lab fell totally. I had invested most of my income back into my lab, and the reason I could get some of these contracts was because I had a heterogeneous network with one or two each of about every kind of client and server. I had Unix servers, NetWare servers, lots of client boxes, all the compilers, three rooms full of $50 books. If I could save and hour by buying a book I did so. But my managers didn't see what was going on. They just saw I was writing good software. I wasn't there for the higher managers to see slaving away while they were on their way out of the office for whatever. When you are telecommuting, your job is already on the way out. If they don't need to watch you, what you are doing isn't that important and they won't be wanting it much longer. If I had a job these days, I absolutely wouldn't want to telecommute. I would want every possible opportunity to kiss ass and participate in office politics. Otherwise someone who does will get your job. It is inevitable. That is how things work. When you aren't there, you cannot defend yourself against behind your back accusations.
Think three times before agreeing to telecommute if you care about your job. Not being employed is much worse than having to pay for the gas.
While Satellite is a cool technology, it is hopelessly one way, and VOD is the coming thing. A while back when I had Comcast, not only did I get a bunch of channels, a lot of on-demand programming was available. That is really nice as getting to decide on a movie and watch it right now is more spontaneous than having to capture something to watch later, or watch what is on now. In this respect I think cable has more to offer than satellite, at least in town where the cable is available. Out in the country, satellite is still the solution for many people.
I am impressed. I jumped to an assumption and I had you all wrong. I apologize. I had just read too many postings from pirates and I was filled with contempt. I am really sorry I said what I did to you. Please forgive me.
I know from experience that part of the appraised value of a corporation is its "Goodwill" as perceived by customers and potential customers. IMHO, in the case of Apple this "Goodwill" is manifested in the confidence that people have in the, "It just Works" aspect of the products Apple sells. Because previously Apple has restricted the hardware base of Macintosh computers using PPC and Intel processors to a modest collection of models, there have been a finite number of hardware configurations involved it was possible to do excellent quality assurance for any new Mac OS X version or update. This desirable situation resulted in very few driver problems and has helped Apple build that, "Goodwill" in the marketplace. There is no way that Apple can continue to test their software to the same extent that customers have come to expect if the hardware base is allowed to explode by being comprised of all available PC hardware. Just because Apple has come around to using some commodity components does not mean that the Apple Macintosh has become just another IBM-PC clone. The fact that Macs do not boot in the IBM-PC clone manner is the first evidence of that. In an IBM-PC, when the system starts, execution begins at a specific location in a flash BIOS where basic hardware (LDT/GDT) are set up and subsequently an INT 0x19 soft interrupt is executed which transfers control to routines in the BIOS that check the first sector of the hard disk for a byte pattern that indicates the existence of a partition sector which then contains entries one of which is active that points to a boot block which is then read to see if it contains a bit pattern that indicates it is the start of a partition and specifies the partition type. This sequence of operations is called the multi-stage boot and works exactly the same on all IBM-PC clone computers with the only difference being that the BIOS may contain different INT 0x13 code with which it accesses the fixed disk to load the initial operating systems tracks that comprise the booting code of the specific operating system. This is not how Macs boot and is the first clue that something is different about Mac hardware.
I assert that if non-Apple hardware is allowed to operate with the Mac OS X operating system, the quality assurance can never be adequate to provide the expected reliability that has been previously observed by Apple owners, and that this would reduce the "Goodwill" factor thereby harming Apple Corporation by reducing its appraised value as a corporation. This is my opinion and I approve of it, IANABCL.
I can only assume that you make a living providing a service. If you depended on the sales of a product to pay your way in life, you would see things very differently. When you are young and have no money, it is easy to say the world should be free. When you get a little older, you come to wish you had something of value to offer the world. The thought that spending time and effort writing software should not bring value to you because in some way, your effort should produce results other people don't value and should be able to get for free... I find it really depressing. I assure you I won't be writing any games.
I know that MS has told people they don't mind installing office at home also, but I don't recall them saying it was ok to bring visual studio home. The idea that people can bring software home from work is totally bogus and is just plain stealing. If you need to work at home, get a notebook from your employer and make sure your copy of VS is legal. I really hate Microsoft, but that doesn't entitle me to pirate their software. I think MS are the scum of the earth, but I still own a legal copy of visual studio 2005that I paid for. If someone gets pissed off and turns you in to the SBA, that $200K fee will seem a lot worse than whatever the going rate is for visual studio. Stealing from your employer isn't cool, and disliking a vendor doesn't excuse theft. Nothing makes me feel more hurt than a customer that bought one copy of my software telling me later that all their customers really likes my software.
Over twenty years I worked on salary as an exempt employee. Projects were always allocated too little time and we always seemed to be working late or on weekends trying to get to Comdex or some other show. I always thought it was terribly unfair that programmers should be exempt. I never actually thought that the companies might me breaking the law and betting they wouldn't be caught. There are a lot of things I would do another way if I had it to do again.
The SSL connection will only protect from a sniffing attack on the transmission. After a key exchange, a bogus server certificate can be used to encrypt the channel during the transfer. The client would have to check the validation status of the server certificate back to a known root.
After I successfully ported the Easywriter program to the IBM-PC, I was offered a $35K contract by IUS to port Easywriter to the LISA but Apple was mad a John Draper, and they refused me the Pascal development system and allowed as how I could write the application in basic if I wanted to. I lost the contract. My first example of Apple deciding who could have an app on their equipment, and it wasn't me. After that I avoided Apples until Vista reared its ugly head. I have decide to give Apple another chance hoping they are less evil than Microsoft. Time will tell.
Almost all TV shows (especially the news) save the hot item for last so as to keep the audience watching the whole show. It happened regularly on Ed Sullivan and Carson. If you show the big act first, the watchers wander off. It is to be expected.
I have decided that Apple was right to pull the App because they want people to take their marketplace seriously. I would rather that they screened all non-free apps to assure a basic level of quality/value to help use judge potential apps for purchase. Some people would say that Apple is exerting too much control. If you feel that way, you can write software for a different platform where there are less controls. If you write an honest application with some genuine functionality, you will have exposure to a large audience, and even with a price cap of one thousand dollars per app, you should be able to do quite well. In all situations, there are border cases that define the limits of the situation. We have just seen that selling an App with minimum functionality for the maximum price is not allowed in Apple's App Store. Actually that works for me. If someone wants people to know they are rich, they should spent the thousand dollars having a custom gold case made for their iphone. Or if they are really out there, they can have a ivory and baby seal fur case made. (Just joking).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about that, I read in a catalog recently that due to popular demand they made a few thousand extra, The One, rings in various sizes so you can still be bound by ultimate evil should you be so inclined. On a more real note, part of the offering of the ring is that you give something of real value to show the commitment and degree of your love, and it is important that its value isn't too arcane. A good grade of gold, and sometimes a chunk of something shiny and of known value like a diamond is something she knows the value of. (to the extent that we can ever get a straight answer about the value of diamonds). On the material plane, she wants to know you will be a good provider and a demonstration that you can come up with valuable jewelry she recognizes the value of is better normally than something you tell her is rare, unless she is a geek too and digs your explanation about the specialness and rarity of the material. I don't like the material aspects much, but you can't deny they are part of the equation, unless she is a better earner than you and she is ok with being the breadwinner. When she shows it to her friends, if she has to or can't explain exactly why it is cool, that's bad.
I have worked on hardware and software that was developed by both the Japanese and the Germans. The firmware documentation was in both. The Japanese was never readable to me, and the german was made up of words longer than 20 characters each. As an American software engineer, I wish the doc were in English. But I know there is a whole world out there of people who speak and think in other languages. Some people think the only real doc is the code, but when the procedure names and function names and data names are in a foreign language, determining the functionality of non-trivial code is problematic, closer to reverse engineering.
They should not be meddling with any of your ports. I think they do some filtering of residential accounts because when I called and complained about troubles sending mail through Apple's .MAC mail server they thought I was residential and blabbed on incoherently about filtering to control viruses and spam or some such. It was obvious the rep hadn't a clue about TCP/IP ports and what they are for. If you haver a business account though, they should not be doing anything to your packets, especially not injecting RST packets and such. If I were you I would get a firewall router that can email you when spurious packets arrive. I have one and it has been educational.
Thank you for the calculations. I have a COMCAST business account that I needed because that is how you get static IP numbers. But I used to be a residential customer. I am a software engineer, and I am constantly downloading software updates from Microsoft and Apple. We have five Apple computers here and two iPhones, plus a number of linux boxes and several Windows machines. They all want to check in and update when they feel like it. I am regularly downloading SDKs from various sources, and the flow of PDF files from the Apple Development Connection is constant. Now and then I download a CD image or less often a DVD image of an operating system distribution disk. I get a fair amount of email, and I do read slashdot. I use youtube lightly. I have been on COMCAST for about two years now, half of which was residential and half of which was business. They never had any problem with my usage. I officially have a 16Mb downward, but it has been running at about 28Mb lately. I don't want to say anything nice about them because when you have problems with them, they are hard to resolve stuff with, but overall things have been working. SInce my only alternative is crippled DSL, I guess I am pretty happy with things the way they are. My usage is not really optional. I must download developer related items when required. I hope they never complain because I have no idea how to resolve the problem if it occurred. I agree the word "Unlimited" is troublesome.
I was mad at the time because it would have been a six month project, and meant a lot to me. It was my first experience with a computer manufacturer deciding what third party software would be allowed on their system. The software being ported was John Draper's Easywriter and Andy was pissed at John about something, and I was collateral damage.
He is the one who cost me $35000 when he witheld the LISA Development system to keep me from porting a popular app. He is a creepy guy with an ego bigger than the universe. The last thing he did that I know of was working on copy protection for Apple ][ floppies.
Are you talking about the forbidden game? The one that got loose on the Internet?
For the last ten fifteen years, I have been big on debug code writing html pages into the web root so that the developer can locally browse the debug data. Emitting code with links makes it easy to get around. I have used this extensively and it works very nicely.
IF you don't want your stuff patented, do it on your own time and make it open source. If you are going to develop technology for someone on their dime with their equipment, don't be surprised if they think they own it. If you are lucky, you get to put your name on the patent and get a dollar. When my Dad worked for Litton, he patented a method for dimming nixie tubes. He got a dollar, and the respect of his son, for technology, not business sense.
The Japanese have had porn for a while, but they are clever about it. For instance they have porn magazine vending machines on the street, but a cover comes down over the magazines till after 8PM, then you can see what you would be buying. They also have beer vending machines. In some ways they are very advanced.
How does this scenario grab you? You use your skype, and the next time you sign onto eBay, they try and sell you things based on words they heard during your phone calls.
So it is all well and good that people think this is about torrent and p2p, but I have seen the browser experience degraded also. And after enough resets, some things fail. I hate that. I have no other choice but to remain with comcast as the alternative to my 16Mb broadband is lousy DSL at 1.5Mb. Those are my only choices, except for satellite and I cannot do that.
Let me put it another way... If the work can be telecommuted, it can be outsourced. Not always, but mostly. Working at home was great because I maintained a better development environment there than I have ever been provided by an employer. Better computers, faster printers, better backup methods, more tools. But my position as a highly qualified software engineer with great facilities wasn't enough to compete with dirt cheap overseas labor, outfitted with cheap computers and $3 development kits from Microsoft.
Let me be clear, I am saying telecommuting is dangerous because it is only one step away from outsourcing. Any time I was able to get a client to actually see me facilities, they were blown away and could then understand why my deliverables were so good. No one seems to be clear of the outsourcing danger, and the danger is not just for programmers, but anyone that can do the work off site.
I just upgraded to 2.0.2. If this whole thread and TFA off base or what?
As the outsourcing started, the pay I could get for a well focused hour in my fully appointed lab fell totally. I had invested most of my income back into my lab, and the reason I could get some of these contracts was because I had a heterogeneous network with one or two each of about every kind of client and server. I had Unix servers, NetWare servers, lots of client boxes, all the compilers, three rooms full of $50 books. If I could save and hour by buying a book I did so. But my managers didn't see what was going on. They just saw I was writing good software. I wasn't there for the higher managers to see slaving away while they were on their way out of the office for whatever. When you are telecommuting, your job is already on the way out. If they don't need to watch you, what you are doing isn't that important and they won't be wanting it much longer. If I had a job these days, I absolutely wouldn't want to telecommute. I would want every possible opportunity to kiss ass and participate in office politics. Otherwise someone who does will get your job. It is inevitable. That is how things work. When you aren't there, you cannot defend yourself against behind your back accusations.
Think three times before agreeing to telecommute if you care about your job. Not being employed is much worse than having to pay for the gas.
While Satellite is a cool technology, it is hopelessly one way, and VOD is the coming thing. A while back when I had Comcast, not only did I get a bunch of channels, a lot of on-demand programming was available. That is really nice as getting to decide on a movie and watch it right now is more spontaneous than having to capture something to watch later, or watch what is on now. In this respect I think cable has more to offer than satellite, at least in town where the cable is available. Out in the country, satellite is still the solution for many people.
I am impressed. I jumped to an assumption and I had you all wrong. I apologize. I had just read too many postings from pirates and I was filled with contempt. I am really sorry I said what I did to you. Please forgive me.
I assert that if non-Apple hardware is allowed to operate with the Mac OS X operating system, the quality assurance can never be adequate to provide the expected reliability that has been previously observed by Apple owners, and that this would reduce the "Goodwill" factor thereby harming Apple Corporation by reducing its appraised value as a corporation. This is my opinion and I approve of it, IANABCL.
I can only assume that you make a living providing a service. If you depended on the sales of a product to pay your way in life, you would see things very differently. When you are young and have no money, it is easy to say the world should be free. When you get a little older, you come to wish you had something of value to offer the world. The thought that spending time and effort writing software should not bring value to you because in some way, your effort should produce results other people don't value and should be able to get for free... I find it really depressing. I assure you I won't be writing any games.
I know that MS has told people they don't mind installing office at home also, but I don't recall them saying it was ok to bring visual studio home. The idea that people can bring software home from work is totally bogus and is just plain stealing. If you need to work at home, get a notebook from your employer and make sure your copy of VS is legal. I really hate Microsoft, but that doesn't entitle me to pirate their software. I think MS are the scum of the earth, but I still own a legal copy of visual studio 2005that I paid for. If someone gets pissed off and turns you in to the SBA, that $200K fee will seem a lot worse than whatever the going rate is for visual studio. Stealing from your employer isn't cool, and disliking a vendor doesn't excuse theft. Nothing makes me feel more hurt than a customer that bought one copy of my software telling me later that all their customers really likes my software.
Over twenty years I worked on salary as an exempt employee. Projects were always allocated too little time and we always seemed to be working late or on weekends trying to get to Comdex or some other show. I always thought it was terribly unfair that programmers should be exempt. I never actually thought that the companies might me breaking the law and betting they wouldn't be caught. There are a lot of things I would do another way if I had it to do again.
The SSL connection will only protect from a sniffing attack on the transmission. After a key exchange, a bogus server certificate can be used to encrypt the channel during the transfer. The client would have to check the validation status of the server certificate back to a known root.
After I successfully ported the Easywriter program to the IBM-PC, I was offered a $35K contract by IUS to port Easywriter to the LISA but Apple was mad a John Draper, and they refused me the Pascal development system and allowed as how I could write the application in basic if I wanted to. I lost the contract. My first example of Apple deciding who could have an app on their equipment, and it wasn't me. After that I avoided Apples until Vista reared its ugly head. I have decide to give Apple another chance hoping they are less evil than Microsoft. Time will tell.
Almost all TV shows (especially the news) save the hot item for last so as to keep the audience watching the whole show. It happened regularly on Ed Sullivan and Carson. If you show the big act first, the watchers wander off. It is to be expected.
I have decided that Apple was right to pull the App because they want people to take their marketplace seriously. I would rather that they screened all non-free apps to assure a basic level of quality/value to help use judge potential apps for purchase. Some people would say that Apple is exerting too much control. If you feel that way, you can write software for a different platform where there are less controls. If you write an honest application with some genuine functionality, you will have exposure to a large audience, and even with a price cap of one thousand dollars per app, you should be able to do quite well. In all situations, there are border cases that define the limits of the situation. We have just seen that selling an App with minimum functionality for the maximum price is not allowed in Apple's App Store. Actually that works for me. If someone wants people to know they are rich, they should spent the thousand dollars having a custom gold case made for their iphone. Or if they are really out there, they can have a ivory and baby seal fur case made. (Just joking).