I was going to work for Vivid - until they said I had to work a week in hand.
ok... I'll get my coat ...
31 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Dec 2010
Patents and Copyrights should be good things. They were designed to protect the individual or company that was smart enough and worked hard enough to make something new.
Being able to transfer a patent to another party goes against the whole spirit of the system (in my very humble opinion) and that ability should be banned - now.
"What I find odd is that the first thing that David Olson knew of it was a court order. Any reasonable person would have sent a letter first before taking action."
Indeed. I understand that under both UK and US law, this is a requirement. Judges have been known to throw cases out when this first (common sense) step is omitted.
You sign a contract. You get paid a huge advance. You spend the advance. You then decide you don't want to play any more but won't refund the cash.
Assange is a grade A+ super-prat and deserves all that he gets thrown at him.
I'll wager he was a spoiled bed-wetting bullied little brat when he was a kid but I'll bet that's not in the book.
Somebody sat at the head of the table and directed this fiasco. Who was it? Nope, I don't know either and sadly, I'd bet a penny to a pound that they are now in another position which will allow them to screw things up and then hand us the bill.
I'm pleased to see public spending under more scrutiny these days but it's also time that people are held accountable. Whoever held the leading role in this incredible foul-up needs to pay the price for their part in it.
Hmm... cloud services already have a poor reputation for reliability (let's not even mention security and/or privacy) so it is quite understandable that those of us who directly feel the pain when things in the cloud aren't working aren't too impressed by it all. At least when things are local you have the opportunity to actually _do_ something rather than sit there hitting the refresh button on a status website hoping, praying for news.
Luddites - no. Concerns of a real and practical nature do not make us Luddites.
I'm sure, as you point out, that the Cloud will get its act together as it matures, but for now at least - it makes me (and many others) rather worried.
Once again we're seeing Govt projects that have cost an absolute fortune fail horribly.
It would appear that the people given overall control for the management of these projects are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the project and are relying on the BS given to them by the vendors. Spec's are poor and there's no clear overview of what the project needs to achieve.
Add to that an apparent lack of negotiating for bulk pricing of equipment (common on large projects) and it all goes pear-shaped very quickly. And we (you and me) are paying for it all.
Why is no common sense applied where a qualified and experienced person is appointed to ensure that these projects meet sensible deadlines at sensible prices? I only work on relatively small projects but I know that I'd be kicked out on my ass if my projects ended up like these Govt ones do.
Ferr chrissake - Govt, get a grip and do things properly. You are spending MY hard-earned money and I want it spent properly.
If my memory serves me, Matt used a Tandy model 4 to write his code on.He also had a model 4P too which caused much droolage at the time! I don't think any of us had the original source code, we were given a speccy and a cassette copy of MM (or JSW) and left to get on with it.
I do recall writing some code to dump graphics from the speccy onto a little thermal printer which saved me some time (and eyestrain) when I wrote JSW. Probably still got them somewhere in the attic.
I wrote the Dragon versions of MM and JSW. A lot of hard work, no access to the Speccy source code and all the graphics were hand-coded from graph paper drawings to binary. I still have the listings somewhere. Oh, yes - there were 2 extra levels and yet if memory serves, the whole thing was only 22KB !
Hugely fun times, Mathew had a lot of Charisma and it's a shame his success was marred by too many hangers-on. Wonder where he is now?
Software projects was a very cool yet surreal place to be.
Happy times :)