Tangurena

One to try, if you can, is a team, each with their own office, but also a large "war room" where folks can rotate in and out of during their projects. During "crunch mode" everyone involved is in the war room, but they still had a private office to retreat to when needed.

This was my favorite, and this company made software for government forms, each family of forms had their own schedule, so what groups were pressured changed during the year.

The apostrophe has been deleted from your link. I suspect some anti-SQL-injection code ate it. %27 should be the appropriate escape character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...

One previous employer had a corporate policy that forbade having low-end computers for testing. The closest we could come was to test the desktop software in a virtual, and starve the virtual for memory. When we had to move to .NET 3.5 for some feature, there were about a dozen customers we had to refund because they were still using Win2k as late as 2009. This software was primarily used by accountants and actuaries, an audience well known for being technology laggards.

The Japanese government did this (selling below cost) with consumer electronics, steel and some other industries, with the end result being that no television sets are made in the US anymore.

While JavaScript is parsing it as octal, this will cause a whole raft of errors if you are making your users enter dates.

User enters 08 for August, even returning NaN would be a mistake.

> If record labels state that they invest a ton of money in musicians and nearly all of them do not make money...

It means that record companies fraudulently inflate their "expenses" in order to bleed off all profit from the industry.

For a record band to make money, they have to avoid record companies at all costs. Unfortunately, even with the internet disintemediating the record companies, it is still very difficult to get around the blood suckers.

An exposition of how broken the music industry business model can be found in Courtney Love's essay: "Courtney Love Does The Math". There are far too many corroborating similar stories for her story to be an outlier or an aberration.

http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

Amazon won't go for that because a number of states treat having an affiliate in their state as a "business presence" which triggers the requirement to collect sales tax in that state.

All the affiliates in my state were eliminated that way.

If you still maintain your college .edu email account, you could join Dreamspark and get a legit copy of Visual Studio Pro for free. If you're interested in XNA, while the regular XNA game studio is free, the student version lets you join App Hub for free (instead of the $99/year fee).

https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx

> I have come to believe that for people that act like this, it is a game, and the game is not won if they cannot get every penny. It probably bothered them that I walked away from the table with less than 100k, because some how they did not play the game hard enough to get that from me.

So very true. The thoughts this remark triggers spawn off into 2 separate forks:

0. Robert Ringer wrote a series of books about winning even though the other guys are trying to intimidate the heck out of you. He categorized all business people into 3 types.

http://www.word-gems.com/leadership.ringer.intro.html

http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422735/Winning%20Th...

http://www.word-gems.com/leadership.ringer.one.html

http://www.word-gems.com/leadership.ringer.two.html

http://www.word-gems.com/leadership.ringer.three.html

1. And the other fork is the series of books by Suzette Haden Elgin that have "gentler art of verbal self defense" in the title. In one of her earlier books, she was trying to articulate the difference in communication between men and women; for most women, "sports/game" was a separate category in parallel with other categories. To translate her argument about male communication patterns into a programming one we're familiar with, she said basically that for men, "sports/game" was the base class for all categories. I'm slightly trivializing her argument, but that she was trying to make the point that competitiveness is something you overlook at your peril.

This has always been the case with PayPal. They deliberately make it as hard as possible to actually contact a real human, and then act all surprised if the victim manages to get enough publicity to get past the barriers.

http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/06/9252...

PayPal's business model seems to be based off of Kafka's novel The Trial.

Paypal wants to be a bank without being regulated as a bank. If they were regulated, this sort of fiasco would get their charter revoked.

In addition, the business courses I'm taking all (in the text books and case studies used in classes) point to how eBay is trying to transition away from the auction model and turn into fix-price sales as some sort of discount Amazon Marketplace. Making life miserable for smaller retailers and auctioners is part of this goal.

I'm going to disagree with you in part, and agree with you in part. I agree with you that this is theatre, but I disagree in that I claim these fines to be trivial to the size corporations involved. By making the fines look "large" to members of the public, the public will hopefully be disuaded into pushing Congress to make real, significant, and meaningful changes to our corporate landscape.

The part I'm disagreeing with is that the criminal misdeeds of the financial institutions are so enormous that even with these "power-upped" fines, the fines are a trivial mosquito bite to the companies.

The SEC is routinely in bed with the financial institutions that they regulate and I see these fines as a corrupt action that fines the institutions less than 1% of the damage the institutions did to the US, and then exempt the institution from further civil and criminal penalties. This is exactly like the "fifty states attorney general" settlement with the banks is doing.

I prefer to walk down the hall and chat with the other person. Humor and sarcasm don't translate well to email, and I've managed to personally offend people without realizing it. By taking the time to actually look them in the eye (and wink, as needed), I find it clears a lot of things up. Now if the email is a purely technical issue, an email is usually the best solution.

My local supermarkets used to have those Kodak kiosks in the place they used to have 1-hour developing (a decade ago). Last year, they tore out the kiosks to replace them with DVDs and magazine racks.

My local camera store tried to manage the transition to digital, but couldn't hold on. They finally went out of business a year ago, and the building torn down. In its place is a new bank.

As an older developer who has been developing for more than 20 years, I find that the reason for the "half-life" to be the impedance mismatch between the demands of a family and the demands of mismanagers (and their crunch time and death marches).

Eventually, developers start saying things like "I want to watch my kids ball game" instead of being at the office and dealing with the latest manager-inflicted crisis. 60 hour weeks are not family-friendly, and the developers that choose family over the office end up getting pushed out the door.

I think the "hate" is that this blogger still gets his affiliate code to work, while those in many other states (such as mine) were disabled because Amazon got into a disagreement with states over sales taxes.

Tech all over.

Earlier this year, one such sociopath latched onto my sister and she convinced me to get involved. As soon as the project looked like it was going to get released, the sociopath tried to dilute my sister's and my shares from 1/3 each to 1/20th each. He wanted to bring in partners that he had previously screwed over to make something up to them by screwing us.

One story that I think can help explain why many companies are stuck selling to Walmart is this one: http://www.fastcompany.com/node/47593/print

The issue quickly becomes a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" issue. If you supply them, they quickly drive your margins to the point where you have to offshore to stay in business. If you don't supply them, you get cut out of the largest retailer in the US and lose that way. Either way, you are screwed.

As I mentioned earlier, if you replace your ERP system (or upgrade it past a certain dollar point), you have to modify it so that Walmart has direct access to the internals. This means that they're placing (and cancelling) orders directly in your system without intervention (if you aren't careful, this can foul up your staffing). This also means that they know your costs, expenses and margins. You aren't going to have any negotiating power when it comes time for them to lower your prices.

I disagree for 2 reasons. First, Apple is notorious with NDAs. Second, many large retailers are quite willing to cancel contracts with any supplier that gets uppity enough to complain in public. Walmart is so notorious for cancelling suppliers that most Walmart suppliers will refuse to allow any company representative speak on the record.

Walmart pays faster, but they are just as aggressive at having their hooks into your financials as Apple and pressuring your margins down.

If you update or replace your ERP system, your contracts with Walmart require you to integrate the new system with Walmart's. If you weren't paying attention upfront, the required changes can quickly make your ERP implementation explode over-budget.

> She started a "geek feminist" website, so that didn't help...

This comes across similar to the excuse: "well of course she got raped - look at how she was dressed".

Feminism only became a "dirty word" during President Reagan's term. Susan Faludi wrote a very good book titled Backlash explaining how the backlash against feminism started, who did it and what motivated them.

http://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-W...

> Stop trying to 'get more women in technology'. Why is this seen as a serious problem that needs fixing?

I used to be a member of SWE (society of women engineers) back in college. One of their large studies (done in the mid 90s, which I think was jointly done with NSBE - national society of black engineers) revealed 3 important things about engineering education in the US:

1. It appears that high school guidance councillors were discouraging women from enrolling in engineering programs. It might have alternatively been that they were encouraging men to enroll in engineering and just not encouraging women. There wasn't enough data to support either conclusion. The M/F ratio among the population is very close to 0.5. The M/F ratio among engineers is well over 10. That there is such a difference points out that there is a problem. We don't run around with guns and blow stuff up - we sit in chairs all day - so the arguments that people use to justify excluding women from combat are worse than useless when you're considering technology.

2. That women in engineering drop out of engineering at twice the rate that men drop out of engineering. The folks doing the study didn't have an answer for that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was because so many of us are jerks.

3. Engineering is seen as "uncool". Movies and TV shows portray engineers as nerds - and that nerds are uncool and unpopular.

A number of women have been beaten, raped and/or murdered by men making identical noises. MikeeUSA wasn't trolling, he was threatening to murder those women he was stalking, and justifying it.

As MikeeUSA himself wrote:

> The women of the "geek feminism" movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser's life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.

Hans was convicted in 2008 of murdering his wife Nina. MikeeUSA is saying categorically that Nina deserved to die, just like MikeeUSA's targets.

http://geekfeminism.org/2011/10/13/on-being-harassed-a-littl...

Parking garages are not lucrative. The cost to build a parking garage runs $20k-30k per parking space. Building one underground adds an additional $10k/space. In contrast, a parking stall on a flat slab is going to run only a few hundred dollars (in Denver, the cost for thick slabs you can park semis on runs about $800/parking stall).

Malaria is a parasite. Vaccines are not effective against parasites, and there has never been such a thing. Until this one.

In Florida, in their state university system, a "certificate" is the replacement for a "minor". This isn't a total replacement, as one can get one's "certificate" issued separately from the diploma (I did this).

Those "completely legal purposes" are only "completely legal" in the US. In the US, the owners of the computer own the data about yourself [1]. In Europe, the data protection acts go the opposite: you own the data about yourself. Furthermore, in Europe, data collection about people has to fall under certain legally sanctioned reasons [2].

Notes: 1 - this can cause surprises when companies go bankrupt and the bankruptcy courts allow the sale of the data (about you) to proceed without your knowledge or consent. It is very rare for you to be notified (such as in the current Borders bankruptcy), or the privacy policies of the dearly departed company to be honored by the courts. 2 - Just because you are willing to give the data to me does not necessarily make it legal.

> It’s not that political journalism has strayed from its roots, or stopped covering important elements of a modern campaign. It’s that the elements of a modern campaign have changed, and as journalists, we have not kept pace.

As someone who actually ran for a small state-level elected office in 2008, I can flat out state that journalists have strayed far far away from anything resembling journalism.

> I don’t believe that we as journalists devote enough attention to understanding those changes.

In Denver, there was ONE journalist whose "beat" covered our race. And the subject matter that the agency we were running for was a small part of what this one person's reporting covered. This guy was older than I am, and I'm old enough to be making "catch up" contributions to my IRA and 401k.

Downsizing and mergers in the newspaper industry has resulted in single reporters covering what used to be covered by a handful of reporters 2 decades ago. It isn't new technology that is enabling more productivity, it is the endless downsizing to boost share prices that has gutted and rendered news agencies useless and unfit for duty.

In 2008, when I ran for that office, there were 2 daily newspapers. In early 2009, one of them closed their doors.

> Elections will become even bigger surprises to us, and then how long will it be before readers start to ask whether we actually know the people and places we cover?

My recommendation to prove to yourself just how out of date and out of touch with modern technology that journalists are, is to run for elected office yourself. Many elected positions are part time (school boards, for example) so you won't have to give up your day job to experience it. Despite coming in dead last, and the winner spending 200x as much as I did, it was a blast.

Sorry. No. He is not the cult leader. Most of her friends for the past few years have been folks who've also left the same cult, so there might be a common background, but no. This isn't the cult trying to take her for a few hundred more thousand dollars.

I've come across this exact thing before (where the techie has to do it all - including spending $10 at godaddy). Always with folks who convince my family to get hold of me.

The cure has been to get the relative involved in the fiasco, where I'll do the work, but they have to be involved. By the time all the poop hits the fan, they finally got a hefty dose of what we have to go through.

In the most recent one-of-these, the serial entrepreneur brainwashed my sister into believing that his new idea does everything and will make us all millionaires. His previous adventures resulted in crashes (or paranoid delusions that the oil companies killed off his customers), and he whined about the folks who "left him stranded". He didn't own the domains of the previous adventures. He didn't own this domain (I made my sister set this one up, so it is hers). As this project got closer to something sellable, he got crazier and crazier and then decided to dilute my sister and my shares (1/3 each) to 1/20th each as he wanted to bring on "friends" he had shafted during previous misadventures. The sad thing is that my sister used to be a developer before getting trapped in a cult, so she should have known better. But now she does.