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lmorris84on Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter

Without it, opinions opposed to the prevailing majority view point are not only side-lined, but the very expression of an interest in them becomes a cause for controversy and social rebuke.

I think in many ways we're already there, but it's society as a whole causing this rather than government(s) specifically.

Heaven forbid you have an opinion on (for example) gay marriage if that opinion is anything BUT full throated support. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich.

We definitely need to resist government oversight, but the problem is much bigger than that IMHO.

lmorris84on Britons: You Have 72 Hours to Stop the Snooper's Charter

Agreed. I think many people would naturally recoil from "big brother government oversight" but see no issue using similar means to have people found and locked up for calling someone an unpleasant name on twitter.

lmorris84on Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

In the case I mentioned I wasn't serious at all - I was just putting feelers out and trying to gauge pricing across a few different vendors. A call at this point is probably wasting my time and theirs.

For me, the stage after finding out a standard price is to perhaps have a call and determine if my requirements match up to the product.

I guess it also depends on the size of the company, type of software etc. If the company has trial versions then it's more likely the person buying knows what it can do etc.

As a hard example, I go to jprofiler's website[1] and can order there and then, no messing around. I go to neotys[2] and it's the sales induced hell I mentioned above.

[1] https://www.ej-technologies.com/buy/jprofiler/select [2] http://www.neotys.com/product/neoload-licenses.html

lmorris84on Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes

rather than giving Cindy the quote which she asked for, I should have asked Cindy to hop on a quick call with me to discuss how they were planning to use Appointment Reminder

I get this all the time when looking for vendors for various things and have to say I usually do an internal eye-roll when it comes up - sometimes I just want a rough quote in an email that I can look at when I get the chance. Most recently we were looking at some load testing tool and I had to sit through a sales call only to find out the cost was ten times what we were prepared to pay. I had zero special requirements so why that price couldn't have been emailed is beyond me.

I understand in some cases like this it might be useful to have a call, I just feel I'm getting the sales BS when it happens to me.

lmorris84on FoundationDB and the New NoSQL

Is it? The front page of CouchDB says "CouchDB is highly available and partition tolerant, but is also eventually consistent"

lmorris84on Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful

I'm a Java programmer so work with OOP every day. I think it has it's pro's and con's like everything else.

My pet hate is how dogmatic some people get to the point where they get angry over the use of if/switch statements. "It's not good OOP, use polymorphism", well the goal isn't to pass an OOP exam, but rather to write clean maintainable code where possible. If an if/switch saves me writing 6 classes with 3 lines in each of them, then that's what I'll do.

lmorris84on Why I don’t like hackathons

Biggest worry for me is impostor syndrome. I'd be terrified of turning up and being absolutely useless and achieving nothing. I don't go to conferences for the same reason.

lmorris84on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review

I imagine they could dispute the charge with their credit card provider and put the onus on them to sort it out.

Being in a contract doesn't make something legally binding - what if they put "if you leave a bad review we reserve the right to shoot you?"