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Comment Re:Two predictions (Score 4, Insightful) 588

Humorous but true. Privileged members of society (such as members of Congress) don't need to worry about the legality of things such as recreational drugs. Whatever they were using before this law passed won't change because of it. No one is going to say, "Hey, marijuana is legal now, I'm gonna quit doing cocaine and smoke marijuana instead."

I know plenty of professionals (lawyers, surgeons, anaesthetists etc) that use recreational drugs. The chances of them getting charged with anything if caught in procession are pretty much nil. Drug laws aren't for the protection of society in general, the purpose is to establish control over people that are viewed as "trouble makers". Upper society members that use 'responsibly' need not worry. If they make a public scene, yeah, they'll be some kind of slap on the wrist, but in general if you are rich enough or respected enough certain laws don't apply. They are for the people beneath you.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 293

Might have been somewhat funny if you spelled Dianetics correctly and skipped the bit about hoarding (can't even spell hoard correctly?!). The first two sentences already hit home you are missing the point of it being people who generally have a lot of books (not creating a false environment) so the last bit is redundant and is just as bad as explaining a joke.

The best delivery would have been: "That's why I keep ten copies of Mien Kampf and Dianetics in each room."

Comment Re:"Safety Requirements"? (Score 1) 314

They might hit a cabbie or airport shuttle operator's profit margin.

This. Locally (not CA) the Airport has a deal with one cab company. In exchange for a non disclosed amount of capital, one company (largest in town) is the only one allowed to pick up passengers from the airport. Others are allowed to drop off, but they can't pick anyone up on that trip (which discourages them from taking fares there since it's a long one way trip and rates are set by law, so they can't charge extra).

Vegas has a surcharge for cabs that go to the airport (at least so the cabbie claimed last time I was there).

Just two examples where the airport has a tie in to taxi revenue. I'm sure some of the California airports have similar deals going on that would be undermined by UberX or similar.

Comment Re:Was documentation a priority? (Score 1) 290

Documentation is more important than code. He insists on documentation first.

Cool. Did not know that.

I once watch him rip a developer a new one (and ripped out code) because the developer committed code without documentation.

And that's something most would take as Theo being an asshole. I think it's totally justified if the rule is documentation first. It doesn't take much to end up with shit documentation. In my experience documenting after the fact never works. The justification is usually, "We should document what it ends up like so we don't have to rewrite it." But it just never happens. To me it's akin to a civil engineer just building something saying they'll draw up the "as-builts" at the end of the project and just work off a napkin up until then (then never do the as-builts). Definitely not professional. I know why it happens in software (squeezed budgets, tight timelines), but it's not right. I'd love to work on a project where we have top down support to do things right.

Comment Was documentation a priority? (Score 2) 290

If so, how did you make it a priority? More specifically, as the leader of OpenBSD what did you do to ensure great documentation?

As a software developer I know that documentation often falls to the wayside (features take priority, schedule already tight etc). As a project manager it's difficult to get good documentation (staff does poor job, stakeholders don't want to pay for it etc). OpenBSD has really good documentation (in my opinion) and it was really useful when initially getting to know OpenBSD, PF etc. Most of the pay for middleware I use has documentation that is absolute shit (incomplete, wrong, not up to date etc). To me the state of documentation in OpenBSD is more impressive than "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!". Of course, "You'll love our man pages!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Comment Re:dumb selection bias (Score 3, Interesting) 136

Overcame what odds? His parents are/were a dentist and a psychiatrist. That makes his parent's household income damn near the 1% (definitely 6 figures probably at least 200K/year which would be top 5%). I.e. his family was well off.

Yes he makes a ton more than his parents, but he's still the same income class. His parents were in the top quintile and so is he. He's just in a richer sub-segment of rich. If he was born middle class or lower it would be overcoming odds (lowest quintile has something like 4% chance of getting into upper or top iirc). Most people end up in the same income class as their parents. There is very little upward mobility and also very little downward for the rich.

Comment Re:Why is it so surprising? Also, $1 million? (Score 1) 408

Well put. You are quite correct that most users of the free version could get by with those options. As for direct competitors to LogMeIn I don't think there are many (and would love to be correctly). I checked out TeamViewer and GoToMyPc before settling on LogMeIn. The remote help market seems to be over served while remote management has a lot less options (maybe the market is smaller). The smart thing LogMeIn did was make their service useful for more use cases while keeping it simple to use.

I can understand there being completely user help focussed products like Copilot. In those situations you want something focussed and simple. In the particular case of Copilot I'm surprised that Fog Creek isn't also offering a remote management suite. They have all the pieces there to create a product that competes in remote management, plus their existing users for their main products (FogBugz and Kiln) are the type of users that may need that kind of service. Can't be bothered to roll my own or host an open source bug tracker, I probably don't have the resources to manage remote management.

Comment Re:Why is it so surprising? Also, $1 million? (Score 1) 408

Most (none?) of those are not directly comparable. They are primarily screen sharing designed for meetings and light support (i.e. guiding someone through something), not remotely managing computers behind a firewall.

I've used Goto and it's good for screen sharing, but that's about it. With logmein you can even control things like updates, view logs etc without logging into the machine. When you do log in you can share the screen (default) or you can block it from the local user and you have full admin access (if the user you log in as has it.. unlike screen sharing software that borks once you hit UAC). I primarily use the pro version on headless machines behind firewalls (where I have no control of the firewall and am lucky the end user can figure out plugging in a network cable). I'm looking at moving to neorouter or setting up something myself using vnc and vnc reflector for cost savings. That being said, pro is pretty reasonable in a business situation. I definitely wouldn't be using it for home usage though.

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