Here's an interesting editorial from the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/opinion/27warner.html?hp I don't think I've ever heard of a coder that uses Provigil or Adderall, but I'd be interested in stories if anyone has them. ...
How does the fair use doctrine apply to websites in terms of screen-scraping? The particular example I am thinking of is extraction of the useful data from a website, and re-presentation of the raw data aggregated with data from other similar websites. For example, suppose one was to extract data from a variety of websites to produce a ...
Following on from my question on the Legalities of screen scraping, even if it's illegal people will still try, so: What technical mechanisms can be employed to prevent or at least disincentivise screen scraping? Oh and just for grins and to make life difficult, it may well be nice to retain access for search engines. I may well be pla...
In general, not just in relation to stackoverflow, sometimes I'm asked a programming question for which the answer will probably be used for good purposes, but there is a chance that it could not be. Two recent examples which reminded me of some real world questions I've been asked are: Send email to many users, and keep a formless ap...
I've been a bit stressed out about this for a while, and figured I'd post here to see what other developers think. I'm with a startup company... a very small one. In fact, it's just me, my boss, and his son. I'm the only Software Engineer, as our only other Engineer (understandably) left for a much better job at an established company...
I'm new to using open source libraries in production code so when it says replicate this license or whatever what is the proper way of doing it? With desktop software is providing a readme somewhere good enough? What about for a website? ...
I am working on a project at work and see an opportunity to extract and abstract some functionality that is part of the project and release it as open source. I have a hard time accepting the idea that this functionality should remain propietary and believe the open source community would get a major benefit from it. Would this be un...
Just want to ask for some opinions here. How do you feel about using a language (and/or framework) that isn't widely used in your location to write software for a company? For instance, I live in an area dominated by .NET, with the occasional PHP job. Let's say that I'm learning Python and decide to use it to write software for my job...
I'm just looking through some of the webmaster stats that Google provides, and noticed that the most common links to our website are to some research articles that we've put up in PDF format. The articles are also available on the site in HTML. I was looking at the sites (mostly forums and blogs) which link to these articles and was thi...
What are the ethics of using personally licensed software in a professional setting? For the sake of discussion, we are not talking about any pirated software, only software which you have legally paid for, but are using at your job. My company owns licenses for the tools we use the most, which basically includes everything we need to ...
Prompted by the responses to How important is the environment at a job? I thought it worthwhile to pose this question: Is it ever OK to just walk out the door and never come back? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why not? I've never done that but I think in the first 2-3 days this isn't that unacceptable. There's no drama, n...
My company is starting work on building a web-based RSS reader that users can sign up to and track feeds; a lot like Google Reader. My first thought was that once I have a feed URL for a certain blog or website, I'd only have to poll it once in order to grab the content and then insert entries into the database for anyone who subscribes...
Say I had an open-source project which I wanted to try and generate some exposure for. Would it be considered unethical to set up a project entry for it on several sites such at github, sourceforge and google code, for example? This would be purely for giving it greater exposure. I realise there might be some practical reasons for doi...
Update: So, how did thing go? We notified them of the existing problem, included background information, a detailed error report and tried to explain in plain human language what the problem was and why it is serious. They thanked us, passed the information to their website developer who has since fixed it. We are not quite sure of t...
If so, how do you organize it? Do you refer to it often? Are there ethical implications? I have a bunch of tarballs lying around that I keep telling myself I'll organize some day, but I've yet to get around to it. And when I do sneak peaks at it, I find that it's mostly obsolete and not applicable to current technologies anyway. But...
A couple of questions I've read today discuss the legal implications of using someones code in your project: Can I legally incorporate GPL & LGPL, open-sourced software in a proprietary, closed-source project? Do you save the code you wrote at your previous jobs? This has left me wondering where example code found online fits into t...
Disclaimer: I know you're not a lawyer! :) This question is for university assignments, not work nor personal. Say I'm looking for the implementation of something very very specific, and I find that in an open source project (say, using google code search). The thing itself is about 20 ~ 30 lines of code, and constitutes less than 10%...
I've developed a web application in ASP.NET for a client who now demands that I turn over the source code. There is no contract (all work has been done on a Time and Material basis) and he has not paid any extra money for the source. I have my own reasons for not handing over the code to him, but I need an opinion from the community. Nu...
In my last job at a small firm, I was paid in billable hours. I was not a contractor; the firm provided an office, computers, software, books and customers. They also took taxes out of my check. If I bid 30 hours on a job, the company would bill the customer for 30 hours at their rate and I would get paid for the same amount of time at...
I think it's a Bad Thing to do, but I was hoping for an authoritative perspective, or at least a broad sampling. I personally feel that a user owns his or her password and that a website or software system merely stores it as a service to them. The user trusts my site with their password, and though I own the site, I do not own the pas...