Global Nerdy

Maybe I should have saved the Bizarro World graphic from my article about American mobile web use being higher than European for this one instead. This Information Week article quotes Microsoft Business Group president Jeff Raikes as saying “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else.”

“We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products,” says Raikes, “what you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Such statements may fly in the face of the Microsoft credo that every non-sanctioned copy of their software translates into a lost sale and the effort and money they’ve put into things like Windows Genuine Advantage, DRM and the BSA. However, Raikes is acknowledging a truth put eloquently by Tim O’Reilly: obscurity is a far greater threat to creators than piracy.

Joe from TechDirt comments:

[Raikes] said the company wants to push for legal licensing, but doesn’t want to push so hard so as to destroy a valuable part of its user base. The company recently got a stark reminder of this lesson when a school in Russia said it would switch to Linux to avoid future hassles with the pirate police.

Simply put, today’s Microsoft Office pirate stands a good chance of becoming tomorrow’s Microsoft Office purchaser. The benefits extend even further when it comes to Microsoft’s development and server tools: as the recent admission of Romanian president Traian Basescu showed, piracy can create a tech boom, which in turn drive paying customers to companies like Microsoft.

We here at Global Nerdy have a couple of things in common with Romania. One is George. The other is that I too have benefited from pirating Microsoft development tools when I was an indie coder with barely enough money to buy a development machine. After landing a couple of contracts, I made the transition that Raikes talked about: from pirate to paying customer of Visual Studio as well as ancillary products such as books, third-party ActiveX components and leigt copies of Windows. Microsoft also benefited from my developing software for Windows, thereby feeding into their business ecosystem.

On both a macro (Romania) and micro (me) level, I think the benefits of piracy far outweighed the revenues from theoretical “lost sales”.

Who knew that CDs and DVDs had a scent?

Pictured to the right is one of Malaysia’s two black labradors who have been trained to detect the scent of polycarbonate, the primary material for optical media. According to the Reuters story titled Malaysia uses sniffer dogs to fight movie pirates, the dogs will be used to find discs in “unlikely” or unregistered containers.

If I were a Malaysian DVD pirate, I’d try to smuggle my contraband in durian shipments. That oughta throw the dogs off the scent.

Back in December, I wrote in Game Development Called on Account of Vista that Windows Vista was not supported by XNA Game Studio Express, a game development tool built on top of Visual Studio Express for students and hobbyists. The fact that it lets you build write games for Windows is one thing, but the really interesting thing to me is that you can also develop games for the XBox 360 (which I own, thanks to a trivia contest at the last Ajax Experience conference).

The good news — at least for those of us with machines running Vista — is that an update for XNA Game Studio has been released, now with support for Windows Vista. I plan to download it later this week, subscribe to the XNA Creators Club (required to develop games for the 360; sounds dangerously close to the Super Adventure Club from South Park) and take it for a spin.

The prevailing wisdom is that European mobile web use is higher than Americans’, but a survey by the Online Publishing Association says that the opposite is true. Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the Bizarro World.

In the survey, roughly equal numbers of American, British, French, German, Italian and Spanish people were interviewed, with some weighting to reflect the mobile phone-using populations of each country. In the survey, they found that while 77% of the European respondents had mobile web access compared to 71% of the U.S. respondents, a higher percentage of the Americans made use of it. 41% of the Americans with mobile web access were regular users, compared to 31% of Europeans overall.
Here’s how the countries in the survey compared in regular mobile web use:

• United Kingdom: 54%
• United States and Italy: tied at 41%
• Germany and Spain: tied at 40%
• France: 34%

More survey results are in the article.

The recent New York Times piece about Palm’s response to the iPhone made me all nostalgic for the days when the Handspring Visor with phone attachment (pictured right) was the phone I really wanted.

A couple of quick items related to the Newspapers Need Nerds! article posted on March 8th:

• Adrian “Django” Holovaty says that washingtonpost.com is looking for a web developer. SOunds like a fun job, and you’ll get to work on projects with very high visibility (that’s important to me personally) to boot! Since Adrian’s the alpha geek there, web apps will be developed in Django (but your Ruby on Rails experience won’t be held against you if you’re willing to forget all that “black magic”). Special consideration will be given to candidates who have contributed to open source projects, have some web app side projects, have a weblog or have journalism experience. Examples of the types of sites that the successful candidate will work on include:
  • John McCain’s campaign contributions
  • Faces of the Fallen
  • Mixed Messages
  • President Bush Latin America trip map
  • Clinton’s Golden Voice
  • U.S. Congress votes database
  • Video Game Reviews database
• Howard Owens writes that journalists can program too. “The point here is that if you’re a journalist and have an opportunity to make a contribution to your career, your company or to our industry through programming, don’t let the math thing scare you. You can do it. Eighty percent of programming (if my math is right) is easy. If I can do it, you can.”

5 Ways To Know When It’s Time To Find Another Job is an InformationWeek article based on the advice of experts from Challenger Gray & Christmas and Monster.com that lists five signs that it may be time to dust off the ol’ resume and start looking around.

The article explains the reluctance of high-tech workers to leave their current jobs, even though such reluctance may be unwarranted:

After the dot-com bubble burst several years ago, a lot of high-tech workers simply felt lucky to have a job–any job. Gone were the days when chief security officers, Java developers, and project managers could pick up a new, and better, job as easily as picking up a latte. Human Resources managers stopped worrying about how to keep good employees from leaving for better jobs. People who had decent jobs counted themselves lucky, kept their heads down and just hoped they weren’t next to be outsourced or otherwise pink slipped.

Those days are gone. High-tech jobs are being created. There are new positions to move into. A lot of people, though, aren’t picking up stakes and moving on. They’re stuck in that head-down mentality and maybe they’re missing the opportunity to find that great next job.

Here are the five signs…

1. If you’re not learning anything anymore. “If you’re no longer learning, the indication is that your time there is over. If you have a really good boss, it can be hard to leave that. But if you’ve learned everything you can from that company and that great boss, you’re not helping yourself by staying.”
2. If the rumor mill says things are going to get worse, especially if your company’s just been merged or acquired. “It’s rare that rumors stay alive when there’s nothing behind them. Pay attention to the rumor mill when it’s about acquisitions, mergers and layoffs. Mergers and acquisitions are a real red flag that some of you will go, if not all of you. There’s a lot of rumors but when everybody is talking about layoffs and it’s being said and said and management isn’t coming out and denying it, then that’s not good Your job is in the most jeopardy if your company has just been acquired.”
3. If you have a toxic co-worker (or worse, more than one). “Is there a bully roaming your office? Is someone else always taking credit for your work? What about that jerk who takes obvious glee in getting under your skin or that one person who makes you dread walking through the office door every morning? Answering yes to any of these questions probably means you’re working in a toxic environment.”
4. If you and the boss have irreconcilable differences. “Are you not receiving challenging work? Are you not getting plum assignments? Is there room for advancement or do you feel like your advancement is being blocked? Are you not being recognized sufficiently, either monetarily or within the organization, for your efforts? Everybody feels all those issues at one time or another. It’s about your level of concern and do you have more than one of these issues?”
5. If you are underpaid and overworked. “Are you not earning what you think others of equal stature are either at this company or at competitors? Are you not getting raises or bonuses? If so, it’s time to do some homework.”

Link