Getty Images makes no bones about asking a lot of money for their images and making sure they get paid. I own a business that among other things produces fine art prints. Some time back a customer asked about a print of a particular Old Master painting that wasn't listed in any publisher's catalog. Tracking down a high-resolution image that I could print myself led me to Getty Images. The minimum royalty for this kind of use was in the $300 range. The rep came right out and said that their royalty structure would not be economical for one-off print like I was seeking.

This, BTW, is for an image that is theoretically in the public domain.

This reminds me of when they were developing the original pilot for the original "Star Trek" series. They wanted to know how the green-skinned Orion slave-girl would look when filmed. They covered her in green makeup and shot some test footage. It came back from the lab with normal pink European flesh tones. So they tried darker makeup. Still pink. They tried the darkest, densest makeup they could find. Still pink. It turned out that the lab was oh-so-helpfully "correcting" the color for them. I think this speaks volumes as to the article's premise...

FiOS deployment is very patchy in the Boston area. I live in a suburb of Boston and I own a retail shop there. My home and shop are about four blocks apart. I had FiOS in both locations since 2008.

Recently I moved my shop to a new location a block and a half away. It is actually between my home and my previous location. No FiOS service, though; I had to settle for DSL.

What's funny is that this sort of "alignment" has been taking place for *years* in dead-tree textbooks.

An example: Back in the 80s I was taking a class in differential equations and was having some trouble. So I went down to the library to see if different textbooks might have different approaches that could help me out. I pulled down four textbooks (different authors) and sat down to read. Turns out EVERY SINGLE ONE of them presented exactly the same concepts in exactly the same order with pretty much the same descriptions. Didn't help me one bit, but it shows how a math professor can make a few extra bucks for very little effort... #include

This article sounds like an arrogant person with a serious case of sour grapes: "Yeah I bombed that test, but look at me! I'm seriously successful and I don't need to use any of the stuff that's on that test anyway! Stupid test!"

I remember when I was a schoolkid other kids would whine things like "Why do I need to learn fractions? I'm never going to use them!"

I understand that "anecdote" is not the singular form of "Data", but here's my story: I've been in the UNIX/Linux internals field for over 25 years. About a year ago, we were scrambling to get a feature into a partner's release, and we were running into one problem after another. The deadline was looming, and the problems were multiplying.

A young-un would probably burn the midnight oil, slave away nights and weekends and death-march themselves right off the deadline cliff (I remember once working with another young programmer who honestly thought he could keep coding right up until the ship date)

I have quite a number of coding and integration marathons under my belt... sometimes we got lucky and things worked, other times we missed the boat, still other times things blew up spectacularly in our faces.

I, took a step back and sized up our situation. I then went to my boss and said, "We need to prepare for the contingency that this feature does NOT make it into the next release"

This, my friends, is the voice of experience.

It's not clear from the original article... is this an internal helpdesk or a customer-facing helpdesk? If you're in a customer-facing position I agree that a look that reinforces your "brand" is good business. If your "customers" are all internal, though, then I have to wonder about management's motivations. Either they're trying to send a subtle message about your current mode of dress, or else they're scheming to get more attention (and resources) from upper management ("We want to make sure they KNOW who helped them out come budget time!")

A more-flexible and less-costly alternative to shirts, though, might be special "help-desk" *badges* that you wear when you're on the clock. These serve the same branding function, but you only have to buy one per employee (if they expect you to wear the shirts four days a week, they damned well better issue at least four shirts per employee!)