No, "J++" was a contract violation. Microsoft licensed Java from Sun and agreed to keep it compatible with Sun Java. MS changed enough things to break it and Sun sued to prevent them from distributing their bastard Java.

There was another lawsuit where Sun sued Microsoft for antitrust violations (and settled for like a billion dollars), but this was several years later.

Meanwhile, Microsoft reverse-engineered Java (it was called J#), and nobody sued.

Wow, I hadn't see this angle on "BYOD", but your PC analogy is probably exactly correct. Let 'the business' bring in a bunch of tablets, and then in five-ten years once everything has shaken out, the CIO can save the day by centrally managing all this crazy stuff.

In my experience, tacking IE7 support onto a modern web site adds up to 15% to the total cost.

I usually estimate it at around 20%, but that assumes minimal javascript and an experienced webdev crew. (Anyone who's been in the business for a while hates IE to the extent they know how kick its ass sideways. If you're hiring kids out of college, on the other hand, it could easily double your costs.)

IIRC, they posted their metrics and half their users were on Macs. I wouldn't worry too hard about IE in their situation either.

Post your contact info :)

Hey, I remember your garbage collector from Nibble magazine! Sorry, but I think pirated your utility.

The issue is Android's permission system is all technical wonkery and doesn't map well onto actual human use cases.

For example, you could have a perfectly legit app which needs Internet access (why not?), and address book access (for sharing functions), but you still have no idea if they could/would sell upload your contacts and sell them to spammers. Not to mention all Android apps ask you for these permissions, even Google's apps.

Android permissions is what you get when you ask computer scientists to solve what is essentially a legal and 'trust' problem that requires some human judgement. This is a very difficult problem to solve, but "users don't understand permissions" is not really the problem.

They are employees of OtherCorp

If you're lucky, they are employees of OtherCorp. It's incredibly common for outsourcing firms to sub-subcontract stuff. Or hire a bunch of temps because they're only staffed for their baseline.

(And once you have 2 layers of PMs between you and the developers, and it takes 48 hours to roundtrip a simple question, you are truely doomed.)

They'll either shrug their shoulders and build your death car or they simply will assume that maybe you have a very good reason for asking for a death car and it's not their job to question it.

I'm laughing with you, but I've worked with some Eastern European guys who will rip up your spec and then spend 45 minutes telling you are stupid for even wanting such a thing. (And likewise, there's plenty of in-house developers with the "I don't care, I just do what they tell me" blue-collar attitude.)

In addition to very explicit specs and deadlines/milestones, the biggest issue I've seen is that companies assumes they can outsource the entire effort, and grossly underestimate the amount of internal management support required. In most cases, you'll need to match their management structure almost one-to-one; e.g. if the outsourcers have two PMs and an account rep, you will three people on your side in various roles (e.g. PM, business analyst, management sponsor). And once you've added in the needed management overhead, sometimes the cost savings is actually very minimal.

This however has nothing to do with this case, as Pystar was not simply reselling the CD the software came on, they were installing it.

Actually, they weren't even directly "installing" it, they were using a disk duplication machine. (This might seem irrelevant from a technical standpoint, but it's an extra, unauthorized copy.)

GIMP isn't a commercial product, you know. Why does something that's non-commercial need marketing?

You have a six-digit ID, so you might remember the days when GIMP was considered the flagship open source desktop program. Slashdot was full of stories where someone showed their buddy the GIMP and they immediately cast-away their Windows chains and switched to Linux. The GTK toolkit was spun-off of GIMP, as it was considered such an advanced program.

OK, except it had an offensive name and a bizarre UI, and doesn't really matter that much anymore. But at one time GIMP was considered a very important marketing point by Linux advocates.