Ah, good, let's start off with a well-reasoned response.

This guy is part-owner of a small company. That means he's creating jobs. He's giving people something worthwhile to do. They're not yet profitable - that always happens with small companies, but he's plugging away. That means he's dedicated, motivated, hard-working, and again - providing jobs for other people.

In order to build up that brand loyalty which you assume is so easy, he needs to stay afloat at least long enough to get sufficient traction. In the real world, Junior, piracy doesnt just hurt big behemoth corporations. It also hurts the small business owner who's just trying to make a buck and help out some other guys. (What are you doing to provide jobs?)

And you dare to call him an asshole. When you are perfectly content with the idea of people stealing the results of his hard efforts and potentially driving a small business into the ground. Do you want the corporations to be the only ones who have a presence in the marketplace? What an asshole.

I didn't know it could do this. That's because after waiting seven YEARS for my street to show up on Google Maps correctly, I've long since given up using their sodding software.

Every other mapping app has had my street listed for ages. Google Maps is the only one that still can't find my address.

You do not realize just how many markets you're writing off here.

At the niche levels (e.g. something highly specialized, and/or that meets regulatory requirements), a company is paying to have the expert support and business knowledge. The company will be able to issue a patch quickly when you find a new scenario. They have a close relationship with the regulatory body in question. The GUI may be secondary to ensuring that the correct workflows are encapsulated within the system - if a number of use cases are missing or incomplete, the lawyers won't care how pretty it is.

Therein lies the problem. There are other comments saying the guy needs to build up a solid customer base, needs to build up a reputation, etc. All the responses you'd expect from a piracy-friendly forum such as /. The submitter (to me, at least) comes across as someone who wants to do the best and most customer friendly thing. But getting to that point takes a lot of time and money. Piracy makes it awfully difficult to get to that point. It really could end up killing the next great genius idea.

But hey, you're okay - at least you get your stuff for free, right? And there's no cost to anyone, because you wouldn't have bought it in any case. Screw this guy if he goes bankrupt...

The first thing I did when I read this article was to time my iPhone. It's a corporate device, so has mandatory password protection. From off to being able to enter the password is 45 seconds.

Thank goodness it isn't a Blackberry. My old phone (as in early 2011) took something like 15 minutes to come up if I ever removed the battery (which occasionally I had to do because it crashed unrecoverably).

Splash screens were, as other posters say, a way to provide feedback that something was happening. Back in the days of ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum games loading from tape, some clever designers came up with the idea of a very quick-to-load game that came up within a minute. You could then play that mini-game while the rest of the real game finished loading off of tape.

Agreed...this question.

The submission starts off with the vague "Companies can..." and then makes a couple of similarly tenuous suppositions-masquerading-as-fact. No linked article linked about how this is a growing trend, or even a blog post from someone rampaging that their employer has just instituted this.

Slow news day, I guess?

PMP is a globally recognized certification, true. And yes, experience is an asset, if it's in project management.

1. No, it's not.
2. If you've spent 20 years as a programmer and suddenly switch to an entirely different role, whatever that role might be, I doubt you're going to find it significantly easier than what you've spent two decades practicing and perfecting.
2a. But lots of people think it's easier. Until they try it.
3. No, it's not.

If this happens, yes, you'll look like a hero. It's really difficult.

A lot of people also assume that they can inflate the cost estimates, come in way under budget, and look like a super hero. Not necessarily. In many companies, what you've effectively done is tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars (if it's a small project. Millions or tens of millions if it's medium to large) that could've been used to fund another project that got killed last year because it didn't fit in the budget.

Project management can be a lot of fun and very rewarding, but you have different kinds of stress to deal with. Developers who go all prima donna on you. Buggy code. Scope creep. (That's the killer.) Inaccurate requirements. Changing requirements (because the regulatory requirements governing your industry changed). SMEs who turn out to be horribly wrong on their estimated work breakdown structure. Stakeholders who argue. Stakeholders who can't clearly define what they want. Vendors who suck so badly that you end up suing them. Etc.

Not meaning to put anyone off. But honestly, I've seen a lot of techs who look at project managers and think they have it easy, and then get a nasty shock when they try it themselves.

MSDN blogs are often very technically detailed, written by people who know this stuff from the inside, and if it's about a topic that's of general computing interest then it seems that's a good thing. And the blog in question is chock full of some really good detailed stuff about how they're doing performance testing, reasons why the lab is architected the way it is, detailed graphics on how they measure performance, how they analyze it...on and on.

Frankly, this seems more akin to old Slashdot than a lot of the nonsense we see here today. (That story the other day about a girl sent home from school because her lunch wasn't healthy, and then quickly called into question over what happened? Really? What was that topic even doing on Slashdot in the first place?) Whatever you think about Microsoft, having this extremely detailed look into how one of the world's biggest software vendors (or are they the biggest now?) goes about performance testing, and how they ensure consistent results, should be really, really interesting to anyone involved in IT.

Your comments about liquidity make me think you don't fully understand how banking works. Actually, it makes me think you have close to zero idea about how banking works. No liquidity = everything stops happening. Everything. Businesses shut down.

Also the worst thing. Someone has a sense of entitlement - "I don't want to pay for this, so instead of doing without or being responsible I'll just take it" - and so they make more and more run-arounds just so they can get their stuff for free.

Utterly predictable response - media gets very heavy and starts going after everything.

Net result for me, an innocent bystander who doesn't pirate stuff, because, you know, it's wrong - the internet gets more rules and becomes less useful.

So thanks a lot, pirates. (And I don't care if you call yourself a pirate, or insist it's copyright infringement, or whatever. That's all semantic nonsense. It's still wrong, it's still illegal, and it's still immoral. So stop arguing over what label you want to be applied to you.) You're ruining the internet for me.

What on earth do you expect the reactions of the media giants to be? Just roll over, shrug their shoulders, and say "oh well"? All the moaning about SOPA and whatever else - you brought it on yourselves and you deserve it, but you also brought it on everyone else. So thanks a lot. Jerks.

9:36 am - a story is posted on Slashdot: Megaupload Co-Founder Allowed Bail.

11:18 am - a story is posted about outages to high profile web sites.

And to think that people were asking what harm could it do to give the Megaupload guy access to the internet...