$GlobalCorp that was paying me a good wage can outsource my job to India, Serbia, South Africa, etc. Check.
I then have to get another job, possibly in another field. Check.
Most jobs being created in the US and UK economies are service industry jobs where I have few applicable qualifications so I will most likely take a serious pay cut. Check.
Because I now have a lot less disposable income, if I want to maintain my previous quality of life I need to look to other sources for products. I can't afford HMV or Virgin prices of GBP15 for a new CD anymore. Imports from overseas may be one solution to this. After all, it's exactly what $GlobalCorp did in step 1 - saved money by sourcing their product (my labour in this case) from a cheaper market.
Nope - can't do that.
AFAIK this is explicitly against the WTO agreements on price differentiation in different markets and the prevention of people from taking advantage of this. This is why the BPI have to use shady trademark laws (see Levi vs Tesco for more on this).
Time to make this shit personal and stop being sheeple!
Maybe he didn't mean style - maybe he meant trade dress, but didn't know the correct term. In any event, you can definitely trademark something like that shadow images with white cables in 'mobile' positions as a totality.
They can't claim copyright, but they could claim trademark violation. I'm not sure if they trademarked their iPod ad images, but the shadow image with the white cables would most likely constitute a trademarkable image. I think that they call this Trade dress (Trade dress is the totality of elements in which a product or service is packaged or presented.)
You're right... Of the three (copyrights, trademarks and patents), the only one that you can easily lose by not defending is a trademark. Nice to see someone here who actually knows this:)
However, having said this, the doctrine of laches could be used as a defence should a patent troll come calling. It's generally frowned upon to know that you own the rights to something that is becoming a de facto standard and then try and sue people to stop using it later.
But I've not heard of this being successfully used. It wasn't used over the lzw compression (gif) patents or the FAT32 patents. FAT32 was invalidated on prior art, and we just lived with the gif disaster. So I've not seen laches be useful yet.
Gimp doesn't get you from A to B. Gimp costs you 10s of man hours in lost time and re-training and then you find out it can't do a load of VERY important stuff for any semi-professional outfit.
He probably wasn't pushed. Lots of inconsiderate bastards ruin my commute home by leaping in front of trains. They figure if they're going, they want other people to be miserable too:)
As far as crime being shifted away from the cameras, that was a worst case scenario fear, and it has happened to a degree. But we still get a LOT of crime that happens in front of the cameras. The yobs don't care. So they get an ASBO (anti-social behaviour order)... so what? It's a badge of honour for many. They can beat seven kinds of crap out of you and not go to jail. Score!
The cop car at the pub fight was most likely down to organised patrols in the area. Many pubs in some areas have fights outside almost every single friday and saturday night, so patrols are around. This is effective in my mind - real coppers who can shout "Stop... or... or I'll yell stop again" are far better than cameras who can just watch you die.
What was it about the cameras that made you feel safer? Did you feel ok knowing that if you were pushed under a train, they might catch the guy from the pictures? Did you feel safer because they might get a picture of the gook who blows up your platform ?
A police officer on the platform can help you. A camera can't.
I've lived in a number of places in London, and I've found two major things...
1. The cops rely on the cameras too much. If there is a glitch and they don't get footage, they don't seem to put much effort into old-school investigative techniques for most crimes (assault, muggings, vandalism). It's a case of "video or it didn't happen"
2. Yobs, drug dealers and thugs don't care about the cameras. I've had various run-ins with groups and individuals in full view of cameras and they've not been even slightly worried.
So I ask again... why did these cameras make you feel safe?
All cameras do is make retribution and revenge possible. They do not stop crime. A policeman on the scene can stop a crime. A camera can't. And what is worse, most cameras are not actively monitored - they just pull the tapes after the event.
Completely ignoring the situation was EXACTLY the right thing to do. Unless this kid had other issues or signs of criminal intent, he should not have even been spoken to about this.
Freedom sometimes includes the freedom to get hurt or to be put at risk.
There was a time when America wasn't just full of scared pussies:(
Well, we're not friends I guess, but I have a homebrew video server. I've got a NAS in the attic that everything (CDs, DVDs, etc.) gets ripped to. I've then got an Xbox (old style) under my TV that acts as the media centre. It's hooked up to the TV with component cables, and to the hi-fi with old style RCA cables. We watch DVDs and listen to music through that instead of moving media around.
I also sync from the storage in the roof to my iPod for the car instead of managing a separate set of playlists for that.
Why should ANY of what I am doing here be illegal ?
He sounds like the typical non-techie manager, if you don't mind me saying so. Who in his right mind would decide IT policy based on 'slick presentation' and bribery. You would find out who else was using the technology and could you see a working example.
I'm not saying that he made the decision purely on this, but when we walked out of the Cary offices, he did comment that they were complete amateurs, and it showed in all of his dealings with them from then on. The respect was gone and he didn't treat them the same way as he did Sun for example. More importantly, he didn't trust their statements or advice because he viewed them as amateurs.
Are you seriously telling us you gave RedHat £300K and they didn't even give you the media?
Yes, I really am telling you that. They didn't give us the media to RHEL 4 X86_64 (our primary platform). They didn't give us the media to RHN satellite or RHN proxy. They didn't give us the channel dumps for RHN. We had to download this and burn it all our self.
The company using cardboard to prop up a project is an example of the 'small business mentality' that they use. Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine:)
At the time of this visit, I'd been using Linux in businesses for about 8 years. I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of IT type - he's used to being woo'd by the vendors... Tickets to sporting events, slick presentations, etc. Red Hat just did NOT treat this man like he is used to being treated by IBM, Oracle and Sun, and this made getting Linux into the company that much harder.
Their failures with support later didn't help matters either.
Subscriptions may well take the pain out of purchasing software, although I might argue that when you get down to AS vs ES (fortunately resolved now) and the per-seat licensing costs around RHN Satellite. You buy a RHEL AS Premium subscription. That's it, right ? That would be all inclusive, right? Nope, you're wrong. If you want to manage that server from an RHN Satellite server, you need to buy an entitlement for your satellite server. If you actually want to be able to deploy the server, you have to buy a different entitlement for Satellite (management vs provisioning).
There's also a lot to be said for having the media on a disc should you need to quickly build a machine on an odd network with no Satellite connectivity. More importantly, it's FREE advertising for RH... Don't you ever wonder why MS are so happy to send trials and sample software all over the place? It's because even when the trial is over and the disc is being used as a coaster, it still has the MS logo all over it.
On top of that, a lot of people, especially heads of IT REALLY like to get something tangible when they spend this kind of money. Why do you think HP still ship that weird license pack for iLO licenses?
What I was trying to say with that bit, is that even beyond the technical merits, there just isn't a Linux vendor who can play in the enterprise space in the way that these people are used to being treated.
10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.
Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.
Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.
The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me:)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.
Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix. Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.
In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
This comment deserves to be seen! I've been posting here for a lot longer than/. has been covering RIAA issues in the depth it does now, and yet I was _still_ accused of being an RIAA troll by NYCL just because I argued with him.
Dismissing a person's arguments just because you think they represent someone is dangerous at best, and just labelling everyone who disagrees with you as an RIAA troll will lead to a lot of useful information and discussing being missed.
Oh, and save your fingers with the usual responses that I see like "I wouldn't even p2p that stuff" "Thank gods they all suck too much for me to listen to" etc.
Obviously hundreds of thousands of people HAVE bought this music, and these are the ones that you need to educate. If you are one of these people, please stop supporting terrorism!
Spoken truly like a person who's never migrated a major site from one ISP to another. The legal issues alone are enough to make my hair fall out and that's before we start to discuss new SLAs, etc.
I posted this here a while back about another trial, but they already found massive coercion and voter fraud in the mail-in elections here.
1. Go to relatives house 2. Hold gun to their head and insist that they vote for who you tell them to 3. Watch them cast the vote 4. Tell them that you will kill them and their pet rabbit if they tell anyone 5. Win the election
Sadly, that is a problem that will always exist if people aren't voting in a private cubicle in a public place.
After the recent postal voting in the UK, it was found that many heads of families coerced the rest of the family into voting a certain way. That just can't happen in a private cubicle where you can always lie to dad later, but vote for who you want to now.
I tried that, but the airline people wouldn't give me a power plug to show them my boarding pass, and the damn thing took up my entire hand luggage allocation, so I guess I'll need to buy a new printer:)
You might want to post that back into the main discussion as a top level reply to the original question. You see, you've replied with useful, helpful information including personal experience, where to get the software and a couple of use scenarios.
I'd hate to see it languish forever under some thread that starts with some dickhead telling people to just google:)
Slashdot Mirror
$GlobalCorp that was paying me a good wage can outsource my job to India, Serbia, South Africa, etc.
Check.
I then have to get another job, possibly in another field.
Check.
Most jobs being created in the US and UK economies are service industry jobs where I have few applicable qualifications so I will most likely take a serious pay cut.
Check.
Because I now have a lot less disposable income, if I want to maintain my previous quality of life I need to look to other sources for products. I can't afford HMV or Virgin prices of GBP15 for a new CD anymore. Imports from overseas may be one solution to this. After all, it's exactly what $GlobalCorp did in step 1 - saved money by sourcing their product (my labour in this case) from a cheaper market.
Nope - can't do that.
AFAIK this is explicitly against the WTO agreements on price differentiation in different markets and the prevention of people from taking advantage of this. This is why the BPI have to use shady trademark laws (see Levi vs Tesco for more on this).
Time to make this shit personal and stop being sheeple!
Maybe he didn't mean style - maybe he meant trade dress, but didn't know the correct term. In any event, you can definitely trademark something like that shadow images with white cables in 'mobile' positions as a totality.
They can't claim copyright, but they could claim trademark violation. I'm not sure if they trademarked their iPod ad images, but the shadow image with the white cables would most likely constitute a trademarkable image. I think that they call this Trade dress (Trade dress is the totality of elements in which a product or service is packaged or presented.)
See http://www.ipwatchdog.com/trademark.html for more
IANAL
You're right... Of the three (copyrights, trademarks and patents), the only one that you can easily lose by not defending is a trademark. Nice to see someone here who actually knows this :)
However, having said this, the doctrine of laches could be used as a defence should a patent troll come calling. It's generally frowned upon to know that you own the rights to something that is becoming a de facto standard and then try and sue people to stop using it later.
But I've not heard of this being successfully used. It wasn't used over the lzw compression (gif) patents or the FAT32 patents. FAT32 was invalidated on prior art, and we just lived with the gif disaster. So I've not seen laches be useful yet.
What? What the hell do patents have to do with code?
/. would start to learn the differences between trademarks, copyrights and patents :(
If MS were to sue over patents, well, they would have ALREADY shown us the patent - you have to disclose everything to get a patent in a first place.
I really wish that people on
Gimp doesn't get you from A to B. Gimp costs you 10s of man hours in lost time and re-training and then you find out it can't do a load of VERY important stuff for any semi-professional outfit.
He probably wasn't pushed. Lots of inconsiderate bastards ruin my commute home by leaping in front of trains. They figure if they're going, they want other people to be miserable too :)
As far as crime being shifted away from the cameras, that was a worst case scenario fear, and it has happened to a degree. But we still get a LOT of crime that happens in front of the cameras. The yobs don't care. So they get an ASBO (anti-social behaviour order)... so what? It's a badge of honour for many. They can beat seven kinds of crap out of you and not go to jail. Score!
The cop car at the pub fight was most likely down to organised patrols in the area. Many pubs in some areas have fights outside almost every single friday and saturday night, so patrols are around. This is effective in my mind - real coppers who can shout "Stop... or... or I'll yell stop again" are far better than cameras who can just watch you die.
I love it when people call Gimp a photoshop clone. That's like calling my Ford Ka a Bugatti Veyron clone.
There's more and more crime here every day. I've got 2 open cases with the police at the moment and they won't lift a finger at all.
What was it about the cameras that made you feel safer? Did you feel ok knowing that if you were pushed under a train, they might catch the guy from the pictures? Did you feel safer because they might get a picture of the gook who blows up your platform ?
A police officer on the platform can help you. A camera can't.
I've lived in a number of places in London, and I've found two major things...
1. The cops rely on the cameras too much. If there is a glitch and they don't get footage, they don't seem to put much effort into old-school investigative techniques for most crimes (assault, muggings, vandalism). It's a case of "video or it didn't happen"
2. Yobs, drug dealers and thugs don't care about the cameras. I've had various run-ins with groups and individuals in full view of cameras and they've not been even slightly worried.
So I ask again... why did these cameras make you feel safe?
All cameras do is make retribution and revenge possible. They do not stop crime. A policeman on the scene can stop a crime. A camera can't. And what is worse, most cameras are not actively monitored - they just pull the tapes after the event.
You probably still hate it :) Look at Red Hat with their closed source stuff that they charge a fortune for :)
Completely ignoring the situation was EXACTLY the right thing to do. Unless this kid had other issues or signs of criminal intent, he should not have even been spoken to about this.
:(
Freedom sometimes includes the freedom to get hurt or to be put at risk.
There was a time when America wasn't just full of scared pussies
Well, we're not friends I guess, but I have a homebrew video server. I've got a NAS in the attic that everything (CDs, DVDs, etc.) gets ripped to. I've then got an Xbox (old style) under my TV that acts as the media centre. It's hooked up to the TV with component cables, and to the hi-fi with old style RCA cables. We watch DVDs and listen to music through that instead of moving media around.
I also sync from the storage in the roof to my iPod for the car instead of managing a separate set of playlists for that.
Why should ANY of what I am doing here be illegal ?
He sounds like the typical non-techie manager, if you don't mind me saying so. Who in his right mind would decide IT policy based on 'slick presentation' and bribery. You would find out who else was using the technology and could you see a working example.
I'm not saying that he made the decision purely on this, but when we walked out of the Cary offices, he did comment that they were complete amateurs, and it showed in all of his dealings with them from then on. The respect was gone and he didn't treat them the same way as he did Sun for example. More importantly, he didn't trust their statements or advice because he viewed them as amateurs.
Are you seriously telling us you gave RedHat £300K and they didn't even give you the media?
Yes, I really am telling you that. They didn't give us the media to RHEL 4 X86_64 (our primary platform). They didn't give us the media to RHN satellite or RHN proxy. They didn't give us the channel dumps for RHN. We had to download this and burn it all our self.
And there is my point - that is running with the big dogs. It's that feeling of security that makes people smile when they sign the cheque.
The company using cardboard to prop up a project is an example of the 'small business mentality' that they use. Slick, well organised presentation rooms are an important issue when selling to enterprises. Hell, so is coffee and biscuits delivered to the room every couple of hours on a full day visit, instead of walking your visitors to the vending machine :)
At the time of this visit, I'd been using Linux in businesses for about 8 years. I was trying to sell a bank on Linux, and my boss was a typical head of IT type - he's used to being woo'd by the vendors... Tickets to sporting events, slick presentations, etc. Red Hat just did NOT treat this man like he is used to being treated by IBM, Oracle and Sun, and this made getting Linux into the company that much harder.
Their failures with support later didn't help matters either.
Subscriptions may well take the pain out of purchasing software, although I might argue that when you get down to AS vs ES (fortunately resolved now) and the per-seat licensing costs around RHN Satellite. You buy a RHEL AS Premium subscription. That's it, right ? That would be all inclusive, right? Nope, you're wrong. If you want to manage that server from an RHN Satellite server, you need to buy an entitlement for your satellite server. If you actually want to be able to deploy the server, you have to buy a different entitlement for Satellite (management vs provisioning).
There's also a lot to be said for having the media on a disc should you need to quickly build a machine on an odd network with no Satellite connectivity. More importantly, it's FREE advertising for RH... Don't you ever wonder why MS are so happy to send trials and sample software all over the place? It's because even when the trial is over and the disc is being used as a coaster, it still has the MS logo all over it.
On top of that, a lot of people, especially heads of IT REALLY like to get something tangible when they spend this kind of money. Why do you think HP still ship that weird license pack for iLO licenses?
What I was trying to say with that bit, is that even beyond the technical merits, there just isn't a Linux vendor who can play in the enterprise space in the way that these people are used to being treated.
10 years ago, I jumped onto the Linux bandwagon. Last year, I started brushing up my Solaris skills and I'm now working to add some Sun certs to my RHCE.
:)) and forsake many useful updates and features in tools like Samba and then you'll get your stable API / ABI. Or you can go with a bleeding edge distro and never have ISV support for your products. Neither of these is a great choice for us, we'd like something in the middle, but I can't find a commercial vendor providing this today.
Linux just is NOT ready for the enterprise. Red Hat, the 'biggest' Linux company out there just hasn't learnt to run with the big dogs yet.
Technical issues about the OS aside, Red Hat just don't present as a professional company. After dealing with Sun and MS for years, dealing with RH is a bit of a joke. £300k doesn't even buy you any media! A visit to their head office in North Carolina sees the presentation done from a projector on a desk, with bits of cardboard to stop it wobbling. Trial versions of the software to keep your skills up to date ? Don't be silly - you have to use CentOS for the free tools and you're SOL for their closed source tools like Satellite or RHN Proxy.
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
At a technical level, Linux is NOT keeping up and is barely fit for datacentre purposes. Only recently has the LVM stuff got to a useful level where we can do multipathing (with IO on both paths) without needing third party software. It's not great yet, and the tools to maintain it are badly documented, but since we just can't get Veritas for 64bit RHEL4 (or couldn't when I checked a few months back), it's the only choice we have.
The constant changes to the API and ABI are a total PITA for ISVs. You can either go with RHEL / SLES (or CentOS if you're broke like me
Lastly, the tools. I'd really rather not get started on the issues with the tools that RH provides to manage systems. Suffice to say, not being able to do LVM setup using the text installer came as a bit of a shock. And when confronting RH on the severe deficiencies in their text-based admin tools, I was just told to spend 8k on a closed source RH product to resolve these... How much MORE like MS can you be? Yeah, we know the base product is a bit broken, but that part isn't really our focus - here, try this expensive fix.
Documentation is in a similar state with some stuff being very well documented and other stuff, poorly if at all.
In the end, Sun still have a better understanding of what the enterprise needs, both from a support and an OS point of view.
This comment deserves to be seen! I've been posting here for a lot longer than /. has been covering RIAA issues in the depth it does now, and yet I was _still_ accused of being an RIAA troll by NYCL just because I argued with him.
Dismissing a person's arguments just because you think they represent someone is dangerous at best, and just labelling everyone who disagrees with you as an RIAA troll will lead to a lot of useful information and discussing being missed.
UMG (http://new.umusic.com/flash.aspx) is the primary group suing this person. Some of their artists include
Beautiful South
Cardigans
Def Leppard
Texas
Peter Gabriel
Razorlight
Sheryl Crow
By buying CDs or digital tracks by these artists, you are helping to fund this lawsuit. Please stop!
UMG's artist lists can be found at:
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=0
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=1
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=2
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=3
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=4
http://new.umusic.com/Artists.aspx?Index=5
Oh, and save your fingers with the usual responses that I see like
"I wouldn't even p2p that stuff"
"Thank gods they all suck too much for me to listen to"
etc.
Obviously hundreds of thousands of people HAVE bought this music, and these are the ones that you need to educate. If you are one of these people, please stop supporting terrorism!
Spoken truly like a person who's never migrated a major site from one ISP to another. The legal issues alone are enough to make my hair fall out and that's before we start to discuss new SLAs, etc.
I posted this here a while back about another trial, but they already found massive coercion and voter fraud in the mail-in elections here.
1. Go to relatives house
2. Hold gun to their head and insist that they vote for who you tell them to
3. Watch them cast the vote
4. Tell them that you will kill them and their pet rabbit if they tell anyone
5. Win the election
Sadly, that is a problem that will always exist if people aren't voting in a private cubicle in a public place.
After the recent postal voting in the UK, it was found that many heads of families coerced the rest of the family into voting a certain way. That just can't happen in a private cubicle where you can always lie to dad later, but vote for who you want to now.
I tried that, but the airline people wouldn't give me a power plug to show them my boarding pass, and the damn thing took up my entire hand luggage allocation, so I guess I'll need to buy a new printer :)
You might want to post that back into the main discussion as a top level reply to the original question. You see, you've replied with useful, helpful information including personal experience, where to get the software and a couple of use scenarios.
:)
I'd hate to see it languish forever under some thread that starts with some dickhead telling people to just google
Does it do every single thing in my list? If so, you've not answered the question :)