Please, please, please let RIM get beaten! I've recently been tagged with one of these poxy things and I hate it. Mostly it just lies in the bottom of my rucksack and I make vague excuses as to why I never respond to mail when away from the office.
The only one I know is for the Filmworks. They recently enabled their stupid 'speak to the menu' solution, and it couldn't understand Batman Begins. So I dialed back and just tried saying 'operator' at the prompt. I was immediately transfered to a real live human... and shortly after that I was begging to be put back through to the machine:(
That's a little harsh. Sure, they're guilty of some pretty rough stuff here, but Matt Damon? I don't think anyone is THAT guilty that they should have to watch him for any length of time:)
Sorry, there was some speculation that it might be something _other_ than a caravan wrecking show? Anything that the host does seems to involve destroyed caravans - heck, even racing radio controlled cards on Top Gear last week ended up with a wrecked caravan:)
On 11/9, the rules changed. Up until then, if you flight was hijacked, you did what the bad guys wanted and spent a couple of hours on a runway in Cuba. Then you came home. You were inconvinienced, but most hijackings resulted in happy endings.
After 11/9, the rules have changed. Now, instead of that afternoon in Cuba, you could spend the last seconds of your life gently accelerating into a burning building. So we react differently. Now, the only successfull attack would involve incapacitating a large number of the passengers. The tools to do this are already detected and caught by airline security.
Trust me, taking my fucking nail clippers away doesn't make planes safer. They take my nail clippers at the gate, but allow me to buy one litre glass bottles in the duty free. Ask an ER doctor about the damage you can do with a broken bottle sometime - it's far more significant than what you can achieve with 1/2" nail scissors!
Actually, dressing smartly HAS made me code better. Because I changed the way I dress (metal t-shirt and jeans to business smart) my whole life changed.
Even though I wore suits to interviews, changing my day-to-day dress code really made a difference. Suddenly people who never looked at me twice before noticed it, and before I knew it I had moved jobs to a large enterprise based on contacts I had recently made. Since being here, I've been given the opportunity to work on projects and do things that I never would have dreamed of before.
Also, because they pay more, they tend to attract excellent technical people, so I've worked with better people and learnt more from them. What I've learnt has made my code better, my processes and documentation better, and helped my career more than I care to think about.
This would be the same Soviet Britain where it is now unlawful to spontaneously protest within a certain distance of the houses of parliament and where all requests for permission are turned down, right ?
And how long before the only person currently allowed to protest there (because he was already there when the law was passed) is killed in a 'tragic, random attack' just to get him out of the way?
Freedom my ass - I'm going back to South Africa. At least there the constitution guarantees the right to freedom of assembly and the police wouldn't be stupid enough to go up against the mob about something as simple as where they toyi-toyi!
Ok, so here's a challenge for anyone living in the US of A right now (and I'm about to do exactly this in the UK).
File a Freedom of Information Act request asking for the number of convictions for copyright infringements where terrorism was involved. I've not worked out quite how to word this yet, but I'm still working on it and I hope you get the drift.
Then write to your local paper with the answer. If this is bullshit (and I can't believe what else it would be), the results should be interesting.
Of course, the cynic within me tells me that they won't release the information citing national security concerns. But I'm going to try anyway.
Yeah, sure. Let's start with their RHN products as I said in my original post. Look into Satellite. It used to be python based so at least you could modify the code even if you weren't licensed to do so, but a large part of it is now written in Java, so you don't even get the source anymore.
Except that everything that Red Hat makes is open source.
I really do wish people would stop propagating that myth! Many of Red Hat's most important products are entirely closed source. Not only do you not have the right to modify the code, you don't even have the right to SEE the source code! Look at their RHN products.
In addition, it's not just code changes that will stop Red Hat supporting you. Recompile your kernel, and they won't support you until you reboot with a stock kernel.
None of the above get to me though. What REALLY gets to me is Red Hat supporting machines that have software from other vendors installed.
I recently had to upgrade the kernel on a batch of machines running RHEL 3 with Veritas storage foundation installed. On the test server, I ran into a problem - during the reboot, the server could not mount any veritas managed filesystems. If I commented these out of fstab and rebooted, I could then mount them fine. Would Red Hat support me, even though I have paid for premium support on all of these boxes ? Not a chance! They told me that it's a Veritas problem - go talk to Veritas.
Veritas of course maintain that it's a Red Hat problem because everything was working fine before the new kernel was booted, which seems reasonable enough to me. Eventually, after expending considerable amount of my own time and effort, I found and solved the problem. It turns out that Veritas needs to put a bunch of modules under/lib/modules/$(uname -r). On a boot without these, it tries to copy them in place, but as the filesystem is read-only at this time, it fails. So the problem appears to be a shared Veritas / Red Hat problem, but at the end of the day, I don't care - I pay 2 companies for premium support of their products, and I don't think I got this!
Something else I forgot to mention on this topic. Does anyone remember when Red Hat launched the Red Hat Database ? I'm not too familiar with the history, but if I remember right, this was a rebadged PostgreSQL.
Well, does anyone want to guess what DB their RHN tools use ? yep - you guessed it - Oracle. Oh, wait... That's not what you guessed ?:D
The do claim that Oracle is one of the main reasons that their RHN products are so expensive, and this is something I can believe!
but every byte of software that Red Hat produces is under the GPL
Not true at all. Much of their most useful software is under a closed source licence.
Their RHN Satellite product (which is the only reason my enterprise installation chose RH over Novell) used to be under a closed licence, but at least I had the code and I could send bug fixes back. Their newest release, 4.0 is java based, so I don't even get the source any more. Now I have to patch my installation up with CGIs that are called instead of the java stuff. It's a real PITA.
RH are moving further and further away from being a community based company - this becomes very apparent when you actually enter into support agreements with them. But having said that, so what ? They are a business and this is their choice. So they see Fedora as a dev lab and won't support it for more than 2 revs.. so what ? So they charge for Satellite and RHN Proxy and won't give me the code... So what ? As a publically trade company their only obligation is to make money for their shareholders. I can respect that, but I just won't be giving them any more free labour - I'll go and donate that where it is more likely to be reciprocated.
It's not out in the UK yet... I saw it in the states last week when I was over there, but most UK denizens have not had the privilege yet. Leave it be for a while;)
I would wait for their side of the story if I had any faith in them whatsover. Unfortunately, their frame of mind became very clear around this time when they brutally murdered an innocent man on a tube train. In light of this, I think I'll just believe this story as it stands.
The DNA thing is normal. Under some twisted bullshit law, the police can now take DNA samples from every person they ever arrest, and they are not required to delete these from their records if this person is found innocent or charges are dropped.
It's just a really cool way for them to build a national DNA database without anyone noticing.
This man was arrested for causing a public disturbance among other things. So all the cops need now to get a DNA sample from you is for you to be making some noise. And they never have to erase it.
This guy is an ex-writer for exe magazine, and he works for a respectable technology company now. Sure, there was a firearms hoax there, but my wife's company have had 3 bomb hoaxes in the last year. Does that mean she's a terrorist ?
Also, note what the police have said caused them to pursue the case... The fact that he had a shortwave received and an RS-232 breakout box.
This guy could have been almost any/. geek.
We don't really need the London police's side of this story because we know their frame of mind around the time this action was taken. Around this time, they held an innocent man down on a tube train and put at least 5 bullets in his head and chest at point blank range. At the time they made all sorts of outrageous claims, many of which have found to be stretching the truth, and some of which have turned out to be outright lies.
I don't trust my police force any more, so I'm more inclined to believe the 'victim' of this tale.
I've been a Linux geek for about 10 years now, and recently got my first enterprise gig. Part of this meant working with both Linux and Solaris to deploy our new SAN (HDS if it matters). One of the first things that blew my mind was how much better Solaris is when it comes to storage. Just make sure you've got all the possible LUNs you'll be allocated by the SAN both now and in the future in your config file, and that's it.
When new storage is allocated to the Sun, just run devfsadm and you'll be able to see it. With Linux, reboot. WTF ? I've still not found a way around this.
Because we've gone for an Enterprise solution with Red Hat, I raised a support call. Their final response was that they do not support adding new LUNs to a machine without a reboot, and that was that.
Earlier on I'd had a run-in with RH support because they wouldn't support hotswapping disks in an HP DL380. These machines are built to do this, but I was having issues detecting the replaced disk and rebuilding my software RAID array. Again Red Hat said that they did not support hot-adding disks to the machine and that I should reboot. I finally found a solution to this one on my own, making the grand I'd paid for RH support on that machine a bit of a joke:(
So yeah, Sun kicks ass on this front, and anything that RH can do to catchup would be useful!
Actually, I think that the braces issue is a perfectly valid reason for disliking python.
Suddenly tools that I use in EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE that I develop in become useless. Moving to the first brace in vim and pressing shift-5 takes me to the last one. So I can easily find the beginning and end of nested blocks, subroutines, methods, whatever. This works when I'm writing C, Objective-C, Java or Perl, and a consistent editing environment is one of the things that makes it easy for me to flip between these as the job requires.
Moving to the indent system would probably be fine if I used it all the time, or even if I used it most of the time, but I don't. So it's a pain to deal with everytime I pick Python up.
The timing on this is interesting. We currently have the regular Arms Fair running at the Excel exhibition centre in London.
This is a time when companies from all around the UK gather in London to sell weapons to countries who can't afford them so that they can keep on killing each other. It's a time when a small % of the UK population get to pay for a massive police operation that doesn't actually create any new jobs in London.
Every time this event is held, my neighborhood turns into a yellow zone. All I can see is police in their shiny yellow jackets all over the place. Cars are randomly stopped, roads are narrowed from two lanes two one so that police can inspect vehicles as they pass, and it's generally a real pain in the ass to live here for the next week.
And with this, we get the protestors. Most of these people are involved in legitimate protest against something they feel very strongly about, and they protest peacefully. Every year we have some nutjobs who take it a little too far and chain themselves to the DLR, but it's never really anything serious.
And yet the UK Terrorism act has been used to remove protestors from the event on a number of occasions now. Police abuse at the event is a common complaint, and open protest is actively discouraged with permission for certain marches / gatherings denied.
No matter what M says, we've already given up so many of our civil liberties in this country that we may as well just hand the others over and have done.
Have a read of The Corporation. It outlines two cases, one in the US (Ford) and one in the UK (can't remember) where the company was sued for not maximising shareholder revenue.
In the case of Ford, I believe Mr Ford wanted to reduce the price of the vehicles so that more people could buy them. His shareholders sued him and won because this would have reduced their revenue. The court found that it is the duty of a company to maximise shareholder earnings.
The case in the UK was very similar, and both of these are now quoted as precedent.
So to answer your question, yes, companies have been successfully sued for NOT maximising shareholder revenue.
Yearly train trip ? I spend 2 hours on trains EVERY SINGLE WORKING DAY OF THE YEAR! And I'm not alone in this.
The UK is heavily reliant on a mass transport system that is prone to failure. I've had train trips that were scheduled to last 2 hours take 8. That's not that unusual.
Sure, I use my train rides to study and to read, but I also use them to play. I've logged over 40 PSP hours on UK rail so far.
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Please, please, please let RIM get beaten! I've recently been tagged with one of these poxy things and I hate it. Mostly it just lies in the bottom of my rucksack and I make vague excuses as to why I never respond to mail when away from the office.
The only one I know is for the Filmworks. They recently enabled their stupid 'speak to the menu' solution, and it couldn't understand Batman Begins. So I dialed back and just tried saying 'operator' at the prompt. I was immediately transfered to a real live human... and shortly after that I was begging to be put back through to the machine :(
That's a little harsh. Sure, they're guilty of some pretty rough stuff here, but Matt Damon? I don't think anyone is THAT guilty that they should have to watch him for any length of time :)
Sorry, there was some speculation that it might be something _other_ than a caravan wrecking show? Anything that the host does seems to involve destroyed caravans - heck, even racing radio controlled cards on Top Gear last week ended up with a wrecked caravan :)
On 11/9, the rules changed. Up until then, if you flight was hijacked, you did what the bad guys wanted and spent a couple of hours on a runway in Cuba. Then you came home. You were inconvinienced, but most hijackings resulted in happy endings.
After 11/9, the rules have changed. Now, instead of that afternoon in Cuba, you could spend the last seconds of your life gently accelerating into a burning building. So we react differently. Now, the only successfull attack would involve incapacitating a large number of the passengers. The tools to do this are already detected and caught by airline security.
Trust me, taking my fucking nail clippers away doesn't make planes safer. They take my nail clippers at the gate, but allow me to buy one litre glass bottles in the duty free. Ask an ER doctor about the damage you can do with a broken bottle sometime - it's far more significant than what you can achieve with 1/2" nail scissors!
Actually, dressing smartly HAS made me code better. Because I changed the way I dress (metal t-shirt and jeans to business smart) my whole life changed.
Even though I wore suits to interviews, changing my day-to-day dress code really made a difference. Suddenly people who never looked at me twice before noticed it, and before I knew it I had moved jobs to a large enterprise based on contacts I had recently made. Since being here, I've been given the opportunity to work on projects and do things that I never would have dreamed of before.
Also, because they pay more, they tend to attract excellent technical people, so I've worked with better people and learnt more from them. What I've learnt has made my code better, my processes and documentation better, and helped my career more than I care to think about.
The parent is correct - The report I saw claimed that he had declined to be retested. This is not an editorial error.
This would be the same Soviet Britain where it is now unlawful to spontaneously protest within a certain distance of the houses of parliament and where all requests for permission are turned down, right ?
And how long before the only person currently allowed to protest there (because he was already there when the law was passed) is killed in a 'tragic, random attack' just to get him out of the way?
Freedom my ass - I'm going back to South Africa. At least there the constitution guarantees the right to freedom of assembly and the police wouldn't be stupid enough to go up against the mob about something as simple as where they toyi-toyi!
Ok, so here's a challenge for anyone living in the US of A right now (and I'm about to do exactly this in the UK).
File a Freedom of Information Act request asking for the number of convictions for copyright infringements where terrorism was involved. I've not worked out quite how to word this yet, but I'm still working on it and I hope you get the drift.
Then write to your local paper with the answer. If this is bullshit (and I can't believe what else it would be), the results should be interesting.
Of course, the cynic within me tells me that they won't release the information citing national security concerns. But I'm going to try anyway.
Would you mind giving specific examples?
Yeah, sure. Let's start with their RHN products as I said in my original post. Look into Satellite. It used to be python based so at least you could modify the code even if you weren't licensed to do so, but a large part of it is now written in Java, so you don't even get the source anymore.
Same goes for their RHN Proxy product.
Except that everything that Red Hat makes is open source.
/lib/modules/$(uname -r). On a boot without these, it tries to copy them in place, but as the filesystem is read-only at this time, it fails. So the problem appears to be a shared Veritas / Red Hat problem, but at the end of the day, I don't care - I pay 2 companies for premium support of their products, and I don't think I got this!
I really do wish people would stop propagating that myth! Many of Red Hat's most important products are entirely closed source. Not only do you not have the right to modify the code, you don't even have the right to SEE the source code! Look at their RHN products.
In addition, it's not just code changes that will stop Red Hat supporting you. Recompile your kernel, and they won't support you until you reboot with a stock kernel.
None of the above get to me though. What REALLY gets to me is Red Hat supporting machines that have software from other vendors installed.
I recently had to upgrade the kernel on a batch of machines running RHEL 3 with Veritas storage foundation installed. On the test server, I ran into a problem - during the reboot, the server could not mount any veritas managed filesystems. If I commented these out of fstab and rebooted, I could then mount them fine. Would Red Hat support me, even though I have paid for premium support on all of these boxes ? Not a chance! They told me that it's a Veritas problem - go talk to Veritas.
Veritas of course maintain that it's a Red Hat problem because everything was working fine before the new kernel was booted, which seems reasonable enough to me. Eventually, after expending considerable amount of my own time and effort, I found and solved the problem. It turns out that Veritas needs to put a bunch of modules under
Something else I forgot to mention on this topic. Does anyone remember when Red Hat launched the Red Hat Database ? I'm not too familiar with the history, but if I remember right, this was a rebadged PostgreSQL.
:D
Well, does anyone want to guess what DB their RHN tools use ? yep - you guessed it - Oracle. Oh, wait... That's not what you guessed ?
The do claim that Oracle is one of the main reasons that their RHN products are so expensive, and this is something I can believe!
but every byte of software that Red Hat produces is under the GPL
Not true at all. Much of their most useful software is under a closed source licence.
Their RHN Satellite product (which is the only reason my enterprise installation chose RH over Novell) used to be under a closed licence, but at least I had the code and I could send bug fixes back. Their newest release, 4.0 is java based, so I don't even get the source any more. Now I have to patch my installation up with CGIs that are called instead of the java stuff. It's a real PITA.
RH are moving further and further away from being a community based company - this becomes very apparent when you actually enter into support agreements with them. But having said that, so what ? They are a business and this is their choice. So they see Fedora as a dev lab and won't support it for more than 2 revs.. so what ? So they charge for Satellite and RHN Proxy and won't give me the code... So what ? As a publically trade company their only obligation is to make money for their shareholders. I can respect that, but I just won't be giving them any more free labour - I'll go and donate that where it is more likely to be reciprocated.
It's not out in the UK yet... I saw it in the states last week when I was over there, but most UK denizens have not had the privilege yet. Leave it be for a while ;)
I would wait for their side of the story if I had any faith in them whatsover. Unfortunately, their frame of mind became very clear around this time when they brutally murdered an innocent man on a tube train. In light of this, I think I'll just believe this story as it stands.
The DNA thing is normal. Under some twisted bullshit law, the police can now take DNA samples from every person they ever arrest, and they are not required to delete these from their records if this person is found innocent or charges are dropped.
It's just a really cool way for them to build a national DNA database without anyone noticing.
This man was arrested for causing a public disturbance among other things. So all the cops need now to get a DNA sample from you is for you to be making some noise. And they never have to erase it.
Cool huh ?
They weren't acting like thugs? What is this then if not a government sanctioned mugging ?
This guy is an ex-writer for exe magazine, and he works for a respectable technology company now. Sure, there was a firearms hoax there, but my wife's company have had 3 bomb hoaxes in the last year. Does that mean she's a terrorist ?
/. geek.
Also, note what the police have said caused them to pursue the case... The fact that he had a shortwave received and an RS-232 breakout box.
This guy could have been almost any
We don't really need the London police's side of this story because we know their frame of mind around the time this action was taken. Around this time, they held an innocent man down on a tube train and put at least 5 bullets in his head and chest at point blank range. At the time they made all sorts of outrageous claims, many of which have found to be stretching the truth, and some of which have turned out to be outright lies.
I don't trust my police force any more, so I'm more inclined to believe the 'victim' of this tale.
I've been a Linux geek for about 10 years now, and recently got my first enterprise gig. Part of this meant working with both Linux and Solaris to deploy our new SAN (HDS if it matters). One of the first things that blew my mind was how much better Solaris is when it comes to storage. Just make sure you've got all the possible LUNs you'll be allocated by the SAN both now and in the future in your config file, and that's it.
:(
When new storage is allocated to the Sun, just run devfsadm and you'll be able to see it. With Linux, reboot. WTF ? I've still not found a way around this.
Because we've gone for an Enterprise solution with Red Hat, I raised a support call. Their final response was that they do not support adding new LUNs to a machine without a reboot, and that was that.
Earlier on I'd had a run-in with RH support because they wouldn't support hotswapping disks in an HP DL380. These machines are built to do this, but I was having issues detecting the replaced disk and rebuilding my software RAID array. Again Red Hat said that they did not support hot-adding disks to the machine and that I should reboot. I finally found a solution to this one on my own, making the grand I'd paid for RH support on that machine a bit of a joke
So yeah, Sun kicks ass on this front, and anything that RH can do to catchup would be useful!
Actually, I think that the braces issue is a perfectly valid reason for disliking python.
Suddenly tools that I use in EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE that I develop in become useless. Moving to the first brace in vim and pressing shift-5 takes me to the last one. So I can easily find the beginning and end of nested blocks, subroutines, methods, whatever. This works when I'm writing C, Objective-C, Java or Perl, and a consistent editing environment is one of the things that makes it easy for me to flip between these as the job requires.
Moving to the indent system would probably be fine if I used it all the time, or even if I used it most of the time, but I don't. So it's a pain to deal with everytime I pick Python up.
My wife recently had an accident that resulted in the amputation of her right thumb. And she's right handed.
One of her biggest complaints thus far is her inability to play games on the console anymore. She loves the gamecube, and this is a real blow for her.
This controller looks great. I can't see it because the site is blocked where I work, but she says she's real excited.
Anyone that does anything to give my wife back some of the joy and happiness that she's lost is all right in my book!
My dad travels there for work quite frequently, and he calls it a fine city. Do this, get a fine. Do that, get a fine. :)
The timing on this is interesting. We currently have the regular Arms Fair running at the Excel exhibition centre in London.
This is a time when companies from all around the UK gather in London to sell weapons to countries who can't afford them so that they can keep on killing each other. It's a time when a small % of the UK population get to pay for a massive police operation that doesn't actually create any new jobs in London.
Every time this event is held, my neighborhood turns into a yellow zone. All I can see is police in their shiny yellow jackets all over the place. Cars are randomly stopped, roads are narrowed from two lanes two one so that police can inspect vehicles as they pass, and it's generally a real pain in the ass to live here for the next week.
And with this, we get the protestors. Most of these people are involved in legitimate protest against something they feel very strongly about, and they protest peacefully. Every year we have some nutjobs who take it a little too far and chain themselves to the DLR, but it's never really anything serious.
And yet the UK Terrorism act has been used to remove protestors from the event on a number of occasions now. Police abuse at the event is a common complaint, and open protest is actively discouraged with permission for certain marches / gatherings denied.
No matter what M says, we've already given up so many of our civil liberties in this country that we may as well just hand the others over and have done.
Have a read of The Corporation. It outlines two cases, one in the US (Ford) and one in the UK (can't remember) where the company was sued for not maximising shareholder revenue.
In the case of Ford, I believe Mr Ford wanted to reduce the price of the vehicles so that more people could buy them. His shareholders sued him and won because this would have reduced their revenue. The court found that it is the duty of a company to maximise shareholder earnings.
The case in the UK was very similar, and both of these are now quoted as precedent.
So to answer your question, yes, companies have been successfully sued for NOT maximising shareholder revenue.
Yearly train trip ? I spend 2 hours on trains EVERY SINGLE WORKING DAY OF THE YEAR! And I'm not alone in this.
The UK is heavily reliant on a mass transport system that is prone to failure. I've had train trips that were scheduled to last 2 hours take 8. That's not that unusual.
Sure, I use my train rides to study and to read, but I also use them to play. I've logged over 40 PSP hours on UK rail so far.