I'm not gonna read it and you can't make me! And if I don't read it, I don't have to do anything about it!
Thank $DIETY that there's only seven more months of this sort of crap. The hell of it is that these bozos could screw things more royally than anyone could ever imagine in those seven months.
``More and more, I'm feeling like the sci-fi stories we've all been reading for years are becoming less far-fetched as time goes on. I'm not talking about the technology of such stories, but rather the trends of governments and societies towards insane laws that stifle freedom and progress, and which make life worse for all but a few of the citizens.''
$DIETY help us all if reality ever starts resembling "The Jigsaw Man". (The short story, not the film.)
... or those with a predominance of English speakers seem to be the ones with, or have plans for, the most draconian DMCA-like laws. Wonder why that is.
I do realize that, since I'm not multi-lingual (unless you count two years of high school French and I don't) that there could be other countries whose copyright laws are even worse and I haven't read about them but I figure if there were such countries we all would have heard about them here on/. .
``And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer''
Maybe he was talking about putting that much memory in an IMSAI.:-D
Nah... I don't think that would have even been physically possible -- what was the largest capacity RAM chip available back then? -- much less affordable and anyone who tried would have to have come up with some kind of bank switching to even make it work.
Thankfully, my first PC came from a vendor who must not have heard of Bill's proclamation and who included enough sockets on the m'board to hold a megabyte. (Oh, I had those babies full of chips in no time.)
BTW, for some IMSAI nostalgia, you can still buy the darned things. (Less than a grand for a basic model.) Let the hand assembly and the toggling in begin!
``The broadband market is becoming more competitive and net neutrality regulations could hamper investment in broadband networks...''
Oh really. In my town we have all of two options for "broadband": Comcast and At&T. Want a business class line from either of those? Prepare to pay through the nose. And I haven't checked out whether this is true with Comcast because, well, they're Comcast, but from AT&T a business class line is no indication that you'll be able to run servers on your broadband connection. You just get to pay more.
These two have a captive market so they have little to no incentive to make a better offereing. Heck, from what I understand the area that we moved away from nearly eight years ago still doesn't even offer ADSL. And when we moved it was two years past its supposedly scheduled installation in the local office. So that is ten years for that area. So just how would net neutrality keep AT&T from installing updated equipment in their local office?
There was a promising alternative to those two: a wireless provider that included a plan for small businesses for a pretty decent connection -- same bandwidth for upload and download -- for a price much lower than either of the two biggies. The catch? Well it turns out all that inbound bandwidth I'd get with a business class connection would be wasted since the local manager decided to prohibit businesses from running their own servers. I'll try again in a year and hope that their management has gotten smarter. Until then, we'll struggle along with our IDSL connection from Covad.
I never thought I'd wind up living in a country that's turning out to be such a technological backwater.
``Dropping out of IT might mean a drop in income, but it doesn't mean he can't find a different way to make money, which is what I assume he intends. There is absolutely no reason to think that he can't raise his children to be at least as healthy and happy on a smaller income.''
I've been thinking along the same lines as the theme of the posted article. And I can see taking a smaller income if it means more time to spend with the family. One of my daughters was complaining the other day that "We don't get to fun stuff with Dad because he's always working". Like the joke goes: "Nobody ever complained on their deathbed that they wished they'd spent more time at the office." Making a career change, though, might not be so easy given the current economic climate. I'll read more of this discussion tonight when I get home and the girls are tucked in.
Well, of course! Money always seems to be more important than democracy so it's not a big surprise where the companies like Diebold put their best engineering effort.
... 100% efficiency. If 1$/gal requires 100% efficiency, would 50% get us 2$/gal? That sounds damned good compared to what we pay for a gallon in the Chicago area. Start production NOW! Improve efficiency later!
No. I think those of us that don't embrace IM and being always-available means we're taking some control over our lives. (I'm in agreement with much of the article's points.)
I use IM at work when I want to see if someone's PC is IM-able; it means I might have a good chance to either walk over to their desk and have a very productive conversation or at least call them. If they're not at their desk at the moment, I at least know they're in the office and will get back to me. (And if I can remember the name of their PC, I won't even have to use IM for this; plain 'ol ping lets me know of they're booted up and likely in the office.)
For folks whose job involves the least little bit of concentration, IM is a huge distraction. Not wanting to be reachable via IM 24 freakin' hours a day doesn't make someone an introvert. Perhaps, more importantly being an IM fanboi doesn't necessarily mean you're extroverted either. It might, though, be a very good predictor of whether you're a boor who doesn't mind interrupting someone with a text message. (Probably the same type who doesn't mind walking into your cubicle/office and interrupting you with some inane questions that could have easily been handled in a less disruptive fashion.)
At work, I spend 95%-plus of my time working on a 'nix workstation through a KVM that also connects to a Windows-based system that I use primarily for email but for a few other things that aren't yet browser-enabled. If I do log into the IM on the Windows system, I set it up to let people know that I'm not working on Windows and they should call me. (Heck I even include my phone number to make it easy.) Then I turn the sound down -- as do most of my co-workers -- so that the damned IM popups don't distract me or anyone else. When I switch to Windows 2-3 times a day to check on email, I typically find several IM windows containing messages that read "U there?", "Hey! Gotta sec?", etc., from a variety of people who were to busy, I guess, to bother to even read the message that I wasn't available.
I have no problem at all with "always-on" media. I have a 'net connection at home that's always on. My PC is nearly always on and the email client polls our mail server and plays a humorous sound clip so I can make a mental note to check the email in a little while. It's just me that's not always on. Someone that isn't always available isn't necessarily introverted; maybe they're just trying to get stuff accomplished without pointless distractions.
... they seem to think that users are nothing more than fee-paying machines. So what's one more fee (or two): You wish to bank electronically with us, we insist that you use this browser that only runs on an operating system with more security problems than you count. And if you don't buy some additional software to attempt to secure the operating system, you cannot do business with us. Well, not securely, anyway.
So, let's add it up: Need costly operating system because we only support the browser that comes with that. OK, that'll be in the neighborhood of US$200 for the basic version (which is handcuffed and you won't be happy with, by the way). Need additional software to mostly plug the security holes in the expensive operating system. That'll run you something like US$99/year. So the first year will set you back around US$300. All so you can access your money that we're keeping for you and earning interest at a rate that doesn't even keep pace with inflation. What a deal! Makes writing a few checks and dropping them in the mail at the end of the month look pretty inviting.
``The minute soldiers are marching in the street acting like cops HERE, things will change (and dont say they do now, I live right next to NYC and even AFTER 9/11 it wasnt that bad).''
I won't say they -- meaning soldiers -- are marching in the street. I don't have to. It's more like the cops are marching down the street acting like soldiers. Watch the evening news almost every night and you'll see cops outfitted like the military. Every time someone scribbles something on the bathroom wall at a college campus nowadays, the cops in their SWAT-team costumes are out in force brandishing weaponry formerly only available to the military. Police departments all over the country are spending more and more money on high-tech and military-grade equipment. Companies like Blackwater are rumored to be setting up shop all over the country. The military won't have to march down the streets. There'll be plenty of civil and private paramilitary groups doing the marching for them.
``I miss finger....
I think I'll install fingerd on my WRT54G and stuff some random information into it, just for old time's sake.''
Anyone remember when you could get the latest information from Space News by fingering their site? I ran across a copy of an old crontab file sitting on a system that had an entry to finger for the latest launch news. If memory serves, it worked up until something like 4-5 years ago. I was a little bummed when it stopped working.
As for finger, I still use it at work (no, we're not running the daemon). Some folks at work have workstations that they leave turned on and stay logged into some of the servers for days and days. Finger is handy to find out whether they're are actually at their desk or not. For some reason, I still keep my ".plan" file reasonably up-to-date. I guess, in case someone runs across "finger" in the manpages.
...that their decline began at roughly the same time they began focusing on locking competitors out of Windows beginning with the elimination of Netscape's air supply. Sort of makes you wonder how things might have turned out if they'd decided to focus on designing better/faster/more-reliable software instead of redesigning their OS so that others could write decent software that ran on it.
When I do think about Microsoft nowadays, it's because I'm wondering how their latest announcement works to further the perpetuation of their monopoly; not because I'm curious about what nifty features might be in any new offering. (Heck, I stopped thinking that their products had nifty features years ago.)
My ISP provides a connection to the internet for me. They don't force me to use some damned AOL-like portal. I run my own servers (web/mail) so I don't have to connect to their mail service to gather my email. So... where are all these advertisements that are intended to subsidize the music industry supposed to be coming from? I can't see how I'd even be seeing them. Yet I'm possibly going to have to pay to avoid seeing them.
Yet another proposal for dipping into my wallet coming from an industry that still has no idea how the Internet is supposed to work. I'm having trouble figuring out who further from understanding this: the RIAA or Ted Stevens.
"Intel's James Reinders... programming for multi-core is catching the imagination of programmers more in Japan, China, Russia, and India than in Europe and the United States."
uttered by a rep from one of the companies that lobbies hard for more and more visas to bring in more foreign IT workers I have to wonder if this isn't just more BS in support of that effoert. It sure doesn't help when he follows it up with:
"We see a significantly HIGHER interest in jumping on a parallelism from programmers with under 15 years experience, verses programmers with more than 15 years."
So not only are you domestic programmers not showing sufficient interest in parallel programming, you're also too old (i.e., more costly) so plan on being replaced by younger, cheaper, foreign programmers.
I fully expect that the next round of Congressional hearings on increasing the cap on visas will include this line of reasoning.
But... New Jersey might file a countersuit against Sequoia claiming that they interfering with New Jersey's ability to verify that the machines are suitable for use in actual elections (before the elections are held and found to be invalid). Imagine GM suing a customer because they took their car to a non-GM mechanic to verify that some work had been done properly. I doubt the courts would look kindly on that.
If I were a New Jersey state elections employee, I'd be looking seriously at returning the equipment, informing Sequoia that it was unsuitable for use, and demanding my money back.
Finally, I'm guessing that Sequoia isn't all that interested in staying in the electronic voting machine business. This act will pretty much have everyone who's still considering even using electronic voting equipment making a mental note to cross Sequoia off their short list of vendors.
Damnit, I already pay way more than enough for a slow IDSL line in order to even have internet access at all thanks to the phone company's having installed fiber all over our town and I'm not about to pay another US$5/month to subsidize an unrelated industry for something that nobody in our household even uses or has any great desire to use. (And before anyone even suggests it: Comcast is never going to get into our household.) And this tax would be going into a pool to be split between artists, performers, publishers, and music labels. Anyone want to wager that the proportion of the split will be heavily shaded to the end of that list of recipients?
Since it was recently revealed that the RIAA isn't even paying musicians anything they're getting from their dubious lawsuits (and probably most of the actual royalties the musicians are due), I say let them find an honest way to make money besides taxing people for things they don't use. Ooh! I've got an idea! Why don't they produce CDs that people like? Or produce CDs of music that people still like but cannot buy any more because someone at the so-called "majors" decided it's not worth enough to do so.
And can we stop calling the Megamusic publishers, "the majors"? The "majors" is for guys who can hit.320, have an ERA under 2.0, steal 50 bases, and earn Golden Gloves. The jerks associated with the RIAA are strictly "the minors".
``The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts.
That's not too far from what used to be fairly common at a lot of companies, especially those that hired lots of engineers. It wasn't really an apprenticeship but it sort of felt that way in that newly hired engineers would float around between different departments learning different parts of the business for maybe a year before they settled in within a more permanent spot. That seemed to be changing, though, not long after I joined a large midwestern engineering firm. The newer guys were being hired directly into a group and expected to stay there for a long time. I preferred the older way of acclimating new hires. You got a better idea of the rest of the company and the various departments. Nowadays its more of a "hire a hit man" mentality when bringing in new people. It's no wonder they tend to not stick around very long. After they've been hired to fill an immediate niche need, they know the company won't really have any great desire to keep them around.
Find me a senior level Vax Admin in the midwest and you're going to be SOL
Heh... I recently sat in on a phone interview with a guy with that background. (A real self-starter and I was rating him high after the interview. Too bad we weren't especially looking for a VAX guy -- or even a VMS guy -- just someone with a ton of backup experience. And primarily in UNIX so my high ranking of this candidate wasn't enough.) I can think of a few folks in the Chicago-area with lots of VMS experience without even trying. (And ten years ago, I might have included my self in that category.) The problem is that they've either moved out of the VMS field and maybe even gotten out of IT altogether. Pity.
While it's nice that they've made it possible to do a GUI-less installation and there's some sort of scripting available, merely stripping the GUI off of Windows will not necessarily make a Windows box look and feel like a UNIX system. Unless Microsoft includes a fully-featured shell with an OS that can actually support multiple simultaneous users, I'll be taking a pass. Somehow, I suspect that any Windows without a GUI is going to feel much, much more like MS-DOS than UNIX. What's that old phrase? Oh yeah: Been there, done that.
That should have been easy to pull off even without analyzing any data.
We used to head to Pizza Hut nearly every day back (it seemed) in the mid-80s and I can recall going for a couple of months without having to pay for pizza. I stopped going to lunch with my coworkers until they found another place to eat. I'd gotten sick to death of Pizza Hut's stuff after that stretch. In fact, I don't think I've been back to one since then. (Hey, living around Chicago has certain advantages and being able to find dozens of pizza places that are better than the Hut is only one of 'em.)
Just what is IBM's goal here? Cornering the market on bad service?
Unless IBM is willing to get themselves laughed out of court should they ever attempt to enforce it, they ought to let this patent wither and die.
the operating system is too complex and burdened by things people don't need. Plus, Vista sometimes seems so slow. Ulanoff gives four suggestions for a complete Vista makeover, like starting with new code and creating a universal interface table
(This guy's my nominee for Person Making the Most Hilarious Statement of the Day Award.)
No siree! Nothing wrong with Vista that a complete rewrite won't fix.
Except that I have doubts that a complete rewrite would actually fix it. Ooh! Maybe SP2 or SP3 will contain all that new code? Then it wouldn't be a complete rewrite, merely a set of patches. Anything to buy time for Windows 7 development.
Burn those little RFID devices to a crisp, I say. Sure, I can't fit my car in the budget model (not that it would probably even run after getting a nice jolt) but I can see putting my clothes in one as soon as they come from the store. That tales care of the "everything I wear" part of the surveillance. Now how do we take care of the remainder?
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I'm not gonna read it and you can't make me! And if I don't read it, I don't have to do anything about it!
Thank $DIETY that there's only seven more months of this sort of crap. The hell of it is that these bozos could screw things more royally than anyone could ever imagine in those seven months.
$DIETY help us all if reality ever starts resembling "The Jigsaw Man". (The short story, not the film.)
... or those with a predominance of English speakers seem to be the ones with, or have plans for, the most draconian DMCA-like laws. Wonder why that is.
I do realize that, since I'm not multi-lingual (unless you count two years of high school French and I don't) that there could be other countries whose copyright laws are even worse and I haven't read about them but I figure if there were such countries we all would have heard about them here on /. .
Maybe he was talking about putting that much memory in an IMSAI. :-D
Nah... I don't think that would have even been physically possible -- what was the largest capacity RAM chip available back then? -- much less affordable and anyone who tried would have to have come up with some kind of bank switching to even make it work.
Thankfully, my first PC came from a vendor who must not have heard of Bill's proclamation and who included enough sockets on the m'board to hold a megabyte. (Oh, I had those babies full of chips in no time.)
BTW, for some IMSAI nostalgia, you can still buy the darned things. (Less than a grand for a basic model.) Let the hand assembly and the toggling in begin!
... and spill my coffee.
Oh really. In my town we have all of two options for "broadband": Comcast and At&T. Want a business class line from either of those? Prepare to pay through the nose. And I haven't checked out whether this is true with Comcast because, well, they're Comcast, but from AT&T a business class line is no indication that you'll be able to run servers on your broadband connection. You just get to pay more.
These two have a captive market so they have little to no incentive to make a better offereing. Heck, from what I understand the area that we moved away from nearly eight years ago still doesn't even offer ADSL. And when we moved it was two years past its supposedly scheduled installation in the local office. So that is ten years for that area. So just how would net neutrality keep AT&T from installing updated equipment in their local office?
There was a promising alternative to those two: a wireless provider that included a plan for small businesses for a pretty decent connection -- same bandwidth for upload and download -- for a price much lower than either of the two biggies. The catch? Well it turns out all that inbound bandwidth I'd get with a business class connection would be wasted since the local manager decided to prohibit businesses from running their own servers. I'll try again in a year and hope that their management has gotten smarter. Until then, we'll struggle along with our IDSL connection from Covad.
I never thought I'd wind up living in a country that's turning out to be such a technological backwater.
I've been thinking along the same lines as the theme of the posted article. And I can see taking a smaller income if it means more time to spend with the family. One of my daughters was complaining the other day that "We don't get to fun stuff with Dad because he's always working". Like the joke goes: "Nobody ever complained on their deathbed that they wished they'd spent more time at the office." Making a career change, though, might not be so easy given the current economic climate. I'll read more of this discussion tonight when I get home and the girls are tucked in.
Well, of course! Money always seems to be more important than democracy so it's not a big surprise where the companies like Diebold put their best engineering effort.
... 100% efficiency. If 1$/gal requires 100% efficiency, would 50% get us 2$/gal? That sounds damned good compared to what we pay for a gallon in the Chicago area. Start production NOW! Improve efficiency later!
No. I think those of us that don't embrace IM and being always-available means we're taking some control over our lives. (I'm in agreement with much of the article's points.)
I use IM at work when I want to see if someone's PC is IM-able; it means I might have a good chance to either walk over to their desk and have a very productive conversation or at least call them. If they're not at their desk at the moment, I at least know they're in the office and will get back to me. (And if I can remember the name of their PC, I won't even have to use IM for this; plain 'ol ping lets me know of they're booted up and likely in the office.)
For folks whose job involves the least little bit of concentration, IM is a huge distraction. Not wanting to be reachable via IM 24 freakin' hours a day doesn't make someone an introvert. Perhaps, more importantly being an IM fanboi doesn't necessarily mean you're extroverted either. It might, though, be a very good predictor of whether you're a boor who doesn't mind interrupting someone with a text message. (Probably the same type who doesn't mind walking into your cubicle/office and interrupting you with some inane questions that could have easily been handled in a less disruptive fashion.)
At work, I spend 95%-plus of my time working on a 'nix workstation through a KVM that also connects to a Windows-based system that I use primarily for email but for a few other things that aren't yet browser-enabled. If I do log into the IM on the Windows system, I set it up to let people know that I'm not working on Windows and they should call me. (Heck I even include my phone number to make it easy.) Then I turn the sound down -- as do most of my co-workers -- so that the damned IM popups don't distract me or anyone else. When I switch to Windows 2-3 times a day to check on email, I typically find several IM windows containing messages that read "U there?", "Hey! Gotta sec?", etc., from a variety of people who were to busy, I guess, to bother to even read the message that I wasn't available.
I have no problem at all with "always-on" media. I have a 'net connection at home that's always on. My PC is nearly always on and the email client polls our mail server and plays a humorous sound clip so I can make a mental note to check the email in a little while. It's just me that's not always on. Someone that isn't always available isn't necessarily introverted; maybe they're just trying to get stuff accomplished without pointless distractions.
... they seem to think that users are nothing more than fee-paying machines. So what's one more fee (or two): You wish to bank electronically with us, we insist that you use this browser that only runs on an operating system with more security problems than you count. And if you don't buy some additional software to attempt to secure the operating system, you cannot do business with us. Well, not securely, anyway.
So, let's add it up: Need costly operating system because we only support the browser that comes with that. OK, that'll be in the neighborhood of US$200 for the basic version (which is handcuffed and you won't be happy with, by the way). Need additional software to mostly plug the security holes in the expensive operating system. That'll run you something like US$99/year. So the first year will set you back around US$300. All so you can access your money that we're keeping for you and earning interest at a rate that doesn't even keep pace with inflation. What a deal! Makes writing a few checks and dropping them in the mail at the end of the month look pretty inviting.
I won't say they -- meaning soldiers -- are marching in the street. I don't have to. It's more like the cops are marching down the street acting like soldiers. Watch the evening news almost every night and you'll see cops outfitted like the military. Every time someone scribbles something on the bathroom wall at a college campus nowadays, the cops in their SWAT-team costumes are out in force brandishing weaponry formerly only available to the military. Police departments all over the country are spending more and more money on high-tech and military-grade equipment. Companies like Blackwater are rumored to be setting up shop all over the country. The military won't have to march down the streets. There'll be plenty of civil and private paramilitary groups doing the marching for them.
Anyone remember when you could get the latest information from Space News by fingering their site? I ran across a copy of an old crontab file sitting on a system that had an entry to finger for the latest launch news. If memory serves, it worked up until something like 4-5 years ago. I was a little bummed when it stopped working.
As for finger, I still use it at work (no, we're not running the daemon). Some folks at work have workstations that they leave turned on and stay logged into some of the servers for days and days. Finger is handy to find out whether they're are actually at their desk or not. For some reason, I still keep my ".plan" file reasonably up-to-date. I guess, in case someone runs across "finger" in the manpages.
...that their decline began at roughly the same time they began focusing on locking competitors out of Windows beginning with the elimination of Netscape's air supply. Sort of makes you wonder how things might have turned out if they'd decided to focus on designing better/faster/more-reliable software instead of redesigning their OS so that others could write decent software that ran on it.
When I do think about Microsoft nowadays, it's because I'm wondering how their latest announcement works to further the perpetuation of their monopoly; not because I'm curious about what nifty features might be in any new offering. (Heck, I stopped thinking that their products had nifty features years ago.)
``... to bring the whole thing to the front''
I take it that you haven't tried running the Gimp in its own virtual desktop? I do that regularly and it works like a charm.
My ISP provides a connection to the internet for me. They don't force me to use some damned AOL-like portal. I run my own servers (web/mail) so I don't have to connect to their mail service to gather my email. So... where are all these advertisements that are intended to subsidize the music industry supposed to be coming from? I can't see how I'd even be seeing them. Yet I'm possibly going to have to pay to avoid seeing them.
Yet another proposal for dipping into my wallet coming from an industry that still has no idea how the Internet is supposed to work. I'm having trouble figuring out who further from understanding this: the RIAA or Ted Stevens.
It's been about three now since the last Windows system at home was converted to Linux. And we sleep just fine, thank you.
But when I hear:
uttered by a rep from one of the companies that lobbies hard for more and more visas to bring in more foreign IT workers I have to wonder if this isn't just more BS in support of that effoert. It sure doesn't help when he follows it up with:
So not only are you domestic programmers not showing sufficient interest in parallel programming, you're also too old (i.e., more costly) so plan on being replaced by younger, cheaper, foreign programmers.
I fully expect that the next round of Congressional hearings on increasing the cap on visas will include this line of reasoning.
But... New Jersey might file a countersuit against Sequoia claiming that they interfering with New Jersey's ability to verify that the machines are suitable for use in actual elections (before the elections are held and found to be invalid). Imagine GM suing a customer because they took their car to a non-GM mechanic to verify that some work had been done properly. I doubt the courts would look kindly on that.
If I were a New Jersey state elections employee, I'd be looking seriously at returning the equipment, informing Sequoia that it was unsuitable for use, and demanding my money back.
Finally, I'm guessing that Sequoia isn't all that interested in staying in the electronic voting machine business. This act will pretty much have everyone who's still considering even using electronic voting equipment making a mental note to cross Sequoia off their short list of vendors.
Damnit, I already pay way more than enough for a slow IDSL line in order to even have internet access at all thanks to the phone company's having installed fiber all over our town and I'm not about to pay another US$5/month to subsidize an unrelated industry for something that nobody in our household even uses or has any great desire to use. (And before anyone even suggests it: Comcast is never going to get into our household.) And this tax would be going into a pool to be split between artists, performers, publishers, and music labels. Anyone want to wager that the proportion of the split will be heavily shaded to the end of that list of recipients?
Since it was recently revealed that the RIAA isn't even paying musicians anything they're getting from their dubious lawsuits (and probably most of the actual royalties the musicians are due), I say let them find an honest way to make money besides taxing people for things they don't use. Ooh! I've got an idea! Why don't they produce CDs that people like? Or produce CDs of music that people still like but cannot buy any more because someone at the so-called "majors" decided it's not worth enough to do so.
And can we stop calling the Megamusic publishers, "the majors"? The "majors" is for guys who can hit .320, have an ERA under 2.0, steal 50 bases, and earn Golden Gloves. The jerks associated with the RIAA are strictly "the minors".
That's not too far from what used to be fairly common at a lot of companies, especially those that hired lots of engineers. It wasn't really an apprenticeship but it sort of felt that way in that newly hired engineers would float around between different departments learning different parts of the business for maybe a year before they settled in within a more permanent spot. That seemed to be changing, though, not long after I joined a large midwestern engineering firm. The newer guys were being hired directly into a group and expected to stay there for a long time. I preferred the older way of acclimating new hires. You got a better idea of the rest of the company and the various departments. Nowadays its more of a "hire a hit man" mentality when bringing in new people. It's no wonder they tend to not stick around very long. After they've been hired to fill an immediate niche need, they know the company won't really have any great desire to keep them around.
Heh... I recently sat in on a phone interview with a guy with that background. (A real self-starter and I was rating him high after the interview. Too bad we weren't especially looking for a VAX guy -- or even a VMS guy -- just someone with a ton of backup experience. And primarily in UNIX so my high ranking of this candidate wasn't enough.) I can think of a few folks in the Chicago-area with lots of VMS experience without even trying. (And ten years ago, I might have included my self in that category.) The problem is that they've either moved out of the VMS field and maybe even gotten out of IT altogether. Pity.
Not hardly. Not to me anyway.
While it's nice that they've made it possible to do a GUI-less installation and there's some sort of scripting available, merely stripping the GUI off of Windows will not necessarily make a Windows box look and feel like a UNIX system. Unless Microsoft includes a fully-featured shell with an OS that can actually support multiple simultaneous users, I'll be taking a pass. Somehow, I suspect that any Windows without a GUI is going to feel much, much more like MS-DOS than UNIX. What's that old phrase? Oh yeah: Been there, done that.
That should have been easy to pull off even without analyzing any data.
We used to head to Pizza Hut nearly every day back (it seemed) in the mid-80s and I can recall going for a couple of months without having to pay for pizza. I stopped going to lunch with my coworkers until they found another place to eat. I'd gotten sick to death of Pizza Hut's stuff after that stretch. In fact, I don't think I've been back to one since then. (Hey, living around Chicago has certain advantages and being able to find dozens of pizza places that are better than the Hut is only one of 'em.)
Just what is IBM's goal here? Cornering the market on bad service?
Unless IBM is willing to get themselves laughed out of court should they ever attempt to enforce it, they ought to let this patent wither and die.
So which is it:
or
(This guy's my nominee for Person Making the Most Hilarious Statement of the Day Award.)
No siree! Nothing wrong with Vista that a complete rewrite won't fix.
Except that I have doubts that a complete rewrite would actually fix it. Ooh! Maybe SP2 or SP3 will contain all that new code? Then it wouldn't be a complete rewrite, merely a set of patches. Anything to buy time for Windows 7 development.
Burn those little RFID devices to a crisp, I say. Sure, I can't fit my car in the budget model (not that it would probably even run after getting a nice jolt) but I can see putting my clothes in one as soon as they come from the store. That tales care of the "everything I wear" part of the surveillance. Now how do we take care of the remainder?