Isn't something from the OS itself, but the "1337" attitude from the users. "Use a different distro!", "RTFM!", "l4m3r!"
I had a similar experience; after being told one time too many to RTFM when there was no FM to R (or an outdated man page, or documentation written in a foreign language and two full versions behind), I started using FreeBSD. BSD users have every bit as big a reputation for being elitist snobs, but I haven't encountered it. The documentation tends to be much better, so that's probably a big part of it.
A school that has no football team. A school whose current computer science building was built thanks to the contribution of a single, wealthy alumnus. A school that recently received a few hundred PCs from a graduate who now owns a computer company. I could go on, but won't.
On my planet the only thing that affects alumni contributions is how well the ball team did this year.
UC Berkeley (to use an example from the article) doesn't exactly have a powerful football presence. Nor does MIT, or many of the other Comp Sci powerhouses in the U.S. Yet somehow, their alumni give them money without purchasing season tickets or skyboxes.
If colleges are doing this as a method of enhancing revenue, I have to wonder if they're prepared for the loss of potential alumni contributions that actions like this could cause. There is also the possibility that schools could be found (by a court, for instance, or tax authorities) to be functioning as for-profit entities; that opens up a can of worms that no administrator wants to deal with.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
Hell, the only thing a sane male would use the 10 GB for is pr0n! And it wouldnt be much of a viewing experience on that screen. Who would waste such precious GB on music for goodness sake!
Those of us who prefer actual real-life women find that 10GB of Barry White MP3s are more helpful than pr0n is.;)
The gaming industry is growing at a record pace, despite lackluster PC sales and a hostile environment created by politicos and the media. Salon, by contrast, is experiencing serious financial problems, a decrease in readership, and a growing reputation for producing "whiny" editorials.
I think I know who is really consigned to the "ghetto" here. Take a look at this quote from the aritcle:
Billions of dollars will change millions of hands, as they always have, but in the end, it won't have any impact on the larger culture going on without them outside their digitized walls.
Salon doesn't even have the "billions of dollars." The rest of it is pot, kettle, black.
You can export anything from Outlook (especially the email and calendar) using its own tools. Click the "Import and Export" option on the "File" menu. It'll output to text, comma- or space-delimited tables, et al. From there, you can import them or whatever you need to do.
For the most part, if you ask any run of the mill Joe if he owns the software he bought, he's going to say "yes". The general computing public believes that they own the software they buy, just like other tangible items at the store. THey're not going to go for a fee that has to keep getting renewed. If Microsoft thinks that people are going to want to keep paying for the same software title over and over again, they're nuts.
Exactly. Does everyone remember Circuit City's Divx (not the codec, but the DVD competitor)? It failed miserably for this very reason. Many of the people who purchased Divx players were surprised to discover that they didn't actually own the discs that they had "bought." Circuit City claimed that they weren't able to secure adequate Hollywood support, but it was also quite clear that the consumers overwhelmingly rejected the business model.
This software scheme isn't any different. As anyone who has suffered through providing tech support knows, users will continue to use software forever, or at least long after its useful life cycle. I know people who are still using Office 95, and one guy who is still trying to install Office 4.3 (for Windows 3.1) on his Win2K Pro machine. MS is in for a world of hurt if they're serious about this scheme.
...the upcoming product activation feature of XP won't work. If MS can't get such large customer groups to pay for their licenses, do they really expect these enormous blocks of users to call in and activate their XP copies? They haven't got call centers large enough to deal with that kind of volume. "XP Pro, Corporate Edition" will come out, and everyone will take it home and make copies of it.
Because being a monopoly means never having to say you're sorry.
The phone company here refused to do a city-wide upgrade until their franchise came up for review, and the city made it a condition of renewal. Even then, they procrastinated and delayed until WIN showed up and scared the hell out of them.
It wasn't an improvement. In the last nine months, the work crews have cut two gas mains, five water lines, and more power lines than I care to count. Note that this is just on one street where my job is located. Around town, it's the same.
That's why monopolies suck. They have no incentive to plan ahead, and when change is forced upon them, they get indignant and ensure that they do a poor job.
With proper implementation, you may never have to be face-to-face with a user again. At my company, we had 1500+ users scattered around town (outgrew our offices), and simply didn't have the time for techs to drive around and fix stuff. So when the helpdesk sent us an issue, we would call the user, make them save their work, then (and this is the key) make them watch as we remotely fixed the problem. That way, they'll learn the proper way to do things, and won't have to call back the next time. Eventually, the helpdesk started using the app, and we had enough free time to work on important things, like upgrading network infrastructure and performing Y2K audits (did I mention this was a couple of years ago?).
As to the trust issue, many remote admin tools (Remotely Possible comes to mind) have a VCR-type function that allows you to record your terminal sessions. Initially, we only recorded sessions with "problem users," but the cost savings we realized allowed us to build a file server to store all of our sessions.
Finally, if users don't want the software on their system, well, tough. Remotely Possible (now called Control IT) allows you to push the software onto the client's box without the user's knowledge, and do so every time they log onto the network, in case the user somehow discovers and deletes it. This is useful with the aforementioned "problem users."
Give remote admin a try, but don't use it as an excuse to abandon phone support. The two, used together, make an excellent "teach a man to fish" tool, and will save your company a fortune in man-hours and support costs.
People don't realize that a union is a safety net, so that the worse case scenario doesn't happen.
People also don't realize that a union is a ceiling, preventing the best- (or even moderately good-) case scenarios from happening. I can barely keep track of the number of times that qualified people have been turned down for promotions in favor of the union's "strict seniority" policy. One of those senior union members showed up at the beginning of his shift, slept in the breakroom for eight hours, and left at the end of the day. Every day. Did I mention that this was a United Auto Workers shop?
AOL and a few other places have been doing this for years. I mention AOL because, unlike eBay, they are equally famous for not informing the users of the changes made.
A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible.
Ye-ah. After all, no one would consider compressing the content or anything. Look at all those.wav and.cda files on Napster...
I can't speak for the average consumer, of course, but I'm not going back to tape. I've spent a great deal of time and effort setting up my system to record programs on hard disks and to archive old tapes on CDs. I'm not going to lay down more cash for a medium as degradable as tape is.
So, there it is in the Constitution, freedom of religion. Want to get around it? Simply decide that someone's beliefs aren't actually a 'religion', then you can go after them with all guns blazing!!!
Actually, I believe that happened under Clinton/Gore, in Waco.
A few months ago here in Austin, these guys left notices on everyone's doorknobs indicating that WIN (the story says that they've changed the name a bit since then) would be out conducting surveys in the neighborhood in preparation for the project start next year. I thought it was yet another vaporware public works project by the city government; I had no idea it was going on elsewhere.
I'm heartened, to say the least--our cable provider can't handle TV and ISP functions on its existing infrastructure, and the phone company is so backed up on DSL installations that people aren't getting them the month they place the order. It's a long way off, but relief is apparently in sight.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this tradmark case a separate action from the trademark case? Or is there a treadmark case invloved somewhere?
What the heck does that mean?
Isn't something from the OS itself, but the "1337" attitude from the users. "Use a different distro!", "RTFM!", "l4m3r!"
I had a similar experience; after being told one time too many to RTFM when there was no FM to R (or an outdated man page, or documentation written in a foreign language and two full versions behind), I started using FreeBSD. BSD users have every bit as big a reputation for being elitist snobs, but I haven't encountered it. The documentation tends to be much better, so that's probably a big part of it.
I disagree. IBM is more like the oncoming train that Wile E. McBridey sees in the tunnel, thinking it's the light at the end.
Don't forget about their noise policy.
A school that has no football team. A school whose current computer science building was built thanks to the contribution of a single, wealthy alumnus. A school that recently received a few hundred PCs from a graduate who now owns a computer company. I could go on, but won't.
On my planet the only thing that affects alumni contributions is how well the ball team did this year.
UC Berkeley (to use an example from the article) doesn't exactly have a powerful football presence. Nor does MIT, or many of the other Comp Sci powerhouses in the U.S. Yet somehow, their alumni give them money without purchasing season tickets or skyboxes.
Finally, I'm curious as to how many talented students will be motivated to continue cranking out code for a lab that may take it from them and sell it with no compensation. Comp Sci departments are already struggling with high dropout rates as skilled students leave to make money in full-time positions. I don't see these kinds of actions as ways to encourage good students to stay in school and finish off their degrees.
Those of us who prefer actual real-life women find that 10GB of Barry White MP3s are more helpful than pr0n is.
Well I'm sure it couldn't pass the turning test
Neither can any other college security guard that I've seen.
The gaming industry is growing at a record pace, despite lackluster PC sales and a hostile environment created by politicos and the media. Salon, by contrast, is experiencing serious financial problems, a decrease in readership, and a growing reputation for producing "whiny" editorials.
I think I know who is really consigned to the "ghetto" here. Take a look at this quote from the aritcle:
Billions of dollars will change millions of hands, as they always have, but in the end, it won't have any impact on the larger culture going on without them outside their digitized walls.
Salon doesn't even have the "billions of dollars." The rest of it is pot, kettle, black.
You can export anything from Outlook (especially the email and calendar) using its own tools. Click the "Import and Export" option on the "File" menu. It'll output to text, comma- or space-delimited tables, et al. From there, you can import them or whatever you need to do.
For the most part, if you ask any run of the mill Joe if he owns the software he bought, he's going to say "yes". The general computing public believes that they own the software they buy, just like other tangible items at the store. THey're not going to go for a fee that has to keep getting renewed. If Microsoft thinks that people are going to want to keep paying for the same software title over and over again, they're nuts.
Exactly. Does everyone remember Circuit City's Divx (not the codec, but the DVD competitor)? It failed miserably for this very reason. Many of the people who purchased Divx players were surprised to discover that they didn't actually own the discs that they had "bought." Circuit City claimed that they weren't able to secure adequate Hollywood support, but it was also quite clear that the consumers overwhelmingly rejected the business model.
This software scheme isn't any different. As anyone who has suffered through providing tech support knows, users will continue to use software forever, or at least long after its useful life cycle. I know people who are still using Office 95, and one guy who is still trying to install Office 4.3 (for Windows 3.1) on his Win2K Pro machine. MS is in for a world of hurt if they're serious about this scheme.
I live (t)here. The radio "choices" here are what drove me to buy a hard drive-based MP3 player for my car.
...the upcoming product activation feature of XP won't work. If MS can't get such large customer groups to pay for their licenses, do they really expect these enormous blocks of users to call in and activate their XP copies? They haven't got call centers large enough to deal with that kind of volume. "XP Pro, Corporate Edition" will come out, and everyone will take it home and make copies of it.
The phone company here refused to do a city-wide upgrade until their franchise came up for review, and the city made it a condition of renewal. Even then, they procrastinated and delayed until WIN showed up and scared the hell out of them.
It wasn't an improvement. In the last nine months, the work crews have cut two gas mains, five water lines, and more power lines than I care to count. Note that this is just on one street where my job is located. Around town, it's the same.
That's why monopolies suck. They have no incentive to plan ahead, and when change is forced upon them, they get indignant and ensure that they do a poor job.
Just like Libya did in the 80s; look how well that turned out. I seem to recall the UK playing a role in breaking that up, too...
As to the trust issue, many remote admin tools (Remotely Possible comes to mind) have a VCR-type function that allows you to record your terminal sessions. Initially, we only recorded sessions with "problem users," but the cost savings we realized allowed us to build a file server to store all of our sessions.
Finally, if users don't want the software on their system, well, tough. Remotely Possible (now called Control IT) allows you to push the software onto the client's box without the user's knowledge, and do so every time they log onto the network, in case the user somehow discovers and deletes it. This is useful with the aforementioned "problem users."
Give remote admin a try, but don't use it as an excuse to abandon phone support. The two, used together, make an excellent "teach a man to fish" tool, and will save your company a fortune in man-hours and support costs.
That's exactly what my morning commute needs: cellphone-wielding drivers trying to play Space Invaders.
People don't realize that a union is a safety net, so that the worse case scenario doesn't happen.
People also don't realize that a union is a ceiling, preventing the best- (or even moderately good-) case scenarios from happening. I can barely keep track of the number of times that qualified people have been turned down for promotions in favor of the union's "strict seniority" policy. One of those senior union members showed up at the beginning of his shift, slept in the breakroom for eight hours, and left at the end of the day. Every day. Did I mention that this was a United Auto Workers shop?
AOL and a few other places have been doing this for years. I mention AOL because, unlike eBay, they are equally famous for not informing the users of the changes made.
Ye-ah. After all, no one would consider compressing the content or anything. Look at all those
I can't speak for the average consumer, of course, but I'm not going back to tape. I've spent a great deal of time and effort setting up my system to record programs on hard disks and to archive old tapes on CDs. I'm not going to lay down more cash for a medium as degradable as tape is.
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Actually, I believe that happened under Clinton/Gore, in Waco.
Yes, but the City of Austin has limited the service area to a very narrow "metropolitan" market.
I'm heartened, to say the least--our cable provider can't handle TV and ISP functions on its existing infrastructure, and the phone company is so backed up on DSL installations that people aren't getting them the month they place the order. It's a long way off, but relief is apparently in sight.