Have to agree somewhat with this. There are a LOT of losers in the IT industry who don't belong here. They were lured to IT has a high-paying job from other, low-end technician positions.
I'm hopeful that another 6-12 months of economic downturn will clear most of the cruft out. However, as I'm seeing in my own place of employment, the same management that put those people into their jobs is also the same management that is willing to retain some losers due to the usual PHB way of looking at the world.
I'd personally like to see a slow expansion of the economy so that new people could be brought into the industry at a pace where there could be some sane considerations in hiring.
I do think that development has been nailed much, much harder than admin. In the admin world you have to kind of keep people to keep systems running. In the development world you can cancel all but maintenance development and kill a lot of jobs, including bright people who "belong" there.
Blade servers and whole-computer-on-a-card solutions are different than what I'm talking about.
Blades are just space consoldators from what I've seen; there's no common bus for moving data or memory.
Fitting a whole computer on a card and injecting the display onto the host doesn't really count either. There's usually no way to move data between the environments, and since they run incompatible processors there's no way to offload processing from the host to the card and vice versa. They're often no more than x86 emulation accelerators.
The system I'm thinking of actually has the blades working together, sharing a commmon bus, potentially sharing memory as well via NUMA type architecture.
We've bought a couple of batches of HP desktops here and they've been no worse or better than any other desktops (Compaqs, Dells).
We've bought nothing but HP x86 servers here and have yet to disappointed by quality or workmanship standards. Even the documentation feels like it has links to the olden days when you actually got *good* documentation.
The few Dell servers I've seen seem pretty cheap. They have been low-end boxes, but there's a flimsyness about them that makes them feel like desktop boxes with server nameplates.
I'm waiting for return to bus-based computing
on
3DLabs Launching New GPU
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...where all you have are CPU cards with whatever specialized adapter is necessary to provide the apporpriate electrical connectivity to peripherals.
Each card is a basically a CPU board with its own memory. The common bus between cards is really a switch to limit card-card contention. One card is the bus master running the kernel. Processes can be shuttled between CPU boards as processing power is available.
The thing is we're getting to the point where just about every PCI device has a CPU on it (NICs with encryption/acceleration engines, RAID cards). Why not just put high-speed general purpose CPUs on the cards and use it as a highly integratable/segmentable cluster?
The actual kernel could do more scheduling and less work, since the "NIC" CPU card could theoretically run large parts of the IP stack in addition to the NIC driver, as an example.
I hate to speak for someone else, but from my perspective, the laserdisk is closed because it wasn't recordable. You paid through the nose for a movie that you couldn't do anything with.
Neither is DVD! That there are just *now* appearing consumer-available optical recording technology capable of holding a whole movie indicates that the LD player was far ahead of its time. There was no consumer-level writable optical format in the late 70s when LD was initially released or even in the early 90s at the pinnacle of its admittedly limited success. Even commercial optical recording of LDs was expensive and complicated with the technology available at the time.
Contrast that to the DVD, which is easy to rip off the disc, manipulate, record to VCD/SVCD. Heck, for maybe 1500 bucks, I can record digital video, edit on my PC and master it onto DVD+RW that will play on any DVD player. That's a flexible format. Much more so than laserdisc.
For $1500 today -- what would that same capability of cost half a decade ago when DVD was initially released? $500,000? $1M? Doesn't sound so open or flexible to me. You're judging the ability to manipulate LD discs and their content by the consumer technology standards of 2002, not 1992 or even 1982. Furthermore the DVD standard deliberately prohibits consumer-level ripping or recording of DVD content. That you "can do it" doesn't make the DVD standard any more open than the ability to steal from a store makes them socialistic.
LD was first released in the late 70's. In twenty years, you knew "a couple people" that had them.
They were ahead of their time and expensive. In 1993 when I first met people my age who had LD players I was 25 years old. I didn't know a lot of people who were willing to spend $500 on anything at that time. Half the people I knew didn't have VCRs or cars, either. That two people I knew who both worked slacker jerk jobs owned them says a lot about their market penetration at that time. I can't argue they were as pervasive as VCRs -- they didn't have that kind of market momentum.
Anyway, the point (My point anyway... I'm not sure about the original poster) is that with LD, the movie company dictated to me what I would see. I saw nothing more, nothing less, and could use it only in the manner they allowed. I couldn't modify the data, or play with it, or record my own.
90% of that applies to any read or recieve-only medium. There was actually much less deliberate attempt to control the content of LDs (no encryption, region coding, etc) than there is of DVDs -- region coding, CSS, DMCA, ad nauseum. Saying "but we cracked it they don't apply" is a false defense of the idea that DVD is an open standard -- the same cracks could and would have been applied to LD if LD had been as closed a standard as DVD and anybody had a HDD capable of holding the LD bitstream in 1993.
LD was ahead of its time as a viewing format -- optical discs, excellent picture and sound quality and no content restrictions. Saying it failed because it was a closed format is not right -- LD died because its technology was superseded. It failed to gain mass popularity due to the catch-22 situation of lack of titles combined with high cost. As the prices on players and title avaibility increased it got eclipsed by the obvious successor, the DVD. It was not a failure because you couldn't record.
Analog laser disks (those 12" disks) for video storage. Good technology, better quality than VHS tape. A niche product; consumers prefer VCRs.
How is the laserdisk an example of a closed system in the same way that Divx was? It seems much more analogous to DVD than Divx. Sure, you can make your own DVDs, but even today its still relatively expensive and relatively complicated, and all but a very small number of TV-studio-priced decks are capable of recording and playing.
LD I think got crushed not so much by VCRs -- they weren't a competitor -- but by the advent of DVD. At some of the video stores I went to in the early-mid 90s there were actually a good selection of LDs available for rent, and I knew a couple of people who owned LD players. If DVD hadn't been invented I don't see why LD wouldn't have gained at least a significant minority status.
There was a service in Minneapolis in the very early 80s called, I think, "Spectrum TV" that was a LOS DBS service that transmitted from downtown on the top of the tallest building.
I think you could get a very small, maybe even only 1, movie/sports channel(s), and it might have been HBO, too. It was before CATV was done in Minneapolis, so if you wanted movies you did this, put in a big dish or moved.
It wasn't encrypted and there was controversy about people pirating the signal, either by putting dishes on the roof and just not paying and/or hiding the dishes in attics -- most of the houses in Minneapolis are built facing east and have steep peaked roofs with attic windows facing north and south, and for lots of people that was facing the transmit point perfectly.
Of course it died as more people moved to the suburbs and when Minneapolis got its "advanced" two-cable CATV system. Every once in a while you can still see someone who still has a dish and hasn't taken it down -- mounted on a mast, connected to the chimney to clear obstructions.
Once the ad-market has an upturn, AOL/TW is going to be quite fearsome. They have the ability to do a huge branding effort.
For clients that will pay. The big trend in advertising has been better media spending by improved demographic targeting. Charging me more to blast my message across the wrong demos simply because you own a huge chunk of the media outlets won't make it smart. The web is still dominated by 18-35 males, just because you own AOL and TW doesn't warrant extra revenue spending on overly broad demos.
...was an original Apple Macintosh 13" color display. Cracked the case, stopped working but didn't break the tube.
I've dropped tons of switches and routers since then, but that's expected racking over your head with one hand on the screw gun and other other holding a 36xx chassis.
Haha. Until HR tells them that the one-day stealth posting for a job brought in 250 resumes the next day and they realize that a draconian, paranoid workforce is no problem when there's no jobs for people to take elsewhere.
Losing employees is only a problem if your annual churn rate goes to high. Many senior managers consider not losing someone a sign that their subordinate managers aren't managing effectively. Six Sigma, anyone?
If you're hiring a manager of techies and they can't do the job of the people they're managing, they aren't qualified.
I believe this, but I also know the entire management paradigm is built around the idea that you don't have to be an expert in XYZ to manage people who do XYZ. You have to be an expert in managing.
I'm trying resolve the two ideas, but I can't -- just being a generic management dweed somehow seems inadequate in a technical environment, yet somehow ultimately someone has to make strategic decisions involving specialists without knowing a zillion specialities.
Or is this just one of the fundamental conflicts of management?
That's because the `technical merits' have no power to make the license a moot point (unless I suppose the software is so horrible that no one cares).
That's what I was getting at. If the software isn't compelling, who cares? And I guess it would make sense to see if the software was compelling on its own merits before the tedious licensing politics got dragged out again.
I'm always amused, well, maybe BEmused at the fact that some people seem to care more about the quality of the license than they do what the software does. Especially with something like Plan9 -- as far as I can tell, its a research/experimental operating system, not a global conspiracy to take over the world market for operating systems.
It kind of reminds me of political people of both the right and the left -- they evaluate solutions to problems first on the ability to adhere to the preferred political paradigm rather than the technical merits.
And its not that those questions aren't sometimes appropriate, I'm just surprised how often it turns up BEFORE someone asks if the technical merits might make what the license is a moot point.
1. Precise and unambiguous are not incompatible with clear and understandable.
Comparing the specialized instructions necessary to make a complicated machine produce specific results with the language necessary for humans to communicate is a false analogy.
It would take a team of Ph.ds millions of lines of code and decades of discussion to produce a machine that could replicate a two sentence exchange between three-year olds.
2. I'm reasonable and educated, yet I have a difficult time understanding my mortgage contracts. Does that mean I don't have to follow them?
That is the point I'm trying to make -- I understand the basic idea, I pay my mortgage every month or they take my house away from me. Why does it "require" them to have sixty pages over multiple contracts to express that simple idea?
I envision a time where legalisms will be so complicated and pervasive that we will spend half our time working to pay lawyers(1).
I also envision a time where people become so sick of the gross abuse of the legal system that a new standard applies: any law or contract not held to be understandable by the generally educated person will not be enforceable.
Yes, this will have some serious consequences -- many highly abstract and detailed social and economic structures which rely on highly detailed and abstract legalese will no longer work. The good news is that these will be replaced by simpler, less complicated social and economic structures. As as society we will be more efficient because we won't need to keep searching for ever-more-complicated structures to achieve efficiencies to account for the drag of the legal dead weight we carry.
(1) The reason we will only work half the time for lawyers is that the other half of our time will be spent working for health care. The purpose of the lawyers being to get the health care we've worked for to actually mean something.
It shows APNIC assignments. You have to grep through the list to get just the CN assignments. It's a big, ugly, long list of 366 netblocks. 53/16s and 300+/24s.
I'm gonna add it to the filter(s) at home and see what it does before I fubar the office with it.
I'm just curious why the clues weren't included with the PDF file.
Re:Its a good time to ....
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2
Now that most of the competition has died down, no one expects them to post record profits etc it gives people the chance to think about where to go next.
We do that here, except now that its so slow we have the time to think about planning for tomorrow instead of this afternoon there's no goddman money available to make it happen.
It's starting to feel like the Staples shared-pen commercial.
My guess about management's tolerance would be that it was seen as an expense budget and not a capital budget, although who knows what the accounting rules are in AT&T or the UK.
If you just said $150k expense budget for toys and nobody asks for shit like $5k desks, new chairs, carpeting/paint maybe it would work out.
Win2k makes steps toward making encryption better, but you need to do like they are doing and build in an encryption system into the operating system so its available to any application (mail, web, filer/filesystem, office stuff, etc) that wants to use it -- and then make it the default behavior to encrypt stuff.
Even if you use encryption, I worry that the gubmint is going to threaten me with 20 years of ass-pounding in a federal penetentiary unless I give up my keys.
The US government is not supposed to be in the business of "labeling" or "dealing with" cults; or small, emerging religions, to use an unbiased term. I like to think that the government shouldn't be "labeling" or "dealing with" anybody.
Clealry the tenets of freedom dictate that we don't want the government labeling groups as cults and burning their members alive (*cough*Waco*cough*).
But also there are groups that use the shield of religion to mask some pretty dubious activities -- Jim Jones anyone? Isn't in the people's best interest that the FBI or whoever at least kind of kept an eye on some of the more fringe groups? I think its probably possible for the government to monitor these groups without necessarily infringing on anyone's right to worship as they see fit.
Few reasonable people seem to think that their freedom to pursue commerce is affected by the SEC, and most people want the SEC to monitor business on an ongoing basis. I don't see why religious groups should be all that different.
I don't know if the article subject's software is consumer, professional, complex, etc but 30 days sounds like just barely long enough for even many consumer evaluation scenarios, and not nearly long enough for significant business evaluation.
Unless software evaluation is part of both your job description and part of your performance review process, it is dead last on the list of things to do.
Which means in my typical week I might be able to fit in maybe 4 hours of evaluation time. In 30 calendar days that's maybe the equivilent of about 10 serious hours looking at something. It could be more or less depending on need and time, but it doesn't feel like very much, especially if the package is very complex and requires either a lot of learning, configuration, long run time or extensive usage to properly evaluate it. And this isn't even counting actually testing the thing in some formal manner.
90 days sounds much, much more realistic and I would hope that with proper contacts that an open-ended evaluation might be possible as well.
Think for example of an SNMP package -- configuration and info gathering could take a long time. Analysis of what it does is time-based -- you need to run the thing for a month to gather enough data to see if the package is telling you anything meaningful. This whole process could take 2 months, longer if the evaluation and usage takes multiple people.
Slashdot Mirror
Have to agree somewhat with this. There are a LOT of losers in the IT industry who don't belong here. They were lured to IT has a high-paying job from other, low-end technician positions.
I'm hopeful that another 6-12 months of economic downturn will clear most of the cruft out. However, as I'm seeing in my own place of employment, the same management that put those people into their jobs is also the same management that is willing to retain some losers due to the usual PHB way of looking at the world.
I'd personally like to see a slow expansion of the economy so that new people could be brought into the industry at a pace where there could be some sane considerations in hiring.
I do think that development has been nailed much, much harder than admin. In the admin world you have to kind of keep people to keep systems running. In the development world you can cancel all but maintenance development and kill a lot of jobs, including bright people who "belong" there.
Blade servers and whole-computer-on-a-card solutions are different than what I'm talking about.
Blades are just space consoldators from what I've seen; there's no common bus for moving data or memory.
Fitting a whole computer on a card and injecting the display onto the host doesn't really count either. There's usually no way to move data between the environments, and since they run incompatible processors there's no way to offload processing from the host to the card and vice versa. They're often no more than x86 emulation accelerators.
The system I'm thinking of actually has the blades working together, sharing a commmon bus, potentially sharing memory as well via NUMA type architecture.
We've bought a couple of batches of HP desktops here and they've been no worse or better than any other desktops (Compaqs, Dells).
We've bought nothing but HP x86 servers here and have yet to disappointed by quality or workmanship standards. Even the documentation feels like it has links to the olden days when you actually got *good* documentation.
The few Dell servers I've seen seem pretty cheap. They have been low-end boxes, but there's a flimsyness about them that makes them feel like desktop boxes with server nameplates.
...where all you have are CPU cards with whatever specialized adapter is necessary to provide the apporpriate electrical connectivity to peripherals.
Each card is a basically a CPU board with its own memory. The common bus between cards is really a switch to limit card-card contention. One card is the bus master running the kernel. Processes can be shuttled between CPU boards as processing power is available.
The thing is we're getting to the point where just about every PCI device has a CPU on it (NICs with encryption/acceleration engines, RAID cards). Why not just put high-speed general purpose CPUs on the cards and use it as a highly integratable/segmentable cluster?
The actual kernel could do more scheduling and less work, since the "NIC" CPU card could theoretically run large parts of the IP stack in addition to the NIC driver, as an example.
I hate to speak for someone else, but from my perspective, the laserdisk is closed because it wasn't recordable. You paid through the nose for a movie that you couldn't do anything with.
Neither is DVD! That there are just *now* appearing consumer-available optical recording technology capable of holding a whole movie indicates that the LD player was far ahead of its time. There was no consumer-level writable optical format in the late 70s when LD was initially released or even in the early 90s at the pinnacle of its admittedly limited success. Even commercial optical recording of LDs was expensive and complicated with the technology available at the time.
Contrast that to the DVD, which is easy to rip off the disc, manipulate, record to VCD/SVCD. Heck, for maybe 1500 bucks, I can record digital video, edit on my PC and master it onto DVD+RW that will play on any DVD player. That's a flexible format. Much more so than laserdisc.
For $1500 today -- what would that same capability of cost half a decade ago when DVD was initially released? $500,000? $1M? Doesn't sound so open or flexible to me. You're judging the ability to manipulate LD discs and their content by the consumer technology standards of 2002, not 1992 or even 1982. Furthermore the DVD standard deliberately prohibits consumer-level ripping or recording of DVD content. That you "can do it" doesn't make the DVD standard any more open than the ability to steal from a store makes them socialistic.
LD was first released in the late 70's. In twenty years, you knew "a couple people" that had them.
They were ahead of their time and expensive. In 1993 when I first met people my age who had LD players I was 25 years old. I didn't know a lot of people who were willing to spend $500 on anything at that time. Half the people I knew didn't have VCRs or cars, either. That two people I knew who both worked slacker jerk jobs owned them says a lot about their market penetration at that time. I can't argue they were as pervasive as VCRs -- they didn't have that kind of market momentum.
Anyway, the point (My point anyway... I'm not sure about the original poster) is that with LD, the movie company dictated to me what I would see. I saw nothing more, nothing less, and could use it only in the manner they allowed. I couldn't modify the data, or play with it, or record my own.
90% of that applies to any read or recieve-only medium. There was actually much less deliberate attempt to control the content of LDs (no encryption, region coding, etc) than there is of DVDs -- region coding, CSS, DMCA, ad nauseum. Saying "but we cracked it they don't apply" is a false defense of the idea that DVD is an open standard -- the same cracks could and would have been applied to LD if LD had been as closed a standard as DVD and anybody had a HDD capable of holding the LD bitstream in 1993.
LD was ahead of its time as a viewing format -- optical discs, excellent picture and sound quality and no content restrictions. Saying it failed because it was a closed format is not right -- LD died because its technology was superseded. It failed to gain mass popularity due to the catch-22 situation of lack of titles combined with high cost. As the prices on players and title avaibility increased it got eclipsed by the obvious successor, the DVD. It was not a failure because you couldn't record.
Analog laser disks (those 12" disks) for video storage. Good technology, better quality than VHS tape. A niche product; consumers prefer VCRs.
How is the laserdisk an example of a closed system in the same way that Divx was? It seems much more analogous to DVD than Divx. Sure, you can make your own DVDs, but even today its still relatively expensive and relatively complicated, and all but a very small number of TV-studio-priced decks are capable of recording and playing.
LD I think got crushed not so much by VCRs -- they weren't a competitor -- but by the advent of DVD. At some of the video stores I went to in the early-mid 90s there were actually a good selection of LDs available for rent, and I knew a couple of people who owned LD players. If DVD hadn't been invented I don't see why LD wouldn't have gained at least a significant minority status.
There was a service in Minneapolis in the very early 80s called, I think, "Spectrum TV" that was a LOS DBS service that transmitted from downtown on the top of the tallest building.
I think you could get a very small, maybe even only 1, movie/sports channel(s), and it might have been HBO, too. It was before CATV was done in Minneapolis, so if you wanted movies you did this, put in a big dish or moved.
It wasn't encrypted and there was controversy about people pirating the signal, either by putting dishes on the roof and just not paying and/or hiding the dishes in attics -- most of the houses in Minneapolis are built facing east and have steep peaked roofs with attic windows facing north and south, and for lots of people that was facing the transmit point perfectly.
Of course it died as more people moved to the suburbs and when Minneapolis got its "advanced" two-cable CATV system. Every once in a while you can still see someone who still has a dish and hasn't taken it down -- mounted on a mast, connected to the chimney to clear obstructions.
Once the ad-market has an upturn, AOL/TW is going to be quite fearsome. They have the ability to do a huge branding effort.
For clients that will pay. The big trend in advertising has been better media spending by improved demographic targeting. Charging me more to blast my message across the wrong demos simply because you own a huge chunk of the media outlets won't make it smart. The web is still dominated by 18-35 males, just because you own AOL and TW doesn't warrant extra revenue spending on overly broad demos.
...was an original Apple Macintosh 13" color display. Cracked the case, stopped working but didn't break the tube.
I've dropped tons of switches and routers since then, but that's expected racking over your head with one hand on the screw gun and other other holding a 36xx chassis.
Haha. Until HR tells them that the one-day stealth posting for a job brought in 250 resumes the next day and they realize that a draconian, paranoid workforce is no problem when there's no jobs for people to take elsewhere.
Losing employees is only a problem if your annual churn rate goes to high. Many senior managers consider not losing someone a sign that their subordinate managers aren't managing effectively. Six Sigma, anyone?
If you're hiring a manager of techies and they can't do the job of the people they're managing, they aren't qualified.
I believe this, but I also know the entire management paradigm is built around the idea that you don't have to be an expert in XYZ to manage people who do XYZ. You have to be an expert in managing.
I'm trying resolve the two ideas, but I can't -- just being a generic management dweed somehow seems inadequate in a technical environment, yet somehow ultimately someone has to make strategic decisions involving specialists without knowing a zillion specialities.
Or is this just one of the fundamental conflicts of management?
That's because the `technical merits' have no power to make the license a moot point (unless I suppose the software is so horrible that no one cares).
That's what I was getting at. If the software isn't compelling, who cares? And I guess it would make sense to see if the software was compelling on its own merits before the tedious licensing politics got dragged out again.
I'm always amused, well, maybe BEmused at the fact that some people seem to care more about the quality of the license than they do what the software does. Especially with something like Plan9 -- as far as I can tell, its a research/experimental operating system, not a global conspiracy to take over the world market for operating systems.
It kind of reminds me of political people of both the right and the left -- they evaluate solutions to problems first on the ability to adhere to the preferred political paradigm rather than the technical merits.
And its not that those questions aren't sometimes appropriate, I'm just surprised how often it turns up BEFORE someone asks if the technical merits might make what the license is a moot point.
Nice try, but Hilary is a bush-biter.
Yes, I know you're creating a metaphor, but since she's a dyke it doesn't work.
1. Precise and unambiguous are not incompatible with clear and understandable.
Comparing the specialized instructions necessary to make a complicated machine produce specific results with the language necessary for humans to communicate is a false analogy.
It would take a team of Ph.ds millions of lines of code and decades of discussion to produce a machine that could replicate a two sentence exchange between three-year olds.
2. I'm reasonable and educated, yet I have a difficult time understanding my mortgage contracts. Does that mean I don't have to follow them?
That is the point I'm trying to make -- I understand the basic idea, I pay my mortgage every month or they take my house away from me. Why does it "require" them to have sixty pages over multiple contracts to express that simple idea?
People can understand that.
I envision a time where legalisms will be so complicated and pervasive that we will spend half our time working to pay lawyers(1).
I also envision a time where people become so sick of the gross abuse of the legal system that a new standard applies: any law or contract not held to be understandable by the generally educated person will not be enforceable.
Yes, this will have some serious consequences -- many highly abstract and detailed social and economic structures which rely on highly detailed and abstract legalese will no longer work. The good news is that these will be replaced by simpler, less complicated social and economic structures. As as society we will be more efficient because we won't need to keep searching for ever-more-complicated structures to achieve efficiencies to account for the drag of the legal dead weight we carry.
(1) The reason we will only work half the time for lawyers is that the other half of our time will be spent working for health care. The purpose of the lawyers being to get the health care we've worked for to actually mean something.
Try this:
0 1
/16s and 300+ /24s.
http://ftp.apnic.net/stats/apnic/apnic-2002-04-
It shows APNIC assignments. You have to grep through the list to get just the CN assignments. It's a big, ugly, long list of 366 netblocks. 53
I'm gonna add it to the filter(s) at home and see what it does before I fubar the office with it.
Where can you get a regional list like this?
All jobs are dead-end jobs because no matter what you to today, if you keep doing that way, it will be dead sooner than your retirement age.
Change or die.
I'm just curious why the clues weren't included with the PDF file.
Now that most of the competition has died down, no one expects them to post record profits etc it gives people the chance to think about where to go next.
We do that here, except now that its so slow we have the time to think about planning for tomorrow instead of this afternoon there's no goddman money available to make it happen.
It's starting to feel like the Staples shared-pen commercial.
Wow, $1500 per thing? And no annual cap?
My guess about management's tolerance would be that it was seen as an expense budget and not a capital budget, although who knows what the accounting rules are in AT&T or the UK.
If you just said $150k expense budget for toys and nobody asks for shit like $5k desks, new chairs, carpeting/paint maybe it would work out.
Win2k makes steps toward making encryption better, but you need to do like they are doing and build in an encryption system into the operating system so its available to any application (mail, web, filer/filesystem, office stuff, etc) that wants to use it -- and then make it the default behavior to encrypt stuff.
Even if you use encryption, I worry that the gubmint is going to threaten me with 20 years of ass-pounding in a federal penetentiary unless I give up my keys.
The US government is not supposed to be in the business of "labeling" or "dealing with" cults; or small, emerging religions, to use an unbiased term. I like to think that the government shouldn't be "labeling" or "dealing with" anybody.
Clealry the tenets of freedom dictate that we don't want the government labeling groups as cults and burning their members alive (*cough*Waco*cough*).
But also there are groups that use the shield of religion to mask some pretty dubious activities -- Jim Jones anyone? Isn't in the people's best interest that the FBI or whoever at least kind of kept an eye on some of the more fringe groups? I think its probably possible for the government to monitor these groups without necessarily infringing on anyone's right to worship as they see fit.
Few reasonable people seem to think that their freedom to pursue commerce is affected by the SEC, and most people want the SEC to monitor business on an ongoing basis. I don't see why religious groups should be all that different.
I don't know if the article subject's software is consumer, professional, complex, etc but 30 days sounds like just barely long enough for even many consumer evaluation scenarios, and not nearly long enough for significant business evaluation.
Unless software evaluation is part of both your job description and part of your performance review process, it is dead last on the list of things to do.
Which means in my typical week I might be able to fit in maybe 4 hours of evaluation time. In 30 calendar days that's maybe the equivilent of about 10 serious hours looking at something. It could be more or less depending on need and time, but it doesn't feel like very much, especially if the package is very complex and requires either a lot of learning, configuration, long run time or extensive usage to properly evaluate it. And this isn't even counting actually testing the thing in some formal manner.
90 days sounds much, much more realistic and I would hope that with proper contacts that an open-ended evaluation might be possible as well.
Think for example of an SNMP package -- configuration and info gathering could take a long time. Analysis of what it does is time-based -- you need to run the thing for a month to gather enough data to see if the package is telling you anything meaningful. This whole process could take 2 months, longer if the evaluation and usage takes multiple people.