I guess my answer to that would be, I think you're asking two different questions.
Question one: Do we believe that Napster wasn't engaged in infringement. I don't believe so. I believe they were involved in much the same way that Netscape is involved in the transmission of kiddie porn and Microsoft is involved in the email transmission of viruses. Yes, they are the medium, but no, I don't think they can be held accountable for that.
Question two: Do we believe they did NOT intend their software to be used to copy commercial music. I personally thing it was, but that intent is a tricky thing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (a tenet of our US judicial system).
I think the boat has been missed. Trying to take a whack at the medium by which MP3s are transferred is doomed to failure. Better and better ways will be developed as the old ways are killed. It's not a cost effective solution.
The right way to do this (and, coincidentally, a more cost effective way) is to wack some big trafficers. Nail a few of the Napster/Gnutella users for some cash per pirated copy they are distributing. Doing that would scare the bulk of the bandwagon "pirates" off quickly. How many people do YOU know that download an occasional copy, because there's nothing stopping them? How many do you know that would stop post-haste if they thought they could be getting an expensive law suit followed by a more expensive fine?
This is the right way to play...Napster isn't their target, it's the first in a long, long line of internet file sharing softwares.
With linux, the drivers you need are either on the cd (95% of the time)
Umm, everytime I try to install linux I find at least one driver I have to track down. About half the time, the driver I'm trying to use isn't supported at all. Of those cases, about half the time, I can't even emulate it very easily. Even when I can find the drivers, installation isn't generally as simple as "double-click on the executable" or "plug the device in, boot up, point to drivers diskette".
Perhaps I've just been plagued with bad installs, but in my experience, drivers aren't anything I feel like discussing when it comes to linux.
Yes, species have always gone extinct, but never before has one speicies been the exterminator of so many others.
...says the man that apparently has been around since the beginning of time. How do you know? How do you know that 16 different varieties of dinosaur didn't single-handedly wipe out billions of species? You don't. Again, your sweeping generalizations are dramatically unprovable and do a great deal to discredit you.
Actually, they volunteered to serve their government. Many learned the hard way that the two can be quite different.
Actually, you should join if you wish to speak of it. We volunteered (at least everyone I served with) to serve our country, and that's precisely what we do.
1.Be adjacent to us. Canada and Mexico aren't scaring me much.
Wrong, proximity means nothing with ICBMs and a reasonable Air Force/Navy.
2.Have a huge air force and/or navy capable of transporting an invasion force. Even at the height of the Cold War, I don't think anyone was seriously expecting a massive amphibious assult on the shores of the USA. (Outside of a handful of movie scriptwriters playing on Cold War paranoia.)
You'd have had to be a complete numb-nuts to not be at least mildly worried, during the height of the cold war, that we could be invaded. Remember, technology wasn't what it is today then, and frankly, China STILL has more than enough Army for a walk-on, and the USSR had, depending on your estimate, nearly enough to more than enough of a military.
3.Have a metric shitload of nuclear weapons - which makes it unwise for us to go to war with you.
Or, just one nuke. One nice sized one. I'm thinking dead center of DC would make for a bad day. How about center-mass NYC? That would be messy. How about center-mass in our crop-growing heartland? How about a little west of center-mass of the country, and let the jet stream carry some fallout for us? You didn't think this through.
Incidentally, there's something you forgot. Economic threats are very real threats...and a very real source of war.
Amazing. In one post you've summed up all that is wrong with science. We seem to be of the mistaken opinion that, at any given time, we know all there is to know about our planet.
There have been a number of ice ages throughout history. A great number of said ice ages have occurred sans-humanity. Who was polluting for the other ones? Hrmm? Industrialist dinosaurs? Ecologically unsound paramecia? Aliens from Pluto? Or was mother nature doing her thing as she has been and will continue to do.
I'm not a fan of the pollution that we're currently forcing on our environment, but I'm less a fan of you ecology-nazis who wish to force completely unproven 'facts' on a relatively mindless media, who in turn passes this crap on to the masses...get the facts before you go whining about the damage we're doing...you're only serving to discredit yourself when you spout unproven 'facts' as reality.
Budget 1: I was setting up a home office for a member of senior management, to include company purchased furniture. Since price wasn't much of an option, you can find really nice looking stuff that looks right in a home and was designed ergonomically as a PC workstation in the executive part of your company's furniture catalog.
Budget 2: When I set mine up, I found that it was very inexpensive (comparitively) to find a local furniture maker and bring my ideas straight to him (with pictures of standard office stuff that I'd like to see on my home unit). I got for about $3,500 a highly useful desk set that looks very nice, fits in with our home decor, and is the most comfortable I've used.
That's what pisses me off about this Global Warming crap. The Earth has been going through hot and cold cycles since it's beginning, and I'd find it odd if this wasn't part of that cycle. How many ice ages have we had thusfar? Do we expect that just because we're here now, they're all done?
Umm..the South Park movie was great if you were 4...I don't know about how "great" it was. It was amusing in spots...that's about all of the good I can say for it. Lets hope that any Simpsons movie isn't the letdown that the South Park movie was.
With a production as large as a full-scale animated movie, I have to say this sounds more like wishful thinking than anything very real. So far it sounds like they have no ideas, no script, no backing, no firm plans, just Matt saying that they'll be doing one. I'd personally love to see it, but my guess is the show will be off the air before there's a chance to do the movie...I've been watching it less and less as it seems to be running out of steam.
Okay, after I read the article, this made more sense. I went into it thinking that the author was trying to say that extraterrestrial life would likely be machine, but in reality it appears that he's saying that we're likely to encounter robotic probes or the like before we meet an actual ET. This just makes sense...
On the other hand, I wouldn't imagine that any intelligent race would replace themselves with machines, so the thought that any ETs we might meet would be machines seems rather far fetched.
The only benchmarks we can trust are those that are totally independent. (The benchmarks being disputed here were sponsored by PostgreSQL.) I'm not accusing benchmarkers of being dishonest, but the only way we can be assured of impartiality is to run completely independent tests. We shouldn't care what the developers say -- we need to know what the users are saying.
That's one of the problems. I don't know that you can even trust independent benchmarks completely. Every place I've seen benchmarks I've seen at least a few questionable ones. I think it's important that anyone looking for hardware OR software realizes that they need to average as many benchmarks and reviews as possible to get a vague sense of the reality of the product.
Aside from that, the article sounded alot like "he said she said". Of course neither company will like the other's benchmark if it makes them look bad. End of story.
a)Why is Slashdot posting all this anime crap? Jeez, I'm a geek and I don't like it... it's all derivative.
Thank you for professing to speak for every "geek" around. I'm white, and I speak for all white people when I say you're an imbecile.
b)It's time for Cmdr Taco to grow up and out of watching this crap. Sure, I watched it in college, but then I became more mature when my friends told me that it wasn't cool to watch anime any more and switched to watching arthouse films. They're really deep, and everyone can learn something from the artful insights of their powerful symbolism.
In the same breath that you call for CT to grow up, you explain that "your friends" told you it wasn't cool to watch anime anymore, so you stopped. How grown up of you. I'm thinking that "cool" or "grown up" on YOUR scale is a place I don't want to be.
d)This doesn't belong here. This is news for nerds. I am a nerd and I don't see this as news.
Again, thank you for speaking for everyone. I don't remember making you our spokesperson, but perhaps I was out on the day of the vote. Personally, I found it an interesting read, and I find it hard to believe that you feel you're sufficiently important to decide what belongs here. Scary.
In short...I hope this was a joke designed to poke fun at the other whiners, otherwise it's just sad.
If I were Rob, I'd be reading this trash while humming the tune to "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" happily to myself. I think it's pretty obvious by now...if you don't want to read about a topic...DON'T READ THE FUCKING TOPIC. This is a simply concept, one would think.
I laugh everytime I read a comment from some half-assed imbecile that actually took the time to open up a topic they didn't want to read about, click the reply link, and explain how "inappropriate" the content is on slashdot.
Perhaps someone could enlighten me..what, pray tell, is appropriate content here? News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters....seems pretty broad...whatever that nerd Rob feels is news, and whatever matters to him...
Forgive us, oh enlightened one, for asking questions that are so beneath your intellect. To be honest, this piece in particular was interesting if for no other reason than as a mental exercise.
The elitism displayed following nearly EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED ask slashdot is pathetic, and does little to mask your own likely lack of competence. If these ask slashdot questions are being asked, it's safe to assume that there's a segment of the slashdot readership that is interested in the answer. If you don't like the question, by all means, don't read it. Is that difficult?
My guess is, I've been doing this "out here in the real world" for a great many more years than you, young'un. Just scrolling through your last three posts...all were devoid of real content and inflammatory. Good job.
As much as I feel for your company, the automatic remailer viruses that have recently plagued companies aren't the hard whack needed. They're as much the IT department's fault as anything else. They require that the IT department is slow to respond and have poorly trained staff.
When the Mailissa virus hit, I was forwarned by about an hour. I heard about it on the radio hitting Ford hard. When I got to work, it had already hit my company. I simply checked the email size (approximatly 730K if I remember correctly), choked the MTA to 729, lowered the TTL for larger-than-MTA-messages to 1, and started sending out emails to all staff explaining what to do if you get the message. Our company, already running way too many people on way too few servers, experienced a 1 hour inconvenience, and no shutdown. Additionally, NAV for Exchange and NAV for Firewalls cleared a good many of the problem inbound emails to start.
No, I don't expect a Fortune 500 company to sue and win for something that is as much their fault for hiring incompetent IT management as Microsofts for incompetent defaults.
I stand firmly by my statement. Wait until a firm case of MS negligence, and wait for that negligence to hit a F500 HARD, meaning severe loss of profit or severe loss of customers. Severe would likely have to be above 1/4. It has to reach a point at which the company is willing to employ as much of its resources as necessary to sue MS, and they'll win.
I would be very interested to see a documented case of Microsoft or Sun being sued and having to pay consequential damages for a bug in their software. Every license and contract I have seen from these folks SPECIFICALLY excludes responsibility for such.
First and foremost, the legal status of such "no responsibility" EULAs are very much up in the air. The companies win some, the companies lose some.
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
Finally, the perception of "someone to sue" is a powerful thing. Many companies would prefer a buggy M$ over a stable BSD simply because there's a firm target for their ire when something bad happens. I'm confident that a nice class action law suit on a wide-spread, truly negligent Windows bug would be a clear-cut winner with big monetary gains for those involved. Would the same hold true for RedHat?
I was going to stay out of this conversation, but I have to chime in here...goodbye karma *sniff*
Well, the truth is that for what we pay, and this is the pay that they base TCO's on, we get techs of comparable experience. Are you suggesting that our HR department be better? If so, this has to be figured into TCO.
One point here. You should take most of the hiring away from the HR department. They don't know IT. They don't know a great many things. The only involvement that the HR dept. has been left with in the hiring processes at the last two companies I've managed was simply offer letters and benefits coordination. They don't even interview the person as a rule. You get a better class of people at a better price that way.
Perhaps I should say that a "Unix Professional" is generally of a higher caliber than an "NT professional" of like station. I'm not sure that this is my point.
I would hope that's not your point, because it's an inherently flawed point. To say that would be as baseless as saying that black people are better than white, white are better than hispanic, or men better than women. The choice of OS is in no way a gauge of the caliber of professional. I see a great many very poor Linux/Unix/HPUX professionals. I see a great many very poor NT/2000 professionals. Each side has their wheat and their chaff. To say one is better than the other is rather biased and ignorant.
I got my MCSE about 3 years ago, and will not update for 2000. The certification has been made a mockery of by the company that is supposed to guarantee it's sanctity.
I must agree that the MCSE is a joke now, which is why it's not a criteria upon which I base my hiring. I treat it like any other certificate from a seminar, it's nice, but that's about all. I prefer people that are reasonably intelligent, seem personable, have proven manageable, and can answer a few reasonable questions. Relying on the MCSE will doom your hiring to failure, and cull out some potentially brilliant candidates before you'd even met them.
To hop semi-on-topic for a brief moment in closing; it's been my hiring experience that truly competent NT professionals are less expensive than truly competent Linux professionals, but not by too great a margin. Not so much that I'd alter my server OS for cheaper labor.
As little respect I have for the financial community when it comes to making technical statements, I have to assume that he has more reasons that the two listed for feeling that Linux should be shunned.
Both of his arguments are completely illogical at any rate. They are both functions of a poor IT staff rather than a poor OS. He states that "undocumented tinkering" is a drawback of Linux. I've worked at a great many Windows shops in which "undocumented tinkering" was a huge problem. It's the staff, not the OS.
He also says that a problem is the expensive IT staff "spending time playing with the OS because it's cool" makes Linux cost-prohibitive. That's rediculous. The staff that does that would be just as likely to do so with Windows or anything else. They'll be the ones "playing" with routing tables, "playing" with the registry, or "playing" with software settings. They'll be the ones running TweakUI on their PDC to make it faster, killing it in the process. This isn't a Linux problem, it's a staffing problem.
I hope that either these were just two of the more idiotic comments from a larger frame of good comments. If not, I'd hope that any relatively intelligent IT manager would understand the flaws in the argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my answer to that would be, I think you're asking two different questions.
Question one: Do we believe that Napster wasn't engaged in infringement. I don't believe so. I believe they were involved in much the same way that Netscape is involved in the transmission of kiddie porn and Microsoft is involved in the email transmission of viruses. Yes, they are the medium, but no, I don't think they can be held accountable for that.
Question two: Do we believe they did NOT intend their software to be used to copy commercial music. I personally thing it was, but that intent is a tricky thing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (a tenet of our US judicial system).
I think the boat has been missed. Trying to take a whack at the medium by which MP3s are transferred is doomed to failure. Better and better ways will be developed as the old ways are killed. It's not a cost effective solution.
The right way to do this (and, coincidentally, a more cost effective way) is to wack some big trafficers. Nail a few of the Napster/Gnutella users for some cash per pirated copy they are distributing. Doing that would scare the bulk of the bandwagon "pirates" off quickly. How many people do YOU know that download an occasional copy, because there's nothing stopping them? How many do you know that would stop post-haste if they thought they could be getting an expensive law suit followed by a more expensive fine?
This is the right way to play...Napster isn't their target, it's the first in a long, long line of internet file sharing softwares.
Woah...hold the phone.
With linux, the drivers you need are either on the cd (95% of the time)
Umm, everytime I try to install linux I find at least one driver I have to track down. About half the time, the driver I'm trying to use isn't supported at all. Of those cases, about half the time, I can't even emulate it very easily. Even when I can find the drivers, installation isn't generally as simple as "double-click on the executable" or "plug the device in, boot up, point to drivers diskette".
Perhaps I've just been plagued with bad installs, but in my experience, drivers aren't anything I feel like discussing when it comes to linux.
Yes, species have always gone extinct, but never before has one speicies been the exterminator of so many others.
...says the man that apparently has been around since the beginning of time. How do you know? How do you know that 16 different varieties of dinosaur didn't single-handedly wipe out billions of species? You don't. Again, your sweeping generalizations are dramatically unprovable and do a great deal to discredit you.
Actually, they volunteered to serve their government. Many learned the hard way that the two can be quite different.
Actually, you should join if you wish to speak of it. We volunteered (at least everyone I served with) to serve our country, and that's precisely what we do.
1.Be adjacent to us. Canada and Mexico aren't scaring me much.
Wrong, proximity means nothing with ICBMs and a reasonable Air Force/Navy.
2.Have a huge air force and/or navy capable of transporting an invasion force. Even at the height of the Cold War, I don't think anyone was seriously expecting a massive amphibious assult on the shores of the USA. (Outside of a handful of movie scriptwriters playing on Cold War paranoia.)
You'd have had to be a complete numb-nuts to not be at least mildly worried, during the height of the cold war, that we could be invaded. Remember, technology wasn't what it is today then, and frankly, China STILL has more than enough Army for a walk-on, and the USSR had, depending on your estimate, nearly enough to more than enough of a military.
3.Have a metric shitload of nuclear weapons - which makes it unwise for us to go to war with you.
Or, just one nuke. One nice sized one. I'm thinking dead center of DC would make for a bad day. How about center-mass NYC? That would be messy. How about center-mass in our crop-growing heartland? How about a little west of center-mass of the country, and let the jet stream carry some fallout for us? You didn't think this through.
Incidentally, there's something you forgot. Economic threats are very real threats...and a very real source of war.
My greatest concern with this article is the allegation that communications relative to safety is discouraged. Nothing is further from the truth.
Nahh..we don't discourage it. We'll FIRE you for it, but we don't discourage it.
I simply do not know how I can be any clearer on this.
Try not firing people that point out safety problems.
Amazing. In one post you've summed up all that is wrong with science. We seem to be of the mistaken opinion that, at any given time, we know all there is to know about our planet.
There have been a number of ice ages throughout history. A great number of said ice ages have occurred sans-humanity. Who was polluting for the other ones? Hrmm? Industrialist dinosaurs? Ecologically unsound paramecia? Aliens from Pluto? Or was mother nature doing her thing as she has been and will continue to do.
I'm not a fan of the pollution that we're currently forcing on our environment, but I'm less a fan of you ecology-nazis who wish to force completely unproven 'facts' on a relatively mindless media, who in turn passes this crap on to the masses...get the facts before you go whining about the damage we're doing...you're only serving to discredit yourself when you spout unproven 'facts' as reality.
I've solved this two ways...on two budgets.
Budget 1: I was setting up a home office for a member of senior management, to include company purchased furniture. Since price wasn't much of an option, you can find really nice looking stuff that looks right in a home and was designed ergonomically as a PC workstation in the executive part of your company's furniture catalog.
Budget 2: When I set mine up, I found that it was very inexpensive (comparitively) to find a local furniture maker and bring my ideas straight to him (with pictures of standard office stuff that I'd like to see on my home unit). I got for about $3,500 a highly useful desk set that looks very nice, fits in with our home decor, and is the most comfortable I've used.
Just some ideas.
That's what pisses me off about this Global Warming crap. The Earth has been going through hot and cold cycles since it's beginning, and I'd find it odd if this wasn't part of that cycle. How many ice ages have we had thusfar? Do we expect that just because we're here now, they're all done?
If they just run WinCE on the appliance, it should be secure enough, right?
:P
+1 Funny or -1 Flamebait...you decide
Umm..the South Park movie was great if you were 4...I don't know about how "great" it was. It was amusing in spots...that's about all of the good I can say for it. Lets hope that any Simpsons movie isn't the letdown that the South Park movie was.
With a production as large as a full-scale animated movie, I have to say this sounds more like wishful thinking than anything very real. So far it sounds like they have no ideas, no script, no backing, no firm plans, just Matt saying that they'll be doing one. I'd personally love to see it, but my guess is the show will be off the air before there's a chance to do the movie...I've been watching it less and less as it seems to be running out of steam.
Okay, after I read the article, this made more sense. I went into it thinking that the author was trying to say that extraterrestrial life would likely be machine, but in reality it appears that he's saying that we're likely to encounter robotic probes or the like before we meet an actual ET. This just makes sense...
On the other hand, I wouldn't imagine that any intelligent race would replace themselves with machines, so the thought that any ETs we might meet would be machines seems rather far fetched.
The only benchmarks we can trust are those that are totally independent. (The benchmarks being disputed here were sponsored by PostgreSQL.) I'm not accusing benchmarkers of being dishonest, but the only way we can be assured of impartiality is to run completely independent tests. We shouldn't care what the developers say -- we need to know what the users are saying.
That's one of the problems. I don't know that you can even trust independent benchmarks completely. Every place I've seen benchmarks I've seen at least a few questionable ones. I think it's important that anyone looking for hardware OR software realizes that they need to average as many benchmarks and reviews as possible to get a vague sense of the reality of the product.
Aside from that, the article sounded alot like "he said she said". Of course neither company will like the other's benchmark if it makes them look bad. End of story.
Check the preferences page. There is a section for Anime...check it off and you won't have to read them. Check it off and go away.
a)Why is Slashdot posting all this anime crap? Jeez, I'm a geek and I don't like it... it's all derivative.
Thank you for professing to speak for every "geek" around. I'm white, and I speak for all white people when I say you're an imbecile.
b)It's time for Cmdr Taco to grow up and out of watching this crap. Sure, I watched it in college, but then I became more mature when my friends told me that it wasn't cool to watch anime any more and switched to watching arthouse films. They're really deep, and everyone can learn something from the artful insights of their powerful symbolism.
In the same breath that you call for CT to grow up, you explain that "your friends" told you it wasn't cool to watch anime anymore, so you stopped. How grown up of you. I'm thinking that "cool" or "grown up" on YOUR scale is a place I don't want to be.
d)This doesn't belong here. This is news for nerds. I am a nerd and I don't see this as news.
Again, thank you for speaking for everyone. I don't remember making you our spokesperson, but perhaps I was out on the day of the vote. Personally, I found it an interesting read, and I find it hard to believe that you feel you're sufficiently important to decide what belongs here. Scary.
In short...I hope this was a joke designed to poke fun at the other whiners, otherwise it's just sad.
-1 Flamebait
If I were Rob, I'd be reading this trash while humming the tune to "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to" happily to myself. I think it's pretty obvious by now...if you don't want to read about a topic...DON'T READ THE FUCKING TOPIC. This is a simply concept, one would think.
I laugh everytime I read a comment from some half-assed imbecile that actually took the time to open up a topic they didn't want to read about, click the reply link, and explain how "inappropriate" the content is on slashdot.
Perhaps someone could enlighten me..what, pray tell, is appropriate content here? News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters....seems pretty broad...whatever that nerd Rob feels is news, and whatever matters to him...
Forgive us, oh enlightened one, for asking questions that are so beneath your intellect. To be honest, this piece in particular was interesting if for no other reason than as a mental exercise.
The elitism displayed following nearly EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED ask slashdot is pathetic, and does little to mask your own likely lack of competence. If these ask slashdot questions are being asked, it's safe to assume that there's a segment of the slashdot readership that is interested in the answer. If you don't like the question, by all means, don't read it. Is that difficult?
What a whiner.
My guess is, I've been doing this "out here in the real world" for a great many more years than you, young'un. Just scrolling through your last three posts...all were devoid of real content and inflammatory. Good job.
As much as I feel for your company, the automatic remailer viruses that have recently plagued companies aren't the hard whack needed. They're as much the IT department's fault as anything else. They require that the IT department is slow to respond and have poorly trained staff.
When the Mailissa virus hit, I was forwarned by about an hour. I heard about it on the radio hitting Ford hard. When I got to work, it had already hit my company. I simply checked the email size (approximatly 730K if I remember correctly), choked the MTA to 729, lowered the TTL for larger-than-MTA-messages to 1, and started sending out emails to all staff explaining what to do if you get the message. Our company, already running way too many people on way too few servers, experienced a 1 hour inconvenience, and no shutdown. Additionally, NAV for Exchange and NAV for Firewalls cleared a good many of the problem inbound emails to start.
No, I don't expect a Fortune 500 company to sue and win for something that is as much their fault for hiring incompetent IT management as Microsofts for incompetent defaults.
I stand firmly by my statement. Wait until a firm case of MS negligence, and wait for that negligence to hit a F500 HARD, meaning severe loss of profit or severe loss of customers. Severe would likely have to be above 1/4. It has to reach a point at which the company is willing to employ as much of its resources as necessary to sue MS, and they'll win.
There's an obligatory Richard Gere joke somewhere in this....
I would be very interested to see a documented case of Microsoft or Sun being sued and having to pay consequential damages for a bug in their software. Every license and contract I have seen from these folks SPECIFICALLY excludes responsibility for such.
First and foremost, the legal status of such "no responsibility" EULAs are very much up in the air. The companies win some, the companies lose some.
Secondly, I can pretty much guarantee that if a nice sizeable Fortune 500 gets whacked hard just once, there will be a suit. They will win.
Finally, the perception of "someone to sue" is a powerful thing. Many companies would prefer a buggy M$ over a stable BSD simply because there's a firm target for their ire when something bad happens. I'm confident that a nice class action law suit on a wide-spread, truly negligent Windows bug would be a clear-cut winner with big monetary gains for those involved. Would the same hold true for RedHat?
I was going to stay out of this conversation, but I have to chime in here...goodbye karma *sniff*
Well, the truth is that for what we pay, and this is the pay that they base TCO's on, we get techs of comparable experience. Are you suggesting that our HR department be better? If so, this has to be figured into TCO.
One point here. You should take most of the hiring away from the HR department. They don't know IT. They don't know a great many things. The only involvement that the HR dept. has been left with in the hiring processes at the last two companies I've managed was simply offer letters and benefits coordination. They don't even interview the person as a rule. You get a better class of people at a better price that way.
Perhaps I should say that a "Unix Professional" is generally of a higher caliber than an "NT professional" of like station. I'm not sure that this is my point.
I would hope that's not your point, because it's an inherently flawed point. To say that would be as baseless as saying that black people are better than white, white are better than hispanic, or men better than women. The choice of OS is in no way a gauge of the caliber of professional. I see a great many very poor Linux/Unix/HPUX professionals. I see a great many very poor NT/2000 professionals. Each side has their wheat and their chaff. To say one is better than the other is rather biased and ignorant.
I got my MCSE about 3 years ago, and will not update for 2000. The certification has been made a mockery of by the company that is supposed to guarantee it's sanctity.
I must agree that the MCSE is a joke now, which is why it's not a criteria upon which I base my hiring. I treat it like any other certificate from a seminar, it's nice, but that's about all. I prefer people that are reasonably intelligent, seem personable, have proven manageable, and can answer a few reasonable questions. Relying on the MCSE will doom your hiring to failure, and cull out some potentially brilliant candidates before you'd even met them.
To hop semi-on-topic for a brief moment in closing; it's been my hiring experience that truly competent NT professionals are less expensive than truly competent Linux professionals, but not by too great a margin. Not so much that I'd alter my server OS for cheaper labor.
As little respect I have for the financial community when it comes to making technical statements, I have to assume that he has more reasons that the two listed for feeling that Linux should be shunned.
Both of his arguments are completely illogical at any rate. They are both functions of a poor IT staff rather than a poor OS. He states that "undocumented tinkering" is a drawback of Linux. I've worked at a great many Windows shops in which "undocumented tinkering" was a huge problem. It's the staff, not the OS.
He also says that a problem is the expensive IT staff "spending time playing with the OS because it's cool" makes Linux cost-prohibitive. That's rediculous. The staff that does that would be just as likely to do so with Windows or anything else. They'll be the ones "playing" with routing tables, "playing" with the registry, or "playing" with software settings. They'll be the ones running TweakUI on their PDC to make it faster, killing it in the process. This isn't a Linux problem, it's a staffing problem.
I hope that either these were just two of the more idiotic comments from a larger frame of good comments. If not, I'd hope that any relatively intelligent IT manager would understand the flaws in the argument.
Avery has been making manila folders with those litte tabs for years. I think they should sue.
The review indicated that only the web browsing component was installed, ergo no Communicator...that's what I'm confused about.