You've just lost one customer, from this point forward, no matter how difficult it may be for me to find other products, I will not buy ANY hardware that contains a BIOS made made by your company.
WHile this may not seem like a big deal, I _am_ in the market for a new system, and have a decent budget to do it with.
If the Studios did decide to try and sue Microsoft and TiVo for this, who's side would you be on? THe enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
You gotta admit, nobody could put the Kibosh on the DMCA faster than MS could. Especially with that $40 BILLION pile of cash and the battalion of lawyers they have. I'd like to say that it would be the fight of the century, but they'd just end up settlin gout of court, and we'd get screwed anyways.
I woke up this morning, and for some reason, I was absolutely famished, can't figure out why, had plenty of food for dinner, etc.
Any and all traces of hunger that I had are now completely gone thanks to this. And I have this sudden desire to kill all of the meat that I eat from now on, just so I can verify its' source...
Did Netsaint/Nagios start small, i.e. just a small shell script that was doing some minimal network testing, or was it designed from the ground up as a massive network tester to replace such overpriced products as NP OpenView, etc?
I know there was a serious code revision between Netsaint 0.0.7 and Nagios 1.0, which was phenomenal, btw, great job. But after using Netsaint (I still call it that, old habits die hard) for almost 2 full years now, I've always been very impressed with how well everything runs and scales.
This is the same guy who hosts the pointless trivia show on Comedy Central "Win Ben Stein's Money".
Yes, and the reason it isn't on CBS is that it is, in reality, acutally, COMEDY! It's a joke, he knows it, the contestants know it. It's not like these people are the same ignorant dirtsticks that are STILL showing up for The Price Is Right after 30 frickin years. These social rejects havent left the confort of their sofa in so long, they honestly can't tell that a can Lysol is 2.59? Jesus!
At least it shows that someone has a sense of humor, and a pretty good one in fact. Just look at the difference between Adam Corolla on The Man Show, and Adam Corolla on LoveLine (NOT the eMpTyVee version). While he clearly has a good time on both, one is very clearly a joke, and the other sometimes offers some pretty serious advice to people who need it.
I'm just running on a different logic today, but wouldn't this fall into anti-competitive behavior? I mean seriously, what other point would amazon have to patenting the way something like this works? To prevent any sort of competition in their field. "Wanna sell things online? Oh, We're Amazon (of Borg), we MUST have invented that, pay us or we'll sue you." It is clearly a tactic to prevent any entry into their realm of business since it's pretty obvious that Amazon is the only online retailer that can't seem to figure out how to make money. Hell, they just bought CDNow, which did make money, but I'm sure they'll fsck that up, too.
Perhaps that investors in Amazon are getting a bit weary of the fact that they still cannot turn a profit, after, how many years has amazon been around? Five? Amazon has gotten NONE of my business since their first little charade with the 1-click crap. This pretty much puts it to the point of going over to Jeff Bezos' house and flogging his Mother with a clue-by-four for not teaching him the difference between right and wrong.
I see many people complaining that they didnt get a bonus, or some that did, but it wasnt near what the C-people got, and yet a whole other group of wankers who think nobody deserves a bonus. The cimple soultion seems to be that if your company gives bonuses, that it be fair, if you busted your ass all year long, and your coworker didnt, you should rightly get a bigger bonus. This of course relies on someone making MORE than you to be honest. Fat chance, pal. The simpler solution seems to be the one that Whole Foods (the healthy food store) employs. Everyone in the company, from the CEO, down to the stokers, knows how much everyone else makes, tends to keep everyone honest and working hard. Not overworking, mind you, just working hard for the money they are earning. Certainly puts a creative form of peer pressure into play, doesnt it?
Blockstackers was taken offline for not paying their bandwidth bill after the royal slashdotting it received when 1Meg photo downloads reduced it to a pile of steaming silicon. Some likened the/.'ing of Blockstackers to act of eating one's own leg.
Thinkgeek was also rumored to be entertaining the idea of geek-themed lingerie, with tacos on them.
Don't like advertisments dancing on your free will? Dare I say it, perhaps one should exercise a little, oh what's that word...WILL POWER? It's not like Budweiser is going to buy this technology, start running commercials containing it, and I will miraculously switch from Fat Tire Ale to Bud. No amount of advertising is going to voer the fact that it is a shitty product.
There is one other heap of legislation that should get mentioned, and when we look back 10 years from now at the shell the internet has become, paying for every 0 and 1 by the cent, remembering when there were more ISP's than just Aol, Earthlink, and MSN, that we should thank that bastion of integrity, Bill Clinton, for signing into law the Telecommunications act of 1996. Remember, this is the law that allowed free reign of the Baby Bells to walk all over the competition, all the while claiming that they were opening up their networks to Covad, et. al. The same law that allowed the cable companies to lock anyone they chose out of the high speed market, while the phone companies were forced to let anyone who wanted to use their networks, not that they made it easy to do so. The same law that allowed for the beginning of the massive fiber rollouts from companies like WorldCom, Global Crossing. Which of course begat useless VC funding (remember Pets.com?) due to anyone thinking that that internet thing was the answer to all their prayers for a new yacht, house, whatever. Hell, you can still see the glut of MBA's in the market for C level jobs. We all know what happened next, that famous bubble popped, and left thousands of tech workers out of jobs. And while we like to jab at MCSE's everywhere, they didnt deserve to be outright fired just because their CEO's had to choose between 10 good employees, or their own over-inflated salaries.
I spent 8 MONTHS out of work, with a mortgage and an infant, because the CEO of my company couldnt stand the thought of not living in the lap of luxury at almost 300 grand a year. And while I know that wasnt the Telecommunications' act fault, the blame does lie there for planting that huge seed of outright GREED in the minds of the people like her. Yep, it was definitely such a prudent move on ol' Billy boy's part to let the companies in control of the most important technology of the next 20 years run amok. Wise move, Bonehead.
Maybe the a better poll would not have been the way that this one was done (i.e. arresting people for crossing 'no go' lines, let's face it, our police arrests ANYONE who does that, if journalists happen to be the ones most frequently doing it, it doesnt make us biased against reporters). What does make us biased against reporters is that, in all honesty, most of us, myself included hold the majority of american journalists in about the same regard as patent attorneys and heads of media conglomerates. We dont see that journalistic integrity that gave us reporters like Woodward and Bernstein anymore.
Why? perhaps because the majority of people who aspire to be journalists are not trying to report the news in a fair manner. They are trying to get themselves on TV, plain and simple. Case in point, observe all the cupie-dolls and bo-hunks on your local TV news, or national, for that matter. Ashleigh Banfield couldnt find a clue if her life depended on it. Or look at how many print reporters write articles that seem remarkably like trolling for hits. They are trying to make a name for themselves, which leads to our/my zero respect for journalists. I'm not saying EVERY journalists is like this, but I think you get my drift.
"Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."
IIRC, Nissan motors has been around for quite a long time in Japan, since the 40's I think. And the only reason that some of us remember it as 'Datsun' was that the original Nissan management decided not to use their prestigious Nissan name when the idea of shipping imports to America came up. The Daughter Company (Datsun) was given nissan's blessing, but they had to use their name instead. Then, after quite some time of acheiving moderate success in America, Nissan took back the Datsun name, and they all became Nissan cars.
So technically, they BOTH have rights to the name, perhaps even equal rights to it. The guy should probably get to keep it, but come on, he should have known Nissan would come calling when he hit 'submit' on NetSol's website way back when. The judge should do something creative - like disallowing BOTH of them from using the name, he gets to use www.nissancomputers.com, and Nissan has to use www.nissancars.com.
This may sound a bit trollish, but I mean it more in a Devil's Advocate sort of way... Could the fact that this 'downturn' is lasting so long have anything to do with the majority of tech writers/industry pundits/whatever continuously writing articles of doom for the tech industry? I mean come on, anyone that is reading a column like that on a regular basis already KNOWS it's going to take a while for IT spending to pick back up, for companies to rediscover the value of their IT dept, from the PC techs to the UNIX security admins. It's almost like these writers are practically trolling for hits themselves, isn't it? Let's face it, reading the tech news online is just as monotonous as watching eMpTyVee or CNN.
I wonder if that spiedy-net would work in an office environment. Would make dealing with the boss MUCH easier, I think. That and Herf wars go to a whole new level.
Obviously, as the patriot act was his baby, and assuming he did his homework, I can see two outcomes from putting this provision in that evil piece of legslation:
One, Very few people know about it and undoubtedly, innocent people will get dragged into the mess. Honestly, I mean what is going to happen if some HS student gets an assignment for a report on '20th century dictators' and goes to the library to research on the likes of Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, etc? Will THEY be labeled as a 'terrorist'?
Two: Everyone knows about it, and people stop going to libraries to protect their reading habits from being snooped on, Which is clearly more chilling in that if people slowly stop going to libraries, no more of that 'dangerous knowledge' will make it to the minds of the public. Which, in all honesty, is probably what Ashcroft et al. were after in the first place, a dumb society that beleives whatever they are told. "Yes, terrorists ARE going to destroy the starbucks on your corner, report anyone reading a newspaper to the proper authorities!"
Doesnt it just figure that the person clearly putting more of our freedom in jeapardy than any before him is someone that wasnt elected, but appointed? How can we get this lunatic removed?
I wrote this a few months ago for a discussion on the same sort of thing on my local LUG mailing list. I think it actually applies here...
Yep, the problem seems to be that no matter how big of mistake any CEO makes, they will still make money. Which leads to bad CEO's getting practically praised for making bad decisions. If I gave my dog a plate full of fresh bacon every time she pooped on the carpet, I would expect much the same results.
The REALLY stupid part is for some reason, there are companies out there who are already probably chomping at the bit to get a 'high-profile' CEO like Bob Allen of AT&T on THEIR executive team, just so that they can have CEO with a big name. Nevermind the fact that his track record as a CEO sucks like a Hoover, he's got a big name, right? that's all that should count, right?
Wrong.
I've seen so many bad CEO's run companies into the ground, I should get a freakin' medal for not hitting them with a LART on sight. Bad CEO's will continue to line their pockets at our expense until one of them ACTUALLY gets punished for making decisions that an average garden slug would have the better sense not to. And I'm not talking fines, people with money, will always have money for little piddly $10 million dollar fines, especially when they've got more socked away than any of us will ever know. I'm talking PRISON, Sheriff Joe style. Bad CEO's are criminals, no different than some doofus who goes in and robs a fedrally-insured bank, except they rob people, REAL people.
I think that everything happening in business (Enron, etc) should serve as a warning to bad CEO's everywhere. You can only trample on the employees that are trying to succeed just as much as you for so long. I'm not a superstitous or religious man, but Karma can be a serious bitch, and I hope that the good St. Karma shows the CEO's just as much compassion and respect that they have shown to their employees.
That's pretty much how I feel about the whole matter when it comes to a CEO claiming that there isnt enough money in the corporate kitty to make 'the investors' happy. The investors don't make a company, the people doing the work do. Respect for your employees doesnt start at the "C" level, it starts at the mailroom, and goes all the way up. If you're a CEO making 250K/yr, and you cut somebody's salary so that you can save a buck, I hope you get hit by a bus. With Dynamite on it. In Hell.
I knew a guy a while back that was in the navy. While he was there (on a carrier), they got a new ship commander. When he did his first ship-wide crew breifing, his words were "I'm going to make Admiral by the end of this tour, and I'm going to retire an Admiral. And each and every one of you is going to help me do it. And I promise every one of you, that if you help me make Admiral, I will make your stay the next 6 months the best you've ever had on a carrier."
So it's fairly simple what is expected of a manager, be it middle, or C-level, whatever. You as an employee have the sole responsibility to your manager of making him look good to his managers. And his (or her:-) sole responsibility to you is to keep you happy, by whatever means possible, be it training when you want it, time off when you need it, timely raises, etc.
In the last six years of being in this field, I've had numerous jobs, more numerous managers, and I have only had ONE manager who dealt with management this way. I busted my ass to make him look good when it came time that he had to report to his boss on the goings on of our dept. and he kept me happy, gave me raises when I needed, let me take time off when I needed it, etc.
Amazing what works, eh? boils down to respect, I guess.
I think the majority of the people who are posting replies to this at least watch Iron Chef, which is cool in it own right. But by far the best cooking show for geeks is Good Eats, with Alton Brown. I have learned more about making my own food taste better by watching him than any other cooking show, ever. He doesnt just cook food, he shows why it cooks the way it does, how to get that perfect done-ness out of steaks, eggs, etc. That and the show is damn funny.
And to the guy who down below who says potatoes are toxic when uncooked, please, get your facts straight, as well. Potatoes are NOT hazardous when uncooked, no more than fresh corn or green beans. Take it from someone who loves a good red potato raw. The last person I heard who still believed spuds were poisonous was my great grandmother, and she no longer bought into that crap, either.
I must be missing something, so flame away, thou trolling moderators, but where the hell is the full download at? Codeweavers seems to have a nice product if it works, but every download page links right back on top of itself, which is just about as annoying as trying to untangle scotch tape.
I read Cryptome regularly, generally every day or so, and the only question that I can think of is, Where do you get your information from? I'd like to know os that I canstart researching things much the same way.
This reminds me a lot of the piano-flinging device that was seen on Northern Exposure so many years ago, where they flung a piano something like 300+ yds with a tree hooked up to some pulleys. That was a damn funny episode.
would roll over in his grave if one of these things showed up in his library. You can only read it until the company says you are done, then you gotta pay more to read some more.
What happens if you want to go back and read a part back at the beginning of the book? I've read "And Then There Were None" at least 15 times, and it's a very good mystery, which obligates you to go back and re-read certain parts from time to time. This is why I don't buy anything but real, honest-to-goodness BOOKS. I can take them in my backpack whereever I want, read them whereever I want, and I don't have to get on my knees for some greedy publisher just to enjoy a good story.
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You've just lost one customer, from this point forward, no matter how difficult it may be for me to find other products, I will not buy ANY hardware that contains a BIOS made made by your company.
WHile this may not seem like a big deal, I _am_ in the market for a new system, and have a decent budget to do it with.
If the Studios did decide to try and sue Microsoft and TiVo for this, who's side would you be on?
THe enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
You gotta admit, nobody could put the Kibosh on the DMCA faster than MS could. Especially with that $40 BILLION pile of cash and the battalion of lawyers they have. I'd like to say that it would be the fight of the century, but they'd just end up settlin gout of court, and we'd get screwed anyways.
Any and all traces of hunger that I had are now completely gone thanks to this. And I have this sudden desire to kill all of the meat that I eat from now on, just so I can verify its' source...
Did Netsaint/Nagios start small, i.e. just a small shell script that was doing some minimal network testing, or was it designed from the ground up as a massive network tester to replace such overpriced products as NP OpenView, etc?
I know there was a serious code revision between Netsaint 0.0.7 and Nagios 1.0, which was phenomenal, btw, great job. But after using Netsaint (I still call it that, old habits die hard) for almost 2 full years now, I've always been very impressed with how well everything runs and scales.
show on Comedy Central "Win Ben Stein's Money".
Yes, and the reason it isn't on CBS is that it is, in reality, acutally, COMEDY! It's a joke, he knows it, the contestants know it. It's not like these people are the same ignorant dirtsticks that are STILL showing up for The Price Is Right after 30 frickin years. These social rejects havent left the confort of their sofa in so long, they honestly can't tell that a can Lysol is 2.59? Jesus!
At least it shows that someone has a sense of humor, and a pretty good one in fact. Just look at the difference between Adam Corolla on The Man Show, and Adam Corolla on LoveLine (NOT the eMpTyVee version). While he clearly has a good time on both, one is very clearly a joke, and the other sometimes offers some pretty serious advice to people who need it.
Perhaps that investors in Amazon are getting a bit weary of the fact that they still cannot turn a profit, after, how many years has amazon been around? Five? Amazon has gotten NONE of my business since their first little charade with the 1-click crap. This pretty much puts it to the point of going over to Jeff Bezos' house and flogging his Mother with a clue-by-four for not teaching him the difference between right and wrong.
Greedy Fscker, I hope you get hit by a bus.
I see many people complaining that they didnt get a bonus, or some that did, but it wasnt near what the C-people got, and yet a whole other group of wankers who think nobody deserves a bonus. The cimple soultion seems to be that if your company gives bonuses, that it be fair, if you busted your ass all year long, and your coworker didnt, you should rightly get a bigger bonus. This of course relies on someone making MORE than you to be honest. Fat chance, pal. The simpler solution seems to be the one that Whole Foods (the healthy food store) employs. Everyone in the company, from the CEO, down to the stokers, knows how much everyone else makes, tends to keep everyone honest and working hard. Not overworking, mind you, just working hard for the money they are earning. Certainly puts a creative form of peer pressure into play, doesnt it?
Thinkgeek was also rumored to be entertaining the idea of geek-themed lingerie, with tacos on them.
Well, except in Microsoft's case.
I spent 8 MONTHS out of work, with a mortgage and an infant, because the CEO of my company couldnt stand the thought of not living in the lap of luxury at almost 300 grand a year. And while I know that wasnt the Telecommunications' act fault, the blame does lie there for planting that huge seed of outright GREED in the minds of the people like her.
Yep, it was definitely such a prudent move on ol' Billy boy's part to let the companies in control of the most important technology of the next 20 years run amok. Wise move, Bonehead.
Why? perhaps because the majority of people who aspire to be journalists are not trying to report the news in a fair manner. They are trying to get themselves on TV, plain and simple. Case in point, observe all the cupie-dolls and bo-hunks on your local TV news, or national, for that matter. Ashleigh Banfield couldnt find a clue if her life depended on it. Or look at how many print reporters write articles that seem remarkably like trolling for hits. They are trying to make a name for themselves, which leads to our/my zero respect for journalists. I'm not saying EVERY journalists is like this, but I think you get my drift.
We seem to have reduced their website into a smoldering pile of silicon and aluminum. Keep up the good work, boys.
"Here's a nifty little gadget, (holding up small, silver-dollar sized, CD) It's gonna replace CD's soon. Guess I'll have to buy the White ALbum again."
Sorry, couldnt resist, carry on about your business folks, nothing to see here.
So technically, they BOTH have rights to the name, perhaps even equal rights to it. The guy should probably get to keep it, but come on, he should have known Nissan would come calling when he hit 'submit' on NetSol's website way back when. The judge should do something creative - like disallowing BOTH of them from using the name, he gets to use www.nissancomputers.com, and Nissan has to use www.nissancars.com.
This may sound a bit trollish, but I mean it more in a Devil's Advocate sort of way... Could the fact that this 'downturn' is lasting so long have anything to do with the majority of tech writers/industry pundits/whatever continuously writing articles of doom for the tech industry? I mean come on, anyone that is reading a column like that on a regular basis already KNOWS it's going to take a while for IT spending to pick back up, for companies to rediscover the value of their IT dept, from the PC techs to the UNIX security admins. It's almost like these writers are practically trolling for hits themselves, isn't it? Let's face it, reading the tech news online is just as monotonous as watching eMpTyVee or CNN.
I wonder if that spiedy-net would work in an office environment. Would make dealing with the boss MUCH easier, I think. That and Herf wars go to a whole new level.
One, Very few people know about it and undoubtedly, innocent people will get dragged into the mess. Honestly, I mean what is going to happen if some HS student gets an assignment for a report on '20th century dictators' and goes to the library to research on the likes of Hitler, Saddam, Stalin, etc? Will THEY be labeled as a 'terrorist'?
Two: Everyone knows about it, and people stop going to libraries to protect their reading habits from being snooped on, Which is clearly more chilling in that if people slowly stop going to libraries, no more of that 'dangerous knowledge' will make it to the minds of the public. Which, in all honesty, is probably what Ashcroft et al. were after in the first place, a dumb society that beleives whatever they are told. "Yes, terrorists ARE going to destroy the starbucks on your corner, report anyone reading a newspaper to the proper authorities!"
Doesnt it just figure that the person clearly putting more of our freedom in jeapardy than any before him is someone that wasnt elected, but appointed? How can we get this lunatic removed?
I wrote this a few months ago for a discussion on the same sort of thing on my local LUG mailing list. I think it actually applies here...
Yep, the problem seems to be that no matter how big of mistake any CEO
makes, they will still make money. Which leads to bad CEO's getting
practically praised for making bad decisions. If I gave my dog a plate
full of fresh bacon every time she pooped on the carpet, I would expect
much the same results.
The REALLY stupid part is for some reason, there are companies out there
who are already probably chomping at the bit to get a 'high-profile' CEO
like Bob Allen of AT&T on THEIR executive team, just so that they can have
CEO with a big name. Nevermind the fact that his track record as a CEO
sucks like a Hoover, he's got a big name, right? that's all that should
count, right?
Wrong.
I've seen so many bad CEO's run companies into the ground, I should get a
freakin' medal for not hitting them with a LART on sight. Bad CEO's will
continue to line their pockets at our expense until one of them ACTUALLY
gets punished for making decisions that an average garden slug would have
the better sense not to. And I'm not talking fines, people with money,
will always have money for little piddly $10 million dollar fines,
especially when they've got more socked away than any of us will ever
know. I'm talking PRISON, Sheriff Joe style. Bad CEO's are criminals, no
different than some doofus who goes in and robs a fedrally-insured bank,
except they rob people, REAL people.
I think that everything happening in business (Enron, etc) should serve as
a warning to bad CEO's everywhere. You can only trample on the employees
that are trying to succeed just as much as you for so long. I'm not a
superstitous or religious man, but Karma can be a serious bitch, and I
hope that the good St. Karma shows the CEO's just as much compassion and
respect that they have shown to their employees.
That's pretty much how I feel about the whole matter when it comes to a CEO claiming that there isnt enough money in the corporate kitty to make 'the investors' happy. The investors don't make a company, the people doing the work do. Respect for your employees doesnt start at the "C" level, it starts at the mailroom, and goes all the way up. If you're a CEO making 250K/yr, and you cut somebody's salary so that you can save a buck, I hope you get hit by a bus. With Dynamite on it. In Hell.
So it's fairly simple what is expected of a manager, be it middle, or C-level, whatever. You as an employee have the sole responsibility to your manager of making him look good to his managers. And his (or her
In the last six years of being in this field, I've had numerous jobs, more numerous managers, and I have only had ONE manager who dealt with management this way. I busted my ass to make him look good when it came time that he had to report to his boss on the goings on of our dept. and he kept me happy, gave me raises when I needed, let me take time off when I needed it, etc.
Amazing what works, eh? boils down to respect, I guess.
And to the guy who down below who says potatoes are toxic when uncooked, please, get your facts straight, as well. Potatoes are NOT hazardous when uncooked, no more than fresh corn or green beans. Take it from someone who loves a good red potato raw. The last person I heard who still believed spuds were poisonous was my great grandmother, and she no longer bought into that crap, either.
sheesh, some people's facts....
I must be missing something, so flame away, thou trolling moderators, but where the hell is the full download at? Codeweavers seems to have a nice product if it works, but every download page links right back on top of itself, which is just about as annoying as trying to untangle scotch tape.
I read Cryptome regularly, generally every day or so, and the only question that I can think of is, Where do you get your information from? I'd like to know os that I canstart researching things much the same way.
This reminds me a lot of the piano-flinging device that was seen on Northern Exposure so many years ago, where they flung a piano something like 300+ yds with a tree hooked up to some pulleys. That was a damn funny episode.
What happens if you want to go back and read a part back at the beginning of the book? I've read "And Then There Were None" at least 15 times, and it's a very good mystery, which obligates you to go back and re-read certain parts from time to time. This is why I don't buy anything but real, honest-to-goodness BOOKS. I can take them in my backpack whereever I want, read them whereever I want, and I don't have to get on my knees for some greedy publisher just to enjoy a good story.