Plus, when you're using tabbed browsing, or you can't get rid of the status bar, you really need the extra screen real estate.
On that matter I've found Opera Mobile to be the best browser choice on my little "old" Android phone. The fact that you can remove all chrome (address bar only shows when at the top of the page or it is active in some way, tab bar and other controls only show when the action button is pressed) makes it usable for occasional breif browsing (checking a bus time table, reading the news headlines in the queue at the cafe,...) even on the 320x240 screen.
If they could make that structurally sound, it would probably look good. You could make the bezel almost nothing. There would be a usability issue to contend with though: with too small a bezel you risk accidental touches being picked up by the screen close to the edges.
As well as the obvious "what if someone takes to long to switch and is between trains when they split" (which could be solved by some form of automatic emergency stop, though that could jam up the whole system for a short while as other trains and trams are backed up by the delay), there is the more simple problem of the long straigh track needed. Even if slowing to 30mph (given they mention the tram speeding up, I assume the connection won't be any slower than this) you need a mile for as two-minute change over plus the distance they'll travel while syncing speed and making the connection plus some safety margin at each end. That is at least 3 miles of uninterrupted perfectly parallel tracks. OK so 3 straight miles are very easy to find on a high-speed line outside urban areas, but that means the tram has to travel that far to get to the meeting ponit which will use more power and therefor fuel. I suspect the time savings to be minimal anyway, especially once you account for delaysd due to regular emergency stops, and I doubt there will be much by way of energy savings (OK so you are not stopping and starting the HST woudl will save a chunk, tbut the trams will probably end up eating what you save there by having to travel the distance to the meetup zone). The trams as a way to travel to and from the interchange are not a bad idea, and already implemented in some placdes, but I can't say the high-speed docking thing is anything other than lunacy.
So I'm not surprised it was at a loss. Meanwhile, how many of the X-thousand "customers" do you think she really won over? Especially anon-Internet shoppers that would probably never visit the place again.
Very few. This all smacks of the same rubbish banded about in the run up to the first major dot-bomb bust: people giving away the shirts off their own backs to draw people in because eyeball count, get them in and eventually you'll make back what you've lost. Only for most businesses they simply doesn't happen. Too many are getting desperate and jumping in deeper than they should in the hope that they'll be one of the lucky ones, and there are going to be fwer lucky ones this time around: many of the markets already have long-standing 400lb gorillas manning the walls, and others require people to be willing to pony up for something new and exciting which with people being careful because of the current economic state (or being destitute because of the current economic state!) and the Internet not being novel and newly exciting to most people, is not likely to happen en mass.
There are very few "good" businesses in that sense these days, and for good reason: there isn't money in it. People expect cheap and they expect quick. They don't want to pay extra for the extra care (though they'll feel free to moan about not getting it of course) and if you try insist they it is worth paying the extra for you to take more time and effort with their case/order they may well just play the "we can pay you X for Y, or we can pay the guy down the road X for Y, your choice" card.
Of course now most businesses are competing on price/volume rather than quality or care there is a lot of competition at that end of the market so the sales people are getting more than a tad dodgy in order to meet their targets (so they keep the volume so can keep being cheap enough to compete with everyone else).
This means customers are going to be harassed and conned more and more, getting worse quality products and services. I can see two ways to change this but neither are going to happen. You could try educate the companies to the fact that by competing purely in price+volume they are running themselves into the ground as well as their competitors (this won't happen because they all dream of being the one that survives to corner the market, or being the one that somehow magically breaks the mould). You could try educating the average customer that by constantly demanding close-to-or-below-break-even pricing, by travelling to a hypermarket to save pennies (spending more in petrol and/or time than they'll save) instead of using a decent local business, and so on, they are hurting their choices long-term (that won't work because the average customer is the general public - have you ever tried educating some of them?!).
These are quite different devices though: they have a much more powerful CPU and GPU, much more RAM (1024M instead of 128 for the $25 RP or 256 on the $35 model) and it has 802.11b/g and bluetooth built-in which the RP will of course support but only via extra devices plugged in. And it might be less than $200 - they might be padding the expected price a little to avoid the moaning if they've misjudged and it comes out more expensive (like the laptop-per-child machines did), better to surprise your target market in a good way than a bad one.
For what I want the RP looks like the no-brainer buy (I'll be getting at least one of the $35 models when they arrive), but if you need the extra power for something then this device might be more up your street. What you would need the power for I don't know, given the RP is claimed to play 1080p h264 encoded video at 30fps just fine (which is one of my intended uses), but no doubt some people out there have ideas of what it can be put to use for.
I mean, did you take even a moment to think about the differences in situations there? Or did you just emotionally knee-jerk like most idiots do?
In fairness, he replied in the spirit of "fuck that sort of person, give their resources to this other sort of people" found in your original post.
I'm all for "when I start to get too senile to be useful, please let me perform an orderly shutdown" but that is my choice and is not something I would want enforced on others (or myself for that matter). What you are suggesting (offing people based upon their perceived utility to society and/or resource draining potential) is a particularly unpleasant slippery slope.
In some places for every young person would has a full life ahead of him/her being useful to society there is one who take whatever they can and give sweet FA, using up a damn sight more resource from the social security net than that 88 year old ever has and ever will. I'm assuming you don't want to go there.
I've thought of a way they could tempt me to upgrade: faster upload speed.
That is what made me upgrade - I was getting a sync rate of ~1.3m (~1.1mbit/sec observed throughput) from Be and now have ~10m (~8.5m observed maximum sustained throughput), and that is a the main bonus of the line upgrade itself (getting a/29 IPv4 range and full IPv6 support were other things that drew me to the ISP I chose). Double-check what package you are on in this respect though as there are two classes available: some allow the full 10mbit if the line between you and the cab is short enough, others are capped at 2mbit.
with an 18 month contract, which is too long
There are ISPs selling the FTTC service with 12 month contracts. That may still be too long for your current situation, but worth looking into if not. https://spreadsheets0.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AquiMM6uTUUzdHl4RGRZcnE1WWw0SVlLcVlzQWZuVFE&output=html is a useful list though not entirely up-to-date (AAISP who I am currently with, have changed their pricing recently and that is not reflected on there) or detailed (it doesn't mention upstream handling: AAISP do not meter that, some others don't also but with some it is counted against your quota - if you regularly upload gigabytes worth of stuff that could be pretty significant).
5) Ubuntu focused immediately on hardware lists. Simple easy instruction to resolve problems on hardware, rather than opaque instructions. The Ubuntu forums were a huge step forward in Linux to the masses.
Which is why it found a home on my netbook and has stayed there since (9.04 then 9.10, not 10.04 (I'm planning on sticking with that at least until 12.04 turns up and beds in) - the hardware support was there and any issues (and existing workarounds) documented.
I tried 10.04 server-side too, seduced by the long support window, though I've gravitated back to Debian in that area.
Don't expose Sid to the wider Internet though. There are times when upstream security updates are delayed by issues that are keeping a package's dependencies from being upgraded. This state usually only lasts at most a couple of days, but the attitude to it is much different than that for Stable. Chances are Stable won't have the bleeding edge versions (with their bleeding edge issues) anyway, and if it is affected a concerted effort will be made to backport relevant changes or otherwise make the fix work ASAP. Because Sid (and Testing to a lesser extent) is not intended for production use, things are a bit more relaxed at such times - they are more likely to just wait for the dependencies to sort themselves out.
It doesn't happen often (it is usually during times of major upheaval like when a significant change to glibc is being merged in), but it does happen so I'd not use Sid on anything exposed to the outside world.
And if you use aptitude instead of apt-* it does most of the jobs of apt-* and dpkg and a few other bits and bobs. It is essentially a wrapper around the same tools (dpkg, deselect,...) that apt-* use, but I find it a little more convenient.
For most home users "up to 8Mbit" is perfectly sufficient. You can you youtube, iPlayer and iTunes down 2Mbit just fine much more is nice but not worth paying extra for..
The largest group of people who want FTTC are people on long lines that are heavily speed restricted for that reason, for these people FTTC lifts them from the just-about-good-enough-these-days 2Mbit range. Unfortunately most of these places are not well served by fibre: both Virgin and BT are concentrating on central urban areas where they can serve a larger number of people with the same amount of equipment+effort as less concentrated places, and those central urban areas don't tend to have such long routes between them and the exchange to start with. For people already getting 8Mbit or more from ADSL2+ it often isn't worth the hassle of switching (which means signing up for a 12 or 18 month contract). Another group that faster lines are useful for is student houses where you are likely to find several relatively heavy users, but the 12-to-18 month contract makes the product useless to them as they are likely only in that house for 9 months.
I only switched to FTTC for the better upstream rate - I've gone from getting ~1.2Mbit up to close to ~8.5M (off a sync rate of 9995K) which meant I could bring a few websites and bits literally "in house" and makes my off-site backups more practical. While I can make use of the 31Mbit I see downstream now, the ~12 I was getting before was perfectly sufficient. If I'm shifting anything big enough that the speed bump downstream makes a difference I'll generally still transfer it overnight anyway when I'll be too asleep to notice (it isn't often I decide to grab 10Gbyte of something on the spur the the moment and want it now now now). And I consider myself a pretty heavy user (nearly 150Gbyte downstream already this month, upstream is unmetered so I don't keep an eye on that).
I'm the other way around. I have a pile of ideas forming (I keep them in a notebook for future reference, occasionally scanning through to remind myself of ideas and whittle out the ones I've changed my mind about being interested in), but troube drumming up the enthusiasm to start them. I never get out in time in the evenings to spend time on such projects, and by the time the weekend comes around I'm too burnt out and need the time away from technical stuff (instead spending the weekend trying to be social (which is not one of my core skills but something I keep trying to get better at!), playing with the cat (an excellent distraction from work related stress), reading something unrelated, or just sleeping the week off) to recover.
IF you are good, and have some experience to back up your education and other training.
We've had trouble getting peopled we needed when we advertised a position recently, so if that is anything to go by someone with the right skillset should have no trouble finding work even in these difficult times.
But if you are at stuck at the lower end of the market (either simply due to inexperience, or because your experience is in areas for which demand is currently low) there are a great many people trying to get on the ladder who you will have to compete with.
Under UK employment and contract law (I have little experience of employment law elsewhere, but I presume many other places have similar provisions) an "all you ever do is ours" clause is considered overly broad and therefor unenforceable. The trouble is that you may have to go to court to get this acknowledged and that won't be cheap. In a loser-pays system like the UK you could refuse to give them the rights, have them take you to court, and have them pay when you win - but you still have to shell out legal costs until the point that you win and that might be something you simply can't afford (though you might be lucky and find a lawyer that will work your case on a no-win-no-fee basis, there are still other costs to consider). In an everyone-pays-and-the-winner-has-to-counter-sue-to-get-their-costs-back system like I believe is how things are generally done in the US this is an even hairier matter.
The other complication is considering whether there is any connection between the work and the business that the company does. The smallest and most tenuous of links might be enough for a separate non-compete clause to come into force, making the question of whether the "all you do" clause is enforceable or not a moot point.
A few years ago I might have said "work", but since having a decent 'net connection I've stopped having any of the Windows dev tools installed locally and remote into the office instead.
I'm debating what to do about my ageing XP install next time I perform a major upgrade on my desktop machine (I plan to move to an SSD for the system drive next year at some point, while I'm reinstalling the base OS there is little point putting something that old on). Essentially I have three choices: go with Windows 8 if it is out by that time, take Windows 7 instead (and avoid some of the touch-centered interface changes and other things I've hear talk about that may well get on my nerves), or decide that as I don't spend that much time playing games anyway (and that time I could easily fill with other hobbies) I can just let the games go and be a true neck-beard once again, installing Linux as the desktop OS and saving myself the upgrade cost of sticking with Windows.
Or maybe have a quiet word with Apple or MS. Maybe they'll offer you some legal advise out of the, erm, goodness of their hearts.
Or you could just put details of what is your's here along with evidence if anything conclusive exists (that part might be difficult if the contribution was some time ago). That might stop people simply calling BS.
As far as I can tell it is still an issue, though I've had little problems after explicitly turning off VMWare's attempts to sync clocks, installing NTP in the guests, and telling NTP not to worry if the skew changes suddenly ("tinker panic 0" in the config file).
After getting irritated by having to patch VMWare to get it going on recent Ubuntu or Debian releases (anything with a kernel newer than 2.6.32) and knowing that VMWare Server is a dead product anyway I've been tinkering with VirtualBox (I know ESXi is free too, but for our purposes we want a class 2 hypervisor) and have been surprised with it managing this much better. Maybe the VMWare guys should pay them for a little advice in that area.
So why is the lean mean OS going the way of Windows?
It isn't really. That fresh Windows install won't include an office package so you'll probably need another disc worth of Office (or a download of Open/Libre Office), and chances are you'll want something more than Paint if you do anything with graphics so you'll at least be installing Paint.net as an extra. People expect some variant of these things on the first disc of a Linux distro, but not on a fresh Windows install (which in my experience comes on DVDs not CDs now anyway) so it isn't an orangesoranges comparison.
I think they designed for DVD and mastered CD as an afterthought. Debian goes the other way around: you are encouraged to get the netinst ISO instead of a full CD, and they make an effort to make sure the most commonly used packages are on CD 1 (though that isn't perfect as it is based on what most people use rather than what is "core" - PPPoE support isn't on the first DVD for instance which is a pain if you are rebuilding a box that normally runs your Internet connection via PPPoE and you don't have a spare router laying around).
A minimal boot/install ISO has been the standard way to install Debian for as long as I've had decent Internet connectivity (i.e. since I moved off dial-up). It is the "netinst" ISOs, the first linked on the "getting Debian" page (http://www.debian.org/distrib/). You are usually discouraged from grabbing the full CD or DVD ISOs unless you are installing on multiple machines at the same time (at which point there might be a bandwidth saving) or you are planning to install it on something in a situation where bandwidth is limited.
Then again, I don't have any desktop installs of Debian. For headless servers there really is no point grabbing a CD as a large part of it is desktop stuff.
There is little point keeping old larger ISOs around too. If you install from a CD/DVD that is some months old, you end up redownloading most of the packages when you first "aptitude safe-upgrade" anyway.
Experience tells me that if someone wants to censor their contribution to a debate, they made a prize fool of themselves.
I'm going to assume that he is the thickest of the worst deluded fuckwits imaginable, which is probably worse than he comes across in the debate, until such time as I have evidence to the contrary. If he wants to show that he is not quite that thick, and therefore someone whose opinions count for naught, he can release the debate to prove that he didn't make that much of a fool of himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, when you're using tabbed browsing, or you can't get rid of the status bar, you really need the extra screen real estate.
On that matter I've found Opera Mobile to be the best browser choice on my little "old" Android phone. The fact that you can remove all chrome (address bar only shows when at the top of the page or it is active in some way, tab bar and other controls only show when the action button is pressed) makes it usable for occasional breif browsing (checking a bus time table, reading the news headlines in the queue at the cafe, ...) even on the 320x240 screen.
If they could make that structurally sound, it would probably look good. You could make the bezel almost nothing. There would be a usability issue to contend with though: with too small a bezel you risk accidental touches being picked up by the screen close to the edges.
As well as the obvious "what if someone takes to long to switch and is between trains when they split" (which could be solved by some form of automatic emergency stop, though that could jam up the whole system for a short while as other trains and trams are backed up by the delay), there is the more simple problem of the long straigh track needed. Even if slowing to 30mph (given they mention the tram speeding up, I assume the connection won't be any slower than this) you need a mile for as two-minute change over plus the distance they'll travel while syncing speed and making the connection plus some safety margin at each end. That is at least 3 miles of uninterrupted perfectly parallel tracks. OK so 3 straight miles are very easy to find on a high-speed line outside urban areas, but that means the tram has to travel that far to get to the meeting ponit which will use more power and therefor fuel. I suspect the time savings to be minimal anyway, especially once you account for delaysd due to regular emergency stops, and I doubt there will be much by way of energy savings (OK so you are not stopping and starting the HST woudl will save a chunk, tbut the trams will probably end up eating what you save there by having to travel the distance to the meetup zone). The trams as a way to travel to and from the interchange are not a bad idea, and already implemented in some placdes, but I can't say the high-speed docking thing is anything other than lunacy.
So I'm not surprised it was at a loss. Meanwhile, how many of the X-thousand "customers" do you think she really won over? Especially anon-Internet shoppers that would probably never visit the place again.
Very few. This all smacks of the same rubbish banded about in the run up to the first major dot-bomb bust: people giving away the shirts off their own backs to draw people in because eyeball count, get them in and eventually you'll make back what you've lost. Only for most businesses they simply doesn't happen. Too many are getting desperate and jumping in deeper than they should in the hope that they'll be one of the lucky ones, and there are going to be fwer lucky ones this time around: many of the markets already have long-standing 400lb gorillas manning the walls, and others require people to be willing to pony up for something new and exciting which with people being careful because of the current economic state (or being destitute because of the current economic state!) and the Internet not being novel and newly exciting to most people, is not likely to happen en mass.
There are very few "good" businesses in that sense these days, and for good reason: there isn't money in it. People expect cheap and they expect quick. They don't want to pay extra for the extra care (though they'll feel free to moan about not getting it of course) and if you try insist they it is worth paying the extra for you to take more time and effort with their case/order they may well just play the "we can pay you X for Y, or we can pay the guy down the road X for Y, your choice" card.
Of course now most businesses are competing on price/volume rather than quality or care there is a lot of competition at that end of the market so the sales people are getting more than a tad dodgy in order to meet their targets (so they keep the volume so can keep being cheap enough to compete with everyone else).
This means customers are going to be harassed and conned more and more, getting worse quality products and services. I can see two ways to change this but neither are going to happen. You could try educate the companies to the fact that by competing purely in price+volume they are running themselves into the ground as well as their competitors (this won't happen because they all dream of being the one that survives to corner the market, or being the one that somehow magically breaks the mould). You could try educating the average customer that by constantly demanding close-to-or-below-break-even pricing, by travelling to a hypermarket to save pennies (spending more in petrol and/or time than they'll save) instead of using a decent local business, and so on, they are hurting their choices long-term (that won't work because the average customer is the general public - have you ever tried educating some of them?!).
These are quite different devices though: they have a much more powerful CPU and GPU, much more RAM (1024M instead of 128 for the $25 RP or 256 on the $35 model) and it has 802.11b/g and bluetooth built-in which the RP will of course support but only via extra devices plugged in. And it might be less than $200 - they might be padding the expected price a little to avoid the moaning if they've misjudged and it comes out more expensive (like the laptop-per-child machines did), better to surprise your target market in a good way than a bad one.
For what I want the RP looks like the no-brainer buy (I'll be getting at least one of the $35 models when they arrive), but if you need the extra power for something then this device might be more up your street. What you would need the power for I don't know, given the RP is claimed to play 1080p h264 encoded video at 30fps just fine (which is one of my intended uses), but no doubt some people out there have ideas of what it can be put to use for.
I mean, did you take even a moment to think about the differences in situations there? Or did you just emotionally knee-jerk like most idiots do?
In fairness, he replied in the spirit of "fuck that sort of person, give their resources to this other sort of people" found in your original post.
I'm all for "when I start to get too senile to be useful, please let me perform an orderly shutdown" but that is my choice and is not something I would want enforced on others (or myself for that matter). What you are suggesting (offing people based upon their perceived utility to society and/or resource draining potential) is a particularly unpleasant slippery slope.
In some places for every young person would has a full life ahead of him/her being useful to society there is one who take whatever they can and give sweet FA, using up a damn sight more resource from the social security net than that 88 year old ever has and ever will. I'm assuming you don't want to go there.
It was all Starbuck's sweary mouth fault!
I've thought of a way they could tempt me to upgrade: faster upload speed.
That is what made me upgrade - I was getting a sync rate of ~1.3m (~1.1mbit/sec observed throughput) from Be and now have ~10m (~8.5m observed maximum sustained throughput), and that is a the main bonus of the line upgrade itself (getting a /29 IPv4 range and full IPv6 support were other things that drew me to the ISP I chose). Double-check what package you are on in this respect though as there are two classes available: some allow the full 10mbit if the line between you and the cab is short enough, others are capped at 2mbit.
with an 18 month contract, which is too long
There are ISPs selling the FTTC service with 12 month contracts. That may still be too long for your current situation, but worth looking into if not. https://spreadsheets0.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AquiMM6uTUUzdHl4RGRZcnE1WWw0SVlLcVlzQWZuVFE&output=html is a useful list though not entirely up-to-date (AAISP who I am currently with, have changed their pricing recently and that is not reflected on there) or detailed (it doesn't mention upstream handling: AAISP do not meter that, some others don't also but with some it is counted against your quota - if you regularly upload gigabytes worth of stuff that could be pretty significant).
5) Ubuntu focused immediately on hardware lists. Simple easy instruction to resolve problems on hardware, rather than opaque instructions. The Ubuntu forums were a huge step forward in Linux to the masses.
Which is why it found a home on my netbook and has stayed there since (9.04 then 9.10, not 10.04 (I'm planning on sticking with that at least until 12.04 turns up and beds in) - the hardware support was there and any issues (and existing workarounds) documented.
I tried 10.04 server-side too, seduced by the long support window, though I've gravitated back to Debian in that area.
Don't expose Sid to the wider Internet though. There are times when upstream security updates are delayed by issues that are keeping a package's dependencies from being upgraded. This state usually only lasts at most a couple of days, but the attitude to it is much different than that for Stable. Chances are Stable won't have the bleeding edge versions (with their bleeding edge issues) anyway, and if it is affected a concerted effort will be made to backport relevant changes or otherwise make the fix work ASAP. Because Sid (and Testing to a lesser extent) is not intended for production use, things are a bit more relaxed at such times - they are more likely to just wait for the dependencies to sort themselves out.
It doesn't happen often (it is usually during times of major upheaval like when a significant change to glibc is being merged in), but it does happen so I'd not use Sid on anything exposed to the outside world.
And if you use aptitude instead of apt-* it does most of the jobs of apt-* and dpkg and a few other bits and bobs. It is essentially a wrapper around the same tools (dpkg, deselect, ...) that apt-* use, but I find it a little more convenient.
For most home users "up to 8Mbit" is perfectly sufficient. You can you youtube, iPlayer and iTunes down 2Mbit just fine much more is nice but not worth paying extra for..
The largest group of people who want FTTC are people on long lines that are heavily speed restricted for that reason, for these people FTTC lifts them from the just-about-good-enough-these-days 2Mbit range. Unfortunately most of these places are not well served by fibre: both Virgin and BT are concentrating on central urban areas where they can serve a larger number of people with the same amount of equipment+effort as less concentrated places, and those central urban areas don't tend to have such long routes between them and the exchange to start with. For people already getting 8Mbit or more from ADSL2+ it often isn't worth the hassle of switching (which means signing up for a 12 or 18 month contract). Another group that faster lines are useful for is student houses where you are likely to find several relatively heavy users, but the 12-to-18 month contract makes the product useless to them as they are likely only in that house for 9 months.
I only switched to FTTC for the better upstream rate - I've gone from getting ~1.2Mbit up to close to ~8.5M (off a sync rate of 9995K) which meant I could bring a few websites and bits literally "in house" and makes my off-site backups more practical. While I can make use of the 31Mbit I see downstream now, the ~12 I was getting before was perfectly sufficient. If I'm shifting anything big enough that the speed bump downstream makes a difference I'll generally still transfer it overnight anyway when I'll be too asleep to notice (it isn't often I decide to grab 10Gbyte of something on the spur the the moment and want it now now now). And I consider myself a pretty heavy user (nearly 150Gbyte downstream already this month, upstream is unmetered so I don't keep an eye on that).
I'm the other way around. I have a pile of ideas forming (I keep them in a notebook for future reference, occasionally scanning through to remind myself of ideas and whittle out the ones I've changed my mind about being interested in), but troube drumming up the enthusiasm to start them. I never get out in time in the evenings to spend time on such projects, and by the time the weekend comes around I'm too burnt out and need the time away from technical stuff (instead spending the weekend trying to be social (which is not one of my core skills but something I keep trying to get better at!), playing with the cat (an excellent distraction from work related stress), reading something unrelated, or just sleeping the week off) to recover.
IF you are good, and have some experience to back up your education and other training.
We've had trouble getting peopled we needed when we advertised a position recently, so if that is anything to go by someone with the right skillset should have no trouble finding work even in these difficult times.
But if you are at stuck at the lower end of the market (either simply due to inexperience, or because your experience is in areas for which demand is currently low) there are a great many people trying to get on the ladder who you will have to compete with.
That is exactly the problem.
Under UK employment and contract law (I have little experience of employment law elsewhere, but I presume many other places have similar provisions) an "all you ever do is ours" clause is considered overly broad and therefor unenforceable. The trouble is that you may have to go to court to get this acknowledged and that won't be cheap. In a loser-pays system like the UK you could refuse to give them the rights, have them take you to court, and have them pay when you win - but you still have to shell out legal costs until the point that you win and that might be something you simply can't afford (though you might be lucky and find a lawyer that will work your case on a no-win-no-fee basis, there are still other costs to consider). In an everyone-pays-and-the-winner-has-to-counter-sue-to-get-their-costs-back system like I believe is how things are generally done in the US this is an even hairier matter.
The other complication is considering whether there is any connection between the work and the business that the company does. The smallest and most tenuous of links might be enough for a separate non-compete clause to come into force, making the question of whether the "all you do" clause is enforceable or not a moot point.
Games, basically.
A few years ago I might have said "work", but since having a decent 'net connection I've stopped having any of the Windows dev tools installed locally and remote into the office instead.
I'm debating what to do about my ageing XP install next time I perform a major upgrade on my desktop machine (I plan to move to an SSD for the system drive next year at some point, while I'm reinstalling the base OS there is little point putting something that old on). Essentially I have three choices: go with Windows 8 if it is out by that time, take Windows 7 instead (and avoid some of the touch-centered interface changes and other things I've hear talk about that may well get on my nerves), or decide that as I don't spend that much time playing games anyway (and that time I could easily fill with other hobbies) I can just let the games go and be a true neck-beard once again, installing Linux as the desktop OS and saving myself the upgrade cost of sticking with Windows.
EFF perhaps?
Or maybe have a quiet word with Apple or MS. Maybe they'll offer you some legal advise out of the, erm, goodness of their hearts.
Or you could just put details of what is your's here along with evidence if anything conclusive exists (that part might be difficult if the contribution was some time ago). That might stop people simply calling BS.
Part of the price you pay covers a little pack of IOPS that comes in the box. If you go for a two year support deal they throw in a few MHz too.
As far as I can tell it is still an issue, though I've had little problems after explicitly turning off VMWare's attempts to sync clocks, installing NTP in the guests, and telling NTP not to worry if the skew changes suddenly ("tinker panic 0" in the config file).
After getting irritated by having to patch VMWare to get it going on recent Ubuntu or Debian releases (anything with a kernel newer than 2.6.32) and knowing that VMWare Server is a dead product anyway I've been tinkering with VirtualBox (I know ESXi is free too, but for our purposes we want a class 2 hypervisor) and have been surprised with it managing this much better. Maybe the VMWare guys should pay them for a little advice in that area.
So why is the lean mean OS going the way of Windows?
It isn't really. That fresh Windows install won't include an office package so you'll probably need another disc worth of Office (or a download of Open/Libre Office), and chances are you'll want something more than Paint if you do anything with graphics so you'll at least be installing Paint.net as an extra. People expect some variant of these things on the first disc of a Linux distro, but not on a fresh Windows install (which in my experience comes on DVDs not CDs now anyway) so it isn't an orangesoranges comparison.
I think they designed for DVD and mastered CD as an afterthought. Debian goes the other way around: you are encouraged to get the netinst ISO instead of a full CD, and they make an effort to make sure the most commonly used packages are on CD 1 (though that isn't perfect as it is based on what most people use rather than what is "core" - PPPoE support isn't on the first DVD for instance which is a pain if you are rebuilding a box that normally runs your Internet connection via PPPoE and you don't have a spare router laying around).
A minimal boot/install ISO has been the standard way to install Debian for as long as I've had decent Internet connectivity (i.e. since I moved off dial-up). It is the "netinst" ISOs, the first linked on the "getting Debian" page (http://www.debian.org/distrib/). You are usually discouraged from grabbing the full CD or DVD ISOs unless you are installing on multiple machines at the same time (at which point there might be a bandwidth saving) or you are planning to install it on something in a situation where bandwidth is limited.
Then again, I don't have any desktop installs of Debian. For headless servers there really is no point grabbing a CD as a large part of it is desktop stuff.
There is little point keeping old larger ISOs around too. If you install from a CD/DVD that is some months old, you end up redownloading most of the packages when you first "aptitude safe-upgrade" anyway.
Experience tells me that if someone wants to censor their contribution to a debate, they made a prize fool of themselves.
I'm going to assume that he is the thickest of the worst deluded fuckwits imaginable, which is probably worse than he comes across in the debate, until such time as I have evidence to the contrary. If he wants to show that he is not quite that thick, and therefore someone whose opinions count for naught, he can release the debate to prove that he didn't make that much of a fool of himself.
I can see RyanAir and friends using this as an excuse to add a new "eBook reader carrying charge" to all flights.