And what do you do when the HR department is just a rubber stamp? When everyone in upper management, including senior HR, brags about their coziness with each other? The option of a graceful exit is removed.
Because signing means that if you download (for example) the Yahoo toolbar you can see and inspect the signature against it and determine it really was written by Yahoo.
Sorry, you were a contractor. You don't get to speculate and do all kinds of things of volunteery things as a contractor and bill by the hour for it; you get to bill for the time spent on things your client asks you for. I would have asked for my money back too, not because your tool is bad (its quality is 100% irrelevant) but because I didn't approve it. Either get approval for it or don't bill for it. You're lucky they didn't sue your employer for your fraudulent billing practices.
My coworker has a Sanyo phone with Sprint service. He cannot send or receive SMS without going through the WAP interface. He has called customer service to confirm this, and they said he must purchase a new phone in order to have true SMS functionality.
It is absolutely not transparent to the user. If I send him SMS he has to sit there and wait for 5 minutes for the slow WAP site. Strangely if I send him an email to xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com it goes straight to his phone, but he cannot reply.
If you don't believe me I will get him to post here.
What we have with copyrights and domain names seems (using a Real Estate metaphor) more like someone lawfully buys some land, then Wal-Mart comes along and sues the buyer for the land because they planned to build a store there in 5 years. It's only a form of squatting if someone occupies land (or a domain name) without purchasing it lawfully. The place this argument fails to equate to copyright law and names would be the implicit assumption that ONLY Wal-Mart could build a store on your land, limiting who could buy the land later (effectively creating a monopoly).
I assume by your use of hypothetical terminology that you haven't seen the abuses of eminent domain by Wal-Mart, as well as the way localities bend over backwards for them...
Your Windows 95 example ignores the fact that Microsoft's product releases have improvements that become more and more incremental over time. For example:
DOS/16-bit Windows to NT 3.51 provided a properly architected, natively 32-bit, cross platform kernel with preemptive multitasking.
NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 provided an entirely new user interface, faster performance, etc.
NT 4.0 to 5.0 provided Active Directory.
NT 5.0 to 5.1 provided... um... themes.
In many cases newer versions actually provide a functionality regression. Note that many of the performance gains in NT 4.0 came from moving the video drivers into ring 0, thereby reducing overall system stability. Also notice that the contextual help in Office 2003 is completely useless, for example.
With the speed that community-maintained projects tend to implement features once a critical mass of basic functionality is attained, Microsoft could very easily hurt their own future business by releasing older versions of their code to the public. They would potentially end up in the same situation as a free software vendor: trading on their reputation as the original authors to provide customizations and technical support. And we all know how bad Microsoft tends to be both at caring about the needs of the individual business, and at providing technical support.
I don't have any illusions as to the reasons for support of OSS by large corporations. However, you say this as if a balancing of adversarial interests is a negative. In other systems it's called "checks and balances", and tends to be rather highly regarded.
As a side note, I can assure you -- having worked at Sun -- that the goal of OpenOffice was not merely to "suck some of the air out of Microsoft". OpenOffice (and the branded version, StarOffice) can run on Solaris/Sparc just as it can on Win32/x86. If enterprise users can be persuaded to migrate from MSOffice/Win32/x86 to OpenOffice/Win32/x86, they might later be persuaded to migrate from x86 workstations to a high-powered Sun server and SunFire terminals. At that point Sun has it made; they can sell systems, expansion components, service contracts, etc.
Theo de Raadt used to contribute to NetBSD until there was a falling out. At that point he felt that it wasn't worth his time to contribute to the project. His view is that people should use OpenBSD rather than NetBSD. Isn't this what every vendor thinks? At least his source is public; he could just as easily have closed it.
That's what a fork is. The same thing happened to XFree86; they annoyed one too many people and suddenly everyone disowned them. And there's been a flurry of X11 development since. XEmacs similarly pressured FSF Emacs to catch up -- eventually -- on some architectural and feature improvements that RMS was too stubborn to include originally, and provided a choice for users that wanted features RMS didn't like but JWZ did. I don't necessarily view forking as a wholesale negative when the source is open; certainly there are downsides to it but forcing users to choose which maintainer takes a better overall approach can have positive aspects as well. I also suspect the threat of forking with regard to ego, support contracts, and professional reputation also tends to force package maintainers to behave in a more cooperative manner than they perhaps might otherwise.
I don't endorse or condemn the history behind OpenBSD; the only BSD I use is FreeBSD so I'm not a partisan for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. But that history is what it is, and I have to wonder whether, when Theo started feeling that his contributions were unwelcome, you would rather have had him stop releasing his code entirely, or fork his project.
Here's what I sent to Google. I had to resubmit their form several times as their Python script kept giving me 0-length responses. I wonder if their comment system is under some load? *smirk*
~~~
I have several complaints about the new groups interface. I had checked it out some time before but immediately gave up on it. I assumed that it would become at least as usable as the current groups interface. Feel free to verify this; my accounts are vsync@quadium.net and vsync128@gmail.com. I just saw the Slashdot article about it and checked it out again.
1. I tried the "original message" feature and noticed that it seems to be missing a lot of the headers. I don't know if this is a new problem but it is very distressing.
2. There is no date search. I recently was doing some research, attempting to find a particular Usenet commentary on the movie. The only way I was able to find what I wanted was by selecting a date range close to the release date of the movie. But hey, if you think that's less processor intensive than me doing a search of all posts ever, then looking through each page of results, more power to you. I won't waste my time personally, of course; I'll write a script to search the results of your search.
3. I like the ability to star topics. This is useful and reminds me of what Gnus can do. However why can't I star an old topic? The usefulness of starring, or "ticking" as it was called when it was invented the first time, is that you can later go back and see messages old enough to have fallen off the front page. Particularly if I had to hunt through the archives. What, you want me to scribble down Message-IDs on a Post-It? That is if you don't start masking Message-IDs too, or making a message lookup impossible.
4. You claim you plan to "[not] be evil". However now you hide the group hierarchy under "Browse all of Usenet", requiring an extra click for me. What is much worse is that you provide a "friendly" view of the group categories. It seems that you are trying to be like AOL and encourage non-technical users to think Usenet is the place for them, with their top-quoting and their spam and their poor spelling and their failure to understand threading. No good can come of this. I encourage you to Google for "the September that never ended".
5. I have my browser's monospace font set to "Andale Mono", an excellent font that is very easy to read. However your interface hard-codes the "Courier New" font for proper viewing of messages, and some inane sans-serif _thing_ for the default view of messages. This is highly improper. Most browsers use "Courier New" for monospace by default, meaning that the only reason I would ever change my preference is if I specifically want something other than Courier New. Why do you feel a need to trample on my UI preferences? And why isn't there an option to toggle, on a per-account basis, the sans-serif font used for body text in violation of all typographical guidelines and the glaringly white background?
6. This email address munging nonsense is a bad idea. Any spammers will simply get a real Usenet connection. And it's horrible to read a technical newsgroup, copy a diff from the message, and attempt to patch software with it, only to find out that your parsing software has decided that a particular string of characters containing "@" was an email address and helpfully "masked" (try the word "munged", which is more accurate, as it implies the annoying and irrevocable loss of useful information).
7. Why when I click on a particular message is the interface to do anything else on Google Groups hidden away in a tiny section of the upper left of the navigation frame? One of the nice things about Google is that there is seemingly a search box on every page. Way to discourage tangential research.
8. Why is your word wrap algorithm broken, and why are you even word wrapping? Usenet is fixed width, period. Sorry. If you must wrap and give people a broken view of the wo
You can disable the "popups blocked" message by left-clicking (yes, left) on the yellow bar to bring up a popup menu, then select "Don't show this message when popups are blocked". For plugins, set plugin.default_plugin_disabled to false in about:config or wherever. I usually chmod 0 libnullplugin.so too, for good measure.
I didn't use find in page much didn't even notice its absence but it was useful to search for something on Google, then change the search type and find the exact instance of my phrase on the result page.
Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience in the channel. It certainly seemed more geared toward highly optimistic advocacy than helping users. I was outright ignored when I asked about my build problems on FreeBSD, as well as about the same UI issues you mentioned.
Don't be fatuous. Just like all these stores have a totally voluntary return process in which you trade UCC regulations for the ability to purchase food and clothing.
For the record, the Washington Post does have intrusive registration. Every time I go to look at a story and I haven't preloaded their cookie, their blocker comes into play and gives me the smarmy message "it's free and it's required". I can just imagine the insulting smirk on their webmaster's face. Well guess what. It's not required. And I click away to read something else. Just like I ignore the music industry and most of what the movie industry puts out.
In your high-and-mighty tirade, did you stop to notice that Michael actually followed your recommendation exactly? He explained that he wasn't using their site, then went further and explained why and what about their policies he found objectionable. It sounds like he's using the free market to his advantage, and not compromising his preferences. Meanwhile you're mocking the attempts of others to use reason to change the world according to their preferences.
I don't know where your attempt at a snarky aside regarding Slashdot subscriptions came from. Perhaps you are attempting to emulate Michael's use of irony? You fail, however, when the alert reader notes that Slashdot does not require that you subscribe, or even exist in its database at all in order to view its content. If you wanted to be clever, you could have mentioned how Slashdot autoblocks IPs and address blocks that post too many downrated comments, or that act as proxy servers. That would have been relevant to the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't Monad supposed to provide that? I hear it's available for download nowadays... I should download it and check it out at some point.
The schools have to be better than Florida's, where I'm stuck now, and I'm betting it's more humid here...
Why, had you tipped them with a $2 bill also?
Courier IMAPD does as well, and installing it using the FreeBSD port was a breeze.
And what do you do when the HR department is just a rubber stamp? When everyone in upper management, including senior HR, brags about their coziness with each other? The option of a graceful exit is removed.
I assume AC is referring to case sensitivity in the filesystem.
Common Lisp has complex numbers natively.
killall was the one that got me. Once.
s/best manager talent/most popular manager talent/
Sorry, you were a contractor. You don't get to speculate and do all kinds of things of volunteery things as a contractor and bill by the hour for it; you get to bill for the time spent on things your client asks you for. I would have asked for my money back too, not because your tool is bad (its quality is 100% irrelevant) but because I didn't approve it. Either get approval for it or don't bill for it. You're lucky they didn't sue your employer for your fraudulent billing practices.
This is silly. Subversion already exists.
It is absolutely not transparent to the user. If I send him SMS he has to sit there and wait for 5 minutes for the slow WAP site. Strangely if I send him an email to xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com it goes straight to his phone, but he cannot reply.
If you don't believe me I will get him to post here.
Because, idiot, Google Groups is not the only interface to access Usenet.
Do you not understand that these people have already published their email addresses to the world? Google Groups is not the sole Usenet agent.
- DOS/16-bit Windows to NT 3.51 provided a properly architected, natively 32-bit, cross platform kernel with preemptive multitasking.
- NT 3.51 to NT 4.0 provided an entirely new user interface, faster performance, etc.
- NT 4.0 to 5.0 provided Active Directory.
- NT 5.0 to 5.1 provided
... um ... themes.
In many cases newer versions actually provide a functionality regression. Note that many of the performance gains in NT 4.0 came from moving the video drivers into ring 0, thereby reducing overall system stability. Also notice that the contextual help in Office 2003 is completely useless, for example.With the speed that community-maintained projects tend to implement features once a critical mass of basic functionality is attained, Microsoft could very easily hurt their own future business by releasing older versions of their code to the public. They would potentially end up in the same situation as a free software vendor: trading on their reputation as the original authors to provide customizations and technical support. And we all know how bad Microsoft tends to be both at caring about the needs of the individual business, and at providing technical support.
As a side note, I can assure you -- having worked at Sun -- that the goal of OpenOffice was not merely to "suck some of the air out of Microsoft". OpenOffice (and the branded version, StarOffice) can run on Solaris/Sparc just as it can on Win32/x86. If enterprise users can be persuaded to migrate from MSOffice/Win32/x86 to OpenOffice/Win32/x86, they might later be persuaded to migrate from x86 workstations to a high-powered Sun server and SunFire terminals. At that point Sun has it made; they can sell systems, expansion components, service contracts, etc.
That's what a fork is. The same thing happened to XFree86; they annoyed one too many people and suddenly everyone disowned them. And there's been a flurry of X11 development since. XEmacs similarly pressured FSF Emacs to catch up -- eventually -- on some architectural and feature improvements that RMS was too stubborn to include originally, and provided a choice for users that wanted features RMS didn't like but JWZ did. I don't necessarily view forking as a wholesale negative when the source is open; certainly there are downsides to it but forcing users to choose which maintainer takes a better overall approach can have positive aspects as well. I also suspect the threat of forking with regard to ego, support contracts, and professional reputation also tends to force package maintainers to behave in a more cooperative manner than they perhaps might otherwise.
I don't endorse or condemn the history behind OpenBSD; the only BSD I use is FreeBSD so I'm not a partisan for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. But that history is what it is, and I have to wonder whether, when Theo started feeling that his contributions were unwelcome, you would rather have had him stop releasing his code entirely, or fork his project.
Here's what I sent to Google. I had to resubmit their form several times as their Python script kept giving me 0-length responses. I wonder if their comment system is under some load? *smirk*
~~~
I have several complaints about the new groups interface. I had checked it out some time before but immediately gave up on it. I assumed that it would become at least as usable as the current groups interface. Feel free to verify this; my accounts are vsync@quadium.net and vsync128@gmail.com. I just saw the Slashdot article about it and checked it out again.
1. I tried the "original message" feature and noticed that it seems to be missing a lot of the headers. I don't know if this is a new problem but it is very distressing.
2. There is no date search. I recently was doing some research, attempting to find a particular Usenet commentary on the movie. The only way I was able to find what I wanted was by selecting a date range close to the release date of the movie. But hey, if you think that's less processor intensive than me doing a search of all posts ever, then looking through each page of results, more power to you. I won't waste my time personally, of course; I'll write a script to search the results of your search.
3. I like the ability to star topics. This is useful and reminds me of what Gnus can do. However why can't I star an old topic? The usefulness of starring, or "ticking" as it was called when it was invented the first time, is that you can later go back and see messages old enough to have fallen off the front page. Particularly if I had to hunt through the archives. What, you want me to scribble down Message-IDs on a Post-It? That is if you don't start masking Message-IDs too, or making a message lookup impossible.
4. You claim you plan to "[not] be evil". However now you hide the group hierarchy under "Browse all of Usenet", requiring an extra click for me. What is much worse is that you provide a "friendly" view of the group categories. It seems that you are trying to be like AOL and encourage non-technical users to think Usenet is the place for them, with their top-quoting and their spam and their poor spelling and their failure to understand threading. No good can come of this. I encourage you to Google for "the September that never ended".
5. I have my browser's monospace font set to "Andale Mono", an excellent font that is very easy to read. However your interface hard-codes the "Courier New" font for proper viewing of messages, and some inane sans-serif _thing_ for the default view of messages. This is highly improper. Most browsers use "Courier New" for monospace by default, meaning that the only reason I would ever change my preference is if I specifically want something other than Courier New. Why do you feel a need to trample on my UI preferences? And why isn't there an option to toggle, on a per-account basis, the sans-serif font used for body text in violation of all typographical guidelines and the glaringly white background?
6. This email address munging nonsense is a bad idea. Any spammers will simply get a real Usenet connection. And it's horrible to read a technical newsgroup, copy a diff from the message, and attempt to patch software with it, only to find out that your parsing software has decided that a particular string of characters containing "@" was an email address and helpfully "masked" (try the word "munged", which is more accurate, as it implies the annoying and irrevocable loss of useful information).
7. Why when I click on a particular message is the interface to do anything else on Google Groups hidden away in a tiny section of the upper left of the navigation frame? One of the nice things about Google is that there is seemingly a search box on every page. Way to discourage tangential research.
8. Why is your word wrap algorithm broken, and why are you even word wrapping? Usenet is fixed width, period. Sorry. If you must wrap and give people a broken view of the wo
You went a month without making backups of any kind or doing any commits to your versioning system? That's ... not a good plan.
I didn't use find in page much didn't even notice its absence but it was useful to search for something on Google, then change the search type and find the exact instance of my phrase on the result page.
Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience in the channel. It certainly seemed more geared toward highly optimistic advocacy than helping users. I was outright ignored when I asked about my build problems on FreeBSD, as well as about the same UI issues you mentioned.
For the record, the Washington Post does have intrusive registration. Every time I go to look at a story and I haven't preloaded their cookie, their blocker comes into play and gives me the smarmy message "it's free and it's required". I can just imagine the insulting smirk on their webmaster's face. Well guess what. It's not required. And I click away to read something else. Just like I ignore the music industry and most of what the movie industry puts out.
In your high-and-mighty tirade, did you stop to notice that Michael actually followed your recommendation exactly? He explained that he wasn't using their site, then went further and explained why and what about their policies he found objectionable. It sounds like he's using the free market to his advantage, and not compromising his preferences. Meanwhile you're mocking the attempts of others to use reason to change the world according to their preferences.
I don't know where your attempt at a snarky aside regarding Slashdot subscriptions came from. Perhaps you are attempting to emulate Michael's use of irony? You fail, however, when the alert reader notes that Slashdot does not require that you subscribe, or even exist in its database at all in order to view its content. If you wanted to be clever, you could have mentioned how Slashdot autoblocks IPs and address blocks that post too many downrated comments, or that act as proxy servers. That would have been relevant to the discussion.