Interesting (I think) question. How much does M$ checking out all these licenses cost them (M$) and how much does it mess up their Total Cost of Ownership arguement. How much does all that lost time showing "compliance" add up to?
I seriously doubt they are counting lost time to audits in those calculations. Just a thought.
No I'm not going to mention the company name, but we are big (fortune 200) and M$ has a very different opinion about the number of licenses we own than we do. There is really little or no intentional piracy going on, but there is bad record keeping which to M$ is no different. They only consider a license to be that hologram code that ships with the computer/CD. No hologram, no legal license. Needless to say, it is not happy days for our IT folks.
Some of it is our fault because we trusted the wrong folks internally to keep track (long story and trust me, you don't care to hear it) but there is a lesson to be learned in making sure someone keeps track of these things. Preferably someone involved with computers...
Of course I'm having a very hard time biting my tongue about how we could avoid this problem in the future. (*cough* linux *cough*)
We have a fairly diverse little network where I work. Our Windows servers are Compaq's and they generally work pretty well. We have an assortment of Thinkpads, Toshiba laptops, Compaq PCs, Dell PCs, an SGI Window box, and a number of other makes plus some unix boxes. I say this just so that I can establish that we have the hardware to compare side by side doing similar, if not identical tasks with identical software.
The Compaq PC have generally been nothing but trouble for our group. They lock up regularly, particularly on CAD or other graphic intensive work. They also are just generally rather flakey. Nothing huge, but it's kind of like the death of a thousand paper cuts. Weirdness with service packs, stability issues, odd software conflicts, etc. It just eats at you little by little until you are ready for some "percussive maintenance".
The other machines we have aren't without their quirks but the Compaq's seem to overall cause the most trouble. It's only the desktop PCs that seem to have issues. The servers and occasional laptop seem to work as well as any other make running Windows. Don't know why this is but it does seem to be an ongoing problem for us.
Linux was and is made by hackers to fill their own needs. A friendly GUI interface was of lesser importance to this group because they didn't need it themselves, and they weren't trying to convince (sell) anyone else on using it. If others did, great but it wasn't a primary motivating force. As the saying goes, they are scratching their own itch, and the interface just doesn't bug them. GNOME was only started because some hackers got an itch due to the restrictive (originally) KDE licenses. This is not to say that projects won't evolve further once started, but the general tendancies of the hacker community lie in other directions besides overt user friendliness.
Apple on the other hand, is a company trying to sell a product. They know darn well that if their product isn't very easy to use, their existing customer base will leave and they will have a hard time attracting new customers. Apple is scratching their own itch. And it appears they are doing a pretty decent job of it too, though only time will tell for sure.
I'm fairly convinced that user friendly GUI's will only become a priority to parts of the linux community with corporate involvement. Companies care about selling products and they will sell more if their products are easy to use. If IBM is going to sell a lot of machines with linux on it, it is in their interest to make linux as attractive as possible to the widest range of customers possible. Ditto for anyone else. Hackers generally don't and won't care.
This article is somewhat frightening to me. While most companies I've worked at attempt to keep quiet about information that could potentially benefit the competition (and rightfully so), most of the time what is regarded as "secret", really isn't very secret.
In most industries and with most products, it is not very hard for anyone with sufficient expertise in the field to understand what a competitor is doing. Heck, if you want to sell a product, you have to tell someone about it. After that your business model and products are pretty open to analysis.
My company makes car parts. There is really very little we have that our competitors don't also. We often pretend like what we are doing is something secret that will give us an advantage, but in reality our competitors are doing the same things. We know what they are doing (generally) and they know what we are doing (generally) so this veneer of secrecy is really just that. Our engineers aren't significantly more (or less) capable and our manufacturing capabilities are comperable. The only real differences are in how we handle our finances, and what intellectual property we happen to own.
The industry of competitive intelligence really isn't so much about finding "secret documents" and industrial spying. (though certainly some of that occurs) Most of it is simply doing a thorough analysis based on publicly available information. You'd be amazed how little really is secret if you are interested enough and willing to spend the time with the info to put the pieces together.
The only time I think a company might have a case for "inevitable disclosure" would be for very high up employees with access to strategic plans or for engineering personel working on not yet released projects (where an attempt at secrecy was maintained) going straight to a direct competitor in a position where that information would be a significant competitive advantage. Other than that, it's none of the company's business. Ever.
Despite the general sleaziness of the concept, (kind of a shakedown if you think about it from a certain perspective) I suspect that a lot of people might lay out the bucks for no-ad TV. I'm going to be curious how successful it will be. I know I use the ISP I do, in part because it's a no-ad service. I suspect a lot of other folks do the same thing. I'd probably pony up a few extra bucks to get TV without ads too.
Will probably never happen of course, since they would probably make more money from the ads. it's nice to dream though...
Bell Labs got divested to Lucent when AT&T spun them off. So unless there is some portion of Bell Labs I don't know about (conceivable) Lucent would be the company responsible here.
I see way too many companies that try to be all things to all people. To have a business become a long term proposition, you need to have some core stuff that you are good at and only add to what you do if it is a good fit. Yes there is lots of opportunity in the world and thinking big is good. However the simple fact is that a single company can't do everything and the very act of trying will kill your business faster than trying to compete head on faster than you can say overextended. Occasionally you find someone who can successfully run disparate businesses (Jack Welch of GE is a good example) but people like that are very rare.
O'reilly seems to have realized this about a part of their business and that is probably a good thing. The company I work for is considerably larger than O'Reilly (fortune 200) and is constantly aquiring and divesting bits of itself because it realizes that it has certain things it's good at and has sufficient profit margins in, and the rest is really just extra baggage. Sometimes the parts we sell are good and well run profitable businesses. They just don't fit so well with our core businesses and the distraction of running them would likely cause more harm than good in the long run.
One of the worst mistakes a business can make is to get too greedy. A lot of the dotcoms died because the didn't have a viable business model, but just as many are dying because they tried to do too much too fast and they simply didn't have the resources to do any of it well. I'm worried about VA for this reason. I like the company and what it is trying to do, but I'm not convinced that the people at the top aren't trying to do too much too fast. I've never been able to figure out how slashdot is a good fit with their business. Yeah it's a part of the linux community, but that doesn't mean it makes good business sense to own it. Maybe there is something I don't see...
The unix vendors are overpriced even for fairly mundane uses such as for engineering workstations, which happens to be what ours was for. They're absolutely thieves when it comes to "mission critical" stuff. Granted, the hardware usually does it's job and the support is great but considering what they charge, it damn well better be great.
Sometimes you just pay the money and it's worth it, but there is no way I could justify the markup for anything less than a mission critical system and even then, there has to be no alternatives. I can't see how anyone could cost justify something like an SGI Octane today except for rare cases where vendor lock in comes into play. (And in case you were wondering, I am typing this on an Octane. Love it but I couldn't justify getting a new one.)
Oh and BTW you don't know a damn thing about my experience and I mentioned hardly anything about them. One simple example and people think they know all your life experiences. Sheesh...
It is very common for the big unix vendors to have obscene markup on anything related to their proprietary systems. Sun, SGI, IBM, HP,... they all do it. If you want official hardware supported by them you're going to pay at least 2-3 times the going rate for the same commodity hardware. CDROM's will cost $500 or more instead of the usual $150 or so we expect. RAM prices from the vendor are out of this world usually.
And if you sign up for "maintenance" (read tech support that is even vaguely useful) you're going to drop a lot of money each year for that too. In some cases, more than you'll end up paying more than the cost of the machine.
Until we got rid of it recently, at work we were paying $18,000 a year in maintenance for an Onyx/2 that was 3 years old. For reference, you can buy a $4000 PC now that is faster than the machine we had. Granted it was a great machine but we certainly were not getting our money's worth.
And people wonder why linux is gaining such a following...
I work for a large fortune 200 manufacturing company. One of the problems we face is precisely due to the location of our facilities.
It's a common practice in manufacturing to locate facilities in very rural areas. This has several benefits. Land is cheap, labor is cheap, unions tend to leave you alone, by being the biggest employer in a small town you get a lot of influence over local regulations, you tend to get a lot of tax breaks, and a few other things. But it also has some drawbacks and one of the biggest is in getting technically skilled workers to work in very rural areas.
People who are skilled with technology and have the corresponding education to go with it, tend not to want to live out in the middle of nowhere. Tech workers tend to be young, educated, and like the lifestyle afforded by living in a more urban (or suburban) area. Not to say there aren't exceptions but as a rule this is very often true. Since technology is daily becoming a bigger part of manufacturing, this is daily becoming a bigger problem. People like to be surrounded by people who want a similar lifestyle to their own.
Lifestyle is important and there is a reason more people live in cities than in the country. People like it that way. If Utah has problems attracting tech workers, you can be quite sure lifestyle has at least something to do with why. I've been to Austin and San Francisco. I understand why those areas might appeal to young tech workers and why Utah might not be at the top of their lists of places to live.
Gee, no Eminem or boy bands. What a tragic loss that would be. Can the economy survive if we can't buy their manufactured tunes? Wouldn't art die if we can't buy millions of comoditized songs from no talent hacks who don't even write their own material, control their own act, or be something besides a walking T&A show?
I saw an interview with the head honcho of Incyte Genomics (a biotech firm which is cataloging the human genome - similar to Celera or the Human Genome Project) and he indicated that the rough number of genes has never really been in doubt. The confusion is that people and getting confused about the difference between a gene and a gene transcript.
Now I'm not a bio-tech geek but I'll try to explain. Your genes are stored in the nucleus of your cells. Genes are composed of DNA. In order to make a protein, a section of your DNA is copied into RNA in a process called transcription. (think of it as copying and pasting a section of code) The RNA is then transported out into little protein factories in your cells and the information contained in the RNA is translated into a protein sequence. (think of translating as changing the code from Perl to C) Proteins are encoded differently than genes so there is a translation process to get the information from one to the other.
Now to get back on topic, there are about 30,000 or so genes in the human body and there are effectively 3 gene transcripts for each gene due to the transport mechanism. Coincidentally this number is about 100,000. So what people are getting confused about is that someone didn't understand the difference between a gene transcript and a gene.
Ultimately understanding gene transcripts and how they form proteins will ultimately be much more important in creating therapies for diseases.
There's an easy solution to leaving your keys hanging around. Use a carabiner to carry your multiple key rings. I've been using one to hold my keys for years. Allows me to get out and get into the house or check my mail without turning the car off. Also can separate whatever keys I need from the rest if I'm going to the mechanic, going out running or whatever. Very convenient. My fiance even uses one now that she saw how convenient it can be.
For those of you who don't know what a carabiner is, it is a sort of retaining ring with a one-way latch. They are (usually) very strong and they are most commonly used by rock/mountain climbers. They're pretty commonly sold as key rings these days. I've seen them at Home Depot recently.
Linux has succeeded so well because of (until recently) the complete lack of frivolous chrome that bogged down
other once-noble systems like DOS.
This has to be a troll but...
"Once-noble systems like DOS? Have you lost your mind? DOS sucked. It was obsolete before it even hit the market, it had incredible numbers of asinine limitations (640K barrier anyone?), was single tasking, awkward to program for, severely lacking in system administration tools, had a rotten file system, no concept of multiple users, and was closed source besides. It was a pathetic knockoff of unix which was only used because there was no real viable alternative.
Sure it was fast but that's because it didn't freakin' do anything. Hard to be slow when you are sitting idle 99.99% of the time.
I keep hearing Transmeta (and others) spout off about the low power requirements of their chip. While that is interesting, I think it really misses the point of what is interesting about Transmeta's chips.
What is interesting about their chips is the abstraction layer and the benefits it provides. No longer is it impossible to update chips to fix flaws in them and no longer is it necessary to have a single vendor for whatever chip the software was designed for. The fact that Transmeta's chips happen to draw very little power doing it is really just a nice byproduct. I think Transmeta is doing itself a disservice by harping on this fact.
Granted, low power consumption is an easier concept to communicate but I think it really misses the bigger picture. In the same way that higher level languages made software development easier than coding in assembly, Transmeta is taking the next step in abstraction. Easing software design barriers is what is truly interesting and revolutionary about what they are doing.
OK, you write tests for everything first. Fine, sounds reasonable. (ignoring for a moment the usual absurd time constraints) Except for, umm... well exactly how do you ensure that your tests aren't broken? Seems a bit of a catch-22...
If your tests aren't telling you what you think they are, then doesn't the whole idea of test first sort of fall into a big gaping hole in the ground?
1) Always do what is best for you and your family. Others may not like it, but they will probably understand.
2) There are other companies and opportunities out there. Your co-workers will manage just fine, especially if they are as talented as you say they are.
3) 90% of the problems in any organization are directly or indirectly the fault of poor management. If they have done badly to this point, there is little reason to believe things will change now.
4) If you can help some of your co-workers later on, by all means do so. You never know when you might need a hand later on. Karma ya know?
5) A job is a contract (of sorts) between you and your employer. They reimburse you, usually financially but sometimes in other ways, for the use of your skills and time. The details of this agreement are largely what each party is willing to agree to and is highly flexible. If the work for whatever reason is not worth the compensation you are getting, (financial or otherwise) then excercise your right as one of the parties and move on with your life.
Perception becomes reality
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Is there any/much evidence that MSNBC has done anything that would decrease their credibility? Other than just
the image thing?
That's just the issue though. Credibility is entirely a matter of perception/image. It doesn't necessarily matter that they actually may have been responsible in their reporting. If people percieve a bias, real or not, then their credibility is shot.
Now I'm not saying they have or haven't shown any bias. I don't watch MSNBC so I wouldn't really know. But I personally would tend to take what they say with a decent sized hunk of salt regarding tech issues just because of who pays the bills. (no pun intended) I doubt I am alone in this though I also doubt very many people have thought very deeply about it.
You know what the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman is?
The car salesman knows he's lying to you!
Re:The Author of this article just doesn't get it.
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But there is a war. Or at least a serious competition
I'm not so sure the "beat the evil empire" thing is altogether bad. I agree that most efforts seem to be an attempt to out-Windows Windows and that probably isn't inherently good. However it does provide a competitive influence as a driver. Windows sets a benchmark to beat. Right now linux is beating that benchmark in some ways and has a ways to go in other areas. But without Windows (or some similar dominant system) I seriously doubt that linux would be getting as much development effort as it is. You have to admit that there are more than a few developers working on linux simply because they don't like Windows/Microsoft.
Linus himself may not be at war, but for better or worse a lot of linux developers certainly are.
I can see a point here, but only kind of. Traditionally, when you dial a number with a "1" at the front, you are going to get charged. Without the "1" it is free. All of that is out the window with this change.
This isn't true anymore (and hasn't been for a while now) because from a technical standpoint the phone company no longer needs you to dial a "1" before a number. The reason there was a 1 in front of the number is so that when you picked up the line dialing the "1" switched you to a line outside the local exchange. Usually this meant extra charges and hence we associate it with long distance. Think of it as being similar to dialing "9" at your office to get an outside line.
Today however, a lot of the phone equipment is computer controlled and packet switched so there is no technical reason for any phone company (at least in the US) to force you to dial a "1" before any number. Those areas that do it, do it mostly for historical reasons. (and for the odd area that hasn't been upgraded yet)
then the company was doing something wrong. Might be they weren't paying enough. Might be work environment issues. Might be the boss was a jerk. Whatever. The company is at fault if the employees leave after training. Period.
Anyone who signs a contract in order to receive training is an idiot. If they want you to do a good job, they will afford you the training and tools necessary to do so. It should always be assumed that there will be some training necessary for any position. (occasionally not true, but rarely in my experience)
Any company that has employees leaving after training needs to take a very hard look at why. If the pay isn't competitive or the work environment sucks, then fix it. Your employees should not be able to get significantly better offers elsewhere.
The idea of a mandatory service period in exchange for training is ridiculous. Training is a part of the cost of hiring someone. If you don't want them to learn and get better, then your company is never going to improve and will slowly lose ground to competitors. A company's employees are the most important asset any company has. If they aren't being treated as such it should not be surprising that they are going elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously doubt they are counting lost time to audits in those calculations. Just a thought.
Some of it is our fault because we trusted the wrong folks internally to keep track (long story and trust me, you don't care to hear it) but there is a lesson to be learned in making sure someone keeps track of these things. Preferably someone involved with computers...
Of course I'm having a very hard time biting my tongue about how we could avoid this problem in the future. (*cough* linux *cough*)
The Compaq PC have generally been nothing but trouble for our group. They lock up regularly, particularly on CAD or other graphic intensive work. They also are just generally rather flakey. Nothing huge, but it's kind of like the death of a thousand paper cuts. Weirdness with service packs, stability issues, odd software conflicts, etc. It just eats at you little by little until you are ready for some "percussive maintenance".
The other machines we have aren't without their quirks but the Compaq's seem to overall cause the most trouble. It's only the desktop PCs that seem to have issues. The servers and occasional laptop seem to work as well as any other make running Windows. Don't know why this is but it does seem to be an ongoing problem for us.
Apple on the other hand, is a company trying to sell a product. They know darn well that if their product isn't very easy to use, their existing customer base will leave and they will have a hard time attracting new customers. Apple is scratching their own itch. And it appears they are doing a pretty decent job of it too, though only time will tell for sure.
I'm fairly convinced that user friendly GUI's will only become a priority to parts of the linux community with corporate involvement. Companies care about selling products and they will sell more if their products are easy to use. If IBM is going to sell a lot of machines with linux on it, it is in their interest to make linux as attractive as possible to the widest range of customers possible. Ditto for anyone else. Hackers generally don't and won't care.
In most industries and with most products, it is not very hard for anyone with sufficient expertise in the field to understand what a competitor is doing. Heck, if you want to sell a product, you have to tell someone about it. After that your business model and products are pretty open to analysis.
My company makes car parts. There is really very little we have that our competitors don't also. We often pretend like what we are doing is something secret that will give us an advantage, but in reality our competitors are doing the same things. We know what they are doing (generally) and they know what we are doing (generally) so this veneer of secrecy is really just that. Our engineers aren't significantly more (or less) capable and our manufacturing capabilities are comperable. The only real differences are in how we handle our finances, and what intellectual property we happen to own.
The industry of competitive intelligence really isn't so much about finding "secret documents" and industrial spying. (though certainly some of that occurs) Most of it is simply doing a thorough analysis based on publicly available information. You'd be amazed how little really is secret if you are interested enough and willing to spend the time with the info to put the pieces together.
The only time I think a company might have a case for "inevitable disclosure" would be for very high up employees with access to strategic plans or for engineering personel working on not yet released projects (where an attempt at secrecy was maintained) going straight to a direct competitor in a position where that information would be a significant competitive advantage. Other than that, it's none of the company's business. Ever.
Will probably never happen of course, since they would probably make more money from the ads. it's nice to dream though...
Bell Labs got divested to Lucent when AT&T spun them off. So unless there is some portion of Bell Labs I don't know about (conceivable) Lucent would be the company responsible here.
O'reilly seems to have realized this about a part of their business and that is probably a good thing. The company I work for is considerably larger than O'Reilly (fortune 200) and is constantly aquiring and divesting bits of itself because it realizes that it has certain things it's good at and has sufficient profit margins in, and the rest is really just extra baggage. Sometimes the parts we sell are good and well run profitable businesses. They just don't fit so well with our core businesses and the distraction of running them would likely cause more harm than good in the long run.
One of the worst mistakes a business can make is to get too greedy. A lot of the dotcoms died because the didn't have a viable business model, but just as many are dying because they tried to do too much too fast and they simply didn't have the resources to do any of it well. I'm worried about VA for this reason. I like the company and what it is trying to do, but I'm not convinced that the people at the top aren't trying to do too much too fast. I've never been able to figure out how slashdot is a good fit with their business. Yeah it's a part of the linux community, but that doesn't mean it makes good business sense to own it. Maybe there is something I don't see...
Make it stop... please...
The unix vendors are overpriced even for fairly mundane uses such as for engineering workstations, which happens to be what ours was for. They're absolutely thieves when it comes to "mission critical" stuff. Granted, the hardware usually does it's job and the support is great but considering what they charge, it damn well better be great.
Sometimes you just pay the money and it's worth it, but there is no way I could justify the markup for anything less than a mission critical system and even then, there has to be no alternatives. I can't see how anyone could cost justify something like an SGI Octane today except for rare cases where vendor lock in comes into play. (And in case you were wondering, I am typing this on an Octane. Love it but I couldn't justify getting a new one.)
Oh and BTW you don't know a damn thing about my experience and I mentioned hardly anything about them. One simple example and people think they know all your life experiences. Sheesh...
And if you sign up for "maintenance" (read tech support that is even vaguely useful) you're going to drop a lot of money each year for that too. In some cases, more than you'll end up paying more than the cost of the machine. Until we got rid of it recently, at work we were paying $18,000 a year in maintenance for an Onyx/2 that was 3 years old. For reference, you can buy a $4000 PC now that is faster than the machine we had. Granted it was a great machine but we certainly were not getting our money's worth.
And people wonder why linux is gaining such a following...
It's a common practice in manufacturing to locate facilities in very rural areas. This has several benefits. Land is cheap, labor is cheap, unions tend to leave you alone, by being the biggest employer in a small town you get a lot of influence over local regulations, you tend to get a lot of tax breaks, and a few other things. But it also has some drawbacks and one of the biggest is in getting technically skilled workers to work in very rural areas.
People who are skilled with technology and have the corresponding education to go with it, tend not to want to live out in the middle of nowhere. Tech workers tend to be young, educated, and like the lifestyle afforded by living in a more urban (or suburban) area. Not to say there aren't exceptions but as a rule this is very often true. Since technology is daily becoming a bigger part of manufacturing, this is daily becoming a bigger problem. People like to be surrounded by people who want a similar lifestyle to their own.
Lifestyle is important and there is a reason more people live in cities than in the country. People like it that way. If Utah has problems attracting tech workers, you can be quite sure lifestyle has at least something to do with why. I've been to Austin and San Francisco. I understand why those areas might appeal to young tech workers and why Utah might not be at the top of their lists of places to live.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls...
Now I'm not a bio-tech geek but I'll try to explain. Your genes are stored in the nucleus of your cells. Genes are composed of DNA. In order to make a protein, a section of your DNA is copied into RNA in a process called transcription. (think of it as copying and pasting a section of code) The RNA is then transported out into little protein factories in your cells and the information contained in the RNA is translated into a protein sequence. (think of translating as changing the code from Perl to C) Proteins are encoded differently than genes so there is a translation process to get the information from one to the other.
Now to get back on topic, there are about 30,000 or so genes in the human body and there are effectively 3 gene transcripts for each gene due to the transport mechanism. Coincidentally this number is about 100,000. So what people are getting confused about is that someone didn't understand the difference between a gene transcript and a gene.
Ultimately understanding gene transcripts and how they form proteins will ultimately be much more important in creating therapies for diseases.
For those of you who don't know what a carabiner is, it is a sort of retaining ring with a one-way latch. They are (usually) very strong and they are most commonly used by rock/mountain climbers. They're pretty commonly sold as key rings these days. I've seen them at Home Depot recently.
This has to be a troll but...
"Once-noble systems like DOS? Have you lost your mind? DOS sucked. It was obsolete before it even hit the market, it had incredible numbers of asinine limitations (640K barrier anyone?), was single tasking, awkward to program for, severely lacking in system administration tools, had a rotten file system, no concept of multiple users, and was closed source besides. It was a pathetic knockoff of unix which was only used because there was no real viable alternative.
Sure it was fast but that's because it didn't freakin' do anything. Hard to be slow when you are sitting idle 99.99% of the time.
What is interesting about their chips is the abstraction layer and the benefits it provides. No longer is it impossible to update chips to fix flaws in them and no longer is it necessary to have a single vendor for whatever chip the software was designed for. The fact that Transmeta's chips happen to draw very little power doing it is really just a nice byproduct. I think Transmeta is doing itself a disservice by harping on this fact.
Granted, low power consumption is an easier concept to communicate but I think it really misses the bigger picture. In the same way that higher level languages made software development easier than coding in assembly, Transmeta is taking the next step in abstraction. Easing software design barriers is what is truly interesting and revolutionary about what they are doing.
If your tests aren't telling you what you think they are, then doesn't the whole idea of test first sort of fall into a big gaping hole in the ground?
Not meant to be a troll, just curious.
2) There are other companies and opportunities out there. Your co-workers will manage just fine, especially if they are as talented as you say they are.
3) 90% of the problems in any organization are directly or indirectly the fault of poor management. If they have done badly to this point, there is little reason to believe things will change now.
4) If you can help some of your co-workers later on, by all means do so. You never know when you might need a hand later on. Karma ya know?
5) A job is a contract (of sorts) between you and your employer. They reimburse you, usually financially but sometimes in other ways, for the use of your skills and time. The details of this agreement are largely what each party is willing to agree to and is highly flexible. If the work for whatever reason is not worth the compensation you are getting, (financial or otherwise) then excercise your right as one of the parties and move on with your life.
That's just the issue though. Credibility is entirely a matter of perception/image. It doesn't necessarily matter that they actually may have been responsible in their reporting. If people percieve a bias, real or not, then their credibility is shot.
Now I'm not saying they have or haven't shown any bias. I don't watch MSNBC so I wouldn't really know. But I personally would tend to take what they say with a decent sized hunk of salt regarding tech issues just because of who pays the bills. (no pun intended) I doubt I am alone in this though I also doubt very many people have thought very deeply about it.
The car salesman knows he's lying to you!
I'm not so sure the "beat the evil empire" thing is altogether bad. I agree that most efforts seem to be an attempt to out-Windows Windows and that probably isn't inherently good. However it does provide a competitive influence as a driver. Windows sets a benchmark to beat. Right now linux is beating that benchmark in some ways and has a ways to go in other areas. But without Windows (or some similar dominant system) I seriously doubt that linux would be getting as much development effort as it is. You have to admit that there are more than a few developers working on linux simply because they don't like Windows/Microsoft.
Linus himself may not be at war, but for better or worse a lot of linux developers certainly are.
This isn't true anymore (and hasn't been for a while now) because from a technical standpoint the phone company no longer needs you to dial a "1" before a number. The reason there was a 1 in front of the number is so that when you picked up the line dialing the "1" switched you to a line outside the local exchange. Usually this meant extra charges and hence we associate it with long distance. Think of it as being similar to dialing "9" at your office to get an outside line.
Today however, a lot of the phone equipment is computer controlled and packet switched so there is no technical reason for any phone company (at least in the US) to force you to dial a "1" before any number. Those areas that do it, do it mostly for historical reasons. (and for the odd area that hasn't been upgraded yet)
Anyone who signs a contract in order to receive training is an idiot. If they want you to do a good job, they will afford you the training and tools necessary to do so. It should always be assumed that there will be some training necessary for any position. (occasionally not true, but rarely in my experience)
Any company that has employees leaving after training needs to take a very hard look at why. If the pay isn't competitive or the work environment sucks, then fix it. Your employees should not be able to get significantly better offers elsewhere.
The idea of a mandatory service period in exchange for training is ridiculous. Training is a part of the cost of hiring someone. If you don't want them to learn and get better, then your company is never going to improve and will slowly lose ground to competitors. A company's employees are the most important asset any company has. If they aren't being treated as such it should not be surprising that they are going elsewhere.