No. If his stress level increases dramatically when I ask him questions about what's in his baggage? Yes.
Yeah, asking questions may actually work, provided you adequately train and pay the security personel executing such interviews. The Israelis are very good at that and nothing happened in Tel Aviv for, literally, decades.
My last encounters with US airline or security personel (which admitedly was in 2002) was that some dumb bimbo, or some illetarate, minimum wage drone is going through some script with the verve and gusto of an average call center agent. (They don't usually do that shtick in Europe, maybe because it's friggin' useless if not done by well trained, versed and compensated personel)
You're suggestion is not a bad one, if executed correctly, but except for my experience with the Israelis this "interview" affair is a sad joke.
Either you guys insist on paying minimum wage for some high school dropouts or you pay and train security personel well. As long as it has to be cheapcheapcheap the best security you can hope for are the new, snazzy combat uniforms of said highschool dropouts.
No, that would be Sony BMG, not Sony. Er! Which is a joint-venture between the Sony Corporation and Bertelsmann.
You know, whenever I read this very statement I'm reminded of some PR shill trying to confuse this really shitty thing (not to mention, criminal act) which a Sony subsidiary pulled off.
In case you were interested Sony/BMG was formed by the combination of spinoffs Sony Music and 'B'ertelsmann 'M'usic 'G'roup, with all of the higher ups from the Bertelsmann side. It is 50/50 owned by Sony and Bertelsmann.
This is true, of course, but doesn't discount the fact that it is the content arm owned by Sony (apart from the Sony/BMG joint venture Columbia Pictures), which seems to call the shots for the last two decades
In this time they morphed from one of the most innovative electronics companies to a bunch of frothing control freaks that design products, which are proprietary, locked down to hell and then some and generally aim right in the other direction of what consumers want.
Case in point? Until 2005 Sonys portable audio players didn't natively support MP3. You where forced to transcode your music with this abyssimal piece of crapware called SonicStage to the proprietary Atrac format, which nobody used (Japan may be an exception) and nobody liked.
I really couldn't care less what Sony/BMGs corporate structure is. With the rootkit fiasco combined with the paranoya-design methodology that they apply to their products Sony managed it onto my eternal shitlist.
I fondly remember the moment when the datasette was finally replaced by a floppy disk drive (5 1/4"). That sucker was almost as expensive as a cheap laptop nowadays. Oh yeah, and we hole punched the disks at the edge, so that it could be used double sided. (For the youngsters: A 10 pack diskettes where around 40$).
Fairly recently I installed an emulator on my Nokia 9300 (which actually has the better screen resolution) and while it does bring some nostalgic feelings back it's not the same.
It probably had to be that fairly ugly box crammed in between a stack of books and an ashtray with the remainders of the spliffs.
Under the agreement, the price of making a call while abroad will be capped at 0.49 per minute, before VAT. While existing roaming charges vary widely, they are generally significantly higher.
from the same article:
A four-minute call home by a French customer in Italy costs 4.72 ($6.39, £3.19), while an Austrian phoning home from Malta would pay 9.51, according to EU data.
For your other reasoning (and that's a guess): A Verizon customer, residing in LA uses the Verizon network while visiting New York. While a Berlin resident may use the Vodafone network in Prague.
It is a bit creative to compare calls with the same company to actual roaming where a different network provides the service.
The article can be found here
Ultimately these corporate entities are out to make money within a certain set of rules.
While this is true they can't just behave as badly as their US bretheren, or they'll get a good whacking by some EU commissioner.
Case in point: Their partially outrageous roaming charges where heavily capped this year, since they failed to regulate themselfs in any serious and tiemly manner.
You made my point more eloquently then I ever could. Actually my original point, which seems to have started this pissfest, is that I refuse to be treated as a crook by a vendor who just took my money. And a lot of it. (Many posters apparently believe that Microsoft sells in Europe for the same prices as in the US, hell! They price gouge what they can. Is anybody surprised?)
There's no question that you should use the right platform for the right job. Personally I deal with databases. Since this is very server based software Linux/Unix is definitely the best plaform. If you're doing graphics design you don't necessarily want a laptop, which is good in databases. And yeah, that's simplified...
OpenOffice; Granted. There are a lot of environments that can't just switch away from MS Office and the tight integration into the MS Server monoculture. But as an office suite it is definitely high quality. As a matter of fact it does a few things worse then Office, but some features are better then what MS has to offer. Most notably: I never lost work on a crashed word session or had a document corrupted beyond repair.
The Gimp; And no! I'm not claiming that it's a Photoshop replacement and it has no song to sing in a professional graphics processing environment let alone a printshop. But claiming it's not a high quality, solid, full featured graphics processing app is well, a bit unreal.
Postgresql; which can replace many very expensive proprietary database engines in a lot of environments.
Thunderbird & Firefox; for my use Thunderbird beats Outlook in just about any aspect. Firfox,of course, is available for Windows, but compared to what Microsoft has to offer, well, need I say more?
Media players? Try VLC. It kicks the pulp out of Windows Media Player and plays anything plus the crap that WMP refuses to play. This is of course except DRMd stuff. But I don't buy into that.
Blender? Apache? But better not get started on the server front anyway. Because it's exactly there where Microsoft looks very old as compared to Linux. Especially when you look into costs
Most notably for me, personally, is the Unix command line, including SSH, FTP and Telnet from any terminal window by default. Plus the fact that I own the system and not vice versea
Let's turn the question around: Except media burning (which works perfectly fine for the command line) give me one example of software I need for everyday tasks and then some that is not available on Linux.
You make a few fair points. But this is something I really need to correct:
which is not $700 but about $200, depending on the dealer
That may be the case in the US, it is not the case in Switzerland. I recently checked at MediaMarkt (which is a huge local chain) and retail prices are still in that ballpark. Granted, hardly anybody buys reatil, but I don't think it's unfair when I compare the price with comparable offers. And both, OS/X and Ubuntu 7.10 are comparable offers.
I grant that my initial post was a bit polemic, so the main point probably went under: Microsoft corporation treats me, their customer, as a crook by default. It's comparable to those innane anti-piracy spots in a cinema. ("Hello! McFly! I just shelled out 14 bucks (yes, 14 bucks) for that movie so I'm most likely in the wrong demographics for your cheesy add. Doncha think???"
Surely you mean only ~$260 [pricegrabber.com]? Not very computer savy if you can't find Vista at a good price.
No I mean ~700$. Microsoft shamelessly gouges central european customers and I found not a lot of cheapie offers for Vista Ultimate in retail here.
And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work.
The only point I buy are games. I never had a hardware issue with Ubuntu; sorry. Even my brand spanking new laptop worked, including WLan and hybernation.
Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.
If you read my original post you would have noticed that I said exactly that. That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS. It doesn't discount the fact that I get a very high quality software build environment out of the box, too.
The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done.
I totally agree, but it's exactly that what infuriates me more and more with Microsoft products. They are trying to turn my computer into a consumer appliance (granted, Apple is not very different) and that's not acceptable to me. But yeah, too each his own.
But my major point is that I'm not willing to shell out money to a company which treats me (the customer, the dude ultimately signing their checks) like a thieving pirate.
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon : Free as in speech, free as in beer comes with about 20000 apps (the number's pulled out of thin air, but there are a lot of apps available), of which most are probably quite simple or outright crap, but there's true quality stuff among them and the pre-selection by the installer is quite good in my book. Oh and I'm part of the Ubuntu community, too.
OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.
Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.
I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.
Yeah but it was the government doing it and 1984 represented an extreme communist/authoritarian state.
Yeah, and now the government is in an even better position. They don't need to get their hands dirty on the privacy front (as if they ever cared), but can let corporations do the collecting and then come in with a subpoena, or with one of those "security letters" the FBI is so fond of abusing illegally.
Come to think about it, companies like AT&T (government says: "bend over". AT&T asks: "how deep do you want to shove it in and which kind of lubricant do you prefer?") make it unnecessary to even spend a quarter for a phone call to a judge.
There are a lot of people who will very thoroughly regret their participation in such site for years to come...
So they have a zillion of members and is that hot Web 2.0. ticket now?
So what? How long do you think "members" need to move to the next "big thing"?
This beacon thing was not only badly thought out and implemented, but Facebook as a company also seems to lie a lot.
Besides that, what about Facebook members in the EU? The sleaze they are trying to pull off is illegal in virtual any EU country (and then some).
They should have done a Google and found themselves a CEO, with respect and a network in the industry. But they seem to have a founder-CEO who doesn't seem to have managed his adolescence quite yet.
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software.
That exists for, literally, decades.
VMS licensees could get the VMS sources for a nominal service fee (which in that days consisted of a hefty chunk of cash). I remember a small box, approx. 6x8x10 cms when I was working for an investment bank in '89. This box contained the VMS source code on microfilm, likely including DECnet stuff and other good shit.
As far as I know there where very few things excluded (LAT comes to mind).
Of course the intention was not to enable customers to write a VMS derivative (good luck on that) and grace the world with it, but basically for troubleshooting and for documentation of some of the more low level parts of your computing environment.
I don't believe that such a deal is completely unique in the enterprise software world. A milder form of it is, for example, source code escrow.
A referendum (signed by 50'000 out of some 7.4 million in the course of 100 days) forces a national vote on a recently-instated new law. Still, more than 50% of all voters participating in that vote will need to "nay" it in order for it not to be instated.
Dude, you pretty much nailed it. Maybe it's worthwhile adding that the threat of a referendum by pressure groups or a political party can have a substantial influence on the legislation process. Pessimists would call it watering a law down, while a more optimistic person interprets the process as compromising.
Overall it has (imo) a positive effect, since it prevents the executive of going bonanza (which they tried, when the executive shifted more to the right and got viciously whacked down in the next four referendums or so in 2003).
Can someone show me where it is said there is jail for P2P downloads?
This is strictly my interpretation, but: Since protocols like Bittorrent depend on the fact that downloaders also upload, so you're, at the very minimum, in a grey area, legally speaking.
The good news is that downloads from,for example, a slightly sinister Czech FTP server, or from services like allofmp3 are still perfectly legal.
The reasoning for that is that the burden of figuring out if a service is legal or not can not be put on the consumer.
I.e. a consumer doesn't necessarily know the legal difference between the Itunes store and a service like allofmp3 (which, alas, is perfectly legal in Switzerland.
How liberal the law actually is is very easy to detect: Just observe the foaming and frothing of the resident IFPI dudes...
Foreigners are usually not eligable to vote (a few exceptions on communal level) and Switzerland has ~ 20% foreigners.
In addition you must be 18 to vote on a federal level.
50000 sounds very low (it's 100'000 for a constitutional referendum) but in practice it's harder to get it going then it sounds.
Democracy is a serious business in Switzerland (with ~3 annual referendums) and people don't look kindly on joker-initiatives.
Nevertheless, a few interesting referendums actually where either accepted (Alpeninitiative, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpeninitiative; sorry in German; no English translation) or where suprisingly tight (~36% voted for the abolishment of the army, for example)
My prediciton is that absolutely nobody who either participates on p2p, nor circumvents "technical copyright protections" will see a jail from the inside. Nor will anybody pay a fine of a gazillion bucks per downloaded file (alas downloading is and remains actually legal in Switzerland).
The penal law provisions are (and that's my strict out of the ass guess) reserved for commercial purveyors of verboten software and for commercial mass offenders and not evene they will go to jail for a first offense (nor will private citizens who make a backup copy with verboten software).
Switzerland doesn't throw people into the slammer for three years just because they where caught with a video camera in a movie theatre, or for four years because you where unlucky enough to be caught with 15Es at a rave and have the misfortune of being black.
I actually followed the debate and it strikes overall quite a reasonable balance. (As mentioned above: download remains legal, for example).
Thus effectively destroying the entire cinema industry?
Well, the cinema industry does a great job of doing that itself. Some oldtimers may remember the time when cinemas where actually theatres? you know with a large hall, no cheap popcorn stink a sound system, which deserved its name an operator as oposed to automated systems that don't have any pride and couldn't care less if the image is unfocused or not aligned correctly?
oh yeah, those theatres actually had screens which deserved that name and not pumped up flat screen tvs. Oh and you also didn't get pestered with 40 minutes of cheesy ads and the coke was not 6$
Modern cinemas suck so bad and provide such a bad experience that I really don't want to be bothered, with very few exceptions. For example the local cinemateque.
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Yeah, asking questions may actually work, provided you adequately train and pay the security personel executing such interviews. The Israelis are very good at that and nothing happened in Tel Aviv for, literally, decades.
My last encounters with US airline or security personel (which admitedly was in 2002) was that some dumb bimbo, or some illetarate, minimum wage drone is going through some script with the verve and gusto of an average call center agent. (They don't usually do that shtick in Europe, maybe because it's friggin' useless if not done by well trained, versed and compensated personel)
You're suggestion is not a bad one, if executed correctly, but except for my experience with the Israelis this "interview" affair is a sad joke.
Either you guys insist on paying minimum wage for some high school dropouts or you pay and train security personel well. As long as it has to be cheapcheapcheap the best security you can hope for are the new, snazzy combat uniforms of said highschool dropouts.
Sony didn't get anything right after buying CBS (Columbia Records).
Sony used to be the innovative electronics company until the Politburo was shifted to the contents division.
From that point on Sony is a sad series of serious fuckups.
We might be able to train them.Uh, that's Sony we are talking about here. You have a better chance to turn tap water into 75 year old Armagnac.
You know, whenever I read this very statement I'm reminded of some PR shill trying to confuse this really shitty thing (not to mention, criminal act) which a Sony subsidiary pulled off.
Folks that can't handle it, like obviously Sony-BMGs management, should really stay clear from an Absinthe bottle.
This is true, of course, but doesn't discount the fact that it is the content arm owned by Sony (apart from the Sony/BMG joint venture Columbia Pictures), which seems to call the shots for the last two decades
In this time they morphed from one of the most innovative electronics companies to a bunch of frothing control freaks that design products, which are proprietary, locked down to hell and then some and generally aim right in the other direction of what consumers want.
Case in point? Until 2005 Sonys portable audio players didn't natively support MP3. You where forced to transcode your music with this abyssimal piece of crapware called SonicStage to the proprietary Atrac format, which nobody used (Japan may be an exception) and nobody liked.
I really couldn't care less what Sony/BMGs corporate structure is. With the rootkit fiasco combined with the paranoya-design methodology that they apply to their products Sony managed it onto my eternal shitlist.
Otherwise you would know that Steve Jobs is God.
I fondly remember the moment when the datasette was finally replaced by a floppy disk drive (5 1/4"). That sucker was almost as expensive as a cheap laptop nowadays. Oh yeah, and we hole punched the disks at the edge, so that it could be used double sided. (For the youngsters: A 10 pack diskettes where around 40$).
Fairly recently I installed an emulator on my Nokia 9300 (which actually has the better screen resolution) and while it does bring some nostalgic feelings back it's not the same.
It probably had to be that fairly ugly box crammed in between a stack of books and an ashtray with the remainders of the spliffs.
Under the agreement, the price of making a call while abroad will be capped at 0.49 per minute, before VAT. While existing roaming charges vary widely, they are generally significantly higher.
from the same article:
A four-minute call home by a French customer in Italy costs 4.72 ($6.39, £3.19), while an Austrian phoning home from Malta would pay 9.51, according to EU data.
For your other reasoning (and that's a guess): A Verizon customer, residing in LA uses the Verizon network while visiting New York. While a Berlin resident may use the Vodafone network in Prague.
It is a bit creative to compare calls with the same company to actual roaming where a different network provides the service. The article can be found here
I don't think that the issue is if Mr. Jobs wants to make money of Consumers the question is how.
While this is true they can't just behave as badly as their US bretheren, or they'll get a good whacking by some EU commissioner.
Case in point: Their partially outrageous roaming charges where heavily capped this year, since they failed to regulate themselfs in any serious and tiemly manner.
There's no question that you should use the right platform for the right job. Personally I deal with databases. Since this is very server based software Linux/Unix is definitely the best plaform. If you're doing graphics design you don't necessarily want a laptop, which is good in databases. And yeah, that's simplified...
OpenOffice; Granted. There are a lot of environments that can't just switch away from MS Office and the tight integration into the MS Server monoculture. But as an office suite it is definitely high quality. As a matter of fact it does a few things worse then Office, but some features are better then what MS has to offer. Most notably: I never lost work on a crashed word session or had a document corrupted beyond repair.
The Gimp; And no! I'm not claiming that it's a Photoshop replacement and it has no song to sing in a professional graphics processing environment let alone a printshop. But claiming it's not a high quality, solid, full featured graphics processing app is well, a bit unreal.
Postgresql; which can replace many very expensive proprietary database engines in a lot of environments.
Thunderbird & Firefox; for my use Thunderbird beats Outlook in just about any aspect. Firfox ,of course, is available for Windows, but compared to what Microsoft has to offer, well, need I say more?
Media players? Try VLC. It kicks the pulp out of Windows Media Player and plays anything plus the crap that WMP refuses to play. This is of course except DRMd stuff. But I don't buy into that.
Blender? Apache? But better not get started on the server front anyway. Because it's exactly there where Microsoft looks very old as compared to Linux. Especially when you look into costs
Most notably for me, personally, is the Unix command line, including SSH, FTP and Telnet from any terminal window by default. Plus the fact that I own the system and not vice versea
Let's turn the question around: Except media burning (which works perfectly fine for the command line) give me one example of software I need for everyday tasks and then some that is not available on Linux.
That may be the case in the US, it is not the case in Switzerland. I recently checked at MediaMarkt (which is a huge local chain) and retail prices are still in that ballpark. Granted, hardly anybody buys reatil, but I don't think it's unfair when I compare the price with comparable offers. And both, OS/X and Ubuntu 7.10 are comparable offers.
I grant that my initial post was a bit polemic, so the main point probably went under: Microsoft corporation treats me, their customer, as a crook by default. It's comparable to those innane anti-piracy spots in a cinema. ("Hello! McFly! I just shelled out 14 bucks (yes, 14 bucks) for that movie so I'm most likely in the wrong demographics for your cheesy add. Doncha think???"
No I mean ~700$. Microsoft shamelessly gouges central european customers and I found not a lot of cheapie offers for Vista Ultimate in retail here.
And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work.The only point I buy are games. I never had a hardware issue with Ubuntu; sorry. Even my brand spanking new laptop worked, including WLan and hybernation.
Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.If you read my original post you would have noticed that I said exactly that. That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS. It doesn't discount the fact that I get a very high quality software build environment out of the box, too.
The other option is that you're a smart professional that just wants to get things done.I totally agree, but it's exactly that what infuriates me more and more with Microsoft products. They are trying to turn my computer into a consumer appliance (granted, Apple is not very different) and that's not acceptable to me. But yeah, too each his own.
But my major point is that I'm not willing to shell out money to a company which treats me (the customer, the dude ultimately signing their checks) like a thieving pirate.
OS/X : Hereround 155$. Probably nicest user interface, at least at Panther level very stable, rock solid foundation (BSD) a real shell and real scripting. Oh and it gives me fanboy privileges.
Vista Ultimate: ~700$. Nothing really to offer, exept maybe this floating waterfall background, which must eat a ton of resources. Requires activation, abuses 30% of my resources for Hollywoods satisfaction. Oh: And by default I'm a criminal software thieve pirate.
I'd wager that if i really chose option three I must be a blistering idiot, too.
Sir, that was a very nice post and I just refer you to my sig.
Yeah, and now the government is in an even better position. They don't need to get their hands dirty on the privacy front (as if they ever cared), but can let corporations do the collecting and then come in with a subpoena, or with one of those "security letters" the FBI is so fond of abusing illegally.
Come to think about it, companies like AT&T (government says: "bend over". AT&T asks: "how deep do you want to shove it in and which kind of lubricant do you prefer?") make it unnecessary to even spend a quarter for a phone call to a judge.
There are a lot of people who will very thoroughly regret their participation in such site for years to come...
So what? How long do you think "members" need to move to the next "big thing"?
This beacon thing was not only badly thought out and implemented, but Facebook as a company also seems to lie a lot.
Besides that, what about Facebook members in the EU? The sleaze they are trying to pull off is illegal in virtual any EU country (and then some).
They should have done a Google and found themselves a CEO, with respect and a network in the industry. But they seem to have a founder-CEO who doesn't seem to have managed his adolescence quite yet.
Way to go Mark!
That exists for, literally, decades.
VMS licensees could get the VMS sources for a nominal service fee (which in that days consisted of a hefty chunk of cash). I remember a small box, approx. 6x8x10 cms when I was working for an investment bank in '89. This box contained the VMS source code on microfilm, likely including DECnet stuff and other good shit.
As far as I know there where very few things excluded (LAT comes to mind).
Of course the intention was not to enable customers to write a VMS derivative (good luck on that) and grace the world with it, but basically for troubleshooting and for documentation of some of the more low level parts of your computing environment.
I don't believe that such a deal is completely unique in the enterprise software world. A milder form of it is, for example, source code escrow.
Dude, you pretty much nailed it. Maybe it's worthwhile adding that the threat of a referendum by pressure groups or a political party can have a substantial influence on the legislation process. Pessimists would call it watering a law down, while a more optimistic person interprets the process as compromising.
Overall it has (imo) a positive effect, since it prevents the executive of going bonanza (which they tried, when the executive shifted more to the right and got viciously whacked down in the next four referendums or so in 2003).
This is strictly my interpretation, but: Since protocols like Bittorrent depend on the fact that downloaders also upload, so you're, at the very minimum, in a grey area, legally speaking.
The good news is that downloads from ,for example, a slightly sinister Czech FTP server, or from services like allofmp3 are still perfectly legal.
The reasoning for that is that the burden of figuring out if a service is legal or not can not be put on the consumer. I.e. a consumer doesn't necessarily know the legal difference between the Itunes store and a service like allofmp3 (which, alas, is perfectly legal in Switzerland.
How liberal the law actually is is very easy to detect: Just observe the foaming and frothing of the resident IFPI dudes...
They don't.
Foreigners are usually not eligable to vote (a few exceptions on communal level) and Switzerland has ~ 20% foreigners.
In addition you must be 18 to vote on a federal level.
50000 sounds very low (it's 100'000 for a constitutional referendum) but in practice it's harder to get it going then it sounds.
Democracy is a serious business in Switzerland (with ~3 annual referendums) and people don't look kindly on joker-initiatives.
Nevertheless, a few interesting referendums actually where either accepted (Alpeninitiative, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpeninitiative; sorry in German; no English translation) or where suprisingly tight (~36% voted for the abolishment of the army, for example)
The penal law provisions are (and that's my strict out of the ass guess) reserved for commercial purveyors of verboten software and for commercial mass offenders and not evene they will go to jail for a first offense (nor will private citizens who make a backup copy with verboten software).
Switzerland doesn't throw people into the slammer for three years just because they where caught with a video camera in a movie theatre, or for four years because you where unlucky enough to be caught with 15Es at a rave and have the misfortune of being black.
I actually followed the debate and it strikes overall quite a reasonable balance. (As mentioned above: download remains legal, for example).
Well, the cinema industry does a great job of doing that itself. Some oldtimers may remember the time when cinemas where actually theatres? you know with a large hall, no cheap popcorn stink a sound system, which deserved its name an operator as oposed to automated systems that don't have any pride and couldn't care less if the image is unfocused or not aligned correctly?
oh yeah, those theatres actually had screens which deserved that name and not pumped up flat screen tvs. Oh and you also didn't get pestered with 40 minutes of cheesy ads and the coke was not 6$
Modern cinemas suck so bad and provide such a bad experience that I really don't want to be bothered, with very few exceptions. For example the local cinemateque.