I wrote: No, that isn't a logical argument if you pick it apart, but you don't get to cross-examine the MPAA lawyers -- just their witnesses.
You replied: You could, of course, bring a witness to pick apart their claims. Preferably someone in academia, who can cite good examples and make the judge understand what's at stake.
You misunderstood my point -- when it comes to the courtroom, each side will bring the best witnesses they can, and each side will place all of the testimony into a context that best suits their needs. So far the MPAA and RIAA lawyers are much better at casting their opponents in a bad light. They stand up and tell the court how much money they've spent on these technologies, and how much money they stand to lose from pirates, while pointing across the room at the defendent. Meanwhile, the defendent's lawyer has to argue that liberty and freedom are more important than the minor indiscretions of their defendent. And there will have been indiscretions -- a skilled lawyer can make Snow White look like a common hooker (after all, she shared a home with *7* men, all of them *dwarves* and she was mixed up with *evil* witches).
The worst of their innuendos will be saved for their summary arguments, which can't be interrupted, and can only be rebutted in summary arguments -- they can't be objected to during the argument itself. You can't put the lawyers themselves on the stand, no matter how much you'd prefer.
BTW, academics generally don't make good witnesses, since they tend to be too honest, and too disconnected from everyday life. They talk about abstract things that might never happen, while the judge knows that none of their academic research means a damn thing in the real world.
Re:No, Kaplan's just doing his job
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, I'd like to be able to play the DVDs I've legally purchased on my BSD (or insert your favorite OS) box. Reverse engineering has traditionally been a legitimate method for making things work when the original owner of a technology isn't interested in pursuing some particular market or use of the technology.
Nice argument (and I agree with you), but they're going to come right back and point out that you can play DVDs on DVD players, and that DVD players aren't pirate tools, but Linux and BSD are hacker tools, so you must really want to pirate that DVD. No, that isn't a logical argument if you pick it apart, but you don't get to cross-examine the MPAA lawyers -- just their witnesses.
It's starting to scare the hell out of me, frankly, that even those of us who have insightful, reasoned, well-thought-out things to say (and sub-five-digit UIDs) can't keep the RIAA and the MPAA straight. I mean, sure they're all the same evil mega-corporate enemies of freedom and everything, but I don't recall the Recording Industry suing 2600 over the copy-protection of Motion Pictures.
Ba-a-a-a-d Llama. What can I say -- I was at work, I was focusing on the comment I was replying to, instead of trying to remember whether I was talking about the left hand or the right hand.
His whole line of reasoning in the decision rests on the assumption that DeCSS is a tool for piracy, and because it is a tool for piracy, fair use rights therefore don't apply. With a bit of hand waving and circular logic, he dismissed the defense's strongest argument. Regardless of his "understanding" of the technology in question, he deserves our contempt.
If the defense's strongest argument can be creditably dismissed by hand-waving, then the defense needed stronger arguments.
I seriously doubt that the RIAA will press civil charges against anyone who cannot be construed to be a threat to society (ie: pirate, terrorist, hacket, etc.). As for criminal charges, that's the DoJ's turf, and the case against Dmitri Sklyarov is the best example of how they'll work. In both arenas, they'll pick the ugliest targets, and try them for who they are, not what they've done, merrily building up precedents here and case law there.
Regardless of your feelings about DeCSS (I'm for it), the RIAA did a very good job of picking a target when they picked 2600 Magazine. It's right up there with Hustler for content and editorial integrity, and 2600 came into court with a serious negative image problem. The rest of the case went about as well as could be expected. That earned the RIAA a legal precedent, and set up additional hurtles for the next target.
The only way that the DMCA will get overturned is if someone manages to do something that obviously violates the DMCA, but is also easily recognizable as something that is socially acceptable and/or necessary. At this time, I can't think of anything that matches these criteria -- the right to download Star Wars movies off the 'net doesn't qualify, and neither does anything else I can think of. Anyone got any suggestions?
Although I'd *love* to see the shuttles and space system revamped to make it more efficent by someone other than the lowest bidder; opening up the space system allows for industry corruption. What happens when someone gets a monopoly in space? Everytime you try to star gaze you have to distinguise the stars from the MS logos? If we were to commericialize space, there will need to be some heavy duty restrictions.
Excuse me? We've already got a monopoly in space -- it's called NASA. As for industry corruption, did you think NASA builds and repairs the shuttles themselves? Hell, no... they're built by single-sourced aerospace contractors... you can't get a better monopoly than that. Any sort of commercial competition for heavy lift capability would be an improvement over the current situation.
I don't mean to make fun, really. But if they hold so much interests for adults, why do you need your wife to (1) read them out loud to you, and (2) do all the voices? Please tell me you have a pair of footy pajamas on when all this is going on...
If you've never read books to one another as part of your courtship / marriage, then you're actually missing a great deal of fun. Not only do you get to find out about books that you might not have thought were interesting, but you get to find out what your spouse thinks is funny, sad, exciting, or boring -- excellent information to help you build a relationship.
When my wife and I were dating, she was living in Pennsylvania, and I was living in Virginia. We'd see each other most weekends, but during the week we subsisted on email and phone calls. I ended up reading a couple of books to my wife over the phone, or cuddled up with her on a bed.
Re:don't understand the need for constant upgradin
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I'm still running 6.2 w/ any patches that
concern me.
I don't particularly see any need to upgrade
to 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2 for that matter.
What's the big deal?
I've used every version of RedHat since 3.3, and several versions of Mandrake over the last 6 years. That's a lot of upgrading, particularly since I have several servers and workstations running Linux. My firewall/proxy/router is still running a heavily upgraded version of RH 6.1, and my mail server is running a butchered version of RH 6.0. My internal web server and all of the workstations are running RH 7.1, and I'll be upgrading some of those to RH 7.2 in the near future, as it stabilizes.
Here's a short list of my reasons to upgrade to RH 7.X:
Convenience: I like RedHat and RPM, because it means I can spend my time developing and deploying applications instead of spending my time configuring software. Since I build distributed applications for a living, I find it convenient to be able to mirror my development and deployment environment at home, and RPM is a great way to make certain that all of the servers are configured correctly and running the same versions of the necessary software. Of course, convenience has a price, and with RedHat, the price is that RPMs for newer software are built for the most recent release.
OpenSSL/OpenSSH: you can't beat the convenience of having these pre-installed and working from RPMs. Anyone who's had to build these from scratch and then configure them will appreciate not having to repeat that procedure every time someone finds a new bug.
Apache 1.3.20: One word: security.
2.4 Kernels: Much better for heavily threaded servers, because of the finer locking granularity.
XFree 4.X: Better support for graphics hardware for my workstations.
Ultimately with Red Hat, they've done a good job of supporting older X.2 releases, but support doesn't mean adding new features. If you want the new features, you'll want to upgrade. If you don't want/need them, then stick with what works. At least Red Hat (and most Linux distros) give you that choice -- as opposed to certain eXtra Proprietary systems.
What I found more interesting was later in the same report, where it listed the major record companies and their market share and labels. To save effort, I've excerpted (fair use) this information below:
Concentration of Ownership
Today, many recording artists and studios earn a great deal of money, pushing
industry sales to about $40 billion. Nevertheless, sales of all recordings have
leveled off, except for a few superstars.
As in other media, a few corporations dominate the recording industry. It is
interesting to note that only one, AOL Time Warner, has its corporate
headquarters in the United States. In the 1990s, here's how the major labels
stacked up.
WEA, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, controlled more than 25 percent of the
market through Atlantic, Elektra, Giant, Reprise, Rhino, Sire, and Warner
Brothers. Sony held about 14 percent of the market share through Columbia and
Epic.
Polygram, which is owned by Philips Electronics, captured just over 13 percent
of the market with A&M, Def Jam, Deutsche Gramophone, Island, Motown, and
Polydor. BMG, which is owned by Bertelsman, held just over 12 percent through
Arista, BMG Classics, Private Music, RCA, Windham Hill, and Zoo.
Other major companies, which control about 10 percent of the market, include
CEMA through its labels Capitol, Chrysalis, EMI, IRS, Liberty, and SBK; and
French-owned Vivendi through Geffen, GRP, MCA Records, and Uptown.
Red Hat's second-quarter net loss was $55.3 million, on revenues of $21 million.
Granted, they've got PR speak down, and slashdot falls over itself reporting these "breakevens". But they've systematically excluded items in almost every quarter they have reported results, and the number slashdot reports are pretty bogus. Most other sites AT LEAST report generally accepted number (GAAP) along with the PR numbers which exclude all losses.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to the way accountants keep track of earnings for publicly traded companies. RedHat did the same thing that everyone from Microsoft and GM on down do: they reported their earnings and losses for the quarter, as well as any other earnings and losses that are required to be accounted for in the current quarter, even though they may have been accrued in previous quarters and years.
To get a better picture, go to the SEC EDGAR database and search for Red Hat's latest 10-Q filing (the latest one I found was filed in July for the quarter ending May 31st, 2001). If you read through the 10-Q filing, you'll see that in any given quarter, half of Red Hat's expenses are from the write-down of investments (ie: the stock market has tubed in the last year) and the amortization of goodwill and intangibles (ie: artificial value of companies during a merger). This is Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) -- Red Hat traded millions of shares away to aquire Cygnus and other companies, and instead of realizing all of the associated costs of those mergers in a single quarter, the costs are spread across several quarters.
Look at the bottom line -- at the beginning of the quarter, Red Hat had $72,459,166 in the bank, and even if they lost $24 million, that still leaves them with $48 million in the bank, and these paper losses will be ending in another quarter or so, which will leave Red Hat breaking even. Pretty good for any tech company in the current economy.
I've been using Covad SDSL (CAIS as ISP) for 18 months, and aside from problems that were directly traceable to Verizon, I've been quite happy with the service, the performance and the price. Granted, I'm a business customer, but I was willing to pay the premium for support and additional IP address space. There's no way that a cablemodem can meet my needs, Verizon won't do (no static IPs) Rhythms is dead (Chap 11), and Telocity is dying (bought by Hughes/Directv). If Covad fails, my only other alternative would be Network Access Solutions, which isn't looking too great either.
What's *your* beef with Covad? It certainly sounds personal.
I know I keep hearing a claim that the JVM supports dozens of languages. You even provided a link. But my question is... Are any of these actually being used? Or are they just experiments.
That's the difference between.Net and the JVM.
I can't speak for all of those tools/languages -- I'm certainly not using all of them myself -- but I have used Jython, SQLJ, BSF/BeanShell, and WebL, and can see a use for many of those languages in different situations. Certainly *someone* saw a need for each of them, and languages like Ada, Cobol, Forth, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran, TCL, Prolog have their own proponents.
While I know that people are using C# and VisualBasic.NET for.NET development, what other languages are currently available *and being used* for development with.NET and how many applications have been actually deployed using.NET? There are literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of applications deployed on Java/JVM -- that's the REAL difference between.NET and JVM.
load of crap. they may come close to being speed-equivalent if you write c++ constrained to the language features java supports. That is, you use heterogeneous container classes and downcast all the time, don't use templates or multiple inheritance, use threads where there is no good reason to, and whip expensive exceptions around like you're getting a commision on them.
I did say *unoptimized -- I know that a properly coded and optimized application written in in C++ can easily outperform a properly coded and optimized Java application. My point was that Java is *fast enough*... given that no one has time in their development schedule to completely optimize anything, and no one has enough competent programmers to code it that way, even if they had enough time to do it and money to pay them.
Oh, and typical server applications?!? If you're writing server applications using a one thread-per-server-scheme, you are nowhere, and you are if you're writing java, cuz it doesn't know from multiplexing, at least in 1.3.
Ah... you're talking about using select() to code I/O handlers. I begin to see the problem -- you seem to think that a web server is a typical server application. I suppose I should have been more specific; I was referring to business applications -- ERP, DSS, HR, A/R, A/P, Inventory Management, etc -- the type of applications that businesses pay money to have developed, because they need them to run their businesses. These sorts of applications are rarely I/O bound, because they typically have no more than hundreds of users and spend most of their time waiting on database queries and user input. With this sort of application, the use of multiple threads to manage code execution is perfectly sensible, and results in very clean and easy to maintain code. You'll note that I was not advocating writing webservers or databases in Java -- but backend applications that serve webservers and use databases are excellent targets for Java development.
Bash c#,.net, etc, all you want. But don't tell me an interpreted language with garbage collection and bullshit container classes and 1970's i/o is as fast as c++. I write networking code in both languages, and i'm not buying it.
Go back and read what I wrote -- I didn't claim that Java was as fast as C++ for *everything* -- just the sorts of applications I develop: business applications. Of course, if you continue to think of Java (and the JVM) as strictly an interpreted language, you're not keeping up with what the JIT compilers are doing these days, and you're completely ignoring the native-code compilers for Java.
He nailed it on the head - The same way we've been harping about the world changing and rendering Microsoft irrelevant, the way the Open Source world does things is pretty much irrelevant and obsolete as well.
His point about finishing the Open Source versions of j2EE (like way quickly now too) is pretty much the only way we are not going to fall behind. We don't have the time to architect some beautiful dream, we need to shit or get off the pot NOW, it's starting to stink in here!
Exactly! Ganesh Prasad has hit the nail precisely on the head with his comments about.NET versus J2EE. Forget the marketshare issues, the meat of this article is that J2EE is here, today, and that complete OSS implementations of J2EE are achieveable this year... as long as the open/free community stops trying to change Sun, and instead works around Sun. It would be much less effort than doing a full implementation of.NET, and much of the work is already done.
All of the myths about Java's speed (slow) are just that -- myths. I've built real-time data collection applications that run perfectly
fine with Java/MySQL/Linux on Pentium 166s with 32MB of RAM -- Java was more than fast enough for our needs, and the development cycle was a lot faster than would have been possible with C++. Java is more than fast enough for server applications where JIT compilers can truly optimize the code, since it is compiled once and then kept in memory and run repeatedly. Benchmarks have shown that for typical server applications, modern JVM/JIT combinations are as fast as unoptimized C++ code. While an expert can still hand-optimize C++ to out perform Java, in reality, you'll have to ship your applications before you have time to apply those optimizations... and Java's development cycle is (in my experience) still much faster than C/C++, simply because you can rely on the JVM to protect the OS from your code (and vice versa).
I'm also tired of hearing about how Sun's JVM only supports a single language -- Java, while.NET supports many languages. There are literally dozens of languages that can be compiled to run on Sun's JVM, even if Perl isn't one of those languages. Anyone who thinks that they'll be able to easily port existing C code to run on.NET and use.NET services hasn't looked at how virtual machines (and the CRL in particular) are implemented. Yes, the JVM is optimized for Java (and vice versa) but you can still use the JVM to allow you to write your applications in non-Java languages and deploy them on any platform that supports a JVM. Some languages, like Jython (a version of Python written in Java), allow you to create non-Java classes that inherit from Java classes, as well as Java classes that inherit from non-Java classes.
Anyone who claims that Sun's control over Java makes it impossible to build an open implementation (because Sun would just change the spec) and then in the same breath says that they won't have the same problems with.NET and Microsoft needs to wake up and smell the brimstone. While Sun does control the Java specification process, they still have to work with their partners and licensees, and the specification process is open -- and most of the reference implementations for the higher-level APIs are open as well. They can't change the Java language without breaking backwards compatibility for thousands of applications and millions of users, and Sun doesn't have any monopolies to fall back on. Microsoft, on the other hand, controls the desktop OS market, and can use that and.NET to conquer the server OS, and since the implementations for.NET are closed, Microsoft can switch the back end and the desktop without breaking applications deployed on Windows... while simultaneously breaking non-Microsoft implementations. What more can a monopolist ask for?
And the best reason to work with Java/J2EE instead of.NET -- Java/J2EE is here, today, and has been working for years. While it isn't perfect, the bugs have been worked out, and it works..NET is still beta code, and once it ships, it will still be a version 1.0 Microsoft product. It will take two more iterations (and who knows how many years) before.NET is truly stable, useful, and reliable. I need to build and deploy applications today -- not 3 years from now.
My point is - if you're going to compare XML with something, why choose - of all things - EDI??!?
Because both formats are supposed to be good for data interchange, and only one of them really is -- XML. With EDI, the standard had to be so all-encompassing that one group of programmers would read the spec one way, and one another way, and so you could spend months trying to correctly interpret data that was "standard".
I'm always amused by people that assume XML will be the magic lingua franca of the Internet and everyone will be able to parse every last bit of meaning out of your document just because [it's human-readable] without ever agreeing on any of those nasty "standards" things.
Apparently you've never had to write a parser for EDI, or any other binary data interchange format.
I'm not going to claim that XML is a magic bullet for data interchange -- but I will attest that human-readable data formats are superior to binary formats when it comes to data interchange. I have lost track of the number of custom parsers I've had to write over the last 15+ years in order to convert data from one system to another, simply because the systems in question didn't have a shared data format. The big wins for XML are that (1) you can visually inspect your before-and-after results, (2) you don't have to write the parser, even if you have to write code to call it, (3) there are actually two sensible APIs to match two very different ways to look at the data, each of which is parser independent, and best of all (4) if you don't have documentation for the schema (or it's misimplemented), you still have a prayer of interpreting the data correctly.
Anyone who's ever had to write an EDI application will *instantly* understand the appeal of XML.
Your comments about Solaris vs Linux are a complete non sequitor -- Sun has a lot of reasons to keep what they've been using for 10 years instead of switching to CUPS or one of the newer printing APIs that are being developed for Linux. Either way, it isn't relevant to the "what you lose when you leave Windows for Linux" question.
I'll admit that Windows has a wider variety of available printer drivers, but you're ignoring the realities of the printing world -- there are really only a couple of page display languages for modern printers: HPGL and Postscript cover 99.99% of printers manufactured in the last 5 years. Since ghostscript ships with Linux, printing to Postscript and having ghostscript translate to the printer makes perfect sense. And of course you can send the Postscript output to any number of devices directly. There aren't *any* printers that use Microsoft's internal page layout APIs. I'd score this one as even.
GUI APIs
You're going to complain about rapid development of the GUI APIs for Linux, and then claim that Microsoft (Win30/ Win31/ Win32S/ Win95/ Win98/ WinNT/ Win2K/ WinME) is *better*? Microsoft, who merrily breaks applications left and right everytime it creates a new version of MSVCRT.DLL is *better*? I don't think so. At least with GNOME, I can have multiple versions of libraries installed without crashing the entire system. Just try running two seperate Windows apps which were built for different versions of MSVCRT. Sorry, Linux wins this one.
Etcetera, etcetera...
You say COM, I say CORBA, RPC, Sockets, and even Bonobo. COM does a lot of things, but one thing it doesn't do is it doesn't check objects against interfaces. Thus it is perfectly acceptable to COM to try and open a spreadsheet when what you passed in was a Word document. And of course, COM is only for a single machine -- it can't handle distributed applications. DCOM can, sort of, but DCOM has its own problems as well.
You want to talk about installers? Hell, Microsoft never bothered to write an installer -- they bought Installshield (and the braindead version at that). You should have a look at Red Carpet, the installer that Ximian wrote to handle all of those Gnome libraries that you're complaining about. While I won't claim it's perfect, it's a damn sight better than what I've experienced with Windows.
Ultimately it comes down to perspective -- all of those faults you see with Linux look like desirable features to me, and vice versa. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been building and deploying business applications for 20 years, on CP/M, MSDOS, Windows, NT, Unix, VMS, Primos, and Pick. I have found the Red Hat Linux environment to be the most reliable environment for deploying applications of all of those I've worked with. I'm not claiming perfection, but I do think that it's a lot better than anything Microsoft has ever delivered, and definitely sufficient for deploying business applications.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Microsoft will be happy to put Office on linux when:
1) Linux is as easy to develop business-class software for as Windows
2) When a Linux user is willing to pay for a peice of software
People often assume that if you break apart OS+Apps, then immediately everything gets ported to linux. Nothing could be further from the truth. So much that the OS provodies is just not there at all in linux.
Let's think about this. What exactly does Windows provide as an OS-service that is (1) necessary for developing business-class software, and (2) isn't available for Linux? Presumably you mean standard APIs... but what standards, and who gets to define them? If what you mean is the Win32 APIs, then you need to think again -- those are merely Microsoft's take, and not the only way to do something. So you must mean general APIs for OS services:
Device Independent Printing. Win32 has a set of print services APIs that comprise two parts: (1) device independent print rendering, and (2) print job management. On the other hand, Linux has APIs to do both of these as well: Postscript and LPR.
GUI APIs. Well, I'd say that Linux is even more flexible than Win32 in this regard, since X-Windows doesn't tie an application to running on a single machine.
Database-independent data access. But wait, Linux can use ODBC as well as the next guy.
Networked File Services? Uh... NFS & Samba & AFS, just for starters.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...
You'd better back up your assertion with some facts, because I just don't see what's missing. Oh, and BTW, I've been a business application developer for over 20 years, so I *do* know what I'm talking about.
I think what you mean is that you want development tools that make it truly easy to churn out software without having to understand the low-level APIs. You want Visual Basic and Visual C/C++ for Linux, and you don't want to have to learn a whole new set of APIs either. Well, then have you looked at Wine lately? What about Kylix?
But seriously, porting an application from one OS to another is hard work, regardless of the tools... there's no economic incentive to do that if there aren't enough users who are willing to buy what you're selling. While I'll admit that many Linux users aren't interested in paying a lot for software, I would suggest that that's because they're more interested in paying what the software is worth to them. There are plenty of users out there who are willing to pay for software that solves a problem that they can't solve any other way. Sound card drivers, Word processing software, games -- there have been plenty of people who have purchased these products because they needed them.
I think the difference is that the Linux marketplace has such a wide variety of solutions available, that people tend to purchase only as much software as they actually need, instead of going for the all-in-one-high-priced-bundle packages that are popular in the PC marketplace.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
There is a clearance level called sensitive, and confidential. All files must be marked properly if they contain this information. In which case they are not unclassified. As such, records must still be kept of how many copies and where they are located if memory serves me correct.
The first problem with that is that from a strictly operational viewpoint, you can't classify *everything* -- because at that point you've eroded the value of the lowest security classification. If every document that is generated is marked sensitive, then either everyone will have to treat every book, file, floppy disk and piece of paper as sensitive... or everyone will ignore the sensitive classification and keep working as usual. Human nature.
The second problem is the one that I raised, and that you ignored -- individual pieces of information by themselves are often completely benign, but correctly correlated can produce a very accurate estimate of information that would normally garner a much higher security classification.
This applies in every day life, as well. As an example, take the current trend in grocery marketing -- the saver club. If you join the club and use your club card everytime you go shopping at a particular grocery store, you get price discounts and cash back after enough purchases. Of course, the reason the store is willing to give you those discounts is that they are gradually building a very accurate database of information about your buying habits: what brands of food, how much, how often. You might not care if someone knows you eat Cheerios, but how about condom usage, or specific medicines? There's a lot of personal information to be gathered by aggregating supposedly non-sensitive data...
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Congratulations. You have failed the first test for a security clearance. Just because the data is unclassified, you can't assume that the data isn't still sensitive.
As an example, suppose you have a spreadsheet that details the fuel consumption for a group of F-16s, and another spreadsheet that details fuel purchases for an air base. Individually the spreadsheets are unclassified information, but together they are sensitive, because from the two spreadsheets you can deduce a great deal about the missions and deployments for that group of F-16s. Even months after the fact, that information is still sensitive, because it can be used to make predictions about that air group.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Not only is there a standard but the ODMG standard is on version 3, JDO is merely a Java standard. Please know the facts before flaming.
Yeah, there's a standard... but what good is the standard if none of the vendors do more than implement subsets of the standard, and none of the vendors implement the same subset?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Re:taking all the fun out of web-based narrative :
on
AI Movie Promo
·
· Score: 2
"Ghaepetto" (nice allusion) has gotta be a code name for the web project, or maybe something or someone from the movie that i couldn't dig up.
You're going to kick yourself.
Think Geppetto, from Pinocchio. "I want to be a real boy."
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
From the article:
"Fact: Women love long hair! It's an instant chick magnet. It's better than walking puppies in the park! Wash it and wear it down. Toss it around on your shoulders a lot. When my guy does this, women will just walk up and start touching his hair! Wouldn't you like this to happen to you?"
Well, I asked my wife about this one, and she claims *my* long (shoulder-length) hair is sexy. Of course, hers is longer than mine, so she might be biased. I can't say that I've had women standing in line to run their fingers through it (though I once met a woman who wanted to run her fingers through my beard).
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Once upon a time, I worked for a fscked-up little company called Ultimate Data Systems (UDS) in Wilton, Connecticut. I was working as a Programmer/Analyst, and doubling as a SysAdmin because they didn't actually have any SysAdmins on staff.
Saying that UDS was not well managed would be somewhat akin to saying that there was a tiny bit of controversy about the latest US Presidential election. As an example, the week that I was hired I was assigned to three different departments, one after another. The first two months I was there, they reorganized the company every two weeks, like clockwork. I didn't really care, since I only took the job as an interim step -- my previous company decided that they couldn't afford to pay little things (like my healthcare and salary) but they still wanted me to keep working...
I could tell lots of sad tales about UDS, but the saddest was that after working there for 6 months, they decided to layoff a third of the employees and move the company from Connecticut to Texas, presumably for some sort of cost savings. They notified everyone by holding a late night conference call, and announcing 3 rounds of layoffs, with the first 12 employees to get the axe the next morning. The next round would be in a month, with a third round a month later. In the meantime, the new company president (who coincidently lived in Texas) was coming in a couple of days to talk to the entire company and explain ALL of the transition plans to everyone...
Yeah, right. As it happened, the new president DID show up and hold a meeting; he just didn't explain anything. He tried to tell everyone that inspite of the upcoming layoffs, and the upcoming move, everyone would still have a place with UDS, even if they didn't want to move. The asshole spent 20 minutes trying to sell that load to the entire company... and this being 1992, and the country still in a recession, these people were actually hoping that he was telling the truth.
For myself, while I was hoping to stick around for a couple more months so I could pad my savings account, I wasn't hurting for job prospects (no family to support, no mortgage, etc)... so I did the only thing I could: when the asshole asked if anyone had any questions, I asked him questions. Every question that anyone in that room could have wanted to ask, I asked. And I didn't take "I don't know" for an answer. Which departments would move, which would stay, what order, what time schedule, what about working from (now) remote areas, what about salaries and relocation expenses, and anything else I could think of to ask. I don't think anyone else asked a single thing in that meeting.
Afterwards, the asshole made time for private meetings, and oddly enough, I was first... heheheh. The really odd thing was, he just asked me questions, and I explained that I wasn't planning to move to Texas (I don't look good in boots and a Stetson). Then he had more one-on-one meetings with other people, left someone else in charge of the office and went back to Texas.
The next morning, as soon as I came in, the new vice president came to tell me the bad news... I was being laidoff. I laughed and told him that I rather expected it, and that I didn't blame him for it. He didn't know what to say after that, so I started cleaning my desk out and went around and said goodbye to everyone. They were all sorry to see me go, but not sorry that I asked all those questions.
I moved to Northern Virginia, got a good job, and made a good life for myself. As for UDS... they eventually folded and are only missed by their creditors.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote: No, that isn't a logical argument if you pick it apart, but you don't get to cross-examine the MPAA lawyers -- just their witnesses.
You replied: You could, of course, bring a witness to pick apart their claims. Preferably someone in academia, who can cite good examples and make the judge understand what's at stake.
You misunderstood my point -- when it comes to the courtroom, each side will bring the best witnesses they can, and each side will place all of the testimony into a context that best suits their needs. So far the MPAA and RIAA lawyers are much better at casting their opponents in a bad light. They stand up and tell the court how much money they've spent on these technologies, and how much money they stand to lose from pirates, while pointing across the room at the defendent. Meanwhile, the defendent's lawyer has to argue that liberty and freedom are more important than the minor indiscretions of their defendent. And there will have been indiscretions -- a skilled lawyer can make Snow White look like a common hooker (after all, she shared a home with *7* men, all of them *dwarves* and she was mixed up with *evil* witches).
The worst of their innuendos will be saved for their summary arguments, which can't be interrupted, and can only be rebutted in summary arguments -- they can't be objected to during the argument itself. You can't put the lawyers themselves on the stand, no matter how much you'd prefer.
BTW, academics generally don't make good witnesses, since they tend to be too honest, and too disconnected from everyday life. They talk about abstract things that might never happen, while the judge knows that none of their academic research means a damn thing in the real world.
Nice argument (and I agree with you), but they're going to come right back and point out that you can play DVDs on DVD players, and that DVD players aren't pirate tools, but Linux and BSD are hacker tools, so you must really want to pirate that DVD. No, that isn't a logical argument if you pick it apart, but you don't get to cross-examine the MPAA lawyers -- just their witnesses.
Ba-a-a-a-d Llama. What can I say -- I was at work, I was focusing on the comment I was replying to, instead of trying to remember whether I was talking about the left hand or the right hand.
If the defense's strongest argument can be creditably dismissed by hand-waving, then the defense needed stronger arguments.
I seriously doubt that the RIAA will press civil charges against anyone who cannot be construed to be a threat to society (ie: pirate, terrorist, hacket, etc.). As for criminal charges, that's the DoJ's turf, and the case against Dmitri Sklyarov is the best example of how they'll work. In both arenas, they'll pick the ugliest targets, and try them for who they are, not what they've done, merrily building up precedents here and case law there.
Regardless of your feelings about DeCSS (I'm for it), the RIAA did a very good job of picking a target when they picked 2600 Magazine. It's right up there with Hustler for content and editorial integrity, and 2600 came into court with a serious negative image problem. The rest of the case went about as well as could be expected. That earned the RIAA a legal precedent, and set up additional hurtles for the next target.
The only way that the DMCA will get overturned is if someone manages to do something that obviously violates the DMCA, but is also easily recognizable as something that is socially acceptable and/or necessary. At this time, I can't think of anything that matches these criteria -- the right to download Star Wars movies off the 'net doesn't qualify, and neither does anything else I can think of. Anyone got any suggestions?
Excuse me? We've already got a monopoly in space -- it's called NASA. As for industry corruption, did you think NASA builds and repairs the shuttles themselves? Hell, no ... they're built by single-sourced aerospace contractors ... you can't get a better monopoly than that. Any sort of commercial competition for heavy lift capability would be an improvement over the current situation.
If you've never read books to one another as part of your courtship / marriage, then you're actually missing a great deal of fun. Not only do you get to find out about books that you might not have thought were interesting, but you get to find out what your spouse thinks is funny, sad, exciting, or boring -- excellent information to help you build a relationship.
When my wife and I were dating, she was living in Pennsylvania, and I was living in Virginia. We'd see each other most weekends, but during the week we subsisted on email and phone calls. I ended up reading a couple of books to my wife over the phone, or cuddled up with her on a bed.
I don't particularly see any need to upgrade to 7.0, 7.1 or 7.2 for that matter.
What's the big deal?
I've used every version of RedHat since 3.3, and several versions of Mandrake over the last 6 years. That's a lot of upgrading, particularly since I have several servers and workstations running Linux. My firewall/proxy/router is still running a heavily upgraded version of RH 6.1, and my mail server is running a butchered version of RH 6.0. My internal web server and all of the workstations are running RH 7.1, and I'll be upgrading some of those to RH 7.2 in the near future, as it stabilizes.
Here's a short list of my reasons to upgrade to RH 7.X:
Ultimately with Red Hat, they've done a good job of supporting older X.2 releases, but support doesn't mean adding new features. If you want the new features, you'll want to upgrade. If you don't want/need them, then stick with what works. At least Red Hat (and most Linux distros) give you that choice -- as opposed to certain eXtra Proprietary systems.
What I found more interesting was later in the same report, where it listed the major record companies and their market share and labels. To save effort, I've excerpted (fair use) this information below:
Concentration of Ownership
Today, many recording artists and studios earn a great deal of money, pushing industry sales to about $40 billion. Nevertheless, sales of all recordings have leveled off, except for a few superstars.
As in other media, a few corporations dominate the recording industry. It is interesting to note that only one, AOL Time Warner, has its corporate headquarters in the United States. In the 1990s, here's how the major labels stacked up.
WEA, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, controlled more than 25 percent of the market through Atlantic, Elektra, Giant, Reprise, Rhino, Sire, and Warner Brothers. Sony held about 14 percent of the market share through Columbia and Epic.
Polygram, which is owned by Philips Electronics, captured just over 13 percent of the market with A&M, Def Jam, Deutsche Gramophone, Island, Motown, and Polydor. BMG, which is owned by Bertelsman, held just over 12 percent through Arista, BMG Classics, Private Music, RCA, Windham Hill, and Zoo.
Other major companies, which control about 10 percent of the market, include CEMA through its labels Capitol, Chrysalis, EMI, IRS, Liberty, and SBK; and French-owned Vivendi through Geffen, GRP, MCA Records, and Uptown.
You weren't the only one thinking it ... and neither one of us was first ... <sigh>
Before you get too carried away...
Red Hat's second-quarter net loss was $55.3 million, on revenues of $21 million.Granted, they've got PR speak down, and slashdot falls over itself reporting these "breakevens". But they've systematically excluded items in almost every quarter they have reported results, and the number slashdot reports are pretty bogus. Most other sites AT LEAST report generally accepted number (GAAP) along with the PR numbers which exclude all losses.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to the way accountants keep track of earnings for publicly traded companies. RedHat did the same thing that everyone from Microsoft and GM on down do: they reported their earnings and losses for the quarter, as well as any other earnings and losses that are required to be accounted for in the current quarter, even though they may have been accrued in previous quarters and years.
To get a better picture, go to the SEC EDGAR database and search for Red Hat's latest 10-Q filing (the latest one I found was filed in July for the quarter ending May 31st, 2001). If you read through the 10-Q filing, you'll see that in any given quarter, half of Red Hat's expenses are from the write-down of investments (ie: the stock market has tubed in the last year) and the amortization of goodwill and intangibles (ie: artificial value of companies during a merger). This is Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) -- Red Hat traded millions of shares away to aquire Cygnus and other companies, and instead of realizing all of the associated costs of those mergers in a single quarter, the costs are spread across several quarters.
Look at the bottom line -- at the beginning of the quarter, Red Hat had $72,459,166 in the bank, and even if they lost $24 million, that still leaves them with $48 million in the bank, and these paper losses will be ending in another quarter or so, which will leave Red Hat breaking even. Pretty good for any tech company in the current economy.
I've been using Covad SDSL (CAIS as ISP) for 18 months, and aside from problems that were directly traceable to Verizon, I've been quite happy with the service, the performance and the price. Granted, I'm a business customer, but I was willing to pay the premium for support and additional IP address space. There's no way that a cablemodem can meet my needs, Verizon won't do (no static IPs) Rhythms is dead (Chap 11), and Telocity is dying (bought by Hughes/Directv). If Covad fails, my only other alternative would be Network Access Solutions, which isn't looking too great either.
What's *your* beef with Covad? It certainly sounds personal.
I can't speak for all of those tools/languages -- I'm certainly not using all of them myself -- but I have used Jython, SQLJ, BSF/BeanShell, and WebL, and can see a use for many of those languages in different situations. Certainly *someone* saw a need for each of them, and languages like Ada, Cobol, Forth, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Fortran, TCL, Prolog have their own proponents.
While I know that people are using C# and VisualBasic.NET for .NET development, what other languages are currently available *and being used* for development with .NET and how many applications have been actually deployed using .NET? There are literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of applications deployed on Java/JVM -- that's the REAL difference between .NET and JVM.
I did say *unoptimized -- I know that a properly coded and optimized application written in in C++ can easily outperform a properly coded and optimized Java application. My point was that Java is *fast enough* ... given that no one has time in their development schedule to completely optimize anything, and no one has enough competent programmers to code it that way, even if they had enough time to do it and money to pay them.
Oh, and typical server applications?!? If you're writing server applications using a one thread-per-server-scheme, you are nowhere, and you are if you're writing java, cuz it doesn't know from multiplexing, at least in 1.3.Ah ... you're talking about using select() to code I/O handlers. I begin to see the problem -- you seem to think that a web server is a typical server application. I suppose I should have been more specific; I was referring to business applications -- ERP, DSS, HR, A/R, A/P, Inventory Management, etc -- the type of applications that businesses pay money to have developed, because they need them to run their businesses. These sorts of applications are rarely I/O bound, because they typically have no more than hundreds of users and spend most of their time waiting on database queries and user input. With this sort of application, the use of multiple threads to manage code execution is perfectly sensible, and results in very clean and easy to maintain code. You'll note that I was not advocating writing webservers or databases in Java -- but backend applications that serve webservers and use databases are excellent targets for Java development.
Bash c#,Go back and read what I wrote -- I didn't claim that Java was as fast as C++ for *everything* -- just the sorts of applications I develop: business applications. Of course, if you continue to think of Java (and the JVM) as strictly an interpreted language, you're not keeping up with what the JIT compilers are doing these days, and you're completely ignoring the native-code compilers for Java.
Sorry for spelling: late, drunk.Friends don't let friends post drunk.
His point about finishing the Open Source versions of j2EE (like way quickly now too) is pretty much the only way we are not going to fall behind. We don't have the time to architect some beautiful dream, we need to shit or get off the pot NOW, it's starting to stink in here!
Exactly! Ganesh Prasad has hit the nail precisely on the head with his comments about .NET versus J2EE. Forget the marketshare issues, the meat of this article is that J2EE is here, today, and that complete OSS implementations of J2EE are achieveable this year ... as long as the open/free community stops trying to change Sun, and instead works around Sun. It would be much less effort than doing a full implementation of .NET, and much of the work is already done.
All of the myths about Java's speed (slow) are just that -- myths. I've built real-time data collection applications that run perfectly fine with Java/MySQL/Linux on Pentium 166s with 32MB of RAM -- Java was more than fast enough for our needs, and the development cycle was a lot faster than would have been possible with C++. Java is more than fast enough for server applications where JIT compilers can truly optimize the code, since it is compiled once and then kept in memory and run repeatedly. Benchmarks have shown that for typical server applications, modern JVM/JIT combinations are as fast as unoptimized C++ code. While an expert can still hand-optimize C++ to out perform Java, in reality, you'll have to ship your applications before you have time to apply those optimizations ... and Java's development cycle is (in my experience) still much faster than C/C++, simply because you can rely on the JVM to protect the OS from your code (and vice versa).
I'm also tired of hearing about how Sun's JVM only supports a single language -- Java, while .NET supports many languages. There are literally dozens of languages that can be compiled to run on Sun's JVM, even if Perl isn't one of those languages. Anyone who thinks that they'll be able to easily port existing C code to run on .NET and use .NET services hasn't looked at how virtual machines (and the CRL in particular) are implemented. Yes, the JVM is optimized for Java (and vice versa) but you can still use the JVM to allow you to write your applications in non-Java languages and deploy them on any platform that supports a JVM. Some languages, like Jython (a version of Python written in Java), allow you to create non-Java classes that inherit from Java classes, as well as Java classes that inherit from non-Java classes.
Anyone who claims that Sun's control over Java makes it impossible to build an open implementation (because Sun would just change the spec) and then in the same breath says that they won't have the same problems with .NET and Microsoft needs to wake up and smell the brimstone. While Sun does control the Java specification process, they still have to work with their partners and licensees, and the specification process is open -- and most of the reference implementations for the higher-level APIs are open as well. They can't change the Java language without breaking backwards compatibility for thousands of applications and millions of users, and Sun doesn't have any monopolies to fall back on. Microsoft, on the other hand, controls the desktop OS market, and can use that and .NET to conquer the server OS, and since the implementations for .NET are closed, Microsoft can switch the back end and the desktop without breaking applications deployed on Windows ... while simultaneously breaking non-Microsoft implementations. What more can a monopolist ask for?
And the best reason to work with Java/J2EE instead of .NET -- Java/J2EE is here, today, and has been working for years. While it isn't perfect, the bugs have been worked out, and it works. .NET is still beta code, and once it ships, it will still be a version 1.0 Microsoft product. It will take two more iterations (and who knows how many years) before .NET is truly stable, useful, and reliable. I need to build and deploy applications today -- not 3 years from now.
Because both formats are supposed to be good for data interchange, and only one of them really is -- XML. With EDI, the standard had to be so all-encompassing that one group of programmers would read the spec one way, and one another way, and so you could spend months trying to correctly interpret data that was "standard".
Apparently you've never had to write a parser for EDI, or any other binary data interchange format.
I'm not going to claim that XML is a magic bullet for data interchange -- but I will attest that human-readable data formats are superior to binary formats when it comes to data interchange. I have lost track of the number of custom parsers I've had to write over the last 15+ years in order to convert data from one system to another, simply because the systems in question didn't have a shared data format. The big wins for XML are that (1) you can visually inspect your before-and-after results, (2) you don't have to write the parser, even if you have to write code to call it, (3) there are actually two sensible APIs to match two very different ways to look at the data, each of which is parser independent, and best of all (4) if you don't have documentation for the schema (or it's misimplemented), you still have a prayer of interpreting the data correctly.
Anyone who's ever had to write an EDI application will *instantly* understand the appeal of XML.
Your comments about Solaris vs Linux are a complete non sequitor -- Sun has a lot of reasons to keep what they've been using for 10 years instead of switching to CUPS or one of the newer printing APIs that are being developed for Linux. Either way, it isn't relevant to the "what you lose when you leave Windows for Linux" question.
I'll admit that Windows has a wider variety of available printer drivers, but you're ignoring the realities of the printing world -- there are really only a couple of page display languages for modern printers: HPGL and Postscript cover 99.99% of printers manufactured in the last 5 years. Since ghostscript ships with Linux, printing to Postscript and having ghostscript translate to the printer makes perfect sense. And of course you can send the Postscript output to any number of devices directly. There aren't *any* printers that use Microsoft's internal page layout APIs. I'd score this one as even.
GUI APIsYou're going to complain about rapid development of the GUI APIs for Linux, and then claim that Microsoft (Win30/ Win31/ Win32S/ Win95/ Win98/ WinNT/ Win2K/ WinME) is *better*? Microsoft, who merrily breaks applications left and right everytime it creates a new version of MSVCRT.DLL is *better*? I don't think so. At least with GNOME, I can have multiple versions of libraries installed without crashing the entire system. Just try running two seperate Windows apps which were built for different versions of MSVCRT. Sorry, Linux wins this one.
Etcetera, etcetera...You say COM, I say CORBA, RPC, Sockets, and even Bonobo. COM does a lot of things, but one thing it doesn't do is it doesn't check objects against interfaces. Thus it is perfectly acceptable to COM to try and open a spreadsheet when what you passed in was a Word document. And of course, COM is only for a single machine -- it can't handle distributed applications. DCOM can, sort of, but DCOM has its own problems as well.
You want to talk about installers? Hell, Microsoft never bothered to write an installer -- they bought Installshield (and the braindead version at that). You should have a look at Red Carpet, the installer that Ximian wrote to handle all of those Gnome libraries that you're complaining about. While I won't claim it's perfect, it's a damn sight better than what I've experienced with Windows.
Ultimately it comes down to perspective -- all of those faults you see with Linux look like desirable features to me, and vice versa. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been building and deploying business applications for 20 years, on CP/M, MSDOS, Windows, NT, Unix, VMS, Primos, and Pick. I have found the Red Hat Linux environment to be the most reliable environment for deploying applications of all of those I've worked with. I'm not claiming perfection, but I do think that it's a lot better than anything Microsoft has ever delivered, and definitely sufficient for deploying business applications.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
1) Linux is as easy to develop business-class software for as Windows
2) When a Linux user is willing to pay for a peice of software
People often assume that if you break apart OS+Apps, then immediately everything gets ported to linux. Nothing could be further from the truth. So much that the OS provodies is just not there at all in linux.
Let's think about this. What exactly does Windows provide as an OS-service that is (1) necessary for developing business-class software, and (2) isn't available for Linux? Presumably you mean standard APIs ... but what standards, and who gets to define them? If what you mean is the Win32 APIs, then you need to think again -- those are merely Microsoft's take, and not the only way to do something. So you must mean general APIs for OS services:
You'd better back up your assertion with some facts, because I just don't see what's missing. Oh, and BTW, I've been a business application developer for over 20 years, so I *do* know what I'm talking about.
I think what you mean is that you want development tools that make it truly easy to churn out software without having to understand the low-level APIs. You want Visual Basic and Visual C/C++ for Linux, and you don't want to have to learn a whole new set of APIs either. Well, then have you looked at Wine lately? What about Kylix?
But seriously, porting an application from one OS to another is hard work, regardless of the tools ... there's no economic incentive to do that if there aren't enough users who are willing to buy what you're selling. While I'll admit that many Linux users aren't interested in paying a lot for software, I would suggest that that's because they're more interested in paying what the software is worth to them. There are plenty of users out there who are willing to pay for software that solves a problem that they can't solve any other way. Sound card drivers, Word processing software, games -- there have been plenty of people who have purchased these products because they needed them.
I think the difference is that the Linux marketplace has such a wide variety of solutions available, that people tend to purchase only as much software as they actually need, instead of going for the all-in-one-high-priced-bundle packages that are popular in the PC marketplace.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
The first problem with that is that from a strictly operational viewpoint, you can't classify *everything* -- because at that point you've eroded the value of the lowest security classification. If every document that is generated is marked sensitive, then either everyone will have to treat every book, file, floppy disk and piece of paper as sensitive ... or everyone will ignore the sensitive classification and keep working as usual. Human nature.
The second problem is the one that I raised, and that you ignored -- individual pieces of information by themselves are often completely benign, but correctly correlated can produce a very accurate estimate of information that would normally garner a much higher security classification.
This applies in every day life, as well. As an example, take the current trend in grocery marketing -- the saver club. If you join the club and use your club card everytime you go shopping at a particular grocery store, you get price discounts and cash back after enough purchases. Of course, the reason the store is willing to give you those discounts is that they are gradually building a very accurate database of information about your buying habits: what brands of food, how much, how often. You might not care if someone knows you eat Cheerios, but how about condom usage, or specific medicines? There's a lot of personal information to be gathered by aggregating supposedly non-sensitive data...
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Congratulations. You have failed the first test for a security clearance. Just because the data is unclassified, you can't assume that the data isn't still sensitive.
As an example, suppose you have a spreadsheet that details the fuel consumption for a group of F-16s, and another spreadsheet that details fuel purchases for an air base. Individually the spreadsheets are unclassified information, but together they are sensitive, because from the two spreadsheets you can deduce a great deal about the missions and deployments for that group of F-16s. Even months after the fact, that information is still sensitive, because it can be used to make predictions about that air group.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Yeah, there's a standard ... but what good is the standard if none of the vendors do more than implement subsets of the standard, and none of the vendors implement the same subset?
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
You're going to kick yourself.
Think Geppetto, from Pinocchio. "I want to be a real boy."
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
"Fact: Women love long hair! It's an instant chick magnet. It's better than walking puppies in the park! Wash it and wear it down. Toss it around on your shoulders a lot. When my guy does this, women will just walk up and start touching his hair! Wouldn't you like this to happen to you?"
Well, I asked my wife about this one, and she claims *my* long (shoulder-length) hair is sexy. Of course, hers is longer than mine, so she might be biased. I can't say that I've had women standing in line to run their fingers through it (though I once met a woman who wanted to run her fingers through my beard).
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Just as long as it ain't named Buttafuoco ... for Amy and Joey, of course...
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,
Once upon a time, I worked for a fscked-up little company called Ultimate Data Systems (UDS) in Wilton, Connecticut. I was working as a Programmer/Analyst, and doubling as a SysAdmin because they didn't actually have any SysAdmins on staff.
Saying that UDS was not well managed would be somewhat akin to saying that there was a tiny bit of controversy about the latest US Presidential election. As an example, the week that I was hired I was assigned to three different departments, one after another. The first two months I was there, they reorganized the company every two weeks, like clockwork. I didn't really care, since I only took the job as an interim step -- my previous company decided that they couldn't afford to pay little things (like my healthcare and salary) but they still wanted me to keep working...
I could tell lots of sad tales about UDS, but the saddest was that after working there for 6 months, they decided to layoff a third of the employees and move the company from Connecticut to Texas, presumably for some sort of cost savings. They notified everyone by holding a late night conference call, and announcing 3 rounds of layoffs, with the first 12 employees to get the axe the next morning. The next round would be in a month, with a third round a month later. In the meantime, the new company president (who coincidently lived in Texas) was coming in a couple of days to talk to the entire company and explain ALL of the transition plans to everyone...
Yeah, right. As it happened, the new president DID show up and hold a meeting; he just didn't explain anything. He tried to tell everyone that inspite of the upcoming layoffs, and the upcoming move, everyone would still have a place with UDS, even if they didn't want to move. The asshole spent 20 minutes trying to sell that load to the entire company ... and this being 1992, and the country still in a recession, these people were actually hoping that he was telling the truth.
For myself, while I was hoping to stick around for a couple more months so I could pad my savings account, I wasn't hurting for job prospects (no family to support, no mortgage, etc) ... so I did the only thing I could: when the asshole asked if anyone had any questions, I asked him questions. Every question that anyone in that room could have wanted to ask, I asked. And I didn't take "I don't know" for an answer. Which departments would move, which would stay, what order, what time schedule, what about working from (now) remote areas, what about salaries and relocation expenses, and anything else I could think of to ask. I don't think anyone else asked a single thing in that meeting.
Afterwards, the asshole made time for private meetings, and oddly enough, I was first ... heheheh. The really odd thing was, he just asked me questions, and I explained that I wasn't planning to move to Texas (I don't look good in boots and a Stetson). Then he had more one-on-one meetings with other people, left someone else in charge of the office and went back to Texas.
The next morning, as soon as I came in, the new vice president came to tell me the bad news ... I was being laidoff. I laughed and told him that I rather expected it, and that I didn't blame him for it. He didn't know what to say after that, so I started cleaning my desk out and went around and said goodbye to everyone. They were all sorry to see me go, but not sorry that I asked all those questions.
I moved to Northern Virginia, got a good job, and made a good life for myself. As for UDS ... they eventually folded and are only missed by their creditors.
Are you moderating this down because you disagree with it,