Witness IE 6 and XP and need I say more? Even migrating to an opensource system costs money. You need extra hardware and redundancy... you don't expect to just pull the plug in a mission critical system, reformat it with a new OS and software and plug it back in right? Not happening.
If money is tight you simply do not upgrade and run the older software. This creates a cycle as the accountants and analysts notice the cost savings and like it. Now the argument is why these 1999 system is fine? Why risk and waste money etc?
Bad times are bad for everyone who uses proprietary are free products. Companies only upgrade during expansions anyway and guess what? If manufactoring is cutting bank thanks to a double dip no one in their right mind will expand and those that are are putting them on hold.
I am guessing... without evidence... that half of the XP users are corporations where the accountants and analysts scream there is no ROI or increase in sales to upgrade to Windows 7 ignoring the added support costs and the other half are poor or unemployed people who are using old computers.
People are upgrading, but in the great recession if you do not have money you simply can't and it has nothing to do with preference for XP. If it were free to upgrade people would do it. China has nothing to do with preference more than pirated copies of Windows. Nice cheap netbooks and used computers are near the $150 - $250 mark. I do not know anyone outside of slashdot who prefers XP. People at worksites hate it too but use whatever IT blesses.
There are reasons to upgrade and everyone knows XP is very old including grandmas.
You can switch to Basic mode which disabled transpariences and is what you are talking about and of course classic which launches the Windows2000 explorer.
Yes it is eye candy but aero in Windows 7 has some nice features like putting Windows apps side by side dragging them far to the left or right, and if you move the cursor over the taskbar Windows will show a preview and a clear window where each app would go when you unminimize it. Not ground shattering but I miss them in Windows XP as I get used to it with 7. These are nice features when you have 12 apps open at once.
I wouldn't pay to upgrade but I certainly wouldn't mind it if I bought a new computer that came with it.
Shitty activeX intranet apps and the great recession forced corporate users to stick with it. Also Vista sucked and was already 2 years late which caused even more delays.
This time around most activeX intranet apps will be rewritten in HTML 5 since IE 6 wont be around forever and businesses are upgrading again after Windows 7 settled in with service pack 1. I think maybe 5 years will be the new norm for upgrades as it does cost money in extra support and security to stick with obsolete systems. China will probably still be XP based in 2020 due to the cost of a new non pirated OS. They skew the statistics. In the US only 25% of people still use XP.
For shit and kicks I downgraded to WindowsXP this weekend with IE 6 and IE 7 to see what hte fuss was all about as I want to make a website and cater to these corporate users.
My experience with XP SUCKED. It was klunky, slow, insecure, and IE 7 kept crashing and locking up. I know it is a shitty browser, but I wanted to see if other websites still catered to it for my experiment. Only half my ram was recognized even though I have PAE enabled, I didn't get sound until I installed SP 3 due to using HDMI. I thought the gui was better looking at first and I was in a time warp from 10 years ago. Did I mention IE was unusable and the system took longer to boot with XP than Windows 7?? WindowsXP was slower and less responsive. I noticed when a browser or app did a lot of work the whole system would lock or slow down. It felt like a single processor system on my hex core.
World of Warcraft sucked ass with a 40% reduction in frame rates. I was getting 19 fps on an ati 5750. That shouldn't happen. Flash doesn't have accelerated GPU video and so on.
Why upgrade? Here on Windows 7 IE 8 FLIES and is fast and bugfree if you are a clueless user. IE 9 has accelerated video, Chrome works better with video and scrolling text, all my ram is recognized. Also Aero is usefull. I love moving my cursor to see a preview of the apps. In addition I drag the title bar in apps to resize them A LOT with Gnome Shell and Windows 7. Can't do that in XP. I can also drag Windows to the far left and right and Aero in Windows 7 will automatically resize them so I can have 2 windows side by side etc. If you have more than 2 processors you can see a boast in performance from the newer kernels
Windows 7 is a nice upgrade on a modern machine and I am glad to be back.
Also according to other sites Xp has just 25% marketshare in the US. XP is not as popular as what other slashdotters would have you believe.
Most users of XP are businesses and people in 3rd world countries who cant afford to have a real non pirated OS. China keeps messing with the statistics and gives the false impression IE 6 and XP are HUGE to developers. Regardless, that they do not browse english websites and live in their own world.
XP will stay around for decades in these markets while corporations are begining to move to Windows 7 FAST. In 2 years the US marketshare for XP will be well under 10% as a result.
According to gStat. Most of the XP machines are in China and other other 3rd world countries where the cost of Windows is a good 2 months salary. That doesn't make any sense so people use pirated XP Sp 2 with IE 6.
Most users are upgrading and I bet you the 26% are mostly corporate users and those who are poor or unemployed in this recession and can't afford a new system.
Don't get me wrong IE 9 is really great and supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 and IE 10 looks like a full contender with Chrome/Firefox for sure. The problem is most users are still running IE 7 and 8. Add to the corporate users who still browse the net with IE 6 and you have a problem.
Most web developers used flash as a work around with these browsers. The problem is besides a few tech professionals does anyone upgrade IE? Until then most webmasters should stick with flash. Oddly, I do see corporate crappy intranet sites switching from activeX to HTML5 but I do not know how entrenched Sharepoint is to activeX unfortunately. I never used it.
Third of the number of infected worms? Or third of infected users? I imagined the older XP based rootkit ones have more users 10 - 1 than one that is on Windows 7. Windows 7 will default to automatic updates unless you tell it not too and is much more secure. I guess if a user ignores the UAC warning and clicks on something anyway you can't stop them.
On another note for shit and kicks I tried to infect my pc to see how easy it is too do. I couldn't do it even Googling for things like anti virus xp or anti virus 2011. I installed XP Service pack 2 with IE 6 and I did manage to slow my computer down but no viruses detected or removed by Malware bytes. I reformatted and put Windows 7 back on. It truly is hard to get infected today and I wonder if people really do click on the dancing pigs.mpg.exe files they get in their emails.
According to gstats Windows 7 has already taken the majority of marketshare in the US.Only 1 out of 4 are still running XP. In comparison, most of China is heavily XP based with IE 6 being their default browser with 85% running pirated versions of XP which of course is totally different than a corporate locked down XP machine running IE 8, fully patched, with anti virus software you see in developed nations.
I would say it is not XP is the problem more than unpatched decade old computers in 3rd world countries running outdated browsers from 10 years ago being infected. Windows XP Sp 3 with IE 8 is not too bad fully patched and it is MUCH MORE secure than Tho0rx XP Black edition Sp 1 with IE 6 with no anti virus.
However, after watching several videos I think it is blown out of proportion. It is not that bad because it is not pervasive. The tiles are only the startup login screen. When you get back to your desktop from lunch you will have the weather, traffic reports, email, stock quotes, etc. Then they will go away when you select the desktop to get work done. The Windows 7 desktop is still there and required for Office and other non tiled apps (all of them). In essense you can use Windows 8 as a regular desktop or as a mobile tablet and the response and reviews from Windows 7 mobile and Mango are very high according to www.amplicate.com and others. Applets are not apps and are treated differently. The tile method may not be bad if Office works for it and you have a tiny 9 inch screen netbook and only running a few apps at a time and want to drag pictures in email and facebook applets.
I prefer this approach rather than take away functionality of gnome-shell and Unity. How is taking away the minimize button functionality making your product better?? As long as both are included I am happy and I do not think it will be like the ribbon where you can't get the menus back.
"If the only licenses you have to comply with are GPL, BSD, etc, the BSA won't have anything to audit.
" I keep seeing this but this is a non viable option. If people didn't need proprietary software I would not run Windows on my machine and neither would Corporate America. I would love to switch back to Fedora or CentOS if I could run Dreamwaver, Photoshop, Office, and World of Warcraft. Fact is, I need Office so my resume doens't look like crap like it would saved in OpenOffice. Fact is, I need Adobe Dreamweaver to create a good website in 1/4th the time as manually typing in CSS and HTML does not show me what it looks like. A gui tool is needed. I guess I could go with paint.net or paintshopro for simple textures and elements. However, for photography for popular sites there is nothing like Photoshop. The Gimp creates visual distortions as the algorithms are not well done like Photoshop's. This assumes it even has the same functionality. Audicity is a joke for those who do professional audio editing, etc.
Sure, there are nice databases and operating systems that can do most of Oracle and Solaris from 8 years ago that is fine for small business. However, without Illustrator, photoshop, and dreamweaver, my productivity would stink. Office at least is a must for any business. If your brochures look like crap or your resume is not formatted properly no one will want to do business with you.
If you wipe them you are destroying evidence and could go to jail. It also makes you look guilty to the lawyers for the BSA.
Also you owe a bad employee jack squat. If he is a small business he needs to save money and maybe this guy was a jerk or cost him some lost revenue when he was fired. Employers owe jack to someone else as someoen else is not their problem. They come in and do work in exchange for a paycheck.
"1. Show retail purchases. In spite of the fact that it is perfectly legal to sell and purchase used software, the BSA pretends it's not. If you have a not-retail receipt, it's worthless. 2. Show a date prior to the first contact from the BSA. If you have an un-dated receipt, it is worthless. 3. Show the title of each piece of software purchased, on its own line item (quantities of identical titles are fine), with a line item price. You likely can't provide this for the copy of Windows that came with your PC. 4. Show the name of the company being audited. Did one of your employee's buy it and get reimbursed? Worthless. Do you have company cards that show employee names? Worthless. Did the retailer not print the billing information on the receipt? Worthless. Was is purchased by a company you bought or merged with? Worthless
"
So basically, what you are saying is you are guilty until proven innocent. All of the above examples certainly are legit with the exception of #1. You can't resell software because it is not actual software you are reselling. It is a copy of the *real* software in a vault at BigCorp. I know that sounds strange but it is in the licensing agreement and since it is licenced it thereofore is not a real tangible product.
But 2-4 just show that yes you indeed have licensed software, but it is in an unconvenient format for the BSA to prove guilt. Fuck em. The defendent doesn't need to help prove guilt upon themselves for the BSA as they do not work for them. That is not their problem if an employee bought it on the clock of working for the defendent. They represented the company. Yes a judge would throw this out as it is reasonable and certainly this is challengable. You have to have a damning email saying "Ya, this is pirated all right" or no receipt at all to show guilt. Even then losing the receipt is reasonable as well. It would be like the RIAA yelling "That is PIRATED since that Christmas present was purchased by your aunt and not YOU!! That will be $50,000." No court would accept this.
I believe the BSA abused their authority and your former employer would have a cause for countersuing in addition, to the court punishing the lawyers at BSA.
$120,000 is very steep for just 8 employees? WOW... you can buy a whole office space for the price of that in the midwest or south. Assuming you buy $700 per worker that only ends up as $56,000. At least you get a tax write off from it but still.
For all those bashing Mozilla and Firefox for not supporting H.264 I have to say HA.
Firefox did the right thing for turning it down regardless if it is part of HTML 5 due to patent reasons. Anyone saying "No, the MPAA are nice guys who would never sue us and the Firefox users are ideological socialists" have been proven that patents indeed suck.
Re:This sets up the battle of the century
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
We all win by not following these silly trends and focus on savings instead. I wated $15 upgrading to HDMI on my computer and I have not noticed a difference in quality with my 1080p display. Just hassles to make the black edges go away and the fonts less blurry. I finally fixed it but fail to see a difference with hiDef content other than I do not have to have an audio cable. These same BestBuy retailers want us to buy the $100 monster HDMI cable, instead of the BigLots $15 and buy these outrageous new Displays and upgraded equipment with insanely high profit margins.
As geeks we should know better. The ISP's are not going to be happy either. I am going to sit back and laugh with a bag of popcorn. I do not need their garbage either.
We are still in a recession where many of us are deep in debt to our eyeballs.
The 3D thing is stupid and very very old technology that can be done in software or just giving a signal with the blues and reds in different spots that look awesomingly cool with 3d glasses. I had a pair back in the 1980s. This reminds me of the stupid monster HDMI cables that sell for $100 at Bestbuy. Thankfully another slashdotter informed me where I can get ones for $10 at BigLots so I can finally upgrade... which was in itself a waste of time and money.
All of this is is greed and the hopes that consumers will just keep buying and buying and upgrading. First it was DVD, then HDTV, then DVI, now HDMI, then blueray, and now 3d and soon 2040P (made that up) with 3D zoom technology etc. When is good enough? I wouldn't mind if this shows actual improvements but it won't and this reminds of an article on slasdhot yesterday that compares speakers today from 30 years ago. What the electronics and MPAA fail to realize is many of us wont be upgrading as the costs are outrageous and the improvements are too few if any. The focus on shiny and big bass has degraded quality on newer items as the article yesterday on slashdot shows with speakers. All this is overpriced and overmargined electronics patented to the godzoo hoping Joe Six pack quickly opens his credit card for the latest in yesterday's technology with 3D now in hardware lol.... oh with gold plated HDMI cables and ethernet cables for his IE 7 experience.
That is a major hassle right there since everyone (enterpise) uses it heavily still. I can only imagine IPv6 might break ActiveX stuff written in VB 5 or 6 as well and maybe old Java intranet sites where IPv4 conventions are hard coded in and god knows what else.
Promisory Estoppel, may kill the patent suit agaisn't Google from this damning evidence. I am no lawyer and I am curious if any lawyers could comment on this post.
But, I was under the impression that it implies in a case such as the following. For example, I can say sure you can have my used car for free. But I then can't turn around and say give me $3000 after I gave you the keys! The fact of the matter is a verbal contract is a verbal contract and you relied it on it to make a decision.
Sure you can whine it wasn't in writting but that is there to make the lawyers happy as proof that the terms were discussed exactly as they were in paper without a guess on who said what. In the case of the blog the proof is written and stored... or in this case deleted by Oracle to hide evidence... ouch... but recovered from Google Cache. He stated it and mentioned there are no liabilities or loss from Sun whatsoever.
This shows you have to be careful what you say or email at work ALWAYS. If this is true the judge can throw out the whole case and maybe even fine Oracle for deleting the evidence if Google has a countersuit. More than likely Google will offer a settlement for a tiny fraction of the amount of the original money they wanted to end the case fast.
Part of me wants to scream ABOUT TIME. I thought it was outrageous back in 2003 and 2004 when malware really began to infect dial up users within seconds and why no one would do anything about it? I mean what if someone tried to break into your home every 30 seconds? Or what if each time you stopped your car at a light people would dash towards your car trying every method to break in?
Today it is a normal to shrug our shoulders while a single person has 675,000 credit card numbers and names.
Yes, this law is stupid and I do agree, but at least it is a step in the right direction and yes many many and I mean many criminals need to be thrown in jail. It is like the wild west and for awhile when IE 6 was popular, the threat of e-commerce leaving the web was real. To this day I refuse to do online banking because I am so paranoid. If banks had authenticators like World of Warcraft I would check it but it is not worth the hasle of having my account compromised.... I develop sites for IE and Windows so probably that is a good thing on my PC.
Most good MBA schools wont accept you if you do not have at least 5 years of real world experience. At least they used too and I hope still do.
An MBA is a horrible idea for someone who is out of work or has no real experience for the reasons you describe. It is the only graduate degree where you are both under AND over qualified at the same time! You can't run an engineering entity. The program was made for engineers actually who know science and product and design but lacked the business background to manage and understand business. MBA's were great for engineers to become managers and then leaders because they had the experience and know knowledge to relate to the bachelor degreed employees in Business Administration.
A good HR department will filter such an MBA out immediately for that reason if he or she has no real world management experience to back them.
I am seriously thinking of going for an MBA but I am unemployed right now. After you get a job then you go in and network with people for better jobs. This is the value of the program as well. If you get it online you are wasting your money.
Slashdot Mirror
Witness IE 6 and XP and need I say more? Even migrating to an opensource system costs money. You need extra hardware and redundancy ... you don't expect to just pull the plug in a mission critical system, reformat it with a new OS and software and plug it back in right? Not happening.
If money is tight you simply do not upgrade and run the older software. This creates a cycle as the accountants and analysts notice the cost savings and like it. Now the argument is why these 1999 system is fine? Why risk and waste money etc?
Bad times are bad for everyone who uses proprietary are free products. Companies only upgrade during expansions anyway and guess what? If manufactoring is cutting bank thanks to a double dip no one in their right mind will expand and those that are are putting them on hold.
Actually in the US only 26% use WindowsXP according to gStat. China skews the numbers heavily.
I am guessing ... without evidence ... that half of the XP users are corporations where the accountants and analysts scream there is no ROI or increase in sales to upgrade to Windows 7 ignoring the added support costs and the other half are poor or unemployed people who are using old computers.
People are upgrading, but in the great recession if you do not have money you simply can't and it has nothing to do with preference for XP. If it were free to upgrade people would do it. China has nothing to do with preference more than pirated copies of Windows. Nice cheap netbooks and used computers are near the $150 - $250 mark. I do not know anyone outside of slashdot who prefers XP. People at worksites hate it too but use whatever IT blesses.
There are reasons to upgrade and everyone knows XP is very old including grandmas.
You can switch to Basic mode which disabled transpariences and is what you are talking about and of course classic which launches the Windows2000 explorer.
Yes it is eye candy but aero in Windows 7 has some nice features like putting Windows apps side by side dragging them far to the left or right, and if you move the cursor over the taskbar Windows will show a preview and a clear window where each app would go when you unminimize it. Not ground shattering but I miss them in Windows XP as I get used to it with 7. These are nice features when you have 12 apps open at once.
I wouldn't pay to upgrade but I certainly wouldn't mind it if I bought a new computer that came with it.
I do not think it will be that long.
Shitty activeX intranet apps and the great recession forced corporate users to stick with it. Also Vista sucked and was already 2 years late which caused even more delays.
This time around most activeX intranet apps will be rewritten in HTML 5 since IE 6 wont be around forever and businesses are upgrading again after Windows 7 settled in with service pack 1. I think maybe 5 years will be the new norm for upgrades as it does cost money in extra support and security to stick with obsolete systems. China will probably still be XP based in 2020 due to the cost of a new non pirated OS. They skew the statistics. In the US only 25% of people still use XP.
It wont be as bad as it was for XP hopefully.
For shit and kicks I downgraded to WindowsXP this weekend with IE 6 and IE 7 to see what hte fuss was all about as I want to make a website and cater to these corporate users.
My experience with XP SUCKED. It was klunky, slow, insecure, and IE 7 kept crashing and locking up. I know it is a shitty browser, but I wanted to see if other websites still catered to it for my experiment. Only half my ram was recognized even though I have PAE enabled, I didn't get sound until I installed SP 3 due to using HDMI. I thought the gui was better looking at first and I was in a time warp from 10 years ago. Did I mention IE was unusable and the system took longer to boot with XP than Windows 7?? WindowsXP was slower and less responsive. I noticed when a browser or app did a lot of work the whole system would lock or slow down. It felt like a single processor system on my hex core.
World of Warcraft sucked ass with a 40% reduction in frame rates. I was getting 19 fps on an ati 5750. That shouldn't happen. Flash doesn't have accelerated GPU video and so on.
Why upgrade?
Here on Windows 7 IE 8 FLIES and is fast and bugfree if you are a clueless user. IE 9 has accelerated video, Chrome works better with video and scrolling text, all my ram is recognized. Also Aero is usefull. I love moving my cursor to see a preview of the apps. In addition I drag the title bar in apps to resize them A LOT with Gnome Shell and Windows 7. Can't do that in XP. I can also drag Windows to the far left and right and Aero in Windows 7 will automatically resize them so I can have 2 windows side by side etc. If you have more than 2 processors you can see a boast in performance from the newer kernels
Windows 7 is a nice upgrade on a modern machine and I am glad to be back.
Also according to other sites Xp has just 25% marketshare in the US. XP is not as popular as what other slashdotters would have you believe.
Most users of XP are businesses and people in 3rd world countries who cant afford to have a real non pirated OS. China keeps messing with the statistics and gives the false impression IE 6 and XP are HUGE to developers. Regardless, that they do not browse english websites and live in their own world.
XP will stay around for decades in these markets while corporations are begining to move to Windows 7 FAST. In 2 years the US marketshare for XP will be well under 10% as a result.
According to gStat. Most of the XP machines are in China and other other 3rd world countries where the cost of Windows is a good 2 months salary. That doesn't make any sense so people use pirated XP Sp 2 with IE 6.
Most users are upgrading and I bet you the 26% are mostly corporate users and those who are poor or unemployed in this recession and can't afford a new system.
Don't get me wrong IE 9 is really great and supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 and IE 10 looks like a full contender with Chrome/Firefox for sure. The problem is most users are still running IE 7 and 8. Add to the corporate users who still browse the net with IE 6 and you have a problem.
Most web developers used flash as a work around with these browsers. The problem is besides a few tech professionals does anyone upgrade IE? Until then most webmasters should stick with flash. Oddly, I do see corporate crappy intranet sites switching from activeX to HTML5 but I do not know how entrenched Sharepoint is to activeX unfortunately. I never used it.
I was going to say l33t h0zx3r, who secretly admins your system agrees too.
Third of the number of infected worms? Or third of infected users? I imagined the older XP based rootkit ones have more users 10 - 1 than one that is on Windows 7. Windows 7 will default to automatic updates unless you tell it not too and is much more secure. I guess if a user ignores the UAC warning and clicks on something anyway you can't stop them.
On another note for shit and kicks I tried to infect my pc to see how easy it is too do. I couldn't do it even Googling for things like anti virus xp or anti virus 2011. I installed XP Service pack 2 with IE 6 and I did manage to slow my computer down but no viruses detected or removed by Malware bytes. I reformatted and put Windows 7 back on. It truly is hard to get infected today and I wonder if people really do click on the dancing pigs.mpg.exe files they get in their emails.
According to gstats Windows 7 has already taken the majority of marketshare in the US.Only 1 out of 4 are still running XP. In comparison, most of China is heavily XP based with IE 6 being their default browser with 85% running pirated versions of XP which of course is totally different than a corporate locked down XP machine running IE 8, fully patched, with anti virus software you see in developed nations.
I would say it is not XP is the problem more than unpatched decade old computers in 3rd world countries running outdated browsers from 10 years ago being infected. Windows XP Sp 3 with IE 8 is not too bad fully patched and it is MUCH MORE secure than Tho0rx XP Black edition Sp 1 with IE 6 with no anti virus.
My first reaction was OH GOD NO.
However, after watching several videos I think it is blown out of proportion. It is not that bad because it is not pervasive. The tiles are only the startup login screen. When you get back to your desktop from lunch you will have the weather, traffic reports, email, stock quotes, etc. Then they will go away when you select the desktop to get work done. The Windows 7 desktop is still there and required for Office and other non tiled apps (all of them). In essense you can use Windows 8 as a regular desktop or as a mobile tablet and the response and reviews from Windows 7 mobile and Mango are very high according to www.amplicate.com and others. Applets are not apps and are treated differently. The tile method may not be bad if Office works for it and you have a tiny 9 inch screen netbook and only running a few apps at a time and want to drag pictures in email and facebook applets.
I prefer this approach rather than take away functionality of gnome-shell and Unity. How is taking away the minimize button functionality making your product better?? As long as both are included I am happy and I do not think it will be like the ribbon where you can't get the menus back.
It is not like Apple would ever sue someone to stop a product that might compete with the iphone. That is just paranoid and silly
To your sig I have to say HA!
"If the only licenses you have to comply with are GPL, BSD, etc, the BSA won't have anything to audit.
"
I keep seeing this but this is a non viable option. If people didn't need proprietary software I would not run Windows on my machine and neither would Corporate America. I would love to switch back to Fedora or CentOS if I could run Dreamwaver, Photoshop, Office, and World of Warcraft. Fact is, I need Office so my resume doens't look like crap like it would saved in OpenOffice. Fact is, I need Adobe Dreamweaver to create a good website in 1/4th the time as manually typing in CSS and HTML does not show me what it looks like. A gui tool is needed. I guess I could go with paint.net or paintshopro for simple textures and elements. However, for photography for popular sites there is nothing like Photoshop. The Gimp creates visual distortions as the algorithms are not well done like Photoshop's. This assumes it even has the same functionality. Audicity is a joke for those who do professional audio editing, etc.
Sure, there are nice databases and operating systems that can do most of Oracle and Solaris from 8 years ago that is fine for small business. However, without Illustrator, photoshop, and dreamweaver, my productivity would stink. Office at least is a must for any business. If your brochures look like crap or your resume is not formatted properly no one will want to do business with you.
If you wipe them you are destroying evidence and could go to jail. It also makes you look guilty to the lawyers for the BSA.
Also you owe a bad employee jack squat. If he is a small business he needs to save money and maybe this guy was a jerk or cost him some lost revenue when he was fired. Employers owe jack to someone else as someoen else is not their problem. They come in and do work in exchange for a paycheck.
"1. Show retail purchases. In spite of the fact that it is perfectly legal to sell and purchase used software, the BSA pretends it's not. If you have a not-retail receipt, it's worthless.
2. Show a date prior to the first contact from the BSA. If you have an un-dated receipt, it is worthless.
3. Show the title of each piece of software purchased, on its own line item (quantities of identical titles are fine), with a line item price. You likely can't provide this for the copy of Windows that came with your PC.
4. Show the name of the company being audited. Did one of your employee's buy it and get reimbursed? Worthless. Do you have company cards that show employee names? Worthless. Did the retailer not print the billing information on the receipt? Worthless. Was is purchased by a company you bought or merged with? Worthless
"
So basically, what you are saying is you are guilty until proven innocent. All of the above examples certainly are legit with the exception of #1. You can't resell software because it is not actual software you are reselling. It is a copy of the *real* software in a vault at BigCorp. I know that sounds strange but it is in the licensing agreement and since it is licenced it thereofore is not a real tangible product.
But 2-4 just show that yes you indeed have licensed software, but it is in an unconvenient format for the BSA to prove guilt. Fuck em. The defendent doesn't need to help prove guilt upon themselves for the BSA as they do not work for them. That is not their problem if an employee bought it on the clock of working for the defendent. They represented the company. Yes a judge would throw this out as it is reasonable and certainly this is challengable. You have to have a damning email saying "Ya, this is pirated all right" or no receipt at all to show guilt. Even then losing the receipt is reasonable as well. It would be like the RIAA yelling "That is PIRATED since that Christmas present was purchased by your aunt and not YOU!! That will be $50,000." No court would accept this.
I believe the BSA abused their authority and your former employer would have a cause for countersuing in addition, to the court punishing the lawyers at BSA.
$120,000 is very steep for just 8 employees? WOW ... you can buy a whole office space for the price of that in the midwest or south. Assuming you buy $700 per worker that only ends up as $56,000. At least you get a tax write off from it but still.
For all those bashing Mozilla and Firefox for not supporting H.264 I have to say HA.
Firefox did the right thing for turning it down regardless if it is part of HTML 5 due to patent reasons. Anyone saying "No, the MPAA are nice guys who would never sue us and the Firefox users are ideological socialists" have been proven that patents indeed suck.
We all win by not following these silly trends and focus on savings instead. I wated $15 upgrading to HDMI on my computer and I have not noticed a difference in quality with my 1080p display. Just hassles to make the black edges go away and the fonts less blurry. I finally fixed it but fail to see a difference with hiDef content other than I do not have to have an audio cable. These same BestBuy retailers want us to buy the $100 monster HDMI cable, instead of the BigLots $15 and buy these outrageous new Displays and upgraded equipment with insanely high profit margins.
As geeks we should know better. The ISP's are not going to be happy either. I am going to sit back and laugh with a bag of popcorn. I do not need their garbage either.
We are still in a recession where many of us are deep in debt to our eyeballs.
The 3D thing is stupid and very very old technology that can be done in software or just giving a signal with the blues and reds in different spots that look awesomingly cool with 3d glasses. I had a pair back in the 1980s. This reminds me of the stupid monster HDMI cables that sell for $100 at Bestbuy. Thankfully another slashdotter informed me where I can get ones for $10 at BigLots so I can finally upgrade ... which was in itself a waste of time and money.
All of this is is greed and the hopes that consumers will just keep buying and buying and upgrading. First it was DVD, then HDTV, then DVI, now HDMI, then blueray, and now 3d and soon 2040P (made that up) with 3D zoom technology etc. When is good enough? I wouldn't mind if this shows actual improvements but it won't and this reminds of an article on slasdhot yesterday that compares speakers today from 30 years ago. What the electronics and MPAA fail to realize is many of us wont be upgrading as the costs are outrageous and the improvements are too few if any. The focus on shiny and big bass has degraded quality on newer items as the article yesterday on slashdot shows with speakers. All this is overpriced and overmargined electronics patented to the godzoo hoping Joe Six pack quickly opens his credit card for the latest in yesterday's technology with 3D now in hardware lol. ... oh with gold plated HDMI cables and ethernet cables for his IE 7 experience.
That is a major hassle right there since everyone (enterpise) uses it heavily still. I can only imagine IPv6 might break ActiveX stuff written in VB 5 or 6 as well and maybe old Java intranet sites where IPv4 conventions are hard coded in and god knows what else.
Promisory Estoppel, may kill the patent suit agaisn't Google from this damning evidence. I am no lawyer and I am curious if any lawyers could comment on this post.
But, I was under the impression that it implies in a case such as the following. For example, I can say sure you can have my used car for free. But I then can't turn around and say give me $3000 after I gave you the keys! The fact of the matter is a verbal contract is a verbal contract and you relied it on it to make a decision.
Sure you can whine it wasn't in writting but that is there to make the lawyers happy as proof that the terms were discussed exactly as they were in paper without a guess on who said what. In the case of the blog the proof is written and stored ... or in this case deleted by Oracle to hide evidence ... ouch ... but recovered from Google Cache. He stated it and mentioned there are no liabilities or loss from Sun whatsoever.
This shows you have to be careful what you say or email at work ALWAYS. If this is true the judge can throw out the whole case and maybe even fine Oracle for deleting the evidence if Google has a countersuit. More than likely Google will offer a settlement for a tiny fraction of the amount of the original money they wanted to end the case fast.
Part of me wants to scream ABOUT TIME. I thought it was outrageous back in 2003 and 2004 when malware really began to infect dial up users within seconds and why no one would do anything about it? I mean what if someone tried to break into your home every 30 seconds? Or what if each time you stopped your car at a light people would dash towards your car trying every method to break in?
Today it is a normal to shrug our shoulders while a single person has 675,000 credit card numbers and names.
Yes, this law is stupid and I do agree, but at least it is a step in the right direction and yes many many and I mean many criminals need to be thrown in jail. It is like the wild west and for awhile when IE 6 was popular, the threat of e-commerce leaving the web was real. To this day I refuse to do online banking because I am so paranoid. If banks had authenticators like World of Warcraft I would check it but it is not worth the hasle of having my account compromised. ... I develop sites for IE and Windows so probably that is a good thing on my PC.
Most good MBA schools wont accept you if you do not have at least 5 years of real world experience. At least they used too and I hope still do.
An MBA is a horrible idea for someone who is out of work or has no real experience for the reasons you describe. It is the only graduate degree where you are both under AND over qualified at the same time! You can't run an engineering entity. The program was made for engineers actually who know science and product and design but lacked the business background to manage and understand business. MBA's were great for engineers to become managers and then leaders because they had the experience and know knowledge to relate to the bachelor degreed employees in Business Administration.
A good HR department will filter such an MBA out immediately for that reason if he or she has no real world management experience to back them.
I am seriously thinking of going for an MBA but I am unemployed right now. After you get a job then you go in and network with people for better jobs. This is the value of the program as well. If you get it online you are wasting your money.