The offer is appealing but has a horrible IP agreement which gives them the rights to work I create while I'm there, *and* rights to work I've created in the past.
Well, that's plumb crazy, and possibly unenforceable too.
In any event the answer is obvious. Get to a real lawyer! That's who can tell you how to protect yourself in a sensible manner.
Why oh why do people have such a hard time paying a few hundred bucks to a lawyer in circumstances where they could possibly suffer thousands of dollars in damage?
That's one of the many reasons why I have stayed with Pegasus Mailfor many years. Because they were created in the same program I know that I can still access my old mail files without problems.
What I do at year end is move all of that year's messages to a new folder and reset my filters so that the new year's messages go into a new set of folders.
Periodically I just copy off previous year's messages to CD.
At least few times I have been able to back a couple of years and find information that I lacked.
Yes! It is obvious that the corporate overlords at Google cannot be trusted to act in a fully altruistic fashion, and may even do things that lead to profit.
Accordingly the Central Committee of Slashdot Readers (CCSR) demands that Google be nationalised and all assets seized so that it can be used for the greater good of all humanity.
Can't find it on-line, but just this week there was a news story about a Canadian who spent 18 months in Japan teaching English. It's a pretty commonplace thing really.
Upon his return he landed a job as a baggage handler at one of our airports. At least he thought he had until he was refused security clearance.
His sole mistake was living somewhere where the Canadian Security agencies felt that they couldn't verify his movements and activities while out of the country.
If you're considering government work you just might want to look into this ahead of time.
Really, do we need a story every time some security problem appears in some software package? Surely anyone with half a brain understands that security relies on multiple protections.
Firewall, virus scanner, frequent updates to all software. Maybe a change in OS.
I really ignore all of these endless warnings any more and just trust that frequent updates and scans, and a reasonable amount of common sense and skepticism will protect me pretty much fully.
"The most blunt assessment came from Microsoft chief Bill Gates, who has put more than $700 million into reducing the size of high school classes through the foundation formed by him and his wife, Melinda. He said high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college"
Hmmm. So Bill, what of the say twenty percent of the population who just aren't going to be able to make the grades to get into college? The left hand side of the bell curve so to speak.
Used to be that those folks would train for a trade or even go to work for a manufacturer or similar employer where loyalty and hard work would make up for a lesser intelligence.
Whoops - those jobs have been shipped offshore.
What of the twenty percent of the population who might have good enough grades to get into a college, but who can't afford the tuition or the loans? Sure some folks can work two jobs and attend college full time, but that's not possible for every student in the country.
Bill, before offering half baked solutions to the "education problem" try to think of one that takes all of these people into consideration.
I don't think that I have ever created a document in it that didn't get messed up somewhere along the line when Word decided to "fix" the formatting or bullets or some other element. This invariably leads me to waste five minutes figuring out what went wrong. This is also why I still like Wordperfect, where "reveal codes" would let you delete what didn't work.
The point though is that Word almost never manages to guess what I want, and consequently is annoying as hell.
OpenOffice is better, but there have still been times when I just about gave up on it - why would anyone default to pasting URLs or e-mail addresses as clickable links in a document which will be printed on paper? It just makes no sense.
Which leads me to my second point. Let me turn things off. I especially would love one checkbox which would disable all formatting of e-mail addresses, URLs, and anything else that programs want to underline or turn green.
You know, I can think of a few people who would love to take this collection off the guy's hands and make good use of it. Real professional engineers.
I'm not sure how many of them are likely to post a random query on Shlashdot though, especially since everything to do with the post has been slashdotted to death.
This really is a situation where it would have been wise for the guy to post an e-mail address, or at least a link to a slashdot profile. Anything really.
I have been hosted by Magma Communications in Ottawa for many years and have nothing but praise for their support and service. Not the cheapest company but superb service and extremely reliable.
Aside from Tetris and Jardinains I really never bothered with games. Too little time, too little interest. I was more concerned with creating real content that playing on my PC.
This week though I downloaded the now free for asking GTA 2 and started playing with it.
Hey - it's fun to crash cars, run over pedestrians,and generally blast the daylights out of everyone on the screen. I haven't even figured out half of how the game works, and have no clue what the end goal is, but I am enjoying myself.
The GTA series is incredibly popular, as are the various shooter games. Socially redeeming? Hardly. Artistic merit? Yah, right.
And these guys are asking why gamers are stereotyped???
Hmmph - it has been at least half a decade since I have used the Yellow Pages for anything more than looking up pizza delivery places.
I can't think of a more annoying, inefficient, and time wasting publication. If there's one that that I would love to see be replaced entirely by technology it's the Yellow Pages.
Ok Bad example. Try searching Google for information on say a Sony STR-DE945 reciever and see how far you need to look to find anything beyond retail. Like maybe for a page from the Sony website?
Nice article which summarized many of the problems with contemporary search engines.
My experience is that a few years ago you could type say "baked gorgonzola" into Google and be sure to get a useful result pretty near the top. These days though what you want is likely to be on page three or four, after a dozen links to price comparison sites.
There really is no such thing as a quick Google search any more. It almost invariably involves multiple formulations of your query, and probably trolling through at least two or three pages of results.
Whether that's because of Google, or the sheer volume of content on the web, or sites that capitalize on Goggle's weaknesses is something I don't know.
Let's engage in little critical thinking here. There may be some argument for protecting trade secrets, but I seem to recall that the last time Apple slapped down Think Secret was for talking about products that would be launched in a day or two.
Given that probably thousands of people had already seen those products (the mac mini and iPod shuffle) it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that Apple suffered any damages whatsoever because of Think Secret's reporting.
Before all of the do-it-yourself system builders leap in, check out this post from Yesterday's discussion:
Leo McGarrysaid, and I can't think of a better summary,
"Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink."
After reading through far too many one paragraph webpages, clicking every five seconds, I have to say that my overwhelming impression is that this is still pretty rough and ready technology.
The lack of a consistent way to connect with real world telephone systems, the sketchy support of 911 services, and the inability of the competing VoIP services to interact make it look as if it will be at least another year before it's viable for most people.
In particular I can't see abandoning a hardwired phone line yet. Internet is still too prone to outages and other problems. What happens when you lose your telephone service because some idiot has launched a DOS attack on Vonage or the Verizon VoIP center?
Or when you lose your main business phone service because a mistaken RIAA takedown notice causes your ISP to shut down your Internet connection?
Until the VoIP services can match the traditional phone companies for reliability and services they won't get my money.
(I admit that Verizon pretty much sets the standard below which no phone service could ever drop, but you get my point...)
"...larger CMS offerings... seem too complex and powerful for this project. Are there any suggestions from Slashdot readers who run high school or college newspapers?"
I think that what wyldeone is requesting is a CMS that doesn't rely on a high level of ubergeekiness. Presumably he or she is working with a relatively unskilled group. Most of what's been suggested have a big learning curve, and require a willingness to dig into the guts of some pretty idiosyncratic packages.
If he or she is going to set up a system that will endure and be used it will need to be friendly to casual users who change from year to year.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeesh. Can't we find something a bit more plausible to test than this? Something that any rational person might think would actually work?
The offer is appealing but has a horrible IP agreement which gives them the rights to work I create while I'm there, *and* rights to work I've created in the past.
Well, that's plumb crazy, and possibly unenforceable too.
In any event the answer is obvious. Get to a real lawyer! That's who can tell you how to protect yourself in a sensible manner.
Why oh why do people have such a hard time paying a few hundred bucks to a lawyer in circumstances where they could possibly suffer thousands of dollars in damage?
That's one of the many reasons why I have stayed with Pegasus Mailfor many years. Because they were created in the same program I know that I can still access my old mail files without problems.
What I do at year end is move all of that year's messages to a new folder and reset my filters so that the new year's messages go into a new set of folders.
Periodically I just copy off previous year's messages to CD.
At least few times I have been able to back a couple of years and find information that I lacked.
Yes! It is obvious that the corporate overlords at Google cannot be trusted to act in a fully altruistic fashion, and may even do things that lead to profit.
Accordingly the Central Committee of Slashdot Readers (CCSR) demands that Google be nationalised and all assets seized so that it can be used for the greater good of all humanity.
Oh yeah, and Open Source too.....
Can't find it on-line, but just this week there was a news story about a Canadian who spent 18 months in Japan teaching English. It's a pretty commonplace thing really.
Upon his return he landed a job as a baggage handler at one of our airports. At least he thought he had until he was refused security clearance.
His sole mistake was living somewhere where the Canadian Security agencies felt that they couldn't verify his movements and activities while out of the country.
If you're considering government work you just might want to look into this ahead of time.
Really, do we need a story every time some security problem appears in some software package? Surely anyone with half a brain understands that security relies on multiple protections.
Firewall, virus scanner, frequent updates to all software. Maybe a change in OS.
I really ignore all of these endless warnings any more and just trust that frequent updates and scans, and a reasonable amount of common sense and skepticism will protect me pretty much fully.
I didn't see her discuss productivity. I did see a whole article telling me what gewgaws she thought were nicest to look at.
What I expected was something concrete about how much more work she can accomplish in a given timeframe and why Mac features make that possible.
Kewl icons are not productivity.
God - the world does not need musical ring tones. Really, we don't. Without doubt they are always irritating and annoying to everyone else.
Really, just because you think that the Looney Tunes themes is cute doesn't mean that the people around don't view you as an idiot.
"The most blunt assessment came from Microsoft chief Bill Gates, who has put more than $700 million into reducing the size of high school classes through the foundation formed by him and his wife, Melinda. He said high schools must be redesigned to prepare every student for college"
Hmmm. So Bill, what of the say twenty percent of the population who just aren't going to be able to make the grades to get into college? The left hand side of the bell curve so to speak.
Used to be that those folks would train for a trade or even go to work for a manufacturer or similar employer where loyalty and hard work would make up for a lesser intelligence.
Whoops - those jobs have been shipped offshore.
What of the twenty percent of the population who might have good enough grades to get into a college, but who can't afford the tuition or the loans? Sure some folks can work two jobs and attend college full time, but that's not possible for every student in the country.
Bill, before offering half baked solutions to the "education problem" try to think of one that takes all of these people into consideration.
What is it with corporations today? When a customer points out that you are making a horrible mistake there is only one option.
Acknowledge it, say that you're sorry, and fix it!
Everyone makes mistakes - the question is what you do to make things right.
"Nah, let's insult the customer, ignore them, and hope that problem will just go away. Surely no-one else will ever notice."
"Hey - what's that lawyer doing here?"
And have some way to turn off anything automatic.
I despise MS Word for one specific reason.
I don't think that I have ever created a document in it that didn't get messed up somewhere along the line when Word decided to "fix" the formatting or bullets or some other element. This invariably leads me to waste five minutes figuring out what went wrong. This is also why I still like Wordperfect, where "reveal codes" would let you delete what didn't work.
The point though is that Word almost never manages to guess what I want, and consequently is annoying as hell.
OpenOffice is better, but there have still been times when I just about gave up on it - why would anyone default to pasting URLs or e-mail addresses as clickable links in a document which will be printed on paper? It just makes no sense.
Which leads me to my second point. Let me turn things off. I especially would love one checkbox which would disable all formatting of e-mail addresses, URLs, and anything else that programs want to underline or turn green.
How about we just conclude that anything which is sufficiently distracting will impair your ability to drive safely?
Big Macs, iced cappucino, scantily clad women on the corner, giant electronic billboards.....
Of course cel phones are an easy target...
You know, I can think of a few people who would love to take this collection off the guy's hands and make good use of it. Real professional engineers.
I'm not sure how many of them are likely to post a random query on Shlashdot though, especially since everything to do with the post has been slashdotted to death.
This really is a situation where it would have been wise for the guy to post an e-mail address, or at least a link to a slashdot profile. Anything really.
I have been hosted by Magma Communications in Ottawa for many years and have nothing but praise for their support and service. Not the cheapest company but superb service and extremely reliable.
Great spam filtering too!
Aside from Tetris and Jardinains I really never bothered with games. Too little time, too little interest. I was more concerned with creating real content that playing on my PC.
This week though I downloaded the now free for asking GTA 2 and started playing with it.
Hey - it's fun to crash cars, run over pedestrians,and generally blast the daylights out of everyone on the screen. I haven't even figured out half of how the game works, and have no clue what the end goal is, but I am enjoying myself.
The GTA series is incredibly popular, as are the various shooter games. Socially redeeming? Hardly. Artistic merit? Yah, right.
And these guys are asking why gamers are stereotyped???
Ahem. Methinks that the San Francisco crew could have been a bit more careful in which photos they use.
Look here
Hmmph - it has been at least half a decade since I have used the Yellow Pages for anything more than looking up pizza delivery places.
I can't think of a more annoying, inefficient, and time wasting publication. If there's one that that I would love to see be replaced entirely by technology it's the Yellow Pages.
Ok Bad example. Try searching Google for information on say a Sony STR-DE945 reciever and see how far you need to look to find anything beyond retail. Like maybe for a page from the Sony website?
Or try to find a User Maunal for the same item: sony STR-DE945 receiver manual.
Nice article which summarized many of the problems with contemporary search engines.
My experience is that a few years ago you could type say "baked gorgonzola" into Google and be sure to get a useful result pretty near the top. These days though what you want is likely to be on page three or four, after a dozen links to price comparison sites.
There really is no such thing as a quick Google search any more. It almost invariably involves multiple formulations of your query, and probably trolling through at least two or three pages of results.
Whether that's because of Google, or the sheer volume of content on the web, or sites that capitalize on Goggle's weaknesses is something I don't know.
4) Management by walking around.
This is not to be confused with one guy I heard of who practiced what employees called "Management by walking around yelling at people."
Let's engage in little critical thinking here. There may be some argument for protecting trade secrets, but I seem to recall that the last time Apple slapped down Think Secret was for talking about products that would be launched in a day or two.
Given that probably thousands of people had already seen those products (the mac mini and iPod shuffle) it's a bit ridiculous to suggest that Apple suffered any damages whatsoever because of Think Secret's reporting.
Apple is behaving like a bully - nothing more.
Before all of the do-it-yourself system builders leap in, check out this post from Yesterday's discussion:
Leo McGarry said, and I can't think of a better summary,
"Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink."
Am I alone in sitting here this morning, reading this story, and refusing to belive that even Verizon would do something so stunningly stupid.
Yee Gods!
After reading through far too many one paragraph webpages, clicking every five seconds, I have to say that my overwhelming impression is that this is still pretty rough and ready technology.
The lack of a consistent way to connect with real world telephone systems, the sketchy support of 911 services, and the inability of the competing VoIP services to interact make it look as if it will be at least another year before it's viable for most people.
In particular I can't see abandoning a hardwired phone line yet. Internet is still too prone to outages and other problems. What happens when you lose your telephone service because some idiot has launched a DOS attack on Vonage or the Verizon VoIP center?
Or when you lose your main business phone service because a mistaken RIAA takedown notice causes your ISP to shut down your Internet connection?
Until the VoIP services can match the traditional phone companies for reliability and services they won't get my money.
(I admit that Verizon pretty much sets the standard below which no phone service could ever drop, but you get my point...)
"...larger CMS offerings ... seem too complex and powerful for this project. Are there any suggestions from Slashdot readers who run high school or college newspapers?"
I think that what wyldeone is requesting is a CMS that doesn't rely on a high level of ubergeekiness. Presumably he or she is working with a relatively unskilled group. Most of what's been suggested have a big learning curve, and require a willingness to dig into the guts of some pretty idiosyncratic packages.
If he or she is going to set up a system that will endure and be used it will need to be friendly to casual users who change from year to year.