I don't disagree with your ideas relative to investing in your career, but I do disagree with the idea that paying for a cell phone and pager so you can be reached by your W-2 employer constitutes such an investment.
I understand and again, I agree in theory. I did it anyway, and it has paid off tremendously over the years. In my circumstance, the only opinion that really mattered was the boss's. Every job has unpleasant aspects. If you quit everytime a company incorporates a policy you don't like, you are not likely to go very far, and your new job is likely to have policies you won't like as well, eventually. Its a catch 22, perhaps, but since I am likely to not like something about either career choice, I am inclined to take the path that allows me to make more money so I can quit doing it sooner.
No kidding. It's almost always the 'assignee' who causes all the trouble, not the 'inventor'. Problem is, it's pretty damn expensive to get a patent, at least in the US.
This is probably a good thing that it is expensive. If patents were as cheap as domain names (Patents as Cheap As $7.99 When You Register 25 or More!), we would have applications flooding the patent office, thus more patents on every stupid thing in the world. It would render the internet useless in a matter of a couple years. We would have patents applied for everything, pressing certain keyboard combinations, methods of posting to a site, and other garbage that would create so much noise, that by sheer odds you would see some of these get approved.
Some people (or corporations) would be submitting hundreds of similar patents, in the hopes that just a few will get approved, so they can start sending letters for royalties. If you think the IP/patent situation is bad now, just think about spam is cheaper than bulk mail, and you get the picture.
You don't work from home, you don't carry a pager, and you don't give them your cell phone number. If they don't want to pay for the means of contacting you, they can try your answering machine and hope for the best.
I don't want to argue the point. While you may be correct, theoretically, there are some consequences.
This situation is not that unique. I have been providing my own equipment and tools for quite a long time. Many years. I don't always like it, but it is part of the reason I have gotten ahead, into a position that compensates with higher pay. My goal has always been to make myself more valueable by improving my education, taking risks, providing some of my own gear until I can show why its needed, and being better than the next guy at my job.
You can stick to your principals, but don't be surprised when someone who is willing to bend leap frogs over you. Employers like employees who invest in their career. Fair or not, it demonstrates that the employee is willing to go the extra mile and invest in their own future with the company. Its not appropriate for all circumstances, nor is drawing a line in the sand.
Personally, I don't think requiring employees to provide some equipment is always a crime, if it is clearly spelled out in advance. To expect an employee to have access to email at home, for instance, requires a computer and some type of internet access. To me, this is a reasonable expectation for most skilled positions, but not as a company expense. Providing for some employees but not others may be an issue, but if a company decides that all salemen should provide their own Palm (for instance), then it may be reasonable, fair and legal. You may not LIKE it, but I am sure there are lots of things you don't like about any job.
Not everyone wants to get ahead. Some are happy in their position, or are not motivated or ambitious. Others want to make more money, get a better position, move up in the world, and stuff money in a 401k so they can retire before they are too old to enjoy it.
If you care about a long term future with the company and you have the skills, my suggestions is to search ebay for your equipment, and make due with what you have. The people in positions above you, grumbling and using words like "unfair" and "lawyer" will get thinned out soon, creating opportunity to rise in the ranks, and pay scale.
Backing up OpenBSD to Windows 95 is not as stupid as it looks.
lol, you are correct! One of our backup solutions is having a win98 box with ActivePerl installed go grab a copy of the datafiles every night. In the event of data corruption, THAT is usually the copy I restore from, purely because it is fast to restore from and highly reliable. (Yes, reliable. It only crashes when you are doing something, so it gets rebooted often enough;)
Not sure why, but that reminded me of the Simpson's episode where Burns and Smithers are going to the power plant's main switching system, and have to go through more locked doors and devices than the intro to a "Get Smart" episode, and once they get there, it has a broken screen door that is open to the outdoors and Burns runs off a dog that wandered in...
Even with our little network (2 T1s, several servers) we do the same thing. Different OS versions, Bind builds, even Apache implimentations. NS1 is dedicated on a slow but extremely robust dual cpu box, all other boxes have a primary task and act as a back up for other tasks. At this small level, its not THAT hard to do, although it takes some preplanning and maintenance. Even the outbound linux router has an offline spare with a different version of Linux and completely different firewall/NAT configuration in case the first gets taken down.
IMHO, when it comes to providing IT services, if you are not paranoid, you are crazy.
I'm not sure on the merits of the GIF format after all these years
LOTS of merits. GIFs still work best for thumbnails (size wise), icons, buttons, etc. for the many websites I manage. JPG is too blocky when overly compressed for this purpose, but I can jump an image down to 8 colors and still maintain the basic shapes in it.
Animation is another feature that is worthwhile. I know people HATE tons of blinking ads, etc. but I use it for 3d views of products, showing them from all angles. They have to click specifically to view them in this way. No flash or shockwave needed, so it is platform independent. Size wise is similar to flash, about 250k for a 8 image GIF. While it is not interactive, it still serves the purpose and guarantees that anyone can view the product from angles, even if they are on Linux, BSD, Mac, Win95, behind a firewall, can't install flash, etc.
Small animated gifs have their place, too. Granted, most sites over use them, but that does not mean all uses are bad. I use a 1px x 1px gif that slowly rotates colors (about 64 steps) as a background for one cell. This slowly changes the color background color, adds a dynamic look, without java, activex, flash, etc. It is done tastefully, and does its job: attracting a little more attention to that cell without pissing customers off.
Once PNG has animation, and every browser supports it, I will be glad to use it (think several years counting existing computer base) but until then, I will stick with the features and advantages of GIF for these limited uses.
If 85% of email is spam i say we just give up on email... Move on and make a new form a communication.
I have been theorizing about a method of communication where you write your message on paper, put it in a paper cover and someone delivers it for you. If enough people were to use this method, you get the price down to like 37 cents or so per message.;)
That would require courage. Don't hold your breath. They are too busy trying to block investigations into abuse from the "oil for food" program.
Mod it down or whatever, I don't care, but the UN is working very hard to fulfill GW's statement, that they are irrelevent. They COULD be very powerful and effective, but the individual players (and yes, often us as well) are too busy with their own little power trips and rip offs.
Oh jesus h. christ, NOW I feel better that the UN is involved. I am sure the spammers are cowering in fear right now. I am sure after a year of debate, the security council will pass a resolution (9-6) that says spam is bad, but only after concessions are made regarding human rights to enough countries to get the full 9 votes....
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"
I just searched eBay, 680 listings in laptop hard drives, with buy it now for $20 for a 1 gig ibm. That took me an entire 20 seconds to do. I'm guessing he didn't look very hard.
but that is a far cry from "its IT's fault!", when you have budgets, TONS of bugs to patch (and test and test and test..), and a short staff. It would be much easier if MS had STARTED with the security settings in SP2 to begin with.
Unfortunately, I was tricked into buying what I THOUGHT was tin foil hat, but was instead ALUMINUM (see previous posts on this subject). This was part of an Al Queda plot back in 1990. I should have know, and have only myself to blame.
When I came up with the idea for Pharm-x (what you call Linux now) I couldn't trust anyone, so I wrote all the code in my head, and committed it to memory (remember, we are just talking about the kernel, not the apps). But because of the defective tin foil hat, my thoughts were intercepted by Al Queda. Now, being really good at bombs, but not good with computers, they looked for some easily corruptable, pot smoking, hippie like, "everything wants to be free", types to help interpret what they were receiving via my unprotected cranium. After a failed attempt with Richard Stallman (when Al Queda says you don't bathe enough, take a hint!) they settle on a young Finnish student.
Unfortunately, they didn't realize how greedy and power hungry this Torvald fellow was. Not knowing anything about programming himself, he used extortion and threats to make others finish the parts of the kernel that they could not intercept. He moved to America, used the leverage and customer base he had built over the years in an attempt to put Microsoft out of business through litigation, proxied by the Justice Dept. (campaign contributions, anyone?) and by GIVING AWAY PROGRAMS with the operating system, ones that you would have to pay for in a Windows system. Next, he set out to destroy SCO by intentionally inserting Unix code into Linux, then blaming IBM, causing a major lawsuit. While IBM will be able to weather the storm, the future does not look so good for SCO, their stockholders, and their poor management team.
Privately, he has even laughed about "the whole BSD" licensing thing. He seems to derive a great deal of enjoyment out of the fact that Linux can use BSD sources, but BSD can't use Linux because of licensing issues. "And I look like the good guy, with 'free' software," he would say, "while I bleed BSD to death, hahahaha!" To this day, my blood runs cold when someone talks about the death of BSD.
Linus has spent the last 13 years, bathing in the riches and fame that come with being credited with being "the father of Linux", while no one has any idea who I am, or the real origins of what is now known as Linux.
But at least I am not bitter.
Re:Here it comes.... 3, 2, 1...
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
or at least mod Taco as "-1 Troll". You know he was laughing his ass off when he posted this one.
Can we do that?;)
Re:Linus the writer?
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I mean, Linus is the creator of Linux, not the "writer of Linux", am I correct? I know I'm being picky (I "write" code) but I see this alot.
More importantly, Linus is the copyright holder for the name Linux. I think everyone knows the whole story by now: Linus gets Minix, doesn't like limitations, uses it to write a new OS, quoted for the famous "real men don't backup, they mirror their data via ftp" or similar, a year later, goes GPL, everyone pitches in, it gets popular, Darl smokes crack (that bill bought for him) and can't just break into Linus's house to steal Linux so he hires lawyers to do it for him.
99% of Windows 3.11 machines have never been connected to the Internet, so I don't think we'd know if there were any security holes.
Maybe most or half, but certainly not 99%. We had a box setup as a router using a modem in the 28.8 days, for around 8 people, all running Windows 3.11, well before 95 came out. And we are not in the tech industry.
Then again, my first internet account was a shell account I accessed from a DOS dialup terminal. Lots of people had internet access with 3.1 and 3.11. I still have the same Usenet account I had pre 95, and still using Forte Agent, which came out for win16 (still support 1.9x in both 32 and 16 bit vers!), as did Mosaic, Netscape, PircH, plus lots of utilities, Trumpet Winsock, Archie, Veronica, Finger (those USED to work, you know), WS_FTP, mIRC, all for 16 bit windows. Plus all the unix utilities I could want from the shell account. Back then, we used our Mosaic browser to Gopher, and we liked it!
But Windows 3.11 has tons of internet capability, still, due to 3rd parties porting unix utils. Windows updates were via ftp then. In a huge directory that had the msg "dont do a ls here, there are too many files". ALL their patches and updates in a SINGLE ftp directory. They weren't too smart back then, internet wise.
You may be right in one way: There may not have been any internet specific holes, but Win 3.11 by itself did not support the Internet. It was all add on software, Free for the most part. No browser (later, IE was released for 3.11), no TCP/IP stack. Even FTP was a port of BSDs, and still has acknowledgements to Berkeley, to this day. If you can get the NIC drivers, you can still surf just fine with 3.11.
You're in IT? Notify the upper-management about the best tools available then implement those tools. If you can't make a reasonable argument why Windows is a hazard than get another career and move over for someone that can. It is POSSIBLE.
IT departments are the problem and Windows will be the dominant OS for decades to come until more IT "men" grow some balls.
HA! Just ask the boss for money and he gives it to you? Thats rich. So, if windows allows an email client to arbitrarily execute code in an email, its the IT depts fault? If Windows IIS allows you to run code by simply sending a malformed URL, its the IT depts fault? So, the solution is buy yet more software, that will not know about these exploits until they are exposed anyway, so is useless for unknown (but will be discovered) vulnerabilities?
And MS is the good guy and the IT guys are the bad guys, because all they have to do is go spend a bunch of money to secure an operating system they already paid alot of money for? And if the company is dependent on software that will only run on Windows for a year or two, its the IT depts fault if the boss won't change to Linux?
I gotta admit, I did enjoy the "grow some balls", coming from an AC. You sound more like a pissed off 20 year old who just finished a program at Devry and can't believe someone won't hire him for $80k.
They complained about scammers that send in the rebate and then return the item. RTFA, not just the last few paragraphs. They didn't complain about people who bought products and sent the rebates in.
They did complain about people that only purchased during big sales, which is kinda stupid. If you can't make a profit (albeit, slim) during a big sale, then don't mark the price down so much.
I don't know enought about the law to know whether this consititures fraud. But even if Staples is engaging in fraud by advertising rebates in their stores which they will refuse to honor, so what? Its not like anyone is going to hire a lawyer just to recover $20.00.
CompUSA used to be really bad about that. I also remember several companies getting some bad press a couple years back because they would not send out the rebates until the customer called back complaining, which most don't do, usually because they forget. I don't do rebates anymore, screwed out of too many of them. If there is a rebate, I call instead of ordering online, and get the price right or buy elsewhere. My time is worth more than the effort to constantly track down $20 rebates time and again.
In the late 90s, there were lots of "buy this $10 item for $20, and get a $20 rebate, so you get it for free!" crap at CompUSA (incompetentUSA) that scammed lots of folks. It was just a way to charge double. This from a company known for selling items for MORE than suggested retail to begin with. I still won't shop there. Best Buy is another store I won't do business with, for similar reasons.
Personally, I'm not sure how people get away with this, whenever I've returned a product that was missing parts (usually a manual or something) I've been dinged a 10%-30% "restocking fee"
Buy everything with an American Express card, and speak polite but LOUD at the customer service desk. AmEx is the best for the customer (and worst for the merchant) when it comes to returns. If you say everything was in the box, and the store says otherwise, you generally win.
I have found that speaking politely but loudly gets you far too. It makes the people behind the counter very uncomfortable, and they are more willing to simply give you your way just to get you to leave. This usually happens right at the "Well, I think I need to speak to your manager" part of the conversation.
Wish i had a mod point left. You make a very good point. My mom loves Windows because its easy. I hate it because its hard. (doskey in shell? not any more. etc., They have gone out of their way to make the dos prompt harder to use than in was in dos 5.0.) It depends on what you are trying to do.
One major point about SuSE's YaST: it frequently does not contain the latest and greatest versions of packages.
Which is one of the reasons i USE SuSe now. Yes, the newest is kewl on a box I am playing with, but for my main desktop, I am more concerned with stability, so being a little behind is ok. Fedora is more on the cutting edge, but doesn't have the software variety. I use both, but I prefer SuSe on the desktop and Fedora on the server. Havent' used Mandrake since 7.1, so can't speak for it.
Slashdot Mirror
all they should really need is a deck of cards to keep busy for a few months.
Did you every see the Holloween Simpson's where the family was watching Mr. Burn's ski resort for the winter? (The Shining spoof)
"No beer and no tv make Homer something somthing..."
"Go crazy?"
"Don't mind if I do!!!!"
I don't disagree with your ideas relative to investing in your career, but I do disagree with the idea that paying for a cell phone and pager so you can be reached by your W-2 employer constitutes such an investment.
I understand and again, I agree in theory. I did it anyway, and it has paid off tremendously over the years. In my circumstance, the only opinion that really mattered was the boss's. Every job has unpleasant aspects. If you quit everytime a company incorporates a policy you don't like, you are not likely to go very far, and your new job is likely to have policies you won't like as well, eventually. Its a catch 22, perhaps, but since I am likely to not like something about either career choice, I am inclined to take the path that allows me to make more money so I can quit doing it sooner.
No kidding. It's almost always the 'assignee' who causes all the trouble, not the 'inventor'. Problem is, it's pretty damn expensive to get a patent, at least in the US.
This is probably a good thing that it is expensive. If patents were as cheap as domain names (Patents as Cheap As $7.99 When You Register 25 or More!), we would have applications flooding the patent office, thus more patents on every stupid thing in the world. It would render the internet useless in a matter of a couple years. We would have patents applied for everything, pressing certain keyboard combinations, methods of posting to a site, and other garbage that would create so much noise, that by sheer odds you would see some of these get approved.
Some people (or corporations) would be submitting hundreds of similar patents, in the hopes that just a few will get approved, so they can start sending letters for royalties. If you think the IP/patent situation is bad now, just think about spam is cheaper than bulk mail, and you get the picture.
You don't work from home, you don't carry a pager, and you don't give them your cell phone number. If they don't want to pay for the means of contacting you, they can try your answering machine and hope for the best.
I don't want to argue the point. While you may be correct, theoretically, there are some consequences.
This situation is not that unique. I have been providing my own equipment and tools for quite a long time. Many years. I don't always like it, but it is part of the reason I have gotten ahead, into a position that compensates with higher pay. My goal has always been to make myself more valueable by improving my education, taking risks, providing some of my own gear until I can show why its needed, and being better than the next guy at my job.
You can stick to your principals, but don't be surprised when someone who is willing to bend leap frogs over you. Employers like employees who invest in their career. Fair or not, it demonstrates that the employee is willing to go the extra mile and invest in their own future with the company. Its not appropriate for all circumstances, nor is drawing a line in the sand.
Personally, I don't think requiring employees to provide some equipment is always a crime, if it is clearly spelled out in advance. To expect an employee to have access to email at home, for instance, requires a computer and some type of internet access. To me, this is a reasonable expectation for most skilled positions, but not as a company expense. Providing for some employees but not others may be an issue, but if a company decides that all salemen should provide their own Palm (for instance), then it may be reasonable, fair and legal. You may not LIKE it, but I am sure there are lots of things you don't like about any job.
Not everyone wants to get ahead. Some are happy in their position, or are not motivated or ambitious. Others want to make more money, get a better position, move up in the world, and stuff money in a 401k so they can retire before they are too old to enjoy it.
If you care about a long term future with the company and you have the skills, my suggestions is to search ebay for your equipment, and make due with what you have. The people in positions above you, grumbling and using words like "unfair" and "lawyer" will get thinned out soon, creating opportunity to rise in the ranks, and pay scale.
Backing up OpenBSD to Windows 95 is not as stupid as it looks.
;)
lol, you are correct! One of our backup solutions is having a win98 box with ActivePerl installed go grab a copy of the datafiles every night. In the event of data corruption, THAT is usually the copy I restore from, purely because it is fast to restore from and highly reliable. (Yes, reliable. It only crashes when you are doing something, so it gets rebooted often enough
Not sure why, but that reminded me of the Simpson's episode where Burns and Smithers are going to the power plant's main switching system, and have to go through more locked doors and devices than the intro to a "Get Smart" episode, and once they get there, it has a broken screen door that is open to the outdoors and Burns runs off a dog that wandered in...
Even with our little network (2 T1s, several servers) we do the same thing. Different OS versions, Bind builds, even Apache implimentations. NS1 is dedicated on a slow but extremely robust dual cpu box, all other boxes have a primary task and act as a back up for other tasks. At this small level, its not THAT hard to do, although it takes some preplanning and maintenance. Even the outbound linux router has an offline spare with a different version of Linux and completely different firewall/NAT configuration in case the first gets taken down.
IMHO, when it comes to providing IT services, if you are not paranoid, you are crazy.
I'm not sure on the merits of the GIF format after all these years
LOTS of merits. GIFs still work best for thumbnails (size wise), icons, buttons, etc. for the many websites I manage. JPG is too blocky when overly compressed for this purpose, but I can jump an image down to 8 colors and still maintain the basic shapes in it.
Animation is another feature that is worthwhile. I know people HATE tons of blinking ads, etc. but I use it for 3d views of products, showing them from all angles. They have to click specifically to view them in this way. No flash or shockwave needed, so it is platform independent. Size wise is similar to flash, about 250k for a 8 image GIF. While it is not interactive, it still serves the purpose and guarantees that anyone can view the product from angles, even if they are on Linux, BSD, Mac, Win95, behind a firewall, can't install flash, etc.
Small animated gifs have their place, too. Granted, most sites over use them, but that does not mean all uses are bad. I use a 1px x 1px gif that slowly rotates colors (about 64 steps) as a background for one cell. This slowly changes the color background color, adds a dynamic look, without java, activex, flash, etc. It is done tastefully, and does its job: attracting a little more attention to that cell without pissing customers off.
Once PNG has animation, and every browser supports it, I will be glad to use it (think several years counting existing computer base) but until then, I will stick with the features and advantages of GIF for these limited uses.
If 85% of email is spam i say we just give up on email... Move on and make a new form a communication.
;)
I have been theorizing about a method of communication where you write your message on paper, put it in a paper cover and someone delivers it for you. If enough people were to use this method, you get the price down to like 37 cents or so per message.
be stopping real travesties like war and disease?
That would require courage. Don't hold your breath. They are too busy trying to block investigations into abuse from the "oil for food" program.
Mod it down or whatever, I don't care, but the UN is working very hard to fulfill GW's statement, that they are irrelevent. They COULD be very powerful and effective, but the individual players (and yes, often us as well) are too busy with their own little power trips and rip offs.
Oh jesus h. christ, NOW I feel better that the UN is involved. I am sure the spammers are cowering in fear right now. I am sure after a year of debate, the security council will pass a resolution (9-6) that says spam is bad, but only after concessions are made regarding human rights to enough countries to get the full 9 votes....
"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"
I just searched eBay, 680 listings in laptop hard drives, with buy it now for $20 for a 1 gig ibm. That took me an entire 20 seconds to do. I'm guessing he didn't look very hard.
but that is a far cry from "its IT's fault!", when you have budgets, TONS of bugs to patch (and test and test and test..), and a short staff. It would be much easier if MS had STARTED with the security settings in SP2 to begin with.
my bad, i knew that, but my fingers didn't ;)
Unfortunately, I was tricked into buying what I THOUGHT was tin foil hat, but was instead ALUMINUM (see previous posts on this subject). This was part of an Al Queda plot back in 1990. I should have know, and have only myself to blame.
When I came up with the idea for Pharm-x (what you call Linux now) I couldn't trust anyone, so I wrote all the code in my head, and committed it to memory (remember, we are just talking about the kernel, not the apps). But because of the defective tin foil hat, my thoughts were intercepted by Al Queda. Now, being really good at bombs, but not good with computers, they looked for some easily corruptable, pot smoking, hippie like, "everything wants to be free", types to help interpret what they were receiving via my unprotected cranium. After a failed attempt with Richard Stallman (when Al Queda says you don't bathe enough, take a hint!) they settle on a young Finnish student.
Unfortunately, they didn't realize how greedy and power hungry this Torvald fellow was. Not knowing anything about programming himself, he used extortion and threats to make others finish the parts of the kernel that they could not intercept. He moved to America, used the leverage and customer base he had built over the years in an attempt to put Microsoft out of business through litigation, proxied by the Justice Dept. (campaign contributions, anyone?) and by GIVING AWAY PROGRAMS with the operating system, ones that you would have to pay for in a Windows system. Next, he set out to destroy SCO by intentionally inserting Unix code into Linux, then blaming IBM, causing a major lawsuit. While IBM will be able to weather the storm, the future does not look so good for SCO, their stockholders, and their poor management team.
Privately, he has even laughed about "the whole BSD" licensing thing. He seems to derive a great deal of enjoyment out of the fact that Linux can use BSD sources, but BSD can't use Linux because of licensing issues. "And I look like the good guy, with 'free' software," he would say, "while I bleed BSD to death, hahahaha!" To this day, my blood runs cold when someone talks about the death of BSD.
Linus has spent the last 13 years, bathing in the riches and fame that come with being credited with being "the father of Linux", while no one has any idea who I am, or the real origins of what is now known as Linux.
But at least I am not bitter.
or at least mod Taco as "-1 Troll". You know he was laughing his ass off when he posted this one.
;)
Can we do that?
I mean, Linus is the creator of Linux, not the "writer of Linux", am I correct? I know I'm being picky (I "write" code) but I see this alot.
More importantly, Linus is the copyright holder for the name Linux. I think everyone knows the whole story by now: Linus gets Minix, doesn't like limitations, uses it to write a new OS, quoted for the famous "real men don't backup, they mirror their data via ftp" or similar, a year later, goes GPL, everyone pitches in, it gets popular, Darl smokes crack (that bill bought for him) and can't just break into Linus's house to steal Linux so he hires lawyers to do it for him.
99% of Windows 3.11 machines have never been connected to the Internet, so I don't think we'd know if there were any security holes.
Maybe most or half, but certainly not 99%. We had a box setup as a router using a modem in the 28.8 days, for around 8 people, all running Windows 3.11, well before 95 came out. And we are not in the tech industry.
Then again, my first internet account was a shell account I accessed from a DOS dialup terminal. Lots of people had internet access with 3.1 and 3.11. I still have the same Usenet account I had pre 95, and still using Forte Agent, which came out for win16 (still support 1.9x in both 32 and 16 bit vers!), as did Mosaic, Netscape, PircH, plus lots of utilities, Trumpet Winsock, Archie, Veronica, Finger (those USED to work, you know), WS_FTP, mIRC, all for 16 bit windows. Plus all the unix utilities I could want from the shell account. Back then, we used our Mosaic browser to Gopher, and we liked it!
But Windows 3.11 has tons of internet capability, still, due to 3rd parties porting unix utils. Windows updates were via ftp then. In a huge directory that had the msg "dont do a ls here, there are too many files". ALL their patches and updates in a SINGLE ftp directory. They weren't too smart back then, internet wise.
You may be right in one way: There may not have been any internet specific holes, but Win 3.11 by itself did not support the Internet. It was all add on software, Free for the most part. No browser (later, IE was released for 3.11), no TCP/IP stack. Even FTP was a port of BSDs, and still has acknowledgements to Berkeley, to this day. If you can get the NIC drivers, you can still surf just fine with 3.11.
You're in IT? Notify the upper-management about the best tools available then implement those tools. If you can't make a reasonable argument why Windows is a hazard than get another career and move over for someone that can. It is POSSIBLE.
IT departments are the problem and Windows will be the dominant OS for decades to come until more IT "men" grow some balls.
HA! Just ask the boss for money and he gives it to you? Thats rich. So, if windows allows an email client to arbitrarily execute code in an email, its the IT depts fault? If Windows IIS allows you to run code by simply sending a malformed URL, its the IT depts fault? So, the solution is buy yet more software, that will not know about these exploits until they are exposed anyway, so is useless for unknown (but will be discovered) vulnerabilities?
And MS is the good guy and the IT guys are the bad guys, because all they have to do is go spend a bunch of money to secure an operating system they already paid alot of money for? And if the company is dependent on software that will only run on Windows for a year or two, its the IT depts fault if the boss won't change to Linux?
I gotta admit, I did enjoy the "grow some balls", coming from an AC. You sound more like a pissed off 20 year old who just finished a program at Devry and can't believe someone won't hire him for $80k.
The Rio Karma comes with a 30 day warranty. The iPod comes with a 1 year warranty. That should've told you something right off the bat.
;)
Still better than Slashdot Karma, I have been known to break that the first day I get it, and no recourse.
They complained about scammers that send in the rebate and then return the item. RTFA, not just the last few paragraphs. They didn't complain about people who bought products and sent the rebates in.
They did complain about people that only purchased during big sales, which is kinda stupid. If you can't make a profit (albeit, slim) during a big sale, then don't mark the price down so much.
I don't know enought about the law to know whether this consititures fraud. But even if Staples is engaging in fraud by advertising rebates in their stores which they will refuse to honor, so what? Its not like anyone is going to hire a lawyer just to recover $20.00.
CompUSA used to be really bad about that. I also remember several companies getting some bad press a couple years back because they would not send out the rebates until the customer called back complaining, which most don't do, usually because they forget. I don't do rebates anymore, screwed out of too many of them. If there is a rebate, I call instead of ordering online, and get the price right or buy elsewhere. My time is worth more than the effort to constantly track down $20 rebates time and again.
In the late 90s, there were lots of "buy this $10 item for $20, and get a $20 rebate, so you get it for free!" crap at CompUSA (incompetentUSA) that scammed lots of folks. It was just a way to charge double. This from a company known for selling items for MORE than suggested retail to begin with. I still won't shop there. Best Buy is another store I won't do business with, for similar reasons.
Personally, I'm not sure how people get away with this, whenever I've returned a product that was missing parts (usually a manual or something) I've been dinged a 10%-30% "restocking fee"
Buy everything with an American Express card, and speak polite but LOUD at the customer service desk. AmEx is the best for the customer (and worst for the merchant) when it comes to returns. If you say everything was in the box, and the store says otherwise, you generally win.
I have found that speaking politely but loudly gets you far too. It makes the people behind the counter very uncomfortable, and they are more willing to simply give you your way just to get you to leave. This usually happens right at the "Well, I think I need to speak to your manager" part of the conversation.
Wish i had a mod point left. You make a very good point. My mom loves Windows because its easy. I hate it because its hard. (doskey in shell? not any more. etc., They have gone out of their way to make the dos prompt harder to use than in was in dos 5.0.) It depends on what you are trying to do.
One major point about SuSE's YaST: it frequently does not contain the latest and greatest versions of packages.
Which is one of the reasons i USE SuSe now. Yes, the newest is kewl on a box I am playing with, but for my main desktop, I am more concerned with stability, so being a little behind is ok. Fedora is more on the cutting edge, but doesn't have the software variety. I use both, but I prefer SuSe on the desktop and Fedora on the server. Havent' used Mandrake since 7.1, so can't speak for it.
yes.