Amazon doesn't really care about their customers all that much. They talk a good game (Bezos particularly) but those dumb patents tell the tale. I had spent thousands there and I am pleased to say that I am responsible for losing them tens of thousands in sales since the patents. By the time my students are counted it may be hundreds of thousands.
I sent them e-mail letting them know my feelings before I stopped buying and before my company stopped buying. They still spam me!
I own two Win CE devices (both HPs) and one Palm Pilot.
Even though I have more fun 'n' games stuff for the Win CE boxes and they have color, sound and more processing power, over time I have used them so infrequently that their batteries have been allowed to nearly die.
Bottom line: although the Win CE's look more fun, the old monochrome Palm Pilot Professional just does the job better. The Palm is the one that rides in my pocket. Not anywhere as snazzy, but it's just a lot more solid.
I can't agree with CmdrTaco on this one at all. And I feel kind of foolish having to say that, because I've spent a lot more money on the HPs than on the Palm. I guess not only magpies are attracted to the shiny and new.
Sure, Carnivore and Echelon and Tempest and the list goes ever on...but I'm talking about the difficulty of tracking down that last mile if you're using a public access point. Which is the only thing preserving at least some anonymity in the U.S.
I see a lot of Yanks talking as if it couldn't happen in the U.S.
I did some consulting for a U.S. government agency a few years back. Their network was using DHCP but the higher-ups were quite upset because they couldn't associate user with IP address. They spent millions ripping out their old network operating system and implementing another just to get this capability.
The government of the U.S. hates anonymity. They would like to be able to track absolutely everything and as soon as they can see a way to do it without getting too much noise from their citizens that's precisely what will happen.
They LOVE AOL? Not anybody I know, and I'm including my non-technical friends. As soon as they're visiting and see what a regular 56K connection can do, they ask for help in dumping AOL ASAP.
Maybe if the AOL user has never seen what they're missing it's a different story, but I'd say most detest the service even before they come around here. Perhaps seeing what they can't do well (or at all) on AOL finally gives them the impetus to lose AOL?
I put together an inventory system more than a decade ago using curses. The company is still using it. Occasionally some of the employees complain about it not being a GUI, but the owner likes it because it's rock-steady stable and it works. And he isn't locked into a perpetual software/hardware upgrade cycle as he would have been with Windows.
What should really be getting tracked is hours per household.
Residents of the U.S. don't realize how much their standard of living has fallen over the last few decades. It was possible to own a house in a nice neighborhood, two cars and assorted other adult toys plus afford to send your kids to college on one factory worker's salary from about post-WWII through the sixties. Now it takes at least two incomes and then you may only get to rent.
Potentially a good argument in favor of DeCSS is that the source has been transformed into a prime number that can be gunzipped into the program source.
Can the court prohibit linking to a prime number?
"...both in terms of what's smart and what's right.."
I would agree that good tech support is the moral thing to do, but the way our markets work, it's not necessarily the smart thing to do.
If you can get consumers to buy something that has no warranty that it will work and that you don't really have to fix if it doesn't work, you've spent less money to get your product to market and stand to make more profit.
The market doesn't care too much about quality. If it did, do you think Word would have won the word-processing wars against WordPerfect? (Remember, when the WordPerfect Corporation owned it, you had unlimited free tech support?)
Could the corporations get a ban on all encrypted traffic for which no key is in escrow for easy policing?
I'm beginning to think that corporations can get just about anything they want in the U.S. I'm trying not to be cynical, but the U.S. Supreme Court has been handing down increasingly bizarre decisions with hardly any public comment against it. Last week's decision gutting the Fourth Amendment, for example: do a majority of U.S. citizens really think it's OK for the police to stop, handcuff, arrest, mugshot and jail a woman for not wearing a seatbelt? In a state where the maximum penalty for this "crime" is a $50 fine?
This from a court that says money is speech, innocence is no defense against the death penalty and there's no need to finish counting votes in a close election.
The only way the RIAA, MPAA et. al. can fully protect what they perceive to be their property is if society allows a police state to develop. The Fourth Amendment was lost last week; we're on our way.
My job is salaried and when the on-call rotation falls to me I get a fixed cost-per-hour for hauling the beeper plus overtime pay for the actual time spent responding to a problem.
It's been that way for about seven years and three companies. And I do work in a "right-to-work" state.
Two companies ago the policy changed: when they weren't paying any extra, the on-call guy didn't respond and they tried to fire him for cause. He sued and received some settlement money from the company because the contract didn't give value for value, something about only having to exercise slight care when you're doing something essentially for no extra compensation. Anyway, after the company settled and it became known to the rest of us, some started turning off their beepers and the result was the salary + fixed + overtime plan.
The only problem with getting them to donate the money is that only Patrick has ponied up any cash. Looks like Mike Goldman is more concerned with money than honor; Patrick met the challenge as written and Mike weaseled out by saying that it wasn't what he meant.
Patrick has two things to consider: Sean and the school's actions.
Sean is probably better off being homeschooled and would have been better served by getting him out of the public school system before now. As far as his record goes, it probably won't matter much: on applications and resume, say that he was in public school until his junior year and was then homeschooled. If you're concerned about having a GED instead of a diploma, check out the Clonlara School Home Based Education Program and you can get a real high school diploma by following their guidelines. They're at www.clonlara.org if you're interested (and if you're new to homeschooling and want some structure, curriculum, textbooks and teachers available to you they're worth the fees.)
However, that leaves the matter of the jerks who have gotten away with something bad. School administrators fear two things: bad publicity and lawsuits. Whether you want to use either or both against them depends on how much of your life you want to devote to fighting the jerks and whether you can get help with funding the latter. I'd go after them in a heartbeat, but I haven't been in Patrick's shoes so I won't presume to tell him what he should do.
>> I'm amazed at how poorly this has been handled. I'll be even more amazed if there is no fallout.
It's at the point where almost nothing surprises me anymore about how tenaciously some managers cling to Microsoft.
I was at a company that bought some fairly esoteric, hard-to-find parts from another company through a web-interfaced front-end app that accessed the other company's inventory system. About a year-and-a-half ago, they migrated to IIS from Apache for the front-end. They'd previously been an all-UNIX shop but had trouble when the front-end went Windows NT and the inventory app stayed UNIX. So, with the help of many consultants and at least two clueful in-house geeks they went all-NT.
Problems out the wazoo, but my company tended to be faithful to suppliers so we put up with bungled orders, downtime and other problems that would cause us not to buy from a supplier if they were new to us. Finally an IIS update was applied at the supplier's site that broke the web ordering for anything but Internet Explorer.
Our company used and supported Netscape only, so we tried to persuade them to make their site work with Netscape. I'll give them credit; they really tried. (Then again, our orders were over 60% of their revenue stream.) Our CEO lunched with their CEO and told him exactly what was at stake: it was costing us too much to do everything by phone and they had to get something running that was usable or we'd have to go elsewhere.
Keep in mind the old UNIX-based system was still around and running parallel and could've benn brought back online. Their IT manager was so committed to keeping NT that he wouldn't switch back.
We stuck with them for another few months despite the additional costs associated with doing business by phone only. They went out of business several months after we regretfully took our trade elsewhere. I know some of the other IT guys at other companies that used the supplier and the word was that their move to NT from UNIX eventually cost them more than 80% of their revenue due to the higher-volume customers leaving.
This was no startup company; they'd been around since at least 1989. Was their move to NT the major factor in their death or just a sign of other bad decisions that were going on behind the scenes? I suspect the former. Why did they cling to Microsoft as they lost more and more revenue because of that decision? Their IT manager had dropped beaucoup bucks on MS products in an attempt to save the company money and didn't want to lose his job for that catastrophically bad decision.
So, will there be fallout? Probably not enough to make Microsoft mend its ways, if not its programs.
The U.S. just had an election in which an arrogant bully "popular" type won against a nerd. (Well, all right, Bush didn't really win anything except the decision of a corrupt Court, but the man still acts as if he won and hardly anybody is challenging his legitimacy.)
It seems unlikely in such an atmosphere that bullying will ever be judged harshly.
"Guardent officials alerted CERT and the affected vendors to the problem before making it public."
Which vendors have the insecure stacks?
Maybe this is an early warning of another Microsoft-only problem being referred to as an Internet problem, the way that the various Outlook buffer-overflow exploits were referred to as "e-mail viruses" by the media-at-large rather than "piss-poor programming".
If Microsoft's Quality Assurance department fell over in the woods, would it make a sound?
>> I don't think that we Texans will
tolerate this kind of nonsense..
Considering some of the politicians from Texas I've seen on C-SPAN, there's little that Texas-at-large won't tolerate. The only loopier characters I've seen have been from California.
Joe Six-Pack User at the desk using the tools given by his company cares intensely about Microsoft because the perception has become that the software is not adequate, and Microsoft gets the blame even when it's not the blue screen of death. Six years ago what you said held true, not now. Whether it's hardware, network policies or stupid sysadmins that don't run their networks properly, the users increasingly blame Microsoft for their problems. And that may hurt Microsoft much more than anything done by the U.S. government.
The really interesting thing about this is that the employees who attain a sufficiently high position are pretty consistently demanding applications other than those crafted by Microsoft. The pressure is starting to mount from some of the other users; it's almost a status symbol not to have to use Microsoft software...
Try www.opensecrets.org and search. Both William Gates of Microsoft and Microsoft are there for hundreds of thousands, leaning Republican for the last election cycle.
The easiest way to make software suck less is to force software companies to provide a real, truthful legal warranty for it when it is sold.
Software would cost more initially but less in the long run since the purchaser would not have to pay as much for after-sale support simply to get the software to perform as it is advertised or written in the manual.
Buyer beware: La-Z-Boy's warranty is not what it once was. My wife and I got identical recliners a few years back from La-Z-Boy. Hers had some serious manufacturing problems and is now sitting as a stack of parts (with perfect fabric). They came out a couple of times and used electric drills and bolts to try to strap it together; it finally fell to pieces and they won't do anything about it.
And, no, she ain't heavy. I'm heavier and my chair is OK.
Her replacement chair, needless to say, was not from La-Z-Boy. That one's holding up just fine.
If you go beyond the first two opening screens on Gary North's website, you'll find this statement from him about why the website's still up:
This Website contains over 6,000 documents on Y2K. I began posting links to these documents in January of 1997.
Many of these links are now dead. The original sources have been removed. The only public records of these documents are the summaries on this site.
For researchers on Y2K, this site will remain a primary source. The major search engines are still linked to the documents, page by page.
For anyone looking into "Y2K and anything else," there will probably be a link to this site on the first or second screen of the search engine.
I have decided not to take down this site for a while. I want researchers to have access to it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, briefly, you're against law and order?
Not that I have a problem with that, just state it bluntly.
Amazon doesn't really care about their customers all that much. They talk a good game (Bezos particularly) but those dumb patents tell the tale. I had spent thousands there and I am pleased to say that I am responsible for losing them tens of thousands in sales since the patents. By the time my students are counted it may be hundreds of thousands.
I sent them e-mail letting them know my feelings before I stopped buying and before my company stopped buying. They still spam me!
I own two Win CE devices (both HPs) and one Palm Pilot.
Even though I have more fun 'n' games stuff for the Win CE boxes and they have color, sound and more processing power, over time I have used them so infrequently that their batteries have been allowed to nearly die.
Bottom line: although the Win CE's look more fun, the old monochrome Palm Pilot Professional just does the job better. The Palm is the one that rides in my pocket. Not anywhere as snazzy, but it's just a lot more solid.
I can't agree with CmdrTaco on this one at all. And I feel kind of foolish having to say that, because I've spent a lot more money on the HPs than on the Palm. I guess not only magpies are attracted to the shiny and new.
Sure, Carnivore and Echelon and Tempest and the list goes ever on...but I'm talking about the difficulty of tracking down that last mile if you're using a public access point. Which is the only thing preserving at least some anonymity in the U.S.
I see a lot of Yanks talking as if it couldn't happen in the U.S.
I did some consulting for a U.S. government agency a few years back. Their network was using DHCP but the higher-ups were quite upset because they couldn't associate user with IP address. They spent millions ripping out their old network operating system and implementing another just to get this capability.
The government of the U.S. hates anonymity. They would like to be able to track absolutely everything and as soon as they can see a way to do it without getting too much noise from their citizens that's precisely what will happen.
Don't chortle too much about India.
They LOVE AOL? Not anybody I know, and I'm including my non-technical friends. As soon as they're visiting and see what a regular 56K connection can do, they ask for help in dumping AOL ASAP.
Maybe if the AOL user has never seen what they're missing it's a different story, but I'd say most detest the service even before they come around here. Perhaps seeing what they can't do well (or at all) on AOL finally gives them the impetus to lose AOL?
...more like, the Supreme Court striking down the 4th Amendment and installing a president, maybe?
As some others have suggested, use curses.
I put together an inventory system more than a decade ago using curses. The company is still using it. Occasionally some of the employees complain about it not being a GUI, but the owner likes it because it's rock-steady stable and it works. And he isn't locked into a perpetual software/hardware upgrade cycle as he would have been with Windows.
What should really be getting tracked is hours per household.
Residents of the U.S. don't realize how much their standard of living has fallen over the last few decades. It was possible to own a house in a nice neighborhood, two cars and assorted other adult toys plus afford to send your kids to college on one factory worker's salary from about post-WWII through the sixties. Now it takes at least two incomes and then you may only get to rent.
Potentially a good argument in favor of DeCSS is that the source has been transformed into a prime number that can be gunzipped into the program source.
Can the court prohibit linking to a prime number?
"...both in terms of what's smart and what's right.."
I would agree that good tech support is the moral thing to do, but the way our markets work, it's not necessarily the smart thing to do.
If you can get consumers to buy something that has no warranty that it will work and that you don't really have to fix if it doesn't work, you've spent less money to get your product to market and stand to make more profit.
The market doesn't care too much about quality. If it did, do you think Word would have won the word-processing wars against WordPerfect? (Remember, when the WordPerfect Corporation owned it, you had unlimited free tech support?)
Could the corporations get a ban on all encrypted traffic for which no key is in escrow for easy policing?
I'm beginning to think that corporations can get just about anything they want in the U.S. I'm trying not to be cynical, but the U.S. Supreme Court has been handing down increasingly bizarre decisions with hardly any public comment against it. Last week's decision gutting the Fourth Amendment, for example: do a majority of U.S. citizens really think it's OK for the police to stop, handcuff, arrest, mugshot and jail a woman for not wearing a seatbelt? In a state where the maximum penalty for this "crime" is a $50 fine?
This from a court that says money is speech, innocence is no defense against the death penalty and there's no need to finish counting votes in a close election.
The only way the RIAA, MPAA et. al. can fully protect what they perceive to be their property is if society allows a police state to develop. The Fourth Amendment was lost last week; we're on our way.
My job is salaried and when the on-call rotation falls to me I get a fixed cost-per-hour for hauling the beeper plus overtime pay for the actual time spent responding to a problem.
It's been that way for about seven years and three companies. And I do work in a "right-to-work" state.
Two companies ago the policy changed: when they weren't paying any extra, the on-call guy didn't respond and they tried to fire him for cause. He sued and received some settlement money from the company because the contract didn't give value for value, something about only having to exercise slight care when you're doing something essentially for no extra compensation. Anyway, after the company settled and it became known to the rest of us, some started turning off their beepers and the result was the salary + fixed + overtime plan.
The only problem with getting them to donate the money is that only Patrick has ponied up any cash. Looks like Mike Goldman is more concerned with money than honor; Patrick met the challenge as written and Mike weaseled out by saying that it wasn't what he meant.
Patrick has two things to consider: Sean and the school's actions.
Sean is probably better off being homeschooled and would have been better served by getting him out of the public school system before now. As far as his record goes, it probably won't matter much: on applications and resume, say that he was in public school until his junior year and was then homeschooled. If you're concerned about having a GED instead of a diploma, check out the Clonlara School Home Based Education Program and you can get a real high school diploma by following their guidelines. They're at www.clonlara.org if you're interested (and if you're new to homeschooling and want some structure, curriculum, textbooks and teachers available to you they're worth the fees.)
However, that leaves the matter of the jerks who have gotten away with something bad. School administrators fear two things: bad publicity and lawsuits. Whether you want to use either or both against them depends on how much of your life you want to devote to fighting the jerks and whether you can get help with funding the latter. I'd go after them in a heartbeat, but I haven't been in Patrick's shoes so I won't presume to tell him what he should do.
>> I'm amazed at how poorly this has been handled. I'll be even more amazed if there is no fallout.
It's at the point where almost nothing surprises me anymore about how tenaciously some managers cling to Microsoft.
I was at a company that bought some fairly esoteric, hard-to-find parts from another company through a web-interfaced front-end app that accessed the other company's inventory system. About a year-and-a-half ago, they migrated to IIS from Apache for the front-end. They'd previously been an all-UNIX shop but had trouble when the front-end went Windows NT and the inventory app stayed UNIX. So, with the help of many consultants and at least two clueful in-house geeks they went all-NT.
Problems out the wazoo, but my company tended to be faithful to suppliers so we put up with bungled orders, downtime and other problems that would cause us not to buy from a supplier if they were new to us. Finally an IIS update was applied at the supplier's site that broke the web ordering for anything but Internet Explorer.
Our company used and supported Netscape only, so we tried to persuade them to make their site work with Netscape. I'll give them credit; they really tried. (Then again, our orders were over 60% of their revenue stream.) Our CEO lunched with their CEO and told him exactly what was at stake: it was costing us too much to do everything by phone and they had to get something running that was usable or we'd have to go elsewhere.
Keep in mind the old UNIX-based system was still around and running parallel and could've benn brought back online. Their IT manager was so committed to keeping NT that he wouldn't switch back.
We stuck with them for another few months despite the additional costs associated with doing business by phone only. They went out of business several months after we regretfully took our trade elsewhere. I know some of the other IT guys at other companies that used the supplier and the word was that their move to NT from UNIX eventually cost them more than 80% of their revenue due to the higher-volume customers leaving.
This was no startup company; they'd been around since at least 1989. Was their move to NT the major factor in their death or just a sign of other bad decisions that were going on behind the scenes? I suspect the former. Why did they cling to Microsoft as they lost more and more revenue because of that decision? Their IT manager had dropped beaucoup bucks on MS products in an attempt to save the company money and didn't want to lose his job for that catastrophically bad decision.
So, will there be fallout? Probably not enough to make Microsoft mend its ways, if not its programs.
The U.S. just had an election in which an arrogant bully "popular" type won against a nerd. (Well, all right, Bush didn't really win anything except the decision of a corrupt Court, but the man still acts as if he won and hardly anybody is challenging his legitimacy.) It seems unlikely in such an atmosphere that bullying will ever be judged harshly.
"Guardent officials alerted CERT and the affected vendors to the problem before making it public."
Which vendors have the insecure stacks?
Maybe this is an early warning of another Microsoft-only problem being referred to as an Internet problem, the way that the various Outlook buffer-overflow exploits were referred to as "e-mail viruses" by the media-at-large rather than "piss-poor programming".
If Microsoft's Quality Assurance department fell over in the woods, would it make a sound?
Yet another security vendor tries to get press by reminding everybody of something that's been out there for years.
(Looks like it worked.)
>> I don't think that we Texans will
tolerate this kind of nonsense..
Considering some of the politicians from Texas I've seen on C-SPAN, there's little that Texas-at-large won't tolerate. The only loopier characters I've seen have been from California.
Nice try, but not a good reflection of reality.
Joe Six-Pack User at the desk using the tools given by his company cares intensely about Microsoft because the perception has become that the software is not adequate, and Microsoft gets the blame even when it's not the blue screen of death. Six years ago what you said held true, not now. Whether it's hardware, network policies or stupid sysadmins that don't run their networks properly, the users increasingly blame Microsoft for their problems. And that may hurt Microsoft much more than anything done by the U.S. government.
The really interesting thing about this is that the employees who attain a sufficiently high position are pretty consistently demanding applications other than those crafted by Microsoft. The pressure is starting to mount from some of the other users; it's almost a status symbol not to have to use Microsoft software...
Try www.opensecrets.org and search. Both William Gates of Microsoft and Microsoft are there for hundreds of thousands, leaning Republican for the last election cycle.
The easiest way to make software suck less is to force software companies to provide a real, truthful legal warranty for it when it is sold.
Software would cost more initially but less in the long run since the purchaser would not have to pay as much for after-sale support simply to get the software to perform as it is advertised or written in the manual.
Buyer beware: La-Z-Boy's warranty is not what it once was. My wife and I got identical recliners a few years back from La-Z-Boy. Hers had some serious manufacturing problems and is now sitting as a stack of parts (with perfect fabric). They came out a couple of times and used electric drills and bolts to try to strap it together; it finally fell to pieces and they won't do anything about it.
And, no, she ain't heavy. I'm heavier and my chair is OK.
Her replacement chair, needless to say, was not from La-Z-Boy. That one's holding up just fine.
If you go beyond the first two opening screens on Gary North's website, you'll find this statement from him about why the website's still up:
This Website contains over 6,000 documents on Y2K. I began posting links to these documents in January of 1997.
Many of these links are now dead. The original sources have been removed. The only public records of these documents are the summaries on this site.
For researchers on Y2K, this site will remain a primary source. The major search engines are still linked to the documents, page by page.
For anyone looking into "Y2K and anything else," there will probably be a link to this site on the first or second screen of the search engine.
I have decided not to take down this site for a while. I want researchers to have access to it.