I think the real problem is that people could make their Li-Ion batteries explode intentionally.
I agree. All it would take is a paper clip and a laptop with a fully-charged Li-ion battery. Or they could custom-build a battery with smaller cells but the same voltage, then use the space they save for bad stuff. I doubt it would be caught on X-ray.
Pretty soon, all laptops will have to be in checked baggage (and subject to the junk fee, of course)
I didn't mention the Compaq and HP acquisitions because they are (for my purposes) irrelevant. As the Digital's money ran out, a once-brilliant service and engineering organization was handed to the script monkeys. Even worse, most of the software products were sold off, including several that we were depending on. For the most part, the new vendors were simply buying a customer list and imposing a semi-forced migration to their mainstream software products. This kind of transaction is not limited to Digital, and possibly worth a discussion of its own.
What was once a tightly integrated set of layered products turned into a scavenger hunt for bits and pieces. Sure, with enough money and patience you could close the gap. And thanks to Compaq and HP, you might even avoid resorting to Ebay. For a few highly specialized shops, I'm sure it was worth the effort. But for most others, there was no point in trying.
The pieces that survive today as part of HP are mere table scraps compared to what existed before. Not that any of this was Compaq or HP's fault. The meltdown was well underway before Compaq bought anything.
The point I was trying to make: Technology companies try hard to make customers dependent upon them. That dependency comes with a high price when there are disruptive changes in the industry.
The post I responded to made various claims about the valuable "protection" associated with buying commercial software. I called bullshit, referring directly to the statements made in that post. Either refute my argument or go away.
Some of your arguments against freeware are dubious...
"There's two reasons for being against 'freeware' - many are distributed as closed-source economically unauditable binaries. This leads to difficulties in gaining code security - the government can go after microsoft if they deliberately put a back door in their software, but some dude who published some freeware MP3 player?"
"Auditable binaries"? When was the last time you audited one? Ever read a Microsoft EULA? Neither the government nor anyone else will be going after Microsoft for anything, even if they provided a back door. I seriously doubt anyone can extract ANY remedy beyond possibly a refund of purchase price. Again, read the EULA. Feel the "protection".
"The second is maintenance - they don't want to become dependent upon unmaintainable software. It happens anyways, but if you're paying some company money, generally you get a warranty."
You mean like having the vendor go out of business and you can't get the source code? In 1990's, I managed a large data center. All of our hardware (and most of the software) came from the #2 player in the industry -- Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC was considered "too big to fail" back in those days. We had about $5 million in software licensing alone. Over the course of five years, the vendor that was "too big to fail" proved otherwise. It was a very expensive learning experience. At the time, our thought process was pretty much the same as yours -- and look how well THAT turned out. Those who ignore history will surely repeat it.
As for warranties, back to the EULA once again. Find me a software license that grants any warranty or accepts any liability beyond possibly refunding the purchase price. Just one. Got links to share?
As for copyright, are there any cases where parties who inadvertently possess infringing code have been held liable INSTEAD of the original source of the infringement? Where ARE these cases? Got links?
There have been several cases where large software companies were found guilty of patent or copyright infringement. Have ANY of their customers ever been charged with infringement for merely possessing the infringing software? Again, where are the cases and let's have some links.
You might be tempted to mention SCO vs. Autozone, but that case was about terms of a license. Autozone wound up in court primarily because they bought software from SCO, probably thinking they had the protections that you mention. As far as I know, companies that used Linux exclusively (and never SCO products) have never been sued by SCO. Makes you wonder how valuable this "protection" is.
The deliberate coverup in response to an FOI request pretty much blows the climatologists out of the water. Kaboom! Game over. The British press is all over the issue while the American press ignores it, hoping it will go away. It won't.
Money rules BOTH sides of the climate debate. You simply don't get funding unless your outcome favors the people who provide the money. If Microsoft funds an "independent study" and the outcome favors Microsoft products (as it always does), we understand, laugh, and life goes on. Why is this climatology such a mystery? If Rob Enderle, Laura DiDio, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute opened a climatology division, Slashdot would be challenging them in about 10 minutes. What's taking so long with the climatologists?
The clues are everywhere. Notice how the "cap and trade" money grab is absolutely essential to solving the problem, while consuming less meat or zero population growth are given hardly any consideration at all. Without the money grab and subsidies for the third world, the sense urgency goes right down the toilet. Things we could be doing at zero cost get zero attention. This doesn't prove climatology is a scam, but it sure looks that way.
Meanwhile, we had better hope global warming a scam. During the years since Kyoto, China has become the number 1 generator of CO2. And they have far more growth potential than the US does. So do Brazil, Russia, and India for that matter. I have actually visited Shanghai and have seen the pollution first hand. Complex measurements were not required; coughing in the smog was more than enough for me. If anyone claims China is serious about controlling pollution, it's total BS.
The reality is that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC nations) offer to do essentially nothing, while they hide behind the number 2 generator of CO2 - the US. I have news for you folks - the US government is broke. Obama views "cap and trade" as a palatable source of tax revenue that will throw off so much cash, he can distribute it all over the world. Problem is, cap and trade is NOT palatable. The production of CO2 will simply migrate to the countries with the least enforcement or the heaviest subsidies. Obama's Democrats will be "wiped off the map" in large sections of the US if they expect Americans to subsidize [even more] offshoring of jobs. There is a very real possibility that a mismanaged implementation of cap and trade would be both ineffective and indistinguishable from economic suicide. In such a scenario, the Democrats would become a regional party with no real power outside of California and Massachusetts.
Fortunately, we have been saved by Russian hackers. No deal in Copenhagen, no cap and trade. No support in Congress; it's dead with a capital "D". Obama is already looking for excuses to cancel the trip! Perhaps they can mail him his Nobel Peace Prize. The countries that were determined to do nothing will be joined by all the others, so that we can all continue to do nothing on an equitable basis. This may not be the best outcome, but it is infinitely better than a naive Obama getting hoodwinked into picking up the costs of everyone else's pollution controls.
"But financially, this is of no benefit to society, or the companies whose stock you're trading."
Wrong on both counts. The existence of day traders ensures a steady volume of trades for many stocks that would be lightly traded otherwise. This means longer-term investors can get into or out of a position without excessive volatility. Although day trading can cause some minor volatility on its own, the effect is more of a smoothing action, keeping the stock price roughly aligned with investors' analysis of future earnings. As for your reference to IPOs, who would ever buy an IPO if there was no active market to sell into at some point in the future?
As an added bonus, day traders help ensure market efficiency. Overpriced stocks get sold, underpriced stocks get bought up. Day traders help reduce the amount of time these out of balance conditions exist. Without them, stock price manipulation would be even easier than it already is.
Even for short periods of time, somebody has to put up the money to hold all of the shares on the stock market. Consider two extreme examples: Investor A is a day trader who runs a $1M portfolio split among 50 companies with 100% turnover every day for 5 years. Investor B invests $1M in one company's IPO and lets it sit for 5 years. Which contributes more to the market cap of the stock market? They are both EQUAL, because each has $1M invested every day of the year.
If the market worked any other way, there would be too many disincentives to investing. Nobody would do it. Where would we be then?
I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and later an equally heavy VT-100. I wore out more than a few keyboards when DEC made the key action lighter and smoother with the LK-201. Nostalgia factor aside, the key location was awesome and the action was perfect.
Back in the mainframe days, DEC was to IBM what Apple is now to Microsoft -- the "other" technology that people prefer once they try it. The keyboard was part of the deal. The LK-201 was slim and stylish, while the IBM keyboards were beefy, much like comparing a sports car to a school bus.
Most companies refuse to give ANY references -- good, bad, or otherwise. They usually confirm dates of employment, job title, and that's it. Fear of lawsuits, you know.
The good news is they are unlikely to give you a bad reference. The bad news is you won't get a good one either. Future potential employers are unlikely to expect much disclosure because they know what their own policy is.
Turnover being what it is these days, it won't be long before nobody at the old company remembers you anyway.
If you have a good relationship with your supervisor or other higher-ups, keep track of these people outside the company and see if they will help your career along with good references, etc. If not, hold on to hardcopy performance reviews. Ask HR for a copy of your file if you need to. Get letters of recommendation from anyone willing to write one.
Under no circumstances should you be bullied into staying longer than you have agreed to. When they have layoffs, zero notice is the norm. For employees resigning, two weeks notice is traditional (but not required). I have supervised many people over the years. When someone quit, I expected to get two weeks notice. In most cases I got it. I could tell some fascinating stories about one bizarre exception, but I won't.
In that one bizarre case where I didn't receive the traditional two weeks notice from my employee, the company had a tendency to fire people as soon as they gave notice. I never did that to anyone, but it was traditional at this company to pack up your stuff BEFORE giving notice. It was THAT bad.
This business of asking employees to stay on longer after giving notice is a standard management ploy. It is used by relatively unskilled managers who think they can squeeze all aspects of the employment relationship. Run, don't walk to the nearest exit.
This is NOT the time to explain who you hate and why. It is imperative to be professional about the process (no matter how bizarre the situation might be). Your co-workers already KNOW to the self-promoting a$$holes are, who is sleeping with whom, the golfers, the entrenched dead wood, etc. There is a time and place to orchestrate a response, but it can wait for more favorable circumstances. If you're really pissed off, help find a new job for everyone who is competent and useful. But help yourself first. It starts with being viewed as a resource within your industry, and you can't do that if you have spent your time bad-mouthing anyone. Besides, you never know who you might be working with in the future.
It takes time, but bad things happen to bad people. Always.
dude, you are a major liar. the site hpc.ru alone currently counts 13539 applications for windows mobile and there are waaaaaaaay more out there. also, all the custom business apps written for windows mobile (for example pretty much every package delivery company like dhl or ups uses windows mobile devices for telematics) make it the currently largest handheld platform
Considering how long Windows Mobile has been out there, 13,539 apps on a website (that happens to be 100% in Russian) is hardly a great victory. Exactly how is this Russian website supposed to compete with the iPhone App store? And where exactly is the MS Windows Mobile app store? Oh, never mind.
The task of making the MS fanboys look silly just doesn't get any easier than this!
The original discussion was MS vs. Ubuntu. The hardware context was presumably netbooks. My reference to Windows Mobile was simply to describe MS efforts in the limited resource environment. For whatever reason, you saw a straw to be grasped because some Russian website has a bunch of apps. As MS builds upon the smashing success of getting 13,539 apps on hpc.ru, perhaps they will deploy Windows Mobile as the "Ubuntu killer" in the netbook market. Lotsa luck.
On my Mac, I frequently use a non-standard keyboard. For all the time I spend bashing Microsoft, I actually use a Micorosoft USB keyboard and I like it a lot! So there goes your keyboard viewer. But I only type in English, so I really don't care of someone has a program to simulate languages I can't type in anyway.
I really doubt that anyone can identify keyboard layouts via software. The computer needs to know the character code of the key that was struck and the user's local language - nothing more. So I doubt anyone can reverse engineer keyboard layouts armed with just the USB device identifier.
What you describe was not what I was thinking of as a netbook. Those machines for "fools and simple users" are viable for many users who need need a web browser, e-mail, and document preparation. I would argue that your characterization is circular logic. Those machines are for "fools" because they can't run XP very well. Which goes right back to proving my point.
Your 120GB of space is essentially the same as my MacBook. Other than the small screen and keyboard, what you are describing is hardly any different than a run of the mill laptop.
I'd be curious to know how much memory you have. 512mb would be rock-bottom for XP, but within reason for Ubuntu. I have seen McAfee anti-virus claim 100mb all by itself, with Outlook sometimes as high as 200mb. Realistically, 1G is what I really want for XP. I think that is what the MSI Wind U100 ships with by default. But so does just about every full-sized laptop these days.
The ability to run XP on 1G of memory and 120G of disk is hardly newsworthy. But as the resources are cut back to save on weight, battery life, and cost, XP can become a burden.
If you cut the memory in half and the disk by 75%, you still have a viable machine -- but only if you get rid of XP. Perhaps Moore's law will once again come to the aid of Microsoft so that the bare minimum netbook is a perfectly viable XP machine.
The Gnome toolbar issue is indeed silly and they need to fix it. Vertical real estate is not to be squandered. However, my 11 year old daughter uses Ubuntu on an obsolete laptop with 800x600 video (and only 384 mb of memory). If I converted her machine to XP, I think she would scream about the performance before she noticed the improved toolbar. In fact, I have yet to hear a single comment about the toolbar.
XP portables are not automatically a bad choice. Many people are asking me how to buy a laptop without getting stuck with Vista. For those people, machines like yours are a great option. MS is making it hard for consumers to buy XP. But in the netbook market, MS either sells XP or they sell nothing.
Although new Macs are in fact x86 machines, Apple does not offer OS X for sale other than pre-installed on a new Apple computer. They COULD easily expand it to other x86 machines but for whatever reason they choose not to. There are some people (not to mention Psystar) who can get OS X working on non-Apple hardware, but it's an unsupported hacker project, much like running Linux on an iPod.
The threat from Apple is somewhat contained because OS X only runs on premium-priced Apple hardware. Windows is still the OS of choice for the corporate sector and [ironically] the computer illiterate people who call upon their MS-based colleagues, friends and relatives for free tech support. I always found it amazing that the platform that needs the most tech support was so popular with the people who need the most assistance.
Ubuntu is a big threat, and it goes way beyond price. Nobody is going to take their existing Dell or HP machine and reformat it for OS X. But they can certainly do it with Linux. Ubuntu has the slickest packaging of the various Linux options, making it a "Poor man's OS X that can run on the hardware I already have." Historically, only a small percentage of users have abandoned Win2K or XP in favor of Linux. But Vista is another matter entirely.
Microsoft is a company built on the principle of Moore's law. Exponential increases in hardware capability means unlimited new possibilities for new features and a fresh desires from the user community (sometimes fueled by marketing hype but desires nonetheless). Each version of Windows was more bloated than the one before, but nothing stopped the users from merging a new version of Windows into their upgrade cycle.
Three events changed everything: 1. Vista "jumped the shark" on bloat while the rest of the market moved the other way. 2. Cheapie Ubuntu netbooks can do almost everything people really need to do. 3. The iPhone is threatening to turn itself into a hand-held OS X machine.
Running Windows XP on a netbook is like fitting a 350 pound driver into a golf cart. You can do it, but you won't carry many golf clubs. Running Vista on a netbook won't even pass the giggle test.
Windows Mobile was their only lightweight option but it never picked up enough traction to seriously compete with a "real" operating system. Apple had more apps running on the iPhone in the first six months than MS ever had for Windows Mobile.
Microsoft needs to slow down the adoption rate of Ubuntu netbooks while they figure out how to exist in the small, light, low-powered world of ultra-portable hardware. They will need a community of people other than themselves to provide a robust portfolio of applications.
MS is one of the few companies that tries to win a race by slowing the other guy down. In this case, they need to speed themselves up and get in the game.
Because in order to buy that argument, you have to assume that the prior tactics were REDUCING the amount of piracy before the strategy changed. You would also have to assume that a significant percentage of the pirated songs would have been purchased -- a dubious assumption at best.
If the lawsuits were working, the RIAA would pick up the pace or at least maintain the status quo. Given the RIAA's legendary learning deficiencies, there must be a preponderance of evidence to prove the ineffectiveness of the lawsuits before they were willing to pull the plug on their legal department.
Nothing is really stopping anyone from downloading whatever they want. And the availability of files to download is, well, just about everything. The individual lawsuits are meaningless, especially the argument that the defendant is "making available" some file that would not have been available otherwise. Take away that one person and the same file can be downloaded by roughly the same number of people in the same amount of time.
It's like suing someone for causing global warming because they cooked a batch of burgers on a charcoal grill. Subtracting one grill, a bag of charcoal, and six burgers from the planet accomplishes nothing. There are not enough lawyers or laser printers to sue everyone who lights up a grill for a burger feast. No matter how many people are sued, ground beef is ending up on toasted buns and the "problem" of global warming remains unchanged.
Class action suits are for multiple plaintiffs, not multiple unrelated defendants, so it really IS all about the copyright infringement of a small number of $0.99 songs every time the RIAA goes to court.
The RIAA should have done what I suggested back in the days of the original Napster. A voluntary $5/month service that tracks the existence of downloads via the existing P2P infrastructure. Revenues allocated to artists proportionally based on their share of the monthly "traffic". Tracking is not intrusive because it is being used to calculate royalties -- nothing more. I would gladly pay $5/month for an "all you can eat" guilt-free download experience. That is $60/year more than I pay for CDs now.
Instead, they continue to find new ways of collecting $0 and my existing library of CD's plays just fine on my iPod.
The RIAA "tax" plan is dead on arrival because there is no way that business use of the internet should be subsidizing recreational downloads. In order to justify the receipt of any money, the RIAA will need to provide something of value. Until they bring something to the table, no deal.
Speaking hypothetically of course, if I had to become a self-promoting back-stabber to keep my job, I would rather behave properly and let nature take its course (even if it meant getting canned). And if the company is rewarding the self-promoting back-stabbers at the expense of team players, it's better to get out and try again somewhere else.
Not much sense in playing the game. If you decide to join the legion of self-promoting back stabbers, it's only a matter of time before someone plays the game more effectively than you do and then out you go.
You should only work with trustworthy people. If for some reason you cannot trust the people you work with, find people you CAN trust and go work with them instead.
Considering that ill-fated PR campaign about a woman who pretended to be a Mac user switching to Windows, when in fact the PR woman WAS the "switcher", can anything be too crazy for a Microsoft ad campaign?
One does not buy a Dell with Ubuntu by accident. Asus EEE? Sure, I saw some at Target. Dell? No.
And she dropped out of college for 2 semesters because she couldn't get a computer that worked? I don't buy that either.
I wonder how many appearances she has to make before she gets a free Zune.
If you think it's tough to be an open source vendor, just imagine what it's like as a proprietary vendor who might have an even bigger investment at risk -- watching the open source market chipping away at it. I don't mean Microsoft or the other major players, as they have already had more ROI than they deserve. After all, it was overpriced "cash cow" products (originally Unix itself) that led to the open source concept in the first place.
The rise of Microsoft marked the halfway point in the race to the bottom. Back in 1980, IBM needed a cheapie OS that would not add $3000 of licensing fees to what was already a $3000 product. The market for $6000 PCs was less than 5% of the potential market for $3000 PCs. IBM was perfectly capable of adapting Unix for the mission, but not without bloating the cost. And besides, the original 8088 was not much of a CPU anyway. Any serious computing would be done via 3270 terminal emulation to a "real" computer elsewhere.
At thsi point, all software races downward approaching a price of zero. It's only a matter of time.
Competing with free is a losing proposition. So don't do it. Unfortunately, management has fallen in love with offshore outsourcing. As a result, the quality of commercial software has no way to avoid the open source juggernaut. It IS possible to out-invest the open source community and still make a buck. That involves real investment and real risk. As long as management stays focused on cost at the expense of innovation, quality and customer satisfaction, the open sourcers are in the driver's seat.
Consider the simple concept of tech support. Blog posting vs. a vendor's offshore call center. Which one responds first? With a workable solution? Resulting in a self-service workaround and a patch for all users? Why do we pay a PREMIUM for "supported" products that are supported by morons? We all know which vendors I am referring to.
I think Apple does a great job of exploiting open source on one hand, while avoiding price erosion in its own products that depend on it. We can't all do what Apple does, but they are onto something.
The IT industry has become an awful place to work. This created a large community of under-utilized, frustrated people who are very anxious to deliver software as it should be. For free, if necessary. Look closely at the key contributors of any major open source project and you will find people with spectacular credentials -- the type of folks you couldn't dream of hiring to work in your company. Competing with these people (at any price, especially zero) is a waste of time and money. The more we dumb down the commercial development business model, the more we feed the process.
Understanding the trend is the first step towards figuring out what to do about it. I think the trick is to plan ahead for the likelihood of commoditization, and maintain a pipeline of new products and ideas that runs ahead of it.
Although I do not have the answers, I am absolutely sure that swimming against the tide is a loser's game.
"I've always wondered if this is really necessary since their DHCP server already knows the MAC addresses to which it has given IP addresses."
Your point would be a valid one if:
(1) We always know the address of the DHCP server (2) There was never any other DHCP server on the same LAN (3) All of the addresses were DHCP-assigned (4) All clients were actually using their DHCP-assigned addresses.
ARP broadcast works even when those assumptions fail. It goes all the way back to statically-addressed networks. Back in the old days, people feared that a dead DHCP server would shutdown an entire subnet. Since that time, we have learned that DHCP failures are few and far between (even with a Windows box running the service).
DHCP assigns IP addresses, sometimes based on the MAC address of the request. It does not authenticate or establish the identity of anything. The address assigned by DHCP is not necessarily the ONLY address that can be used at the moment. Clients that have their own idea of an IP address can ignore DHCP -- with unpredictable results. A bad person might take their DHCP assignment and use it to determine the proper subnet and default route for a unilateral static assignment in the same subnet. Depending on a number of factors, it might work. This leads to the "reasonable doubt" theory of DHCP logs as an identification tool.
DSL is a little different because of PPPOE. In that case, you have username/password identification before DHCP even has a chance to assign the address. But even then, I wonder about the possibility of wandering outside the DHCP assignment after the inital login, using a locally hard-coded static address. IMHO, it's harder (but perhaps not impossible) to game the addressing system on DSL.
My point is that DHCP by itself cannot FORCE a client to use only the DHCP-assigned address. Some ISPs may have supplemental technology to ensure compliance, but there is more room to maneuver than most people think.
Years ago, I had a cable modem. In the beginning, all customers had static IPs. I had several lengthy outages that ultimately led to ditching cable in favor of slower but more reliable DSL. One of the more interesting problems occurred when someone else decided (or was mistakenly assigned) to use my static IP address. Obviously, I had service trouble (as I suspect the other person did as well). The ISP's solution was to assign a NEW address to ME.
The interesting part is this: On some networks, it is possible to assume a static address that you did NOT receive via DHCP and it just might work. It may or may not be subject to somebody else's DHCP lease. Even if it is, the other person's computer may be off. In my case, it all happened by accident. Maybe it's not always an accident.
Between the static address, DHCP leases, ISP bumbling on the management of either one, combined with both intentional and unintentional user mistakes about configuration, there is more than a reasonable doubt about the identity of ANYONE based on simply an IP address. And of course a MAC address can be easily faked.
A friend of mine received an RIAA nastygram sent by his cable ISP. Fortunately, this guy kept logs of his DHCP address assignments and quickly proved the ISPs records to be false. It seems the address used for the downloading was assigned to my friend AFTER the alleged downloads took place. The cable clowns never bothered to compare the date/time of the alleged activity with their logs; they just launched a nastygram to whoever had the current address. Morons.
You are quite correct on the hobbies. I like to hire people who are obsessed with technology. At least I know they are self-motivated to stay current. Such people bring new ideas to work as a byproduct of thinking during off hours. They tend to apply themselves that much more DURING the work day as well.
More to the point of the base article, the value of the more experienced worker is their memory of mistakes and the actions needed to avoid them next time. Also, there is the demonstrated ability to transition from old tech to new. Someone who has 20+ years of experience has made some adjustments over time. Such people tend to think of problems in a generic context, as opposed to a one-dimensional code monkey who sputters when you take way his Visual Studio.
I have seen some young candidates who exhibit some of the maturity that rates high in my book. And there have been a few very experienced one-dimensional code monkeys who have somehow managed to slide through an entire career without learning much. But neither case is typical.
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I think the real problem is that people could make their Li-Ion batteries explode intentionally.
I agree. All it would take is a paper clip and a laptop with a fully-charged Li-ion battery. Or they could custom-build a battery with smaller cells but the same voltage, then use the space they save for bad stuff. I doubt it would be caught on X-ray.
Pretty soon, all laptops will have to be in checked baggage (and subject to the junk fee, of course)
I didn't mention the Compaq and HP acquisitions because they are (for my purposes) irrelevant. As the Digital's money ran out, a once-brilliant service and engineering organization was handed to the script monkeys. Even worse, most of the software products were sold off, including several that we were depending on. For the most part, the new vendors were simply buying a customer list and imposing a semi-forced migration to their mainstream software products. This kind of transaction is not limited to Digital, and possibly worth a discussion of its own.
What was once a tightly integrated set of layered products turned into a scavenger hunt for bits and pieces. Sure, with enough money and patience you could close the gap. And thanks to Compaq and HP, you might even avoid resorting to Ebay. For a few highly specialized shops, I'm sure it was worth the effort. But for most others, there was no point in trying.
The pieces that survive today as part of HP are mere table scraps compared to what existed before. Not that any of this was Compaq or HP's fault. The meltdown was well underway before Compaq bought anything.
The point I was trying to make: Technology companies try hard to make customers dependent upon them. That dependency comes with a high price when there are disruptive changes in the industry.
The post I responded to made various claims about the valuable "protection" associated with buying commercial software. I called bullshit, referring directly to the statements made in that post. Either refute my argument or go away.
Some of your arguments against freeware are dubious...
"There's two reasons for being against 'freeware' - many are distributed as closed-source economically unauditable binaries. This leads to difficulties in gaining code security - the government can go after microsoft if they deliberately put a back door in their software, but some dude who published some freeware MP3 player?"
"Auditable binaries"? When was the last time you audited one? Ever read a Microsoft EULA? Neither the government nor anyone else will be going after Microsoft for anything, even if they provided a back door. I seriously doubt anyone can extract ANY remedy beyond possibly a refund of purchase price. Again, read the EULA. Feel the "protection".
"The second is maintenance - they don't want to become dependent upon unmaintainable software. It happens anyways, but if you're paying some company money, generally you get a warranty."
You mean like having the vendor go out of business and you can't get the source code? In 1990's, I managed a large data center. All of our hardware (and most of the software) came from the #2 player in the industry -- Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC was considered "too big to fail" back in those days. We had about $5 million in software licensing alone. Over the course of five years, the vendor that was "too big to fail" proved otherwise. It was a very expensive learning experience. At the time, our thought process was pretty much the same as yours -- and look how well THAT turned out. Those who ignore history will surely repeat it.
As for warranties, back to the EULA once again. Find me a software license that grants any warranty or accepts any liability beyond possibly refunding the purchase price. Just one. Got links to share?
As for copyright, are there any cases where parties who inadvertently possess infringing code have been held liable INSTEAD of the original source of the infringement? Where ARE these cases? Got links?
There have been several cases where large software companies were found guilty of patent or copyright infringement. Have ANY of their customers ever been charged with infringement for merely possessing the infringing software? Again, where are the cases and let's have some links.
You might be tempted to mention SCO vs. Autozone, but that case was about terms of a license. Autozone wound up in court primarily because they bought software from SCO, probably thinking they had the protections that you mention. As far as I know, companies that used Linux exclusively (and never SCO products) have never been sued by SCO. Makes you wonder how valuable this "protection" is.
The deliberate coverup in response to an FOI request pretty much blows the climatologists out of the water. Kaboom! Game over. The British press is all over the issue while the American press ignores it, hoping it will go away. It won't.
Money rules BOTH sides of the climate debate. You simply don't get funding unless your outcome favors the people who provide the money. If Microsoft funds an "independent study" and the outcome favors Microsoft products (as it always does), we understand, laugh, and life goes on. Why is this climatology such a mystery? If Rob Enderle, Laura DiDio, and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute opened a climatology division, Slashdot would be challenging them in about 10 minutes. What's taking so long with the climatologists?
The clues are everywhere. Notice how the "cap and trade" money grab is absolutely essential to solving the problem, while consuming less meat or zero population growth are given hardly any consideration at all. Without the money grab and subsidies for the third world, the sense urgency goes right down the toilet. Things we could be doing at zero cost get zero attention. This doesn't prove climatology is a scam, but it sure looks that way.
Meanwhile, we had better hope global warming a scam. During the years since Kyoto, China has become the number 1 generator of CO2. And they have far more growth potential than the US does. So do Brazil, Russia, and India for that matter. I have actually visited Shanghai and have seen the pollution first hand. Complex measurements were not required; coughing in the smog was more than enough for me. If anyone claims China is serious about controlling pollution, it's total BS.
The reality is that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC nations) offer to do essentially nothing, while they hide behind the number 2 generator of CO2 - the US. I have news for you folks - the US government is broke. Obama views "cap and trade" as a palatable source of tax revenue that will throw off so much cash, he can distribute it all over the world. Problem is, cap and trade is NOT palatable. The production of CO2 will simply migrate to the countries with the least enforcement or the heaviest subsidies. Obama's Democrats will be "wiped off the map" in large sections of the US if they expect Americans to subsidize [even more] offshoring of jobs. There is a very real possibility that a mismanaged implementation of cap and trade would be both ineffective and indistinguishable from economic suicide. In such a scenario, the Democrats would become a regional party with no real power outside of California and Massachusetts.
Fortunately, we have been saved by Russian hackers. No deal in Copenhagen, no cap and trade. No support in Congress; it's dead with a capital "D". Obama is already looking for excuses to cancel the trip! Perhaps they can mail him his Nobel Peace Prize. The countries that were determined to do nothing will be joined by all the others, so that we can all continue to do nothing on an equitable basis. This may not be the best outcome, but it is infinitely better than a naive Obama getting hoodwinked into picking up the costs of everyone else's pollution controls.
"But financially, this is of no benefit to society, or the companies whose stock you're trading."
Wrong on both counts. The existence of day traders ensures a steady volume of trades for many stocks that would be lightly traded otherwise. This means longer-term investors can get into or out of a position without excessive volatility. Although day trading can cause some minor volatility on its own, the effect is more of a smoothing action, keeping the stock price roughly aligned with investors' analysis of future earnings. As for your reference to IPOs, who would ever buy an IPO if there was no active market to sell into at some point in the future?
As an added bonus, day traders help ensure market efficiency. Overpriced stocks get sold, underpriced stocks get bought up. Day traders help reduce the amount of time these out of balance conditions exist. Without them, stock price manipulation would be even easier than it already is.
Even for short periods of time, somebody has to put up the money to hold all of the shares on the stock market. Consider two extreme examples: Investor A is a day trader who runs a $1M portfolio split among 50 companies with 100% turnover every day for 5 years. Investor B invests $1M in one company's IPO and lets it sit for 5 years. Which contributes more to the market cap of the stock market? They are both EQUAL, because each has $1M invested every day of the year.
If the market worked any other way, there would be too many disincentives to investing. Nobody would do it. Where would we be then?
At that point, who would the cops call?
Mod parent up. Sugar has lots of deployment options to reflect different budgets and hosting scenarios.
I could sure use a USB version of that!
I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and later an equally heavy VT-100. I wore out more than a few keyboards when DEC made the key action lighter and smoother with the LK-201. Nostalgia factor aside, the key location was awesome and the action was perfect.
Back in the mainframe days, DEC was to IBM what Apple is now to Microsoft -- the "other" technology that people prefer once they try it. The keyboard was part of the deal. The LK-201 was slim and stylish, while the IBM keyboards were beefy, much like comparing a sports car to a school bus.
Most companies refuse to give ANY references -- good, bad, or otherwise. They usually confirm dates of employment, job title, and that's it. Fear of lawsuits, you know.
The good news is they are unlikely to give you a bad reference. The bad news is you won't get a good one either. Future potential employers are unlikely to expect much disclosure because they know what their own policy is.
Turnover being what it is these days, it won't be long before nobody at the old company remembers you anyway.
If you have a good relationship with your supervisor or other higher-ups, keep track of these people outside the company and see if they will help your career along with good references, etc. If not, hold on to hardcopy performance reviews. Ask HR for a copy of your file if you need to. Get letters of recommendation from anyone willing to write one.
Under no circumstances should you be bullied into staying longer than you have agreed to. When they have layoffs, zero notice is the norm. For employees resigning, two weeks notice is traditional (but not required). I have supervised many people over the years. When someone quit, I expected to get two weeks notice. In most cases I got it. I could tell some fascinating stories about one bizarre exception, but I won't.
In that one bizarre case where I didn't receive the traditional two weeks notice from my employee, the company had a tendency to fire people as soon as they gave notice. I never did that to anyone, but it was traditional at this company to pack up your stuff BEFORE giving notice. It was THAT bad.
This business of asking employees to stay on longer after giving notice is a standard management ploy. It is used by relatively unskilled managers who think they can squeeze all aspects of the employment relationship. Run, don't walk to the nearest exit.
This is NOT the time to explain who you hate and why. It is imperative to be professional about the process (no matter how bizarre the situation might be). Your co-workers already KNOW to the self-promoting a$$holes are, who is sleeping with whom, the golfers, the entrenched dead wood, etc. There is a time and place to orchestrate a response, but it can wait for more favorable circumstances. If you're really pissed off, help find a new job for everyone who is competent and useful. But help yourself first. It starts with being viewed as a resource within your industry, and you can't do that if you have spent your time bad-mouthing anyone. Besides, you never know who you might be working with in the future.
It takes time, but bad things happen to bad people. Always.
dude, you are a major liar. the site hpc.ru alone currently counts 13539 applications for windows mobile and there are waaaaaaaay more out there. also, all the custom business apps written for windows mobile (for example pretty much every package delivery company like dhl or ups uses windows mobile devices for telematics) make it the currently largest handheld platform
Considering how long Windows Mobile has been out there, 13,539 apps on a website (that happens to be 100% in Russian) is hardly a great victory. Exactly how is this Russian website supposed to compete with the iPhone App store? And where exactly is the MS Windows Mobile app store? Oh, never mind.
The task of making the MS fanboys look silly just doesn't get any easier than this!
The original discussion was MS vs. Ubuntu. The hardware context was presumably netbooks. My reference to Windows Mobile was simply to describe MS efforts in the limited resource environment. For whatever reason, you saw a straw to be grasped because some Russian website has a bunch of apps. As MS builds upon the smashing success of getting 13,539 apps on hpc.ru, perhaps they will deploy Windows Mobile as the "Ubuntu killer" in the netbook market. Lotsa luck.
On my Mac, I frequently use a non-standard keyboard. For all the time I spend bashing Microsoft, I actually use a Micorosoft USB keyboard and I like it a lot! So there goes your keyboard viewer. But I only type in English, so I really don't care of someone has a program to simulate languages I can't type in anyway.
I really doubt that anyone can identify keyboard layouts via software. The computer needs to know the character code of the key that was struck and the user's local language - nothing more. So I doubt anyone can reverse engineer keyboard layouts armed with just the USB device identifier.
What you describe was not what I was thinking of as a netbook. Those machines for "fools and simple users" are viable for many users who need need a web browser, e-mail, and document preparation. I would argue that your characterization is circular logic. Those machines are for "fools" because they can't run XP very well. Which goes right back to proving my point.
Your 120GB of space is essentially the same as my MacBook. Other than the small screen and keyboard, what you are describing is hardly any different than a run of the mill laptop.
I'd be curious to know how much memory you have. 512mb would be rock-bottom for XP, but within reason for Ubuntu. I have seen McAfee anti-virus claim 100mb all by itself, with Outlook sometimes as high as 200mb. Realistically, 1G is what I really want for XP. I think that is what the MSI Wind U100 ships with by default. But so does just about every full-sized laptop these days.
The ability to run XP on 1G of memory and 120G of disk is hardly newsworthy. But as the resources are cut back to save on weight, battery life, and cost, XP can become a burden.
If you cut the memory in half and the disk by 75%, you still have a viable machine -- but only if you get rid of XP. Perhaps Moore's law will once again come to the aid of Microsoft so that the bare minimum netbook is a perfectly viable XP machine.
The Gnome toolbar issue is indeed silly and they need to fix it. Vertical real estate is not to be squandered. However, my 11 year old daughter uses Ubuntu on an obsolete laptop with 800x600 video (and only 384 mb of memory). If I converted her machine to XP, I think she would scream about the performance before she noticed the improved toolbar. In fact, I have yet to hear a single comment about the toolbar.
XP portables are not automatically a bad choice. Many people are asking me how to buy a laptop without getting stuck with Vista. For those people, machines like yours are a great option. MS is making it hard for consumers to buy XP. But in the netbook market, MS either sells XP or they sell nothing.
Although new Macs are in fact x86 machines, Apple does not offer OS X for sale other than pre-installed on a new Apple computer. They COULD easily expand it to other x86 machines but for whatever reason they choose not to. There are some people (not to mention Psystar) who can get OS X working on non-Apple hardware, but it's an unsupported hacker project, much like running Linux on an iPod.
The threat from Apple is somewhat contained because OS X only runs on premium-priced Apple hardware. Windows is still the OS of choice for the corporate sector and [ironically] the computer illiterate people who call upon their MS-based colleagues, friends and relatives for free tech support. I always found it amazing that the platform that needs the most tech support was so popular with the people who need the most assistance.
Ubuntu is a big threat, and it goes way beyond price. Nobody is going to take their existing Dell or HP machine and reformat it for OS X. But they can certainly do it with Linux. Ubuntu has the slickest packaging of the various Linux options, making it a "Poor man's OS X that can run on the hardware I already have." Historically, only a small percentage of users have abandoned Win2K or XP in favor of Linux. But Vista is another matter entirely.
Microsoft is a company built on the principle of Moore's law. Exponential increases in hardware capability means unlimited new possibilities for new features and a fresh desires from the user community (sometimes fueled by marketing hype but desires nonetheless). Each version of Windows was more bloated than the one before, but nothing stopped the users from merging a new version of Windows into their upgrade cycle.
Three events changed everything:
1. Vista "jumped the shark" on bloat while the rest of the market moved the other way.
2. Cheapie Ubuntu netbooks can do almost everything people really need to do.
3. The iPhone is threatening to turn itself into a hand-held OS X machine.
Running Windows XP on a netbook is like fitting a 350 pound driver into a golf cart. You can do it, but you won't carry many golf clubs. Running Vista on a netbook won't even pass the giggle test.
Windows Mobile was their only lightweight option but it never picked up enough traction to seriously compete with a "real" operating system. Apple had more apps running on the iPhone in the first six months than MS ever had for Windows Mobile.
Microsoft needs to slow down the adoption rate of Ubuntu netbooks while they figure out how to exist in the small, light, low-powered world of ultra-portable hardware. They will need a community of people other than themselves to provide a robust portfolio of applications.
MS is one of the few companies that tries to win a race by slowing the other guy down. In this case, they need to speed themselves up and get in the game.
Because in order to buy that argument, you have to assume that the prior tactics were REDUCING the amount of piracy before the strategy changed. You would also have to assume that a significant percentage of the pirated songs would have been purchased -- a dubious assumption at best.
If the lawsuits were working, the RIAA would pick up the pace or at least maintain the status quo. Given the RIAA's legendary learning deficiencies, there must be a preponderance of evidence to prove the ineffectiveness of the lawsuits before they were willing to pull the plug on their legal department.
Nothing is really stopping anyone from downloading whatever they want. And the availability of files to download is, well, just about everything. The individual lawsuits are meaningless, especially the argument that the defendant is "making available" some file that would not have been available otherwise. Take away that one person and the same file can be downloaded by roughly the same number of people in the same amount of time.
It's like suing someone for causing global warming because they cooked a batch of burgers on a charcoal grill. Subtracting one grill, a bag of charcoal, and six burgers from the planet accomplishes nothing. There are not enough lawyers or laser printers to sue everyone who lights up a grill for a burger feast. No matter how many people are sued, ground beef is ending up on toasted buns and the "problem" of global warming remains unchanged.
Class action suits are for multiple plaintiffs, not multiple unrelated defendants, so it really IS all about the copyright infringement of a small number of $0.99 songs every time the RIAA goes to court.
The RIAA should have done what I suggested back in the days of the original Napster. A voluntary $5/month service that tracks the existence of downloads via the existing P2P infrastructure. Revenues allocated to artists proportionally based on their share of the monthly "traffic". Tracking is not intrusive because it is being used to calculate royalties -- nothing more. I would gladly pay $5/month for an "all you can eat" guilt-free download experience. That is $60/year more than I pay for CDs now.
Instead, they continue to find new ways of collecting $0 and my existing library of CD's plays just fine on my iPod.
The RIAA "tax" plan is dead on arrival because there is no way that business use of the internet should be subsidizing recreational downloads. In order to justify the receipt of any money, the RIAA will need to provide something of value. Until they bring something to the table, no deal.
The Songsmith version of Roxanne is very funny, but it's NOTHING compared to what they did with Billy Idol's "White Wedding"
Speaking hypothetically of course, if I had to become a self-promoting back-stabber to keep my job, I would rather behave properly and let nature take its course (even if it meant getting canned). And if the company is rewarding the self-promoting back-stabbers at the expense of team players, it's better to get out and try again somewhere else.
Not much sense in playing the game. If you decide to join the legion of self-promoting back stabbers, it's only a matter of time before someone plays the game more effectively than you do and then out you go.
You should only work with trustworthy people. If for some reason you cannot trust the people you work with, find people you CAN trust and go work with them instead.
Considering that ill-fated PR campaign about a woman who pretended to be a Mac user switching to Windows, when in fact the PR woman WAS the "switcher", can anything be too crazy for a Microsoft ad campaign?
One does not buy a Dell with Ubuntu by accident. Asus EEE? Sure, I saw some at Target. Dell? No.
And she dropped out of college for 2 semesters because she couldn't get a computer that worked? I don't buy that either.
I wonder how many appearances she has to make before she gets a free Zune.
If you think it's tough to be an open source vendor, just imagine what it's like as a proprietary vendor who might have an even bigger investment at risk -- watching the open source market chipping away at it. I don't mean Microsoft or the other major players, as they have already had more ROI than they deserve. After all, it was overpriced "cash cow" products (originally Unix itself) that led to the open source concept in the first place.
The rise of Microsoft marked the halfway point in the race to the bottom. Back in 1980, IBM needed a cheapie OS that would not add $3000 of licensing fees to what was already a $3000 product. The market for $6000 PCs was less than 5% of the potential market for $3000 PCs. IBM was perfectly capable of adapting Unix for the mission, but not without bloating the cost. And besides, the original 8088 was not much of a CPU anyway. Any serious computing would be done via 3270 terminal emulation to a "real" computer elsewhere.
At thsi point, all software races downward approaching a price of zero. It's only a matter of time.
Competing with free is a losing proposition. So don't do it. Unfortunately, management has fallen in love with offshore outsourcing. As a result, the quality of commercial software has no way to avoid the open source juggernaut. It IS possible to out-invest the open source community and still make a buck. That involves real investment and real risk. As long as management stays focused on cost at the expense of innovation, quality and customer satisfaction, the open sourcers are in the driver's seat.
Consider the simple concept of tech support. Blog posting vs. a vendor's offshore call center. Which one responds first? With a workable solution? Resulting in a self-service workaround and a patch for all users? Why do we pay a PREMIUM for "supported" products that are supported by morons? We all know which vendors I am referring to.
I think Apple does a great job of exploiting open source on one hand, while avoiding price erosion in its own products that depend on it. We can't all do what Apple does, but they are onto something.
The IT industry has become an awful place to work. This created a large community of under-utilized, frustrated people who are very anxious to deliver software as it should be. For free, if necessary. Look closely at the key contributors of any major open source project and you will find people with spectacular credentials -- the type of folks you couldn't dream of hiring to work in your company. Competing with these people (at any price, especially zero) is a waste of time and money. The more we dumb down the commercial development business model, the more we feed the process.
Understanding the trend is the first step towards figuring out what to do about it. I think the trick is to plan ahead for the likelihood of commoditization, and maintain a pipeline of new products and ideas that runs ahead of it.
Although I do not have the answers, I am absolutely sure that swimming against the tide is a loser's game.
"I've always wondered if this is really necessary since their DHCP server already knows the MAC addresses to which it has given IP addresses."
Your point would be a valid one if:
(1) We always know the address of the DHCP server
(2) There was never any other DHCP server on the same LAN
(3) All of the addresses were DHCP-assigned
(4) All clients were actually using their DHCP-assigned addresses.
ARP broadcast works even when those assumptions fail. It goes all the way back to statically-addressed networks. Back in the old days, people feared that a dead DHCP server would shutdown an entire subnet. Since that time, we have learned that DHCP failures are few and far between (even with a Windows box running the service).
DHCP assigns IP addresses, sometimes based on the MAC address of the request. It does not authenticate or establish the identity of anything. The address assigned by DHCP is not necessarily the ONLY address that can be used at the moment. Clients that have their own idea of an IP address can ignore DHCP -- with unpredictable results. A bad person might take their DHCP assignment and use it to determine the proper subnet and default route for a unilateral static assignment in the same subnet. Depending on a number of factors, it might work. This leads to the "reasonable doubt" theory of DHCP logs as an identification tool.
DSL is a little different because of PPPOE. In that case, you have username/password identification before DHCP even has a chance to assign the address. But even then, I wonder about the possibility of wandering outside the DHCP assignment after the inital login, using a locally hard-coded static address. IMHO, it's harder (but perhaps not impossible) to game the addressing system on DSL.
My point is that DHCP by itself cannot FORCE a client to use only the DHCP-assigned address. Some ISPs may have supplemental technology to ensure compliance, but there is more room to maneuver than most people think.
Years ago, I had a cable modem. In the beginning, all customers had static IPs. I had several lengthy outages that ultimately led to ditching cable in favor of slower but more reliable DSL. One of the more interesting problems occurred when someone else decided (or was mistakenly assigned) to use my static IP address. Obviously, I had service trouble (as I suspect the other person did as well). The ISP's solution was to assign a NEW address to ME.
The interesting part is this: On some networks, it is possible to assume a static address that you did NOT receive via DHCP and it just might work. It may or may not be subject to somebody else's DHCP lease. Even if it is, the other person's computer may be off. In my case, it all happened by accident. Maybe it's not always an accident.
Between the static address, DHCP leases, ISP bumbling on the management of either one, combined with both intentional and unintentional user mistakes about configuration, there is more than a reasonable doubt about the identity of ANYONE based on simply an IP address. And of course a MAC address can be easily faked.
A friend of mine received an RIAA nastygram sent by his cable ISP. Fortunately, this guy kept logs of his DHCP address assignments and quickly proved the ISPs records to be false. It seems the address used for the downloading was assigned to my friend AFTER the alleged downloads took place. The cable clowns never bothered to compare the date/time of the alleged activity with their logs; they just launched a nastygram to whoever had the current address. Morons.
You are quite correct on the hobbies. I like to hire people who are obsessed with technology. At least I know they are self-motivated to stay current. Such people bring new ideas to work as a byproduct of thinking during off hours. They tend to apply themselves that much more DURING the work day as well.
More to the point of the base article, the value of the more experienced worker is their memory of mistakes and the actions needed to avoid them next time. Also, there is the demonstrated ability to transition from old tech to new. Someone who has 20+ years of experience has made some adjustments over time. Such people tend to think of problems in a generic context, as opposed to a one-dimensional code monkey who sputters when you take way his Visual Studio.
I have seen some young candidates who exhibit some of the maturity that rates high in my book. And there have been a few very experienced one-dimensional code monkeys who have somehow managed to slide through an entire career without learning much. But neither case is typical.