1. Neither Dell nor HP has a high-end server operating system equivalent to Solaris.
2. Sun's hardware has been of a higher caliber and reliability. I have no reason to assume that they would put any less effort into their Opteron-based products.
3. Sun has never chased the consumer desktop market. You won't find a Sun for sale at Best Buy. Nor will you find pictures on Sun's web site of smiling, multi-ethnic families clustered around Sun machines on which the children are doing homework.
4. Sun has the technical know-how that neither HP nor Dell has. Sun continues to innovate while HP and Dell are content to sell cookie-cutter PCs. There's nothing wrong with the latter as a business plan, but it's a far cry from Sun's technical leadership role in the industry.
I'll be happy if Sun backs away from their SPARC CPU development. They don't sell enough hardware to cover the R&D costs necessary to make SPARC CPUs competitive against Intel, AMD, or even IBM offerings.
You may have paid for your computer, but if it's running a service which is intended to accept messages and display them as Windows dialogs, then whose problem is it really? If you don't want messages, why do you have a device that behaves this way?
Two answers:
1. Because you are a typical consumer and don't know how to disable the service.
or
2. Because you want your network admin to be able to send you dialog-based messages saying things like "remote dial-up session terminating in five minutes for maintenance."
I have a telephone which accepts calls, but that doesn't mean that every sleazy marketer has a legal right to call me at 3:00AM to peddle his wares. Nor does it mean that one can call every ten minutes telling me that, if I don't like it, that I have to pay him for a device which screens out such calls.
My point is, no on is stealing anything.
So no one is stealing anything when they spam you? If you don't want to receive spam, why do you have a public service running which accepts spam and puts it in your inbox?
You pay nothing to NBC, CBS, HBO, MTV, etc. You pay your cable company to deliver channels to your house. What next? Are you going to complain that you paid for your car so you shouldn't hear ads on its radio or see billboards through its windshield?
You mean cable is free! And here we've all been paying for it like suckers.
You're paying for the delivery of network channels. It's analogous to saying that there shouldn't be ads on broadcast television because you paid someone to install your antenna.
What if the billboard or bench is on public land? As a citizen and a taxpayer, are you not already a part owner of that land?
Yes, you are. And if you don't want your park benches, sides of public buses, etc. rented out to advertisers, then you and the other owners can ask your representative to stop the practice. But someone is going to have to make up the revenue loss, so don't complain when your property taxes go up.
First we find out that Bob Dole uses Viagra. Now we learn that Republican party both use Microsoft Windows and IIS. So we have one Republican who has trouble getting it up and the rest have trouble keeping it up.
Shame on us! We are intruded upon every day and no one complains. Hour by hour, our eyes and ears are bombarded with advertisements, but we accept it all as a fact of life.
The key difference here is that you paid for your PC and no advertiser, whether a spammer or a pop-up advertiser, has a right to steal your bandwidth or storage.
Don't like ads while listening to the radio? Then pay for satellite radio and listen to ad-free stations. Don't like ads during movies you view on TV? Then watch the movies on pay-per-view. But it's idiotic to watch a television station to which you send no money and then get mad that they show ads. Of course they show ads! It's how they finance the operation of their television station.
If you don't like a billboard, then buy the property on which it is located and tear down the billboard. But you are hard-pressed to claim that the billboard interfered with your work or cost you money.
The only side-side usability study I've heard of found that it took only a couple of minutes longer (something like 45 - 48 minutes)to complete a set of tasks with a non-technical bunch. This was XP and RH 9, if I recall.
The issue isn't just using a few pre-installed office apps. It's the hair-pulling, cursing, painful, multi-hour process of discovering that your Archos MP3 player will only be recognized after you "rmmod ide-scsi" -- which you have to do before plugging the player into the USB port, because, if you don't, you'll have to reboot. That's why Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
And why can't I delete c:\program files\MSN Gaming Zone
Because if you're joe-average-user, you'll delete it and then call tech support because your shortcut to it doesn't work anymore and you don't know why the shortcut is even there because you deleted the directory. That's why there are are Control Panel apps to remove programs and Windows components.
Getting outlook express off of your SERVER is extremely difficult.
So why should I install Linux for my desktop OS only to discover that it installed SERVER software like Apache, sendmail, etc.? You think that the average user has any better luck purging his Linux desktop install of all of the unwanted server apps? How about getting rid of all of the idiotic install-by-default apps that the average Linux distro installs? Yeah, I really need Learn-Kanji flash cards installed by default.
Purdue, the IT department sets up everyone's computer, be they secretary, grad student, or tech. They control what software (within reason) goes onto a system, what patches get applied, and when.
So what? It doesn't show that Linux requires less support. All you've done is tell us who supports it at Purdue. You haven't shown us that the IT department handles fewer trouble tickets as a result of Linux. You haven't shown that problems occur less often or that the GUI is as easy for the average person to understand.
Face it: Windows is bloody expensive. So is Office. If corporations could realize a savings by going to Linux, they would, and in droves, not just a few here and there. The fact is that Linux costs more in support than they save in initial cost.
The only real advantage of Windows is that in runs many games.
You're kidding, right? Windows is far easier to support and administer. Quick: On ALL versions of Linux since 1995, how do you adjust the screen resolution, background wallpaper, and color depth? It's just about the same for every version of Windows for the last 8 years. With Windows, the user can plug in a digital camera and it just works. They can get a copy of Office just like they use at work. Tech support people don't have to ask Windows XP users which Windows manager they are using. The command prompt is always the same and tech support people don't have to wonder if it's bash, ksh, etc. They can go to the store and get a copy of a label making program or a Spanish language trainer. If (God forbid) they want to use AOL, they just insert the disc. They can go buy a copy of PowerDVD if they want to watch DVDs.
I think it is much more of an advantage for home users that Linux comes bundled with many useful applications.
All that means for most users is complete and utter confusion. "What's babygimp? What is dia and dia Gnome? Which one should I use? Why is there a 'Kanji drill and dictionary program' on my computer?..." It also comes with many applications that are practically useless to most users. Take a look at what is in Debian Stable. I'm sick of OSs that include every package under the sun. I don't want a 6 CD distribution. I want one disk that installs the OS and only the most basic utilities. I don't need 5 different web browsers, 6 text editors, 4 word processors, or 3 different ways to display a clock on my screen.
Also: Would his 90-year old father really be able to install Windows painlessly?
Painlessly? Probably not. Successfully? Probably. And what if he bought a PC with both Linux and Windows installed? Which would be easier for him? Windows. No contest. He wouldn't be expected to compile apps he wanted to run. A single EXE file would handle installations of new software. He would not have to deal with gzipped tar files. He could update the OS by just clicking "Windows Update."
Linux is great. I use it. It's really cool. But I still gripe about stupidity. Each distribution installs different packages -- often in non-standard directories. The way that the user configures the OS and hardware in one distro is totally different than how he does it in another one. Some distros install KDE. Some install Gnome. It's impossible for support organizations to write scripts (e.g. "Click Start and then move the arrow up to Documents. A list of documents you've recently worked on will pop up on the right hand side..."
I am not an ubergeek and I use it on my Desktop. Hey, even my mom uses it on her desktop - and she is no geek whatsoever.
Well, if you're going by solid statistics like that, who can argue with you? If you've already done an exhaustive study where you show that it works on two systems for two users, well, that's flawless research.
Makes me wonder why Red Hat is saying this now, right after they are withdrawing their home user distribution?
Maybe you should, instead, ask why they are withdrawing their home user distribution. This may come as a shock to you, but an executive at RedHat probably knows a lot more about whether Linux is ready for the desktop than you and your mom do. In the article, he says that "We know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or puts a lot of pressure on your support systems", then that's what will happen. I know people who have attempted to support commercial end-user desktop apps under Linux. The user support was a nightmare.
This is a business decision for RedHat. They don't have some emotional tie to it. They don't care about Linux Torvald's "vision" or Richard Stallman's philosophy. If they were making money putting Linux on desktops, they would keep selling a desktop OS. If they aren't making money, then they stop. The Linux community can either learn from RedHat's decisions and statements and make the appropriate changes to Linux or they bury their heads in the sand. It's up to them.
Re:Monads are an old philosophical concept
on
Microsoft's new CLI
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· Score: 1
Although it's easy to make the gonad jokes, the concept of monads have a long history in metaphysics dating back to the greeks.
Okay, I ask you, what's more fun: Making gonad jokes or discussing metaphysics and philosophy?
Let's say you hire a maid or something and one day you read her blog and you see a picture of a box from Victoria's secret with a caption like "looks like mr. fmaxwell will be having fun with his wife tonight!" or something? How would you feel?
Aroused -- though relieved that she didn't figure out the lacy underthings were for me.;-)
I see now. Your morality is "Kill them all and let God sort them out".
Don't tell me what my "morality is."
As IllServe wrote in another modded-up message:
A. He's just a temp
B. He's demonstrated a propensity to take photos of things "behind the scenes" at Microsoft and publish them on the internet.
I don't expect they cared too much about this incident, but it identifies him as someone willing to snipe at his own place of employment on the internet. Being a temp, no reason to negotiate, just fire and forget. Why bother getting promises of good behavior from him that he'll likely reneg on next week when you can push the recycle button.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable decision to me, and this guy had it coming.
IllServe gets it. I get it. The moderators get it. Even the guy who was fired gets it. In his blog, he wrote:
Who's to blame?
In the end -- me. I really don't blame Microsoft for their actions. By my best guess, they saw me as breaking the rules -- whether those rules were a "no cameras" clause, an NDA, or something entirely different -- and decided that rather than give me a second chance and run the risk of me doing something similar in the future, it would be better to just cut me loose before I could do any more damage. {snip} However, I cannot fault them for making the decision that they did, however much I wish that that they had made a different decision.
I goofed. I regret it, but the damage is done.
What is so confusing or morally offensive about it to you?
You don't seem to have even the most rudimentary grasp of business, ethics, or logic. This isn't baseball. He doesn't get three strikes. As a temp, he was a an "at-will" employee. That means that he could terminate his employment at any time. It also meant that Microsoft could terminate his employment, at any time, with or without notice or cause. Microsoft did not, in a moral or legal sense, owe him warnings, employee counseling, politely worded requests to remove the material, or any kind of deal. Microsoft's responsibility is to its shareholders and they acted correctly in this incident.
P.S. I have a lot of respect for the guy who got fired. He has behaved with dignity. He has not tried to blame others or lash out at Microsoft. He has displayed a level of professionalism, maturity, and introspection which is commendable. I have no doubt that he will put this mistake behind him in years to come and be very successful throughout the rest of his life.
I think that you're a decent guy and I wish you the best of luck. When I said "loose cannon", I was referring to a possible perception by the security folks.
I'm not in disagreement with anything that you said. I think that we need more legislation to protect workers.
That said, I don't know the guy, his management, or anything else. All I know is what I read and deduced. If I were in security, I might have done the same thing that Microsoft did. It didn't seem out of line to me.
Yes, it's my idea of morality. You fire people who display bad judgement. There are plenty of people out there with good judgement who you don't have to worry about. What's your idea of morality? Waiting until the actions of someone with poor judgement harm your company and/or people working there?
RTFA. He is a Mac fanboy. He wanted to share his excitement at seeing a truckload of Macs.
I read his Blog. Maybe you should. Unlike you, he did not attribute his firing to Mac fanaticism. He attributed it to he own lapse in judgement.
You don't fire people because of something that someone else might do tomorrow. (Well, obviously you do, but it's not morally justifiable.)
Yes you do and yes it is. If an employee shows questionable judgement, you don't keep him/her around until that judgement costs your company big-time.
They ARE "just Macs".
They are to you because you don't know what they are being used for. Someone else might something that makes them more significant (e.g., "Bill Gates said that they weren't upgrading the Macs in that building, so it must be for the rumored port of Palladium to the G5 Macs.")
And maybe he did it just to embarass Microsoft or cause them to be the butt of jokes. His blog headline, after all, was "Even Microsoft wants G5s."
So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Then what was the real reason? Why did they want all of this bad publicity? This must be a very complicated evil plan.
Facilities? A truck, not a research lab of any description.
That's what he posted. Maybe he went around the campus taking pictures of research labs, product packaging, and so forth all of the time. You really have to ask yourself: Why was some guy who works in the print shop hanging around the loading dock taking photos?
Would there not be security people standing guard if there was anything super secret at that location?
Because there probably isn't anything "super-secret" at all. They don't want food stolen from the fridge either, but there's no guard there. There may be sensitive and proprietary information that he deals with every day.
"Oh no, he just took a picture of our buildings. Don't let the competitors see that and find out that our competetive edge is in our building designs!...
Try to extrapolate. Put yourself in the other position: You're in charge of security at Microsoft. It's brought to your attention that a temp from the print shop has posted a picture on the web showing the delivery of Apple products to Microsoft. Did he do it to embarass Micriosoft? Maybe. Why was a guy working in the print shop hanging around the delivery dock taking pictures with a digital camera? What else is he photographing around the campus? If this was just an example of poor judgement, might he show poor judgement in the future and do something much more harmful? Could be...
I feel for the guy and I'm sorry that he got in trouble, but I just don't see this as some kind of evil deed by Microsoft.
If they guy had previous warnings from MS management and this was his third strike, then yeah I can understand MS letting him go.
It's really simple economics. What does it cost to replace someone and what potential cost is there to keep them? If you are concerned that an easily-replaced temp may pose a security risk, you replace him.
It's not like he posted a picture of him and a coworker playing Frisbee. He posted a picture that shows the delivery of Apple products to Microsoft. Sure, you and I can say it makes sense since they develop apps for Apple, but you could just as well question whether the guy's intent was to embarass Microsoft and where his loyalties are.
I don't want to come down hard on the guy. He seems like a decent guy but he made a mistake -- and he admitted it. We've all done dumb things. Sometimes doing a dumb thing is expensive -- as it apparently was in this case. I wish him the best of luck and hope that, like me, he learns from his youthful indiscretions.
I am debating the points. You spouted all manner of insane BS about this fellow mailing sooper sekret info to MS competitors... with absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he did any such thing.
Liar. What I wrote was:
So what could be seen in the other pictures he took? You know -- the ones that he didn't post on the web site. Did he e-mail those to Microsoft competitors? Did they include new hardware being developed at Microsoft? Were there photos of company-proprietary documentation?
The fact is, that you don't know what (if any) other pictures the guy took. The guy presented an unreasonable security risk for the value he brought to the company. That's all.
Sucks to be caught lying, doesn't it?
Frankly, you're the fucking idiot,
Yeah, that's why I've got three +5 posts in this thread right now, fucktard.
I'm just an obnoxious asshole
Don't underestimate yourself. You're also illiterate, stupid, illogical, and immature.
They do evil things, like firing some poor shlub who thought it would be of interest to show the G5s that MS had bought, all the while taking care not to reveal any other details.
Nope. That wasn't evil. It was perfectly reasonable. If Microsoft doesn't want people to know that they bought G5s, then that's their business. If they don't want photos of their building and purchases on the web, it's their choice. If they don't think that some guy from the print shop should be hanging out on the loading dock taking pictures of incoming equipment, they have every right to fire said person. You need to grow up.
Hey, you missed a spot on Ballmer's ass over there.
Please! You've got your head so far up Steve Jobs' ass that you need a snorkel to breathe.
Amazing! You still clearly don't grasp that it is could be beneficial to designing traffic systems to use IR or some other similar method to track vehicles approaching a light.
Don't tell me what I did and did not "grasp." You couldn't even rationally debate the points that I made in my previous post.
Instead of recognizing your impulsive and insulting post, you instead try to defend your poorly reasoned argument by arguing that no one mentioned designing the system to to accomadate emergency vehicles. Since your arguments don't involve a security system preventing one legged chimps with IR transmitters strapped to their backs from interfering with the system, may I also assume you are opposed to a system that would not allow for one legged chimp IR monkeys? The point you picked on did not say anything about interfering with existing traffic, but merely commented on an improved system that could use IR transmitters to track vehicles and improve traffic conditions.
Jesus Christ, what was that idiotic rambling about "one legged chimp IR monkeys"? The comment I cited, in its entirety was:
Maybe if everyone had these, it would lead to smarter intersections.
Since "these" was referring to MIRT devices currently reserved for emergency vehicles, my comments were cogent and well-reasoned. If everyone had them, then emergency vehicles would be unable to get priority green lights. It was a stupid suggestion that would lead to interference with emergency vehicles. Now debate like a man or slink away. Either one works for me.
did you say somethine? all i heard was wahh wahhh wahh wahh waaaa hhhwaa awhhhwwaaaaa
Try taking your head out of your ass. Then you could hear better.
but NO one here is talking espionage
I am. When some employee is wandering around the building taking shots with digital cameras, you'd have to be an idiot to not be concerned about why.
007tupid, it was an out door shot,
It was taken indoors, you frigging moron. If the truck was backed up to the loading dock, you couldn't see into it unless you were inside of the building, could you?
Being concerned about security AFTER pictures are posted to the internet is ludicrous.
Did it ever occur to you that the concern might be about what he would do in the future? This particular picture might not be a big concern but they don't know what other pictures he has taken and what pictures he might take in the future? Could it be that they were concerned that some guy from the print shop was hanging around the loading dock taking pictures of incoming shipments? If I were in security, I'd be suspicious of that.
--If he was dealing in industrial espionage, do you really think he would BLOG IT?!
I'll type slowly for you:
Bob Cunningham is the spy. He saw this guy's web page and seeing the Macs being unloaded confirmed what he had suspected based on things that he had seen at Microsoft, and what his girlfriend Marla, who also works at Microsoft, told him. He called his handler at Apple who paid him handsomely for his work.
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so Sun will become Dell or HP???
I seriously doubt it.
1. Neither Dell nor HP has a high-end server operating system equivalent to Solaris.
2. Sun's hardware has been of a higher caliber and reliability. I have no reason to assume that they would put any less effort into their Opteron-based products.
3. Sun has never chased the consumer desktop market. You won't find a Sun for sale at Best Buy. Nor will you find pictures on Sun's web site of smiling, multi-ethnic families clustered around Sun machines on which the children are doing homework.
4. Sun has the technical know-how that neither HP nor Dell has. Sun continues to innovate while HP and Dell are content to sell cookie-cutter PCs. There's nothing wrong with the latter as a business plan, but it's a far cry from Sun's technical leadership role in the industry.
I'll be happy if Sun backs away from their SPARC CPU development. They don't sell enough hardware to cover the R&D costs necessary to make SPARC CPUs competitive against Intel, AMD, or even IBM offerings.
You may have paid for your computer, but if it's running a service which is intended to accept messages and display them as Windows dialogs, then whose problem is it really? If you don't want messages, why do you have a device that behaves this way?
Two answers:
1. Because you are a typical consumer and don't know how to disable the service.
or
2. Because you want your network admin to be able to send you dialog-based messages saying things like "remote dial-up session terminating in five minutes for maintenance."
I have a telephone which accepts calls, but that doesn't mean that every sleazy marketer has a legal right to call me at 3:00AM to peddle his wares. Nor does it mean that one can call every ten minutes telling me that, if I don't like it, that I have to pay him for a device which screens out such calls.
My point is, no on is stealing anything.
So no one is stealing anything when they spam you? If you don't want to receive spam, why do you have a public service running which accepts spam and puts it in your inbox?
That's funny.
Idiot.
I pay for cable, yet it is filled with ads.
You pay nothing to NBC, CBS, HBO, MTV, etc. You pay your cable company to deliver channels to your house. What next? Are you going to complain that you paid for your car so you shouldn't hear ads on its radio or see billboards through its windshield?
You mean cable is free! And here we've all been paying for it like suckers.
You're paying for the delivery of network channels. It's analogous to saying that there shouldn't be ads on broadcast television because you paid someone to install your antenna.
What if the billboard or bench is on public land? As a citizen and a taxpayer, are you not already a part owner of that land?
Yes, you are. And if you don't want your park benches, sides of public buses, etc. rented out to advertisers, then you and the other owners can ask your representative to stop the practice. But someone is going to have to make up the revenue loss, so don't complain when your property taxes go up.
First we find out that Bob Dole uses Viagra. Now we learn that Republican party both use Microsoft Windows and IIS. So we have one Republican who has trouble getting it up and the rest have trouble keeping it up.
Shame on us! We are intruded upon every day and no one complains. Hour by hour, our eyes and ears are bombarded with advertisements, but we accept it all as a fact of life.
The key difference here is that you paid for your PC and no advertiser, whether a spammer or a pop-up advertiser, has a right to steal your bandwidth or storage.
Don't like ads while listening to the radio? Then pay for satellite radio and listen to ad-free stations. Don't like ads during movies you view on TV? Then watch the movies on pay-per-view. But it's idiotic to watch a television station to which you send no money and then get mad that they show ads. Of course they show ads! It's how they finance the operation of their television station.
If you don't like a billboard, then buy the property on which it is located and tear down the billboard. But you are hard-pressed to claim that the billboard interfered with your work or cost you money.
The only side-side usability study I've heard of found that it took only a couple of minutes longer (something like 45 - 48 minutes)to complete a set of tasks with a non-technical bunch. This was XP and RH 9, if I recall.
The issue isn't just using a few pre-installed office apps. It's the hair-pulling, cursing, painful, multi-hour process of discovering that your Archos MP3 player will only be recognized after you "rmmod ide-scsi" -- which you have to do before plugging the player into the USB port, because, if you don't, you'll have to reboot. That's why Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
And why can't I delete c:\program files\MSN Gaming Zone
Because if you're joe-average-user, you'll delete it and then call tech support because your shortcut to it doesn't work anymore and you don't know why the shortcut is even there because you deleted the directory. That's why there are are Control Panel apps to remove programs and Windows components.
Getting outlook express off of your SERVER is extremely difficult.
So why should I install Linux for my desktop OS only to discover that it installed SERVER software like Apache, sendmail, etc.? You think that the average user has any better luck purging his Linux desktop install of all of the unwanted server apps? How about getting rid of all of the idiotic install-by-default apps that the average Linux distro installs? Yeah, I really need Learn-Kanji flash cards installed by default.
Purdue, the IT department sets up everyone's computer, be they secretary, grad student, or tech. They control what software (within reason) goes onto a system, what patches get applied, and when.
So what? It doesn't show that Linux requires less support. All you've done is tell us who supports it at Purdue. You haven't shown us that the IT department handles fewer trouble tickets as a result of Linux. You haven't shown that problems occur less often or that the GUI is as easy for the average person to understand.
Face it: Windows is bloody expensive. So is Office. If corporations could realize a savings by going to Linux, they would, and in droves, not just a few here and there. The fact is that Linux costs more in support than they save in initial cost.
The only real advantage of Windows is that in runs many games.
You're kidding, right? Windows is far easier to support and administer. Quick: On ALL versions of Linux since 1995, how do you adjust the screen resolution, background wallpaper, and color depth? It's just about the same for every version of Windows for the last 8 years. With Windows, the user can plug in a digital camera and it just works. They can get a copy of Office just like they use at work. Tech support people don't have to ask Windows XP users which Windows manager they are using. The command prompt is always the same and tech support people don't have to wonder if it's bash, ksh, etc. They can go to the store and get a copy of a label making program or a Spanish language trainer. If (God forbid) they want to use AOL, they just insert the disc. They can go buy a copy of PowerDVD if they want to watch DVDs.
I think it is much more of an advantage for home users that Linux comes bundled with many useful applications.
All that means for most users is complete and utter confusion. "What's babygimp? What is dia and dia Gnome? Which one should I use? Why is there a 'Kanji drill and dictionary program' on my computer?..." It also comes with many applications that are practically useless to most users. Take a look at what is in Debian Stable. I'm sick of OSs that include every package under the sun. I don't want a 6 CD distribution. I want one disk that installs the OS and only the most basic utilities. I don't need 5 different web browsers, 6 text editors, 4 word processors, or 3 different ways to display a clock on my screen.
Also: Would his 90-year old father really be able to install Windows painlessly?
Painlessly? Probably not. Successfully? Probably. And what if he bought a PC with both Linux and Windows installed? Which would be easier for him? Windows. No contest. He wouldn't be expected to compile apps he wanted to run. A single EXE file would handle installations of new software. He would not have to deal with gzipped tar files. He could update the OS by just clicking "Windows Update."
Linux is great. I use it. It's really cool. But I still gripe about stupidity. Each distribution installs different packages -- often in non-standard directories. The way that the user configures the OS and hardware in one distro is totally different than how he does it in another one. Some distros install KDE. Some install Gnome. It's impossible for support organizations to write scripts (e.g. "Click Start and then move the arrow up to Documents. A list of documents you've recently worked on will pop up on the right hand side..."
I am not an ubergeek and I use it on my Desktop. Hey, even my mom uses it on her desktop - and she is no geek whatsoever.
Well, if you're going by solid statistics like that, who can argue with you? If you've already done an exhaustive study where you show that it works on two systems for two users, well, that's flawless research.
Makes me wonder why Red Hat is saying this now, right after they are withdrawing their home user distribution?
Maybe you should, instead, ask why they are withdrawing their home user distribution. This may come as a shock to you, but an executive at RedHat probably knows a lot more about whether Linux is ready for the desktop than you and your mom do. In the article, he says that "We know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or puts a lot of pressure on your support systems", then that's what will happen. I know people who have attempted to support commercial end-user desktop apps under Linux. The user support was a nightmare.
This is a business decision for RedHat. They don't have some emotional tie to it. They don't care about Linux Torvald's "vision" or Richard Stallman's philosophy. If they were making money putting Linux on desktops, they would keep selling a desktop OS. If they aren't making money, then they stop. The Linux community can either learn from RedHat's decisions and statements and make the appropriate changes to Linux or they bury their heads in the sand. It's up to them.
Although it's easy to make the gonad jokes, the concept of monads have a long history in metaphysics dating back to the greeks.
Okay, I ask you, what's more fun: Making gonad jokes or discussing metaphysics and philosophy?
I thought 'NONADS' would be more descriptive.
People using a "Unix" derivative OS probably should not yuck it up about naming something "NONADS".
Let's say you hire a maid or something and one day you read her blog and you see a picture of a box from Victoria's secret with a caption like "looks like mr. fmaxwell will be having fun with his wife tonight!" or something? How would you feel?
;-)
Aroused -- though relieved that she didn't figure out the lacy underthings were for me.
All kidding aside, good analogy. Thanks.
Don't tell me what my "morality is."
As IllServe wrote in another modded-up message: IllServe gets it. I get it. The moderators get it. Even the guy who was fired gets it. In his blog, he wrote:What is so confusing or morally offensive about it to you?
You don't seem to have even the most rudimentary grasp of business, ethics, or logic. This isn't baseball. He doesn't get three strikes. As a temp, he was a an "at-will" employee. That means that he could terminate his employment at any time. It also meant that Microsoft could terminate his employment, at any time, with or without notice or cause. Microsoft did not, in a moral or legal sense, owe him warnings, employee counseling, politely worded requests to remove the material, or any kind of deal. Microsoft's responsibility is to its shareholders and they acted correctly in this incident.
P.S. I have a lot of respect for the guy who got fired. He has behaved with dignity. He has not tried to blame others or lash out at Microsoft. He has displayed a level of professionalism, maturity, and introspection which is commendable. I have no doubt that he will put this mistake behind him in years to come and be very successful throughout the rest of his life.
I think that you're a decent guy and I wish you the best of luck. When I said "loose cannon", I was referring to a possible perception by the security folks.
I'm not in disagreement with anything that you said. I think that we need more legislation to protect workers.
That said, I don't know the guy, his management, or anything else. All I know is what I read and deduced. If I were in security, I might have done the same thing that Microsoft did. It didn't seem out of line to me.
That's your idea of morality?
Yes, it's my idea of morality. You fire people who display bad judgement. There are plenty of people out there with good judgement who you don't have to worry about. What's your idea of morality? Waiting until the actions of someone with poor judgement harm your company and/or people working there?
RTFA. He is a Mac fanboy. He wanted to share his excitement at seeing a truckload of Macs.
I read his Blog. Maybe you should. Unlike you, he did not attribute his firing to Mac fanaticism. He attributed it to he own lapse in judgement.
You don't fire people because of something that someone else might do tomorrow. (Well, obviously you do, but it's not morally justifiable.)
Yes you do and yes it is. If an employee shows questionable judgement, you don't keep him/her around until that judgement costs your company big-time.
They ARE "just Macs".
They are to you because you don't know what they are being used for. Someone else might something that makes them more significant (e.g., "Bill Gates said that they weren't upgrading the Macs in that building, so it must be for the rumored port of Palladium to the G5 Macs.")
And maybe he did it just to embarass Microsoft or cause them to be the butt of jokes. His blog headline, after all, was "Even Microsoft wants G5s."
So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Then what was the real reason? Why did they want all of this bad publicity? This must be a very complicated evil plan.
Facilities? A truck, not a research lab of any description.
That's what he posted. Maybe he went around the campus taking pictures of research labs, product packaging, and so forth all of the time. You really have to ask yourself: Why was some guy who works in the print shop hanging around the loading dock taking photos?
Would there not be security people standing guard if there was anything super secret at that location?
Because there probably isn't anything "super-secret" at all. They don't want food stolen from the fridge either, but there's no guard there. There may be sensitive and proprietary information that he deals with every day.
"Oh no, he just took a picture of our buildings. Don't let the competitors see that and find out that our competetive edge is in our building designs!...
Try to extrapolate. Put yourself in the other position: You're in charge of security at Microsoft. It's brought to your attention that a temp from the print shop has posted a picture on the web showing the delivery of Apple products to Microsoft. Did he do it to embarass Micriosoft? Maybe. Why was a guy working in the print shop hanging around the delivery dock taking pictures with a digital camera? What else is he photographing around the campus? If this was just an example of poor judgement, might he show poor judgement in the future and do something much more harmful? Could be...
I feel for the guy and I'm sorry that he got in trouble, but I just don't see this as some kind of evil deed by Microsoft.
If they guy had previous warnings from MS management and this was his third strike, then yeah I can understand MS letting him go.
It's really simple economics. What does it cost to replace someone and what potential cost is there to keep them? If you are concerned that an easily-replaced temp may pose a security risk, you replace him.
It's not like he posted a picture of him and a coworker playing Frisbee. He posted a picture that shows the delivery of Apple products to Microsoft. Sure, you and I can say it makes sense since they develop apps for Apple, but you could just as well question whether the guy's intent was to embarass Microsoft and where his loyalties are.
I don't want to come down hard on the guy. He seems like a decent guy but he made a mistake -- and he admitted it. We've all done dumb things. Sometimes doing a dumb thing is expensive -- as it apparently was in this case. I wish him the best of luck and hope that, like me, he learns from his youthful indiscretions.
Liar. What I wrote was:
Sucks to be caught lying, doesn't it?
Frankly, you're the fucking idiot,
Yeah, that's why I've got three +5 posts in this thread right now, fucktard.
I'm just an obnoxious asshole
Don't underestimate yourself. You're also illiterate, stupid, illogical, and immature.
They do evil things, like firing some poor shlub who thought it would be of interest to show the G5s that MS had bought, all the while taking care not to reveal any other details.
Nope. That wasn't evil. It was perfectly reasonable. If Microsoft doesn't want people to know that they bought G5s, then that's their business. If they don't want photos of their building and purchases on the web, it's their choice. If they don't think that some guy from the print shop should be hanging out on the loading dock taking pictures of incoming equipment, they have every right to fire said person. You need to grow up.
Hey, you missed a spot on Ballmer's ass over there.
Please! You've got your head so far up Steve Jobs' ass that you need a snorkel to breathe.
Don't tell me what I did and did not "grasp." You couldn't even rationally debate the points that I made in my previous post.
Instead of recognizing your impulsive and insulting post, you instead try to defend your poorly reasoned argument by arguing that no one mentioned designing the system to to accomadate emergency vehicles.
Since your arguments don't involve a security system preventing one legged chimps with IR transmitters strapped to their backs from interfering with the system, may I also assume you are opposed to a system that would not allow for one legged chimp IR monkeys? The point you picked on did not say anything about interfering with existing traffic, but merely commented on an improved system that could use IR transmitters to track vehicles and improve traffic conditions.
Jesus Christ, what was that idiotic rambling about "one legged chimp IR monkeys"? The comment I cited, in its entirety was: Since "these" was referring to MIRT devices currently reserved for emergency vehicles, my comments were cogent and well-reasoned. If everyone had them, then emergency vehicles would be unable to get priority green lights. It was a stupid suggestion that would lead to interference with emergency vehicles. Now debate like a man or slink away. Either one works for me.
did you say somethine? all i heard was wahh wahhh wahh wahh waaaa hhhwaa awhhhwwaaaaa
Try taking your head out of your ass. Then you could hear better.
but NO one here is talking espionage
I am. When some employee is wandering around the building taking shots with digital cameras, you'd have to be an idiot to not be concerned about why.
007tupid, it was an out door shot,
It was taken indoors, you frigging moron. If the truck was backed up to the loading dock, you couldn't see into it unless you were inside of the building, could you?
Being concerned about security AFTER pictures are posted to the internet is ludicrous.
Did it ever occur to you that the concern might be about what he would do in the future? This particular picture might not be a big concern but they don't know what other pictures he has taken and what pictures he might take in the future? Could it be that they were concerned that some guy from the print shop was hanging around the loading dock taking pictures of incoming shipments? If I were in security, I'd be suspicious of that.
--If he was dealing in industrial espionage, do you really think he would BLOG IT?!
I'll type slowly for you:
Bob Cunningham is the spy. He saw this guy's web page and seeing the Macs being unloaded confirmed what he had suspected based on things that he had seen at Microsoft, and what his girlfriend Marla, who also works at Microsoft, told him. He called his handler at Apple who paid him handsomely for his work.