Re:Isn't there something wrong with the riddle?
on
Coder on the Cross
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· Score: 1
It was a given in the problem that all the sinners left on the third day. Not that it stops the problem being badly worded, but your "counterexample" that nobody leaves on the third day is crap.
It also doesn't seem to work out correclty if the sinner's sin is not believing in a divine entity or ignoring the commands of that entity.
There is a healthy attatchment - but only when it serves your personal interest directly. The hope for 'future recognition' is a useless endeavor.
Agreed. While recognition is nice, a week after you've gotten it you've got nothing to show for it. Time off, more money, better opportunity, additional education...those are the ways to really show that someone is doing a good job.
Listen, you may abhor unions but it's a necessary evil and the alternative is much, much worse: unchecked capitalism. History shows us most of the inhumane ills: women and children working 70 and 80 hour weeks and worse.
There are child labor laws in the US that prevent the exploitation of children in the manner that you have mentioned. For the most part, children aren't even allowed to work and are therefore unable to be "protected" by unions to begin with. Those that can work are still limited by state and federal laws as to the hours that they can work until they reach the age of majority (legally considered an adult).
As far as women working 70-80 hour weeks, I see that all the time today. I see men working the same kinds of hours. It's called being a salaried employee in the busy company.
Only the threat of socialism (which incidentally didn't arise out of a vacuum, but was a reaction to the worst excesses of capitalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s) and repeated striking and unionization among the people have the autocrats of the United States decide to give SOME assurances to the workers: 8 hour days, safety regulations, etc.
Once again, there are laws that protect workers from unsafe work environments. Ever hear of OSHA?
The appalling working conditions that spawned the birth of unions just don't happen today. They didn't exist because employers are evil slave laborers, they existed because of poor economic conditions and the fact that we were only beginning to enter the industrial age. There were no clearly defined limits. The government and laws hadn't caught up with technology enough to be able to protect the workers. Now they have.
Unions are a bad thing. They enforce mediocrity while robbing the people who they are supposed to protect. They lobby for legislation to increase their powers and assure their future, but they don't do anything to actually help people anymore. And yes, I used to work a union job.
Consider the following docket from the trial which indicates a fairly serious conspiracy to take Rambus' designs and modify them only enough to avoid paying patents.
Bah! I took you up on that offer and read through that docket. First off, it's from a proceeding that took place almost a month and a half ago, so it certainly qualifies as old news. Secondly, it certainly does not in any way indicate a conspiracy of any sort to take Rambus's designs. They quite plainly state that they would design a "public domain" version of the memory that Rambus was trying to sell them. They wanted to take some of the elements of the Rambus design that were not patented or patentable (in the public domain or obvious) and use them in a new design that specifically excluded patented info. They wanted to design a similar memory interface that wouldn't be an infringement. It hardly qualifies as stealing and there certainly is nothing wrong with it.
What Rambus alleges in this document is way up the scale from being even remotely shady. After all, that's the purpose of patent searches. Before you make a new product, you look at everyone else's patented designs and try to make sure that your product does not infringe those patents.
Intel still has a love-hate relationship with Rambus and is still touting RDRAM as the next gen ram technology despite its cost and potential technical flaws. It's pretty hard to boycott intel.
Don't be silly...it's been over 10 years since I last bought an Intel product. You can get AMD or VIA CPU's; mainboard chipsets by VIA, SiS, or ALi; graphics chipsets from Nvidia, Matrox, ATI, ST Micro, Trident, S3, etc; NICs from 3COM, NetGear, LinkSys, etc; network switches from 3Com, Cisco, and several others; managed hosting from a slew of ASPs...ad nauseum. You can't name one Intel product that the average or exceptional tech user would need that doesn't have a non-Intel alternative. Heck...a couple years back my company was buying new Compaq Deskpro 2000 business PC's, and they came with Matrox display adapters, TI NICs and VIA chipsets. The only thing in them that actually was Intel was the CPU. So even in the big business world their grasp isn't as strong as they'd like you to believe.
Also, I believe that SDRAM chip makers must pay royalties to Rambus. So, you'd have to boycott all SDRAM.
You believe incorrectly. None of the SDRAM chip makers must pay royalties to Rambus except those that signed licensing deals with them for SDRAM rather than fight the Rambus claims in court. That's what this whole lawsuit is about to begin with. (duh!) Right now it appears that the only two who aren't paying royalties to Rambus are Infineon and Micron. So just buy your SDRAM or DDR from Crucial Technology and you're safe (they are the direct-sales division of Micron).
1. Margins on hardware are extremely thin. So thin, in fact, that a single 1-hour tech support call to a vendor can often wipe out all of the profit in a given sale. Add up the cost of having to have a knowledgable person on the other end of the phone for that hour, the cost of the phone for that hour, that desk and cubicle, the software that tracks trouble tickets, etc. It's really quite expensive to offer tech support.
2. In order to save money, less scrupulous vendors will hire less knowledgable (and therefore cheaper) support staff. Or they'll hire fewer of them, causing long wait times in the queues.
3. Because of item number 2, knowledgable and skilled support workers are more scarce. Those who are good get promoted out of it or they are only using it to get some experience in the industry and quickly move on to better jobs. This causes even more headaches.
4. Customers (consumers) are always looking for something for nothing, or the best deal they can possibly get. So they tend to favor vendors with the lowest prices over vendors with equivalent products but higher prices (and usually better support). Then they complain because they don't feel that they're getting proper support. But they still continue to feed situations 1, 2, and 3.
5. Consumers are stupid. Period. 95% of them can't tell you what they've done or what's wrong or what's not working. All they can say is, "It doesn't work." Even in a business environment I get people who tell me, "I plugged that one cable into the thing on the side of the computer where it looks like it fits but it won't sync." OK...could you possibly be any more vague? Do you really expect that I can help you when that's all that you give me to go on? Why would you possibly consider calling for support without a serial number or a product model number? How can someone be expected to diagnose a problem with a unit when they don't even know what the unit is?
Consumers buy complex systems and components without even stopping to think if there might be compatibility issues, let alone support for those issues. Yet the same people wouldn't think of buying a car without doing some research on the car or dealer first. And we all know that a computer is many times more complicated than a car, don't we?
People expect the same level of customer service when buying a PC as they do when buying a couch. But even though they may be the same price, the couch offers several times the profits of a PC for a MUCH simpler product. That makes support pretty darn simple to provide.
I'm not normally a Katz-basher, but geez...think about it for a minute. If you want support, pay a little more and go with a vendor that has a reputation for good support. Don't buy from Bubba's House of Cheap-o and skip the support contract just because it makes it as costly as buying from Sterling Reputation Inc.
Businesses have figured this out long ago. That's why we buy PC's from Compaq and Dell. We know that we can call in a problem and be on the phone with an agent within 5 minutes and have the problem fixed or a replacement on the way. Businesses know that you can't get something for nothing, and they know that support is a major something. Once consumers get their head out of their asses, they'll realize the same thing.
And yes, it is their fault for supporting vendors and markets that don't support them when there are reasonably priced alternatives that would support them.
I'd have OSHA in there a second time for the retaliation, for I do not believe that is legal either.
It's not generally. I got fired once for filing a claim with the US Department of Labor against my employer (company A) regarding overtime pay. I won the claim but got canned. I called the USDoL back and told them that I got fired in retaliation and they told me that since I worked in an "at-will" employment state I was basically screwed. They could file suit to get my job back and make my employer re-hire me, but then they'd just turn around and fabricate something ridiculous to fire me over anyways.
I was very lucky with that employer (company A) because my next employer (company B) after that was a competitor and I had no NDA or non-compete. So we basically stole most of his customers (without him even knowing that I worked there) and he finally decided to close up shop get out of the business altogether. I was greatly pleased the day that he came to company B and tried to sell his customer list. I actually got to be the one to tell him "no."
Observation: You should not be an hourly employee Advice: You need a lawyer, not a bunch of/.ers
Why shouldn't he be an hourly employee? I've been hourly on-call before and salaried on-call, and I ALWAYS got paid extra for hourly on-call positions (whereas I never got paid for on-call on salaried jobs). In mny opinion, if you have to be on-call, hourly pay is the only way to go.
I also find it rather odd that this same question came up a couple months ago but got totally different responses. At that time, it was 600 posts about how each person was compensated for on-call time at their specific job. This time around it's a couple hundred people screaming "get a lawyer or quit!"
I think that it largely depends on what you are doing. I used to work for a company where I was guaranteed to get 10-15 calls over the course of a week of on-call time. I was paid an additional amount that (at the time) equalled out to roughly 50% of my weekly rate (for 40 hours). These calls could come anytime, 24x7 though usually half of them were on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
In my current position I am the only Admin at my site, so I carry a 24x7 nationwide pager. I don't get a flat-rate for on-call because I'm actually a contractor. I do however get to bill a minimum of 1 additional hour every time I get paged (which is pretty rare), rounded up to the nearest whole hour. Since I usually work a minimum of 40 hours per week, any on-call hours come out as overtime hours.
So if I dial in and it takes me 70 minutes to fix the problem I get to bill 2 hours. If I actually have to go into the office, the clock starts when the pager goes off and doesn't stop until I'm back home (or wherever I was). Since I live a 45-minute drive from my office, this pretty much guarantees 3 hours or more of OT any time that I have to go in.
Just yesterday my pager went off at 5:30 while I was on the way home. It was someone with a simple question, but I got to bill an hour of OT for a 2 minute phonecall.
If I'm going on vacation I just tell the folks at the office and they'll have someone from another site cover for me (fortunately we have another office in the same city).
I think that this works out pretty well for me...I rarely get bothered but when I do it's worth it. I don't feel particularly restricted in what I can do on the evenings or weekends. Most days, I don't even think of it as being on call.
Perhaps, but not ignorant editoral comments on every single Microsoft post. Don't you see anything wrong with that?
Not really. It's a free (as in speech) country...that means that we're free to make jackasses of ourselves by stating our views on pretty much anything that we care to. If one is lucky enough to have a bully pulpit...well...that's just the way it goes.
I gues it's in the hands of the PC manufacturers to do the right thing...
Nah...if it were in the hands of the PC manufacturers then this won't happen for good business reasons. It actually is in the hands of the 16-year old techie kids who are building PC's for their local OEM screwdriver shop who just got a build order for 500 naked PCs. You know, the ones who MS is trying to bribe into betraying business confidence.
Can I stick a new processor on my mother board? Can I add a processor to a SMP machine that was running with only one? What happend if the original processor dies? Can I add/subtract RAM? Change the keyboard? Get a new monitor? Move my cpu to a new motherboard? Add a hardrive? Subtract a hard drive?
Excellent questions. I have no answer for this. But Microsoft does, only they're not telling.
Anyone remember reading about the Windows XP product activation scheme? XP builds a unique ID number or some sort of checksum from the hardware on your system when you install it. You pass that ID number to MS to activate your OS. If you don't activate the OS, the OS doesn't work. If your hardware deviates substantially from its initial configuration, the ID will have changed and subsequent activation of your OS will not be possible without getting a new activation key from MS (at whatever they decide to charge for them).
Microsoft has not yet been forthcoming about just how much change in hardware can be tolerated before Windows XP decides that you've got a different machine. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the threshold change to be more/less restrictive as MS gets closer/farther from hitting its revenue targets for the quarter...just a simple Windows Update away...
I know this is a linux site and is going to have a "prolinux" spin, but that should be expressed in the stories they choose to post, and not in editorial comments in each and every single story - especially when the editorial comments misinterpret or are just plain ignorant. It's irresponsible.
That's odd...I thought that editorial comments and editorials in general were the appropriate place to editorialize. Is that no longer the case?
Now you remember this letter your got from M$FT a while ago. You read it over, and you say to your self. "Self: IANAL. Nonetheless, this looks a great deal like what M$FT is talking about. And while he didn't SAY he had a license, he didn't say he didn't either. What the hell, it's only a phonecall/email"
Agreed. Just because they only say that they're looking for people who claim to have site licenses doesn't mean that they aren't interested in everyone else. If you turn someone in for buying 500 naked PC's (even if they said that they intend to install Linux on them), MS is still going to take notice and the purchaser will more than likely still get a letter from the BSA. It's not like they're going to say, "Oh, he didn't mention site licenses, so he must be legitimate" and throw away the tip. These are the same people who are encouraging disgruntled employees or former employees to give anonymous tips on their employers/former employers. Only here they're bribing them to do it!
In the original article about the rat out your clients game, there is a link to an article about licensing. In there you will find:
If you got your computer with an OEM license, but you "ghost" the hard disk as most larger companies do to achieve consistency, you have to buy a second Windows license for that computer. Installing this second license voids your OEM license so the OEM no longer provides support. You now have to get that from Microsoft at $350 per incident.
So in short, yes, you are supposed to install all apps individually onto a clean OEM Windows install.
This was the case up until about 6 or 7 months ago. Due to the outcry of the volume license purchasers, if you have an Open or Select agreement you are no longer required to buy an additional license in order to re-image an OEM installation with Select or Open media. I have a series of letters somewhere from our MS sales rep because we went back and forth on this very issue for several weeks.
It states in the letter that they are looking for volume purchases where it is stated by the purchaser that the reason an OS is not needed is because of *existing* MS volume licences. It makes no mention of reporting purchases where the stated intent is to install alternate operating systems.
Of course not, and for two very good reasons:
1. According to Microsoft (when dealing with OEMs anyway), there is no such thing as an alternative OS. It's Windows or nothing. If you go back and do some reading on the letters that MS started sending out regarding "naked PCs" a few months ago, you will see this mentality shining through. In Microsoft's mind, a naked PC will end up with a pirated version of Windows on it.
and
2. If they didn't mention the "erroneous" claims of MS volume licenses, then they'd have absolutely no business asking for this info. Not that they really have any right to ask for it in the first place, but throwing in this line about volume licenses does at least add the veneer of legitimacy to it.
The simple fact is, until recently you had to buy an additional license if you had a volume license agreement and wanted to reimage a PC that came with an OEM installation. That's right, you pay for a new machine with an OEM Windows install on it, then you are required to buy an additional license in order to reimage it with your corporate standard. In this context, the MS letter makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately, MS modified it's volume licensing (Select and Open) agreements to allow you to re-image an OEM installation without having to buy a second license for that PC. The reason for this was because volume licensees (large corporations) started screaming about not only the existence of a Windows tax, but having to pay the Windows tax twice. Taken in this context, it would seem that you should be able to purchase additional licenses via Select or Open agreements and buy naked PC's and potentially save some money on your OEM deal.
Or I could be upgrading 1000 486 WinNT 4 boxes to..... 1000 AMD 1.5GHz, more memory than a desktop will ever need Win NT 4 boxes... Some compainys DONT NEED WinXP ot 2K or Me, 9x &/or NT are fine, and some IT mangers know this!
The problem with that is that MS licenses are generally not transferable from one PC to another, regardless of whether you have OEM or retail licenses. The license is tied to the specific machine.
What would be more natural for gesture based control than touching the screen and making the gesture?
Think of all the greasy finger smudges you'd have on your screen...yuck. Beyond that, I like having my monitor a certain distance in front of me and elevated about 4 inches off of the table. It would be a pain in the butt to have to stretch out and gesture that far away.
Apart from the fact that three redundant computers going down at once just should NOT happen
From what I've read elsewhere around the web, it sounds like the server crashed. The three redundant systems were actually the clients. If the server goes down, it doesn't matter how many redundant clients there are.
Which of course begs the question, why didn't they have a redundant server or cluster or something?
Wasn't there a big stink about how they were using open source (esp. Linux) on board?
Dunno. But The Register had a story awhile back that had pictures of the astronauts. They were using old IBM Thinkpads running DOS. Or at least that's what it looked like.
Re:You know someone should disagree around here (Score:2)
by Zachary Kessin on Tuesday April 24, @06:46AM EDT (#227)
(User #1372 Info)
Well I would say ethics is an absolute, but it does have grey areas. Would working in the Defense industry be ethical? I don't know it rather depends on for whom. I will not say that war is always unethical. In fact I will say quite the oposite, there are times when it would be unethical not to fight. When some thug Somewhere starts killing people en mass (Think Nazi Germany, Kosavo Bosnia etc) It shows a complete lack of ethics to sit on your hands and do nothing. As for biotech companies, you know many of them are working on drugs that can cure diseses or fight hunger on a massive level (The Golden rice).
As for ethics being absolute yes they are. While I make it a point to not push my ethical views on others I do beliive there are some absolutes. If every positon about ethics is equaly valid then the Marxist position that "We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an etenal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law..." Which Karl Marx wrote in his book "Capital". Lenin said similar things. If you accept that moraltiy can be defined as such than the Stalin's Gulag and Pol Pot's killing fields (Both of which in someone's mind advanced the "Class Struggle") were a perfectly acceptable thing.
OK...so now you're saying that if I do not believe that ethics are an absolute then I am a Communist and also endorse mass murder. Talk about demonizing the opposition...geez. Marxism as Marx promoted it isn't the way that it has been implemented anywhere in the world. Period. And regardless of your feelings on his political beliefs, he had some very interesting observations about society.
It's funny that the conservative types agree with you though. They also believe that morals and ethics are an absolute. They believe this because they believe that morals and ethics come from a god-figure. But for those of us who do not believe in the Judeo-Christian religious figure, where do our morals and ethics come from? I certainly have morals and ethics. They came from somewhere. And they are absolutely not the same as those espoused by the Judeo-Christian "moralist" hatemongers in modern American society. So how did my morals and ethics come into being? How can it be possible that I can have a moral and ethical belief system that is totally without religious belief (and in fact contrary to most of it), yet it be life-affirming, loving, and happiness orientated?
Morals and ethics are not an absolute. Anyone who believes that they are absolute is seriously deluded.
And yet Denmark has a thriving sex industry, porn is everywhere, usually displayed in front of the counter at news agencies. It is just as big there as anywhere else.
So I don't agree that represion of sex in the US has increased the desire for porn.
OMIGOD!!! That can only mean one thing: people actually LIKE porn! It must be genetic or something...
Sooner or later, the current economic slowdown will turn around and tech workers will have lots of options in more traditional fields again. My opinion is that those who go to work in the porn industry now, will find their resumes are significantly tainted should they ever decide they want to go back to a more mainstream employer.
I might tend to agree with you that some employers would look negatively on resumes that listed Hustler.com or TeenageHardcore.com on them. But most resumes won't list the names of the sites that they work for. They'll say things like DHD Media, Vivid Entertainment Group, or LFP Inc (the company that own Hustler.com), and then they'll list the job duties and skills required of them in that postion (designed web-based front end for large databases in an e-commerce application, etc...).
I know that you wanted to completely divorce your opinion of porn from your statement, but it shows through (just like mine does). We always tend to believe that we are normal and that most people (the right-thinking ones, anyway) think the same way that we do on "moral" issues. That may or may not be the case. I think that you'd find that most people don't necessarily adhere to the same moral standards that they espouse.
Besides, I've worked with managers who would have said, "You used to work in porn? Cool..."
I wonder why. A lot of places seem to have over exposed (as in too much light) photos because cameras left in matrix meter mode on that much untanned flesh tends to meter wrong. Anyone who has photographed nudes in an art class could do better.
That's because amatuer porn is pretty popular right now. Who wants to see yet another airbrushed nude of Pamela Anderson when we can see Polaroids of that girl we ran into at the bar last nite?
but seriously, even stretching beyond the technology industry, does higher unemployment lead to more people in need of immediate gratification?
Not necessarily more, but there is a certain maintenance level. It's kinda like food. A recession may come, the markets may crash, but people still need to eat. The same goes for the sex industry. People still need their rotating-vibrating-shivering-double-headed-translu scent-dong-now-with-enhanced-squirming-action!
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It was a given in the problem that all the sinners left on the third day. Not that it stops the problem being badly worded, but your "counterexample" that nobody leaves on the third day is crap.
It also doesn't seem to work out correclty if the sinner's sin is not believing in a divine entity or ignoring the commands of that entity.
There is a healthy attatchment - but only when it serves your personal interest directly. The hope for 'future recognition' is a useless endeavor.
Agreed. While recognition is nice, a week after you've gotten it you've got nothing to show for it. Time off, more money, better opportunity, additional education...those are the ways to really show that someone is doing a good job.
Listen, you may abhor unions but it's a necessary evil and the alternative is much, much worse: unchecked capitalism. History shows us most of the inhumane ills: women and children working 70 and 80 hour weeks and worse.
There are child labor laws in the US that prevent the exploitation of children in the manner that you have mentioned. For the most part, children aren't even allowed to work and are therefore unable to be "protected" by unions to begin with. Those that can work are still limited by state and federal laws as to the hours that they can work until they reach the age of majority (legally considered an adult).
As far as women working 70-80 hour weeks, I see that all the time today. I see men working the same kinds of hours. It's called being a salaried employee in the busy company.
Only the threat of socialism (which incidentally didn't arise out of a vacuum, but was a reaction to the worst excesses of capitalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s) and repeated striking and unionization among the people have the autocrats of the United States decide to give SOME assurances to the workers: 8 hour days, safety regulations, etc.
Once again, there are laws that protect workers from unsafe work environments. Ever hear of OSHA?
The appalling working conditions that spawned the birth of unions just don't happen today. They didn't exist because employers are evil slave laborers, they existed because of poor economic conditions and the fact that we were only beginning to enter the industrial age. There were no clearly defined limits. The government and laws hadn't caught up with technology enough to be able to protect the workers. Now they have.
Unions are a bad thing. They enforce mediocrity while robbing the people who they are supposed to protect. They lobby for legislation to increase their powers and assure their future, but they don't do anything to actually help people anymore. And yes, I used to work a union job.
Consider the following docket from the trial which indicates a fairly serious conspiracy to take Rambus' designs and modify them only enough to avoid paying patents.
Bah! I took you up on that offer and read through that docket. First off, it's from a proceeding that took place almost a month and a half ago, so it certainly qualifies as old news. Secondly, it certainly does not in any way indicate a conspiracy of any sort to take Rambus's designs. They quite plainly state that they would design a "public domain" version of the memory that Rambus was trying to sell them. They wanted to take some of the elements of the Rambus design that were not patented or patentable (in the public domain or obvious) and use them in a new design that specifically excluded patented info. They wanted to design a similar memory interface that wouldn't be an infringement. It hardly qualifies as stealing and there certainly is nothing wrong with it.
What Rambus alleges in this document is way up the scale from being even remotely shady. After all, that's the purpose of patent searches. Before you make a new product, you look at everyone else's patented designs and try to make sure that your product does not infringe those patents.
Intel still has a love-hate relationship with Rambus and is still touting RDRAM as the next gen ram technology despite its cost and potential technical flaws. It's pretty hard to boycott intel.
Don't be silly...it's been over 10 years since I last bought an Intel product. You can get AMD or VIA CPU's; mainboard chipsets by VIA, SiS, or ALi; graphics chipsets from Nvidia, Matrox, ATI, ST Micro, Trident, S3, etc; NICs from 3COM, NetGear, LinkSys, etc; network switches from 3Com, Cisco, and several others; managed hosting from a slew of ASPs...ad nauseum. You can't name one Intel product that the average or exceptional tech user would need that doesn't have a non-Intel alternative. Heck...a couple years back my company was buying new Compaq Deskpro 2000 business PC's, and they came with Matrox display adapters, TI NICs and VIA chipsets. The only thing in them that actually was Intel was the CPU. So even in the big business world their grasp isn't as strong as they'd like you to believe.
Also, I believe that SDRAM chip makers must pay royalties to Rambus. So, you'd have to boycott all SDRAM.
You believe incorrectly. None of the SDRAM chip makers must pay royalties to Rambus except those that signed licensing deals with them for SDRAM rather than fight the Rambus claims in court. That's what this whole lawsuit is about to begin with. (duh!) Right now it appears that the only two who aren't paying royalties to Rambus are Infineon and Micron. So just buy your SDRAM or DDR from Crucial Technology and you're safe (they are the direct-sales division of Micron).
OK, let's sum it up in several ways:
1. Margins on hardware are extremely thin. So thin, in fact, that a single 1-hour tech support call to a vendor can often wipe out all of the profit in a given sale. Add up the cost of having to have a knowledgable person on the other end of the phone for that hour, the cost of the phone for that hour, that desk and cubicle, the software that tracks trouble tickets, etc. It's really quite expensive to offer tech support.
2. In order to save money, less scrupulous vendors will hire less knowledgable (and therefore cheaper) support staff. Or they'll hire fewer of them, causing long wait times in the queues.
3. Because of item number 2, knowledgable and skilled support workers are more scarce. Those who are good get promoted out of it or they are only using it to get some experience in the industry and quickly move on to better jobs. This causes even more headaches.
4. Customers (consumers) are always looking for something for nothing, or the best deal they can possibly get. So they tend to favor vendors with the lowest prices over vendors with equivalent products but higher prices (and usually better support). Then they complain because they don't feel that they're getting proper support. But they still continue to feed situations 1, 2, and 3.
5. Consumers are stupid. Period. 95% of them can't tell you what they've done or what's wrong or what's not working. All they can say is, "It doesn't work." Even in a business environment I get people who tell me, "I plugged that one cable into the thing on the side of the computer where it looks like it fits but it won't sync." OK...could you possibly be any more vague? Do you really expect that I can help you when that's all that you give me to go on? Why would you possibly consider calling for support without a serial number or a product model number? How can someone be expected to diagnose a problem with a unit when they don't even know what the unit is?
Consumers buy complex systems and components without even stopping to think if there might be compatibility issues, let alone support for those issues. Yet the same people wouldn't think of buying a car without doing some research on the car or dealer first. And we all know that a computer is many times more complicated than a car, don't we?
People expect the same level of customer service when buying a PC as they do when buying a couch. But even though they may be the same price, the couch offers several times the profits of a PC for a MUCH simpler product. That makes support pretty darn simple to provide.
I'm not normally a Katz-basher, but geez...think about it for a minute. If you want support, pay a little more and go with a vendor that has a reputation for good support. Don't buy from Bubba's House of Cheap-o and skip the support contract just because it makes it as costly as buying from Sterling Reputation Inc.
Businesses have figured this out long ago. That's why we buy PC's from Compaq and Dell. We know that we can call in a problem and be on the phone with an agent within 5 minutes and have the problem fixed or a replacement on the way. Businesses know that you can't get something for nothing, and they know that support is a major something. Once consumers get their head out of their asses, they'll realize the same thing.
And yes, it is their fault for supporting vendors and markets that don't support them when there are reasonably priced alternatives that would support them.
I'd have OSHA in there a second time for the retaliation, for I do not believe that is legal either.
It's not generally. I got fired once for filing a claim with the US Department of Labor against my employer (company A) regarding overtime pay. I won the claim but got canned. I called the USDoL back and told them that I got fired in retaliation and they told me that since I worked in an "at-will" employment state I was basically screwed. They could file suit to get my job back and make my employer re-hire me, but then they'd just turn around and fabricate something ridiculous to fire me over anyways.
I was very lucky with that employer (company A) because my next employer (company B) after that was a competitor and I had no NDA or non-compete. So we basically stole most of his customers (without him even knowing that I worked there) and he finally decided to close up shop get out of the business altogether. I was greatly pleased the day that he came to company B and tried to sell his customer list. I actually got to be the one to tell him "no."
Observation: You should not be an hourly employee Advice: You need a lawyer, not a bunch of /.ers
Why shouldn't he be an hourly employee? I've been hourly on-call before and salaried on-call, and I ALWAYS got paid extra for hourly on-call positions (whereas I never got paid for on-call on salaried jobs). In mny opinion, if you have to be on-call, hourly pay is the only way to go.
I also find it rather odd that this same question came up a couple months ago but got totally different responses. At that time, it was 600 posts about how each person was compensated for on-call time at their specific job. This time around it's a couple hundred people screaming "get a lawyer or quit!"
I think that it largely depends on what you are doing. I used to work for a company where I was guaranteed to get 10-15 calls over the course of a week of on-call time. I was paid an additional amount that (at the time) equalled out to roughly 50% of my weekly rate (for 40 hours). These calls could come anytime, 24x7 though usually half of them were on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
In my current position I am the only Admin at my site, so I carry a 24x7 nationwide pager. I don't get a flat-rate for on-call because I'm actually a contractor. I do however get to bill a minimum of 1 additional hour every time I get paged (which is pretty rare), rounded up to the nearest whole hour. Since I usually work a minimum of 40 hours per week, any on-call hours come out as overtime hours.
So if I dial in and it takes me 70 minutes to fix the problem I get to bill 2 hours. If I actually have to go into the office, the clock starts when the pager goes off and doesn't stop until I'm back home (or wherever I was). Since I live a 45-minute drive from my office, this pretty much guarantees 3 hours or more of OT any time that I have to go in.
Just yesterday my pager went off at 5:30 while I was on the way home. It was someone with a simple question, but I got to bill an hour of OT for a 2 minute phonecall.
If I'm going on vacation I just tell the folks at the office and they'll have someone from another site cover for me (fortunately we have another office in the same city).
I think that this works out pretty well for me...I rarely get bothered but when I do it's worth it. I don't feel particularly restricted in what I can do on the evenings or weekends. Most days, I don't even think of it as being on call.
Perhaps, but not ignorant editoral comments on every single Microsoft post. Don't you see anything wrong with that?
Not really. It's a free (as in speech) country...that means that we're free to make jackasses of ourselves by stating our views on pretty much anything that we care to. If one is lucky enough to have a bully pulpit...well...that's just the way it goes.
I gues it's in the hands of the PC manufacturers to do the right thing...
Nah...if it were in the hands of the PC manufacturers then this won't happen for good business reasons. It actually is in the hands of the 16-year old techie kids who are building PC's for their local OEM screwdriver shop who just got a build order for 500 naked PCs. You know, the ones who MS is trying to bribe into betraying business confidence.
However, what constititutes a machine?
Can I stick a new processor on my mother board? Can I add a processor to a SMP machine that was running with only one? What happend if the original processor dies? Can I add/subtract RAM? Change the keyboard? Get a new monitor? Move my cpu to a new motherboard? Add a hardrive? Subtract a hard drive?
Excellent questions. I have no answer for this. But Microsoft does, only they're not telling.
Anyone remember reading about the Windows XP product activation scheme? XP builds a unique ID number or some sort of checksum from the hardware on your system when you install it. You pass that ID number to MS to activate your OS. If you don't activate the OS, the OS doesn't work. If your hardware deviates substantially from its initial configuration, the ID will have changed and subsequent activation of your OS will not be possible without getting a new activation key from MS (at whatever they decide to charge for them).
Microsoft has not yet been forthcoming about just how much change in hardware can be tolerated before Windows XP decides that you've got a different machine. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the threshold change to be more/less restrictive as MS gets closer/farther from hitting its revenue targets for the quarter...just a simple Windows Update away...
I know this is a linux site and is going to have a "prolinux" spin, but that should be expressed in the stories they choose to post, and not in editorial comments in each and every single story - especially when the editorial comments misinterpret or are just plain ignorant. It's irresponsible.
That's odd...I thought that editorial comments and editorials in general were the appropriate place to editorialize. Is that no longer the case?
Now you remember this letter your got from M$FT a while ago. You read it over, and you say to your self. "Self: IANAL. Nonetheless, this looks a great deal like what M$FT is talking about. And while he didn't SAY he had a license, he didn't say he didn't either. What the hell, it's only a phonecall/email"
Agreed. Just because they only say that they're looking for people who claim to have site licenses doesn't mean that they aren't interested in everyone else. If you turn someone in for buying 500 naked PC's (even if they said that they intend to install Linux on them), MS is still going to take notice and the purchaser will more than likely still get a letter from the BSA. It's not like they're going to say, "Oh, he didn't mention site licenses, so he must be legitimate" and throw away the tip. These are the same people who are encouraging disgruntled employees or former employees to give anonymous tips on their employers/former employers. Only here they're bribing them to do it!
In the original article about the rat out your clients game, there is a link to an article about licensing. In there you will find:
If you got your computer with an OEM license, but you "ghost" the hard disk as most larger companies do to achieve consistency, you have to buy a second Windows license for that computer. Installing this second license voids your OEM license so the OEM no longer provides support. You now have to get that from Microsoft at $350 per incident.
So in short, yes, you are supposed to install all apps individually onto a clean OEM Windows install.
This was the case up until about 6 or 7 months ago. Due to the outcry of the volume license purchasers, if you have an Open or Select agreement you are no longer required to buy an additional license in order to re-image an OEM installation with Select or Open media. I have a series of letters somewhere from our MS sales rep because we went back and forth on this very issue for several weeks.
It states in the letter that they are looking for volume purchases where it is stated by the purchaser that the reason an OS is not needed is because of *existing* MS volume licences. It makes no mention of reporting purchases where the stated intent is to install alternate operating systems.
Of course not, and for two very good reasons:
1. According to Microsoft (when dealing with OEMs anyway), there is no such thing as an alternative OS. It's Windows or nothing. If you go back and do some reading on the letters that MS started sending out regarding "naked PCs" a few months ago, you will see this mentality shining through. In Microsoft's mind, a naked PC will end up with a pirated version of Windows on it.
and
2. If they didn't mention the "erroneous" claims of MS volume licenses, then they'd have absolutely no business asking for this info. Not that they really have any right to ask for it in the first place, but throwing in this line about volume licenses does at least add the veneer of legitimacy to it.
The simple fact is, until recently you had to buy an additional license if you had a volume license agreement and wanted to reimage a PC that came with an OEM installation. That's right, you pay for a new machine with an OEM Windows install on it, then you are required to buy an additional license in order to reimage it with your corporate standard. In this context, the MS letter makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately, MS modified it's volume licensing (Select and Open) agreements to allow you to re-image an OEM installation without having to buy a second license for that PC. The reason for this was because volume licensees (large corporations) started screaming about not only the existence of a Windows tax, but having to pay the Windows tax twice. Taken in this context, it would seem that you should be able to purchase additional licenses via Select or Open agreements and buy naked PC's and potentially save some money on your OEM deal.
Or I could be upgrading 1000 486 WinNT 4 boxes to..... 1000 AMD 1.5GHz, more memory than a desktop will ever need Win NT 4 boxes... Some compainys DONT NEED WinXP ot 2K or Me, 9x &/or NT are fine, and some IT mangers know this!
The problem with that is that MS licenses are generally not transferable from one PC to another, regardless of whether you have OEM or retail licenses. The license is tied to the specific machine.
What would be more natural for gesture based control than touching the screen and making the gesture?
Think of all the greasy finger smudges you'd have on your screen...yuck. Beyond that, I like having my monitor a certain distance in front of me and elevated about 4 inches off of the table. It would be a pain in the butt to have to stretch out and gesture that far away.
Apart from the fact that three redundant computers going down at once just should NOT happen
From what I've read elsewhere around the web, it sounds like the server crashed. The three redundant systems were actually the clients. If the server goes down, it doesn't matter how many redundant clients there are.
Which of course begs the question, why didn't they have a redundant server or cluster or something?
Wasn't there a big stink about how they were using open source (esp. Linux) on board?
Dunno. But The Register had a story awhile back that had pictures of the astronauts. They were using old IBM Thinkpads running DOS. Or at least that's what it looked like.
Re:You know someone should disagree around here (Score:2) by Zachary Kessin on Tuesday April 24, @06:46AM EDT (#227) (User #1372 Info) Well I would say ethics is an absolute, but it does have grey areas. Would working in the Defense industry be ethical? I don't know it rather depends on for whom. I will not say that war is always unethical. In fact I will say quite the oposite, there are times when it would be unethical not to fight. When some thug Somewhere starts killing people en mass (Think Nazi Germany, Kosavo Bosnia etc) It shows a complete lack of ethics to sit on your hands and do nothing. As for biotech companies, you know many of them are working on drugs that can cure diseses or fight hunger on a massive level (The Golden rice). As for ethics being absolute yes they are. While I make it a point to not push my ethical views on others I do beliive there are some absolutes. If every positon about ethics is equaly valid then the Marxist position that "We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an etenal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law..." Which Karl Marx wrote in his book "Capital". Lenin said similar things. If you accept that moraltiy can be defined as such than the Stalin's Gulag and Pol Pot's killing fields (Both of which in someone's mind advanced the "Class Struggle") were a perfectly acceptable thing.
OK...so now you're saying that if I do not believe that ethics are an absolute then I am a Communist and also endorse mass murder. Talk about demonizing the opposition...geez. Marxism as Marx promoted it isn't the way that it has been implemented anywhere in the world. Period. And regardless of your feelings on his political beliefs, he had some very interesting observations about society.
It's funny that the conservative types agree with you though. They also believe that morals and ethics are an absolute. They believe this because they believe that morals and ethics come from a god-figure. But for those of us who do not believe in the Judeo-Christian religious figure, where do our morals and ethics come from? I certainly have morals and ethics. They came from somewhere. And they are absolutely not the same as those espoused by the Judeo-Christian "moralist" hatemongers in modern American society. So how did my morals and ethics come into being? How can it be possible that I can have a moral and ethical belief system that is totally without religious belief (and in fact contrary to most of it), yet it be life-affirming, loving, and happiness orientated?
Morals and ethics are not an absolute. Anyone who believes that they are absolute is seriously deluded.
And yet Denmark has a thriving sex industry, porn is everywhere, usually displayed in front of the counter at news agencies. It is just as big there as anywhere else. So I don't agree that represion of sex in the US has increased the desire for porn.
OMIGOD!!! That can only mean one thing: people actually LIKE porn! It must be genetic or something...
Sooner or later, the current economic slowdown will turn around and tech workers will have lots of options in more traditional fields again. My opinion is that those who go to work in the porn industry now, will find their resumes are significantly tainted should they ever decide they want to go back to a more mainstream employer.
I might tend to agree with you that some employers would look negatively on resumes that listed Hustler.com or TeenageHardcore.com on them. But most resumes won't list the names of the sites that they work for. They'll say things like DHD Media, Vivid Entertainment Group, or LFP Inc (the company that own Hustler.com), and then they'll list the job duties and skills required of them in that postion (designed web-based front end for large databases in an e-commerce application, etc...).
I know that you wanted to completely divorce your opinion of porn from your statement, but it shows through (just like mine does). We always tend to believe that we are normal and that most people (the right-thinking ones, anyway) think the same way that we do on "moral" issues. That may or may not be the case. I think that you'd find that most people don't necessarily adhere to the same moral standards that they espouse.
Besides, I've worked with managers who would have said, "You used to work in porn? Cool..."
I wonder why. A lot of places seem to have over exposed (as in too much light) photos because cameras left in matrix meter mode on that much untanned flesh tends to meter wrong. Anyone who has photographed nudes in an art class could do better.
That's because amatuer porn is pretty popular right now. Who wants to see yet another airbrushed nude of Pamela Anderson when we can see Polaroids of that girl we ran into at the bar last nite?
but seriously, even stretching beyond the technology industry, does higher unemployment lead to more people in need of immediate gratification?
u scent-dong-now-with-enhanced-squirming-action!
Not necessarily more, but there is a certain maintenance level. It's kinda like food. A recession may come, the markets may crash, but people still need to eat. The same goes for the sex industry. People still need their rotating-vibrating-shivering-double-headed-transl
Er...something like that anyways.