But the shops in Totenham Court Road (the traditional street where London geeks go to find the latest and greatest gadgetry) had signs advertising the fact that they had a few.
This, at least here, is important: that means it is selling like hot cakes.
I have worked in many countries, in different continents (more than a couple of days, mind you) and never ever in all my years had worked more than 7 or 8 hours a day regularly. I also visited many offices (US included) and while there was the typical workaholic plenty of people left the office at 17:00 or 18:00 sharp every day.
There is the odd day everything goes bananas, but that is a very rare exception, not the rule.
If you are not able to put limits and to enter into a fair relationship with your employer, don't blame the world economy, blame is closer to home. No, actually it lives with you. Stop feeding it.
If you are going to do something properly you try it. Many times.
This is true for Leonardo, Monet or Picasso. Picasso went literally bananas painting things like horses, minotaurs adn many other animals. All this coalesced in the Guernica (for which he made countless of drafts).
All those electronics are produced at very low cost nowadays, what we are talking here is about service and companies willing to please their costumers (what a thought).
All the Linux companies are helping each other in the development of software, with the collaboration of substantial amounts of people doing things just for the fun of it.
They compete in service, but in general stuff that proves god in one distro quickly finds its way into others.
This is the way it should be, companies failing to play this game will be abandoned by users and developers like hot potatoes.
So tone down the incendiary, unnecessary confrontational tone. It is completely unnecessary and unwarranted.
There is the example proponents of open formats have been talking about all along, brought to you live from the company we love to hate because they pull this nonsense every time a new product comes along.
MS has decided to screw people (whatever the reason I don't care, this is an unilateral decision that suits this company but not necessarily the public that they are supposed to serve, how many I don't care, if the person affected is you it will be a cold comfort to know you are the only one affected) and there still be clueless/.ers and people in the computing world defending MS's pseudo "open" format that they are trying to spoon fed into us by means less than palatable (and here I look at you Miguel de Icaza, who should know better, alleged technical brilliance should not be enough to endorse a technical specification of any kind).
The problem is what is the question and who is the questioner.
This kind of compatibility issues would not arise if formats were open and fully documented. The answer to problems with file accessibility is open standards, but the question comes from the users, not the companies, for the companies the answer is closed formats since they are interested in revenue, not their users anymore (specially true when it comes to companies in monopolistic positions).
The idiocy is that if file formats were open, MS would not have to necessarily worry about backwards compatibility, since the market out there would see to that. Oh wait, that would enhance competition. My bad Uncle Ballmer.
This guy's view of the forest is obscured by a big fat three in front of him.
While he is staring at technological innovation only (or so one guesses) he is missing that people working with Open Source innovated in the way the software is made.
Innovation in the process but not necessarily in the products (a point which is itself highly debatable as the discussion shows). This new way to develop software has permitted us to have who knows how many distributions of an operating system, each one with multiple choices about configuration, software available and support options.
In a market that lacked much variety, OSS developers offered just that. At th time that one single company was intending to monopolize anything related to a computer (I still remember how Windows NT was going to kill UNIX in the mid 90s) the most innovative decision of the time was not to play the closed source game.
Given how much closed source development has stopped the advance of computing, people devoted to developing open solutions were bound to make up for the time lost by providing open equivalent solutions.
That phase of the game is almost over. With the Eee PC selling like hot cakes, Ubuntu being a perfectly usable desktop, Google creating applications that could not care less about the underlying OS, big companies releasing substantial pieces of software under the GPL and other open licenses, the era of "just copying" (lets homour the author, without really conceding the point) is reaching its natural end.
With behemoths like IBM, Sun, Red Hat and many others firmly in the side of Open Source, it is just a matter of time before technological innovation that is hyped to high heavens comes from developers releasing their code as Free code.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer.
No, it isn't.
As long as you are in your workplace when requested and do the job for which you are hired, your company has no business whatsoever in any legal activities you decide to pursuit.
You are selling yourself cheap if you allow your company to fuck with your personal life. If they ever attempt to intrude a rude "I dare you, and I am talking to my lawyer" should be more than enough in most cases.
In the UK such intrusion could be used to build a case of unjustified dismissal.
No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster.
Pointless example in two levels: a bank would screen employees for situations like this, most likely no work relationship would be ever established, also what is the point of doing your time if you are considered guilty forever? If anything a convicted fraudster could be a great asset on identifying fraud.
No school wants teachers who are porn stars
Why not? I would have no problem with that. A good teacher is a good teacher, if after that he does something else, it is their time. If anything this statement says more about your moral hangovers than about the issue at hand.
No police force wants an ex-con as an officer.
Why not? What about having served your time? Who could be a better "mole"? Do you ever get out of that box in which you are thinking?
The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
You are embarrassing yourself by failing to understand what the issue is (you reading comprehension powers are sorely lacking).
Firstly, you are mixing free time while in a current job with criminal activity previous to joining a job. 2 of your lame examples commit this stupid mistake.
Let me bring an example more pertinent: most serious companies nowadays will not allow discrimination based on sexual preferences (heck, some companies celebrate diversity of sexual preferences). In the same companies you are bound to have very religious people that will go to their churches (or mosques, bless them) to talk about the evils of homosexuality. As much as I abhor religious zealots, as long as they are respectful at work with all their colleagues and do their job, what possible excuse would be there for a company to chastise a religious person for publicizing his beliefs on their free time?
Now if employers terminate people unreasonably for being part of a political organization, due to their ethnicity or religion or for some other discriminatory reason the existing legal protection needs to come into play (as is the case of Stacy Snyder mentioned in TFA - terminating someone for being seen with a large glass of alcohol is moronic - that said she's better off with a different employer if that's how her current one acts). We don't need new special laws for the Internet. We may need minor adjustments to existing laws to take the Internet into account. We certainly don't need special protection for morons be they employer or employee.
Why should religious affiliation should have priority over making an ass of myself? As my example above shows, there could be as much ground for making life of a religious zealot difficult as there would be for messing up with a tasteless muck posting embarrassing stuff in Facebook.
Since a company is not arbiter of the morals of its employees, then it should not be taking that role, otherwise, sooner or later it will be brought up to account by somebody that feels offended for the inaction of a company in respect to somebody else.
Companies making these devices know this to be true for 99% of home users (I would say 100%, but hey, you may actually need 3TB), and make sensible compromises about their offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
But the shops in Totenham Court Road (the traditional street where London geeks go to find the latest and greatest gadgetry) had signs advertising the fact that they had a few.
This, at least here, is important: that means it is selling like hot cakes.
As a matter of fact it runs using Wine in Linux.
I have worked in many countries, in different continents (more than a couple of days, mind you) and never ever in all my years had worked more than 7 or 8 hours a day regularly. I also visited many offices (US included) and while there was the typical workaholic plenty of people left the office at 17:00 or 18:00 sharp every day.
There is the odd day everything goes bananas, but that is a very rare exception, not the rule.
If you are not able to put limits and to enter into a fair relationship with your employer, don't blame the world economy, blame is closer to home. No, actually it lives with you. Stop feeding it.
You jest surely.
That may have been MSDOS and all the derivative versions (on PCs).
Windows did not hit the radar until Win3.x hit the market.
.... because your question is leading.
If you would ask for the value of Y for:
Y=sqrt(25)
you would probably get more correct answers .
It is not that they are specializing necessarily.
If you are going to do something properly you try it. Many times.
This is true for Leonardo, Monet or Picasso. Picasso went literally bananas painting things like horses, minotaurs adn many other animals. All this coalesced in the Guernica (for which he made countless of drafts).
Some geeks (engineers, programmers, whatever), no matter how brilliant, seem to think that sliced bread was invented yesterday.
People have always adapted, and very often do so against their will and in disadvantageous situations.
To idly ask "could you reinvent yourself?" is lazy thinking, since the answer is yes, so what is the point asking?
All those electronics are produced at very low cost nowadays, what we are talking here is about service and companies willing to please their costumers (what a thought).
All the Linux companies are helping each other in the development of software, with the collaboration of substantial amounts of people doing things just for the fun of it.
They compete in service, but in general stuff that proves god in one distro quickly finds its way into others.
This is the way it should be, companies failing to play this game will be abandoned by users and developers like hot potatoes.
So tone down the incendiary, unnecessary confrontational tone. It is completely unnecessary and unwarranted.
There is the example proponents of open formats have been talking about all along, brought to you live from the company we love to hate because they pull this nonsense every time a new product comes along.
/.ers and people in the computing world defending MS's pseudo "open" format that they are trying to spoon fed into us by means less than palatable (and here I look at you Miguel de Icaza, who should know better, alleged technical brilliance should not be enough to endorse a technical specification of any kind).
MS has decided to screw people (whatever the reason I don't care, this is an unilateral decision that suits this company but not necessarily the public that they are supposed to serve, how many I don't care, if the person affected is you it will be a cold comfort to know you are the only one affected) and there still be clueless
The problem is what is the question and who is the questioner.
This kind of compatibility issues would not arise if formats were open and fully documented. The answer to problems with file accessibility is open standards, but the question comes from the users, not the companies, for the companies the answer is closed formats since they are interested in revenue, not their users anymore (specially true when it comes to companies in monopolistic positions).
The idiocy is that if file formats were open, MS would not have to necessarily worry about backwards compatibility, since the market out there would see to that. Oh wait, that would enhance competition. My bad Uncle Ballmer.
... in a matter of a couple of generations.
Palestinians were expelled and colonized in a matter of a few years.
Jews were almost exterminated in Europe in less than a decade.
Native Americans in all the American continent were obliterated in 5 generations or less.
Lots of things can happen in 100 years.
Until Uncle Ballmer lets lose his patent chasing lawyers, which he is explicitly threatening to do.
Well, thanks but no thanks.
MS sells you 4 or 5 different versions of the same damned software. They are artificially segmenting the market and withholding features.
That tells me all what I need to know about how good Vista is, which if it was any, would lure costumers based on merit and not in marketing gimmicks.
And poor security.
But not a single blue screen, no sir, those are gone.
Rock solid software, I'm telling ya.
This guy's view of the forest is obscured by a big fat three in front of him.
While he is staring at technological innovation only (or so one guesses) he is missing that people working with Open Source innovated in the way the software is made.
Innovation in the process but not necessarily in the products (a point which is itself highly debatable as the discussion shows). This new way to develop software has permitted us to have who knows how many distributions of an operating system, each one with multiple choices about configuration, software available and support options.
In a market that lacked much variety, OSS developers offered just that. At th time that one single company was intending to monopolize anything related to a computer (I still remember how Windows NT was going to kill UNIX in the mid 90s) the most innovative decision of the time was not to play the closed source game.
Given how much closed source development has stopped the advance of computing, people devoted to developing open solutions were bound to make up for the time lost by providing open equivalent solutions.
That phase of the game is almost over. With the Eee PC selling like hot cakes, Ubuntu being a perfectly usable desktop, Google creating applications that could not care less about the underlying OS, big companies releasing substantial pieces of software under the GPL and other open licenses, the era of "just copying" (lets homour the author, without really conceding the point) is reaching its natural end.
With behemoths like IBM, Sun, Red Hat and many others firmly in the side of Open Source, it is just a matter of time before technological innovation that is hyped to high heavens comes from developers releasing their code as Free code.
If you had a bit of wit, you would not be asking that question....
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer.
No, it isn't.
As long as you are in your workplace when requested and do the job for which you are hired, your company has no business whatsoever in any legal activities you decide to pursuit.
You are selling yourself cheap if you allow your company to fuck with your personal life. If they ever attempt to intrude a rude "I dare you, and I am talking to my lawyer" should be more than enough in most cases.
In the UK such intrusion could be used to build a case of unjustified dismissal.
No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster.
Pointless example in two levels: a bank would screen employees for situations like this, most likely no work relationship would be ever established, also what is the point of doing your time if you are considered guilty forever? If anything a convicted fraudster could be a great asset on identifying fraud.
No school wants teachers who are porn stars
Why not? I would have no problem with that. A good teacher is a good teacher, if after that he does something else, it is their time. If anything this statement says more about your moral hangovers than about the issue at hand.
No police force wants an ex-con as an officer.
Why not? What about having served your time? Who could be a better "mole"? Do you ever get out of that box in which you are thinking?
The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
You are embarrassing yourself by failing to understand what the issue is (you reading comprehension powers are sorely lacking).
Firstly, you are mixing free time while in a current job with criminal activity previous to joining a job. 2 of your lame examples commit this stupid mistake.
Let me bring an example more pertinent: most serious companies nowadays will not allow discrimination based on sexual preferences (heck, some companies celebrate diversity of sexual preferences). In the same companies you are bound to have very religious people that will go to their churches (or mosques, bless them) to talk about the evils of homosexuality. As much as I abhor religious zealots, as long as they are respectful at work with all their colleagues and do their job, what possible excuse would be there for a company to chastise a religious person for publicizing his beliefs on their free time?
Now if employers terminate people unreasonably for being part of a political organization, due to their ethnicity or religion or for some other discriminatory reason the existing legal protection needs to come into play (as is the case of Stacy Snyder mentioned in TFA - terminating someone for being seen with a large glass of alcohol is moronic - that said she's better off with a different employer if that's how her current one acts). We don't need new special laws for the Internet. We may need minor adjustments to existing laws to take the Internet into account. We certainly don't need special protection for morons be they employer or employee.
Why should religious affiliation should have priority over making an ass of myself? As my example above shows, there could be as much ground for making life of a religious zealot difficult as there would be for messing up with a tasteless muck posting embarrassing stuff in Facebook.
Since a company is not arbiter of the morals of its employees, then it should not be taking that role, otherwise, sooner or later it will be brought up to account by somebody that feels offended for the inaction of a company in respect to somebody else.
According to who?
That is not my experience and I have knowledge of many big corps that continued deployment as usual.
No, really, you don't.
Even if you think you do.
Companies making these devices know this to be true for 99% of home users (I would say 100%, but hey, you may actually need 3TB), and make sensible compromises about their offerings.
I moved to a new flat (department) 2 years ago. All the new bulbs I bought are still working fine, not a single replacement....
Because nuclear power is a subsidized, uneconomic, dangerous white elephant.
... is a basic necessity.
People failing to appreciate that show a lack of economical wherewithal comparable to the one of people contracting mortgages they could not service.
How do you make your car work ? Do you smash it with a hammer first before turning on the key?
... then you simply are not paying attention.