The far more Maquiavelian dealings in which they forbid their clients to do things are far more malign.
Oh yeah, they are convicted of abusing their monopoly also. In two different jurisdictions (US, EU). In the EU the bundled media player is what got them slapped.
MS is a company that pushes its luck to get as much as they can until they ar atopped. It is a bloody behavioural pattern, ignore it if you wish but to deny it is frankly disingenious.
They did it when they started (Gates used computing university time that wasn't his to use to start MS), and they keep doing it.
That they get sensible people to praise and defend them is the lasting monument to their wickedness.
.... I think I know more about how your religion is used as a tool of opression.
Lets not delve too deeply in the fact that men can have 4 wives, but not the other way around (hearing Muslims trying to justify this is an exquisite exercise of double speak and self delussion).
Lets forget that Islamic costume makes it OK for very old men to marry girls so young that in many ocassions have just left infancy (but never the other way around, thankfully).
But it is a wwll known documented fact that Islam imposes on women a life of domesticity and servitude to their men (be this the father, the husband or the brothers).
In the most extreme Islamic countries (like Saudi Arabia), a WOman is not her own person. They very often can't vote and almost never are electable for an elected body (when they exist).
Inheritance law in Muslim societies is also less favourable towards women, as is divorce law.
There are a few examples of Islamic countries that are more enlightened, like Malaysia and to a degree some parts of Indonesia. But the element that would like to see the complete sujugation of women to men is always a trend all too easy to find on Islamic countries and societies.
Very few in Mexico will regard other people "inferior" in the sense you are implying.
But it is a matter of fact on Mexican life that people of European descent, for reasons quite obvious, have held economical power.
In Mexico it is always quite a good bet to assume that the more European you look (i.e. "White") the wealthier you are.
But not superior.
When the French sent a poor Austrian chap to attempt to become emperor, he was eventually captured and executed, the pardon, in the hands of a dark skinned Zapotecan Indian, was denied.
That is a lesson that no Mexican, of any given race, has forgotten.
What is wrong with wanting an Ipod and only 7 CDs on it?
Why do everybody needs to fill the music players with uncountable hours of music that will neve be heard?
All this people boasting about 20000 songs n their Ipods are consumate idiots. Basic arithmetic will show that they wil neve ever listen to all that music.
SOmebody sensible will put a few CDs and be done with it. Somebody even more sensible would buy a small caoacity okayer.
Leadership emerges naturally in any group of people for the simple reason that it is in our nature. The best is to formalize the role of dealer in order to avoid the wasteful bickering that will ensue a situation in which the leader is not clearly defined.
We are primates, never ever forget that, we always look to find the most suitable leader for any situation and immediately start to plot his demise. We need a silverback to protect us and to make the group of monkeys homogeneous, but we hate the silver back because we want to be in his position (and we want to mate also:-) ).
All this one vote rubish and all the other mumbo jumbo you mention is against the nature of small groups of people, and when it comes to find the best solution to something the point of view of a good leader is more valuable than the point of view of 20 apprentices. Ask any old timer in the IT world how many times he or she has been the reinvention of the wheel and my point should be obvious.
We vote for leaders when human societies grow too big to express interpersonal hierarchies. Any silverback would be executed by the mob without a societal agreement of some kind, democratic or otherwise, but in small groups that is unnecessary, thus it is important to help the group establish a leader so that it can concentrate in getting come job done instead of back scratching and expurgating flease to stablish a proper hierarchy.
In the US you are pretty much a non person if you don;t have a driving license or a social security number.
Well, guess what, illegal immigrants need neither. They will be hired to do one job, will be paid in cash, and be let go to never be seen again.
ID cards would change nothing regarding this, employers that employ illegal immigrants now, will continue to do so. Or do you thing Illegal immigrants will be queuing for their ID cards any time soon?
If that is you idea of more secure I never want you watching after me.
If you have different documents to relate to the state and to other organizations then the chances of your full identity being hijacked diminish in inverse proportion to the amount of relationships you need to keep.
If your only relationship to get a gamut of services is one little card, the day someone else manages to fake it, then you are fucked. Big time.
Labour is born out of socialist movements, and we know that Socialism has very nasty tendencies to control and sheperd people in the direction the state dictates.
Taken to the extreme, that is Communism, we know the control freakery can be quite scary.
The people currently in power (as a movement) I believe never had the chance to be this long as rulers, thus they are showing their true, big broterish, colours (I can almost hear George Orwell: "I told you so!"). Their reflect reaction is always to control.
I was around the area on the day. The pro-hunting protesters where really pushing their luck, the frontline people facing the police were gratuitioulsy agressive, until the police had to hit back.
Of course the pro-hunting lobby use this to play the role of victims, but they were not blameless.
You don't fire somebody for playing Solitaire. Period.
What about if the guy in question is your best employee? There are people bound to cover all their objectives in less time than their normal working hours. If those people do something else once they have fullfilled all their work responsibilites, what is the problem with a bit of Solitaire?
A firm willing to fire somebody for such a menial nonsense obviously does not have any metrics about employees' performance.
Oh wait, it is a major. A politician. Somebody trying to be in the headlines appearing to be though.
That explain his attitude, but it does not explain yours, you use all the managerial babble but without a really knowledge of the concepts involved.
If people worth millions (paper money or not) can't be arsed to buy "Investment 101" or "Savings for Dummies" they are setting themselves for failure.
And don't bring the "they were forced to buy Enron" bullshit. I am pretty sure that nobody put a gun to the head of anybody to force them to risk all their saving eggs in one basket only.
The bad luck of a fool is always regrettable and certainly one can feel a degree of pity for the fool, but the fool has to take responsibility for his own actions if he or she is a normal functioning grown up adult.
99% full: we have scripts thank you. We have tried many different policies to clean up once we are alerted: asking nicely (they ignore us), asking harshly (they complain), being draconian (removing older, bigger files) people get sarcastic at you (here, I give you 100 bucks, buy a new disk), imposing limits (everybody has a good reason to need more than their colleagues), doing careful audits (discovering all the porn, movies, pictures, unauthorized software, etc., people, kid you not, complain about their privacy being violated.)
So after a while we just turn the damn 99% script off. Once the filesystem gets full we send an email to all the parties involved to sort it out. Say what you may, this works better than all the approaches above. We could try group quotas or smaller volumes assigned to smaller teams, but live is too short and I am sure people would still find problems with this or any other solution.
Disasters at 3am: you know, shit really happens, I know Mr Rumsfeld has discredited this very true notion, but shit does happen. You can have full redundancy, careful considerations to avoid downtime even people working to cover on site 24x7. Shit still will happen. So get over yourself and be grateful that there are people out there interested on this kind of job, which we can see form your post, get no recognition at all in spite of the users being stupid asses.
... if your company has absolutely no metrics to measure your perfromance.
I work 7 hours each day, not a single minute more (and it has been like this for several years) and I know how productive I am in comparision to others colleagues, what were the objectives for me and my team each year, half year and quarter.
We all browse the internet while in the office, have flexible time, can work from home when we ask to do so (I have not been denied this ever) and organize ourselves to allow at least one member of our team to come and go as he likes one week out of five.
The secret? We quantizize our work in a way that lends itself to be measured and track every single request, problem or project this way.
We know who is fixing problems, who is doing grunt work, who is organizing things and who is slacking.
Once this is done and we show that we are meeting our targets, if we are reading the newspaper or checking/. during office hours nobody bothers us and our boss is not reprimanded for that, because we have the number to show that we are meeting our targets.
Any temptation to remove a member of the team "because we could do better" is fought with numbers, statistics, performance charts, etc (we are geeks for bunnies sakes, statistics should be our greatest assets when dealing with bean counters).
You did not try to organize yourself, organization is an attitude with a method.
Boxing things in drawers it is not.
If you are not willing to use organizational techniques, fair enough, but you are less productive than if you would use organizational and time keeping techniques that are tried and tested.
But I am an atheist now, and very happy about it, thank you very much.
I have to say that the wacko things some of you guys are told about Catholicism are so far departed from the truth that is not worth my effort debunking them (somebody else already had a go, doing quite a good job at it).
I would just add that when one religion talks about another one you are listening to biased, uncompromissing propaganda.
I scrutinize very carefully any kind of propaganda that is clearly biased. Are you grown up enough to scrutinize the one received from institutions that you trust?
It is pricipled people that help to set the agenda. Stallman, with all his failings (that very often amount to how inflexible he is regarding his principles. Well, duh!), has been a pretty consistent presence in the IT world.
His opinions don't change according to how the wind blows (which can't ba said of many companies that jumed into the OSS bandwagon) and has been instrumental to the advance of the idea of open free software.
Why should we ignore somebody with such a good tracked record?
For the sake of argument, lets say I have a CD from company X with the latest and greatest Operating System in the known universe. It sells for 45 bucks.
I am copying it now. OK, the copy is finished.
Now smart cookie, did my action diminished X's bank account total?
Slashdot Mirror
OS/2
CPM-DOS
and that is only for starters.
The far more Maquiavelian dealings in which they forbid their clients to do things are far more malign.
Oh yeah, they are convicted of abusing their monopoly also. In two different jurisdictions (US, EU). In the EU the bundled media player is what got them slapped.
MS is a company that pushes its luck to get as much as they can until they ar atopped. It is a bloody behavioural pattern, ignore it if you wish but to deny it is frankly disingenious.
They did it when they started (Gates used computing university time that wasn't his to use to start MS), and they keep doing it.
That they get sensible people to praise and defend them is the lasting monument to their wickedness.
.... I think I know more about how your religion is used as a tool of opression.
Lets not delve too deeply in the fact that men can have 4 wives, but not the other way around (hearing Muslims trying to justify this is an exquisite exercise of double speak and self delussion).
Lets forget that Islamic costume makes it OK for very old men to marry girls so young that in many ocassions have just left infancy (but never the other way around, thankfully).
But it is a wwll known documented fact that Islam imposes on women a life of domesticity and servitude to their men (be this the father, the husband or the brothers).
In the most extreme Islamic countries (like Saudi Arabia), a WOman is not her own person. They very often can't vote and almost never are electable for an elected body (when they exist).
Inheritance law in Muslim societies is also less favourable towards women, as is divorce law.
There are a few examples of Islamic countries that are more enlightened, like Malaysia and to a degree some parts of Indonesia. But the element that would like to see the complete sujugation of women to men is always a trend all too easy to find on Islamic countries and societies.
Very few in Mexico will regard other people "inferior" in the sense you are implying.
But it is a matter of fact on Mexican life that people of European descent, for reasons quite obvious, have held economical power.
In Mexico it is always quite a good bet to assume that the more European you look (i.e. "White") the wealthier you are.
But not superior.
When the French sent a poor Austrian chap to attempt to become emperor, he was eventually captured and executed, the pardon, in the hands of a dark skinned Zapotecan Indian, was denied.
That is a lesson that no Mexican, of any given race, has forgotten.
Mexico is the 14th economic powerhouse in the world and a member of the OCED.
The problem in Mexico is not the eocnomy, is the distribution of the resources.
For historical reasons the wealth is highly concentrated in a privileged few. Mexicans live in poverty but few live in abject misery.
What is wrong with wanting an Ipod and only 7 CDs on it?
Why do everybody needs to fill the music players with uncountable hours of music that will neve be heard?
All this people boasting about 20000 songs n their Ipods are consumate idiots. Basic arithmetic will show that they wil neve ever listen to all that music.
SOmebody sensible will put a few CDs and be done with it. Somebody even more sensible would buy a small caoacity okayer.
.... creates a lot of wealth in the metropoli while making life in the colonies missery.
Those pesky Europeans, so clever and superior they are.
You can do pretty much squat to gain peace of mind if you use a commercial, closed source application.
You can inspect the code, and modify it if you need to, if you use an open source application.
Did it cross your brain that when one sends an email it may be on reply to an earlier one?
Microsofties, think out of the box for bunnies sakes.
Leadership emerges naturally in any group of people for the simple reason that it is in our nature. The best is to formalize the role of dealer in order to avoid the wasteful bickering that will ensue a situation in which the leader is not clearly defined.
:-) ).
We are primates, never ever forget that, we always look to find the most suitable leader for any situation and immediately start to plot his demise. We need a silverback to protect us and to make the group of monkeys homogeneous, but we hate the silver back because we want to be in his position (and we want to mate also
All this one vote rubish and all the other mumbo jumbo you mention is against the nature of small groups of people, and when it comes to find the best solution to something the point of view of a good leader is more valuable than the point of view of 20 apprentices. Ask any old timer in the IT world how many times he or she has been the reinvention of the wheel and my point should be obvious.
We vote for leaders when human societies grow too big to express interpersonal hierarchies. Any silverback would be executed by the mob without a societal agreement of some kind, democratic or otherwise, but in small groups that is unnecessary, thus it is important to help the group establish a leader so that it can concentrate in getting come job done instead of back scratching and expurgating flease to stablish a proper hierarchy.
Sorry guys, British people need to get a clue and vote for the party that consistently has opossed this scam.
In the US you are pretty much a non person if you don;t have a driving license or a social security number.
Well, guess what, illegal immigrants need neither. They will be hired to do one job, will be paid in cash, and be let go to never be seen again.
ID cards would change nothing regarding this, employers that employ illegal immigrants now, will continue to do so. Or do you thing Illegal immigrants will be queuing for their ID cards any time soon?
If that is you idea of more secure I never want you watching after me.
If you have different documents to relate to the state and to other organizations then the chances of your full identity being hijacked diminish in inverse proportion to the amount of relationships you need to keep.
If your only relationship to get a gamut of services is one little card, the day someone else manages to fake it, then you are fucked. Big time.
Labour is born out of socialist movements, and we know that Socialism has very nasty tendencies to control and sheperd people in the direction the state dictates.
Taken to the extreme, that is Communism, we know the control freakery can be quite scary.
The people currently in power (as a movement) I believe never had the chance to be this long as rulers, thus they are showing their true, big broterish, colours (I can almost hear George Orwell: "I told you so!"). Their reflect reaction is always to control.
I was around the area on the day. The pro-hunting protesters where really pushing their luck, the frontline people facing the police were gratuitioulsy agressive, until the police had to hit back.
Of course the pro-hunting lobby use this to play the role of victims, but they were not blameless.
In big corporations there are strict procedures in place to grant raises. Your boss may not even be the person with the final saying in the matter.
You don't fire somebody for playing Solitaire. Period.
What about if the guy in question is your best employee? There are people bound to cover all their objectives in less time than their normal working hours. If those people do something else once they have fullfilled all their work responsibilites, what is the problem with a bit of Solitaire?
A firm willing to fire somebody for such a menial nonsense obviously does not have any metrics about employees' performance.
Oh wait, it is a major. A politician. Somebody trying to be in the headlines appearing to be though.
That explain his attitude, but it does not explain yours, you use all the managerial babble but without a really knowledge of the concepts involved.
If people worth millions (paper money or not) can't be arsed to buy "Investment 101" or "Savings for Dummies" they are setting themselves for failure.
And don't bring the "they were forced to buy Enron" bullshit. I am pretty sure that nobody put a gun to the head of anybody to force them to risk all their saving eggs in one basket only.
The bad luck of a fool is always regrettable and certainly one can feel a degree of pity for the fool, but the fool has to take responsibility for his own actions if he or she is a normal functioning grown up adult.
99% full: we have scripts thank you. We have tried many different policies to clean up once we are alerted: asking nicely (they ignore us), asking harshly (they complain), being draconian (removing older, bigger files) people get sarcastic at you (here, I give you 100 bucks, buy a new disk), imposing limits (everybody has a good reason to need more than their colleagues), doing careful audits (discovering all the porn, movies, pictures, unauthorized software, etc., people, kid you not, complain about their privacy being violated.)
So after a while we just turn the damn 99% script off. Once the filesystem gets full we send an email to all the parties involved to sort it out. Say what you may, this works better than all the approaches above. We could try group quotas or smaller volumes assigned to smaller teams, but live is too short and I am sure people would still find problems with this or any other solution.
Disasters at 3am: you know, shit really happens, I know Mr Rumsfeld has discredited this very true notion, but shit does happen. You can have full redundancy, careful considerations to avoid downtime even people working to cover on site 24x7. Shit still will happen. So get over yourself and be grateful that there are people out there interested on this kind of job, which we can see form your post, get no recognition at all in spite of the users being stupid asses.
... if your company has absolutely no metrics to measure your perfromance.
/. during office hours nobody bothers us and our boss is not reprimanded for that, because we have the number to show that we are meeting our targets.
I work 7 hours each day, not a single minute more (and it has been like this for several years) and I know how productive I am in comparision to others colleagues, what were the objectives for me and my team each year, half year and quarter.
We all browse the internet while in the office, have flexible time, can work from home when we ask to do so (I have not been denied this ever) and organize ourselves to allow at least one member of our team to come and go as he likes one week out of five.
The secret? We quantizize our work in a way that lends itself to be measured and track every single request, problem or project this way.
We know who is fixing problems, who is doing grunt work, who is organizing things and who is slacking.
Once this is done and we show that we are meeting our targets, if we are reading the newspaper or checking
Any temptation to remove a member of the team "because we could do better" is fought with numbers, statistics, performance charts, etc (we are geeks for bunnies sakes, statistics should be our greatest assets when dealing with bean counters).
You did not try to organize yourself, organization is an attitude with a method.
Boxing things in drawers it is not.
If you are not willing to use organizational techniques, fair enough, but you are less productive than if you would use organizational and time keeping techniques that are tried and tested.
But I am an atheist now, and very happy about it, thank you very much.
I have to say that the wacko things some of you guys are told about Catholicism are so far departed from the truth that is not worth my effort debunking them (somebody else already had a go, doing quite a good job at it).
I would just add that when one religion talks about another one you are listening to biased, uncompromissing propaganda.
I scrutinize very carefully any kind of propaganda that is clearly biased. Are you grown up enough to scrutinize the one received from institutions that you trust?
Not joking.
A meaningful regular activity outside the office is by far the best antidote to feel constrained in such a good position.
It is pricipled people that help to set the agenda. Stallman, with all his failings (that very often amount to how inflexible he is regarding his principles. Well, duh!), has been a pretty consistent presence in the IT world.
His opinions don't change according to how the wind blows (which can't ba said of many companies that jumed into the OSS bandwagon) and has been instrumental to the advance of the idea of open free software.
Why should we ignore somebody with such a good tracked record?
.... Ecuador != Equator ....
For the sake of argument, lets say I have a CD from company X with the latest and greatest Operating System in the known universe. It sells for 45 bucks.
I am copying it now. OK, the copy is finished.
Now smart cookie, did my action diminished X's bank account total?
I rest my case.