This is not the case at all. In the last few years, MySQL has matured and more people have found out about PostgreSQL (in fact, PostgreSQL is probably the best kept secret OSS has to offer - it has a kick ass feature set and it's completely and utterly free). For a large amount of enterprise stuff, PostgreSQL is more than adequate and as a bonus, does not treat your data as garbage.
Anyone considering building some sort of database application has the option of spending a couple months (with change left over) from the money they would spend on an Oracle license, and invest it in learning PostgreSQL. At the current rate of developement, it will in all likelihood solve any future problem they could have. For free. No worries about licenses. Anyone in a startup where money is tight and time is cheap should be considering PostgreSQL. That's only partly true. PostgreSQL is a nice database for small businesses or even in larger companies or corporations for small to medium projects. You can save a bundle on Oracle licenses if you use Postgres wisely just like you can save a bundle on Red Hat Server licenses if you use Centos wisely. I'm not even going to get into the debate as to why I'd choose Postges over MySql since that discussion has a disappointing habit of degenerating into a flamewar. I have seen Postgres used numerous times in the Corp world and where it failed was usually in projects that went from small to very large and highly loaded with great speed. Basically it did not scale well. The problem was not so much the issue of missing features in Postgres since the feature set is growing at a steady pace, the problem was with stability. As the projects grew larger, the traffic went up and it became imperative that the database be available 24/7 with next to 0 down time Postgres didn't work out all that well because of stability issues. This will change as Postgres matures but at the moment developers should think hard about when they use Postgres instead of Oracle or some other high end database. In some situations it will work in others you will end up porting your Postgres system to a proprietary database after getting burned and changing databases in mid stream can be a bitch. You might want to do that because the proprietary product is more stable but even if it isn't the most important reasons would be that it comes with guaranteed vendor support and because there are plenty of Oracle Certified mercenaries you can bring in to help you an emergency. When you are loosing the equivalent of the price of a new server every few of hours or so because your database is down, the idea of throwing hardware, Oracle consultants and Oracle licenses at the problem, becomes less of an issue. In the end I think Postgres and other similar OSS database have the potential to do to the database market what Linux did to the *nix server market, it will eat up the low end niche of the market, especially when it grows the kind of support base Linux now has. At the moment the only support I can get for Postgres databases where I live and work is by advertising for people with experience and hope somebody bites, there are four companies here that hire out Oracle specialists as consultants and all offer 24/7 emergency services. The prices are obscene but it's comforting to know the option is available
As always this is my experience, your milage may vary.
Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE rdesktop Is better and it's also free. Of course you'll have to install the Apple development kit that comes with your computer and compile rdesktop (three commands IIRC and it takes less than 30 seconds, there used to be a bug in the makefile, they seem to have fixed that). The last time I downloaded rdesktop didn't come with a newbie proof GUI client and the only help is a the man page, which I suppose is a show-stopper for some people. You'll also probably have to modify the $PATH and $MANPATH variables since it installs to/usr/local by default.
BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it. Does not do enough things, that VI, Emacs or Eclipse can't do, for me to be willing to pay $125 for it. Those three alternatives are all free btw.
IChat AV - built-in to 10.4 Adium does several different chat protocols including MS Messenger and iChat and it's also free.
Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95 Fire up Terminal (Its in the/Applications/utilities folder), type: 'ftp', it comes with OS.X. I won't fault anybody for being reluctant to use the FTP functionality built into Finder since Finder sucks ass. Hopefully this will change with OS.X 10.5
Nota Bene - These are my personal opinions of these apps, your milage may vary.
That's a good point. Some dudes at sun with a bunch of schlubs in their underwear at home can figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out What kind of an animal is a 'schlub'? And why is it's preferred habitat the underwear of dudes@Sun.com? Perhaps the whole problem could be solved by breeding some more shlubs and setting them free in the underwear of dudes@Microsoft.com?
... maybe they could start peer reviewing/. titles too Nah.... We'd be much better off if the USPTO followed our example and started giving anonymous members of the public the ability to assign mod-points to patents. People could express their approval of a patent with ratings like: '+1 Innovative', '+1 Ingenious' while particularly silly patents would get a rating of: '+1 Funny'. As for disapproval, it could be expressed with ratings like: '-1 Prior Art' or the somewhat more forceful: '-1 WTF!?!' and let's not forget the indispensable: '-1 Patent troll'. Just imagine how much fun we could all have with a system like that!
If it doesn't affect you, not likely to make it in to a "thing that didn't work for me" article, is it? Reading that article brought back memories of Windows 98 and NT4. Like many other people at the time I was irritated by the instability of 98 and decided to install NT4 because I had heard it was more stable than 'old bluescreen'. I quickly found out that while the stability definitely was a lot better under NT4 (at least it was on my mini tower, other people's milage may have varied) there weren't any NT4 drivers for half the other stuff I had bought including my scanner, printer, modem and network card and many games also didn't get along all that well with NT4 so... after a couple of weeks of trying to get the thing to work.... no more NT4. Eventually Microsoft spat out Windows 2000 (aka. NT5) which was nothing to cheer over but at least it combined the promised increase in stability with broader hardware support. Unfortunately for MS, by then I was at Uni and running Linux.... It seems to me that this story will repeat it self for a lot of users for the first 6-12 months of Vista's life. Even if an average user buys a brand new PC with Vista pre-installed a lot of their old peripherals won't work and will require replacing and they can''t just go and buy any gizmo that takes their fancy and hook it up to their Vista box. After a year or so it probably won't matter any more, frugal computer users will stick with XP because they see no reason to shellout the extra cash. The broad masses will, however, take the hidden cost of the upgrade and use Vista while a handful of technologically adventurous Windows users will decide to try one of the two alternatives instead of Vista.
Was it a comfy chair? No... this time the 'Bald Avenger®' used a hand made Italian throwing chair (an excellent chocie) designed to fracture but not fatally shatter the skull of the target (aka. Mr. Dell) thus teaching him a lesson without causing permanent injury. Next time of course the gloves will come off... the Bald Avenger will hit Mr. Dell with the 'smirk of repentance' which will burn his soul out and send it to the deepest pit of Recycle-Bin-Hell where Clippy, the angel of darkness, will punish Mr. Dell for his disloyalty by driving him insane with a never ending flood of useless suggestions...
Disclaimer: The above message is intended to make absolutely no sense at all, if it failed in this the author would like to apologize in advance.
However, corporations and businesses in general are prone to using a lot of custom-designed software built by Windows-only outfits. Until that changes, Apple will have a hard time penetrating the corporation. There are also quite a few shops that operate Unix/Linux only, at least on the server side. My current employer has used various flavors of Unix servers more or less exclusively for decades and has been supplementing them with Linux for about 10 years. They still use Windows on desktops though and that includes the developers which interestingly enough has caused problems. The number of Windows workstations has, however, been changing over the last couple of years or so. Both Linux and OS.X laptops have been trickling into the development department with about 30% of the developers now running *nix desktops/laptops and 70% Windows, mostly for C/C++, Java and Perl development. If you are working with *nix based servers almost exclusively, the fact that your developers are not using Windows desktops/laptops actually has advantages in terms of development and administration. For example, the code you write and compile on and OS.X/Linux desktop/laptop will compile with few problems on AIX/HPUX/Solaris and even with cross platform tools like Java you bypass a number of problems. The trouble with OS.X/Linux workstations start with the Windows only Office and collaboration apps, things like Visio, Visual Basic enabled Excel files, Lotus Notes (yuk).... even Entourage does not replicate all the features of Outlook. I would not recommend OS.X or Linux machines as a replacements for regular Office worker's workstations unless you make the conscious decision to go all OSS throughout your company or organization regardless of the interoperability problems vis-a-vi the Windows world, as well as the retraining costs such a move will bring. However even if you do decide to keep Windows as the primary workstation for the office drones switching some of your *nix development teams OS.X or Linux desktops can actually make more sense than issuing them WinDells. That's my experience anyway.... of course other people's milage may vary.
It sounds like Germany has tried to regulate instead of solve the situation, and when the regulators are bought out (as with this 'let us build our own exclusive network' deal) the entire mechanism is pointless and the consumers don't benefit. <rant> The thing about Germany is that at the moment it's a country that is in dire need of radical economic and regulatory reform but as a leading politician from one of it's neighboring countries observed: "Economic reform is something the Germans seem to have a deep rooted primal fear of." Just take a look at the last elections in Germany, Social Democrats and Christian democrats in a coalition government. Either one on their own I can live with but a coalition is like putting a pack of hyenas in a pen with a pride of lions and expecting to have a quitet day at the Zoo. The Christ Democrats probably would have won the election, (If only because people thought that there was no way they could possibly f*ck things up any worse than Schröder did). Then Angela Merkel started talking about economic reform and deregulating the job market and the Social Democrats breathed a collective sigh of relief as their poll ratings went up again. Of course Stoiber's comments about the East Germans didn't help either, talk about putting your foot in your mouth! Basically Angela Merkel was right though, economic reform is something Germany desperately needs and the longer it is postponed the worse the transition will be. </rant>
Exactly. You don't see terrorist bombings in Norway, because Norway isn't sticking their collective noses in other peoples' business. Sure they do, Norwegian claims to fishing grounds in the North Atlantic are quite aggressive to the point of where you could classify them as a comic form of miniature Imperialism and they cause constant friction in Norway's diplomatic relations with it's neighbors. The reason you don't hear about armed clashes in the region is simply that North Atlantic costal states such as Russia, Norway and Iceland have long since abandoned such futile methods as conventional warfare for solving disputes about fish in favor of consuming large amounts of alcohol and then mooning each other from the bridge wings of their trawlers. The tactic gained popularity after it worked wonders against the destroyers and frigates of the Royal Navy during the cod wars of the 1950's and 70's.
You scare me... you know, first this is against kiddie porn, then terrorism, and in a not all-too-far future, it is for the war on tax evasion or for finding that Bittorrent files you have...
There should be limits on what can be done legally. And that script kiddie should be jailed, too. <rant> That's true, on the other hand you have to see things from law enforcement's point of view. I saw a documentary recently about child pornography. The reporters interviewed an FBI agent who is part of a task force that combats child-porn, child-prostitution and child-abuse. He described a case they have been working on for something like 2-3 years. It involves a tech savvy pedophile who regularly posts pictures of him self abusing a little girl in a pretty savage way. The FBI has no practical way of tracking him down if they stay within the strict framework of the law. This pedophile is clever enough to post his pictures in ways that ensure he can't be easily tracked, both the victim and he him self are disguised in such a way that they can't be recognized and there is nothing that is shown in any of the material he posts that can be used to narrow his location down any further than that he probably lives somewhere in the USA or Canada. Effectively the FBI has been doomed to watch this child growing up in the pictures they download off the net as it spends it's youth being savagely abused. I can understand why some law enforcement officers want us to allow them, under special circumstances of course, to employ precisely the kind of methods this hacked used. If we don't the odds favor many pedophiles in that they will probably get away with inflicting their perversions on innocent children and posting a record of that abuse on the Internet. I am fully aware of the abuse potential of allowing law-enforcement to hack computers as part of an investigation but I also deeply doubt that the vast majority of the law enforcement community is out to use such investigative tools as a stepping stone in their diabolical efforts to use Orwell's 1984 as a roadmap for creating a totalitarian surveillance state. The people we truly have to worry might rob us of our liberty will use hacking to further their cause regardless of whether the law allows it or not.
Oh... and I am sorry if I scared you even more. </rant>
Steve Jobs keeps making the stupid mistake of maximizing product quality over all else, when a smart business person understands that product quality is just one of many factors that must be balanced to maximize profits. I don't buy Macs because of their superior quality. I buy them becasue Apple computers tend to be comparatively well designed (at least the laptops are), the Apple desktop environment has better ergonomics than Windows (in my opinion, your milage may vary), personally I value the fact that OS.X is Unix based and Apple hardware tends to age better than many (but by no means all) PC computer brands, there are PC brands that do just as well as Apple. I don't think that Apple computers or products in general are insanely better quality than other products in the same price bracket. If you can accuse Apple of anything it is that they occasionally over design their products and to fall into the trap of sacrificing practicality and robustness for coolness of design.
Because my 72 year old mother can, and does, install programs herself in Windows. If it requires anything more complex than "double click on setup.exe" or "double click on the program icon when you save it", you've lost her completely and I have to tunnel in to her machine or make a 125 mile drive. He does have a point you know. The Windows 'setup.exe' installation system is hardly the ultimate... it has been improved upon and I see no reason to copy it just because it is familiar to Windows users. Amazing as it may seem people actually have problems with the Windows setup process, simple as it seems to the average nerd. How about the OS.X model of dragging and dropping an Application bundle to the "Applications" folder but leaving the installation package option open for advanced users? I have yet to meet a Windows user who had problems with that concept. The only question they ever have is: 'Is it really that easy?' If Linux were to copy any installation method I would prefer it to be an improved version of the OS.X drag-and-drop application bundle.
Regardless of the exact implementation details there should be an open Linux standard that all desktop suites and all Linux distros could implement on their own but that would provide inter-operability. It should be a system that makes provision for easy installation of GUI apps for novices (preferably drag-and-drop), and by packages for advanced users (both for GUI apps and command-line apps, drivers etc..). The standard should also require the ability to track any configuration files the app generates in standard system folders after installation. Of course the scheme would be a compromise that would sacrifice some functionality for standardization and there would always be distros that would recoil from it in disgust go the way their beliefs on OSS-puritanism dictate but at least it would give business oriented distro's like Suse and Red Hat some UI consistency.
Only if you pass O'Reilly Genuine Advantage. *hides* Yup.. and if you don't pass ORGA test the book will grow arms, legs and start throwing chairs at you.
Oh.... And you can come out of hiding now... your book passed the ORGA test this time.
The explanation may be that it's not the christian democrats who are the most important anti-porn force in Norway - it's the feminists. Perhaps Norvegian men should get together and form a Masculinist part that is in favor of more powerful cars, free beer, bigger boobs, more porn and the replacement of religion by sports-fandom? Of course, knowing the Feminists, the danger in this is that it might result in Norway pioneering an new form of civil war.
Yeah, if a woman was along with all those lost men, she would have asked for directions! Yup... and given what we know about the navigational skills of the human female they would have ended up settling in the Kerguelen Archipelago instead of China.
No, your goal is to not lose money from your employer while they are still your employer.:)
Being a professional and finishing up your projects is a good way to encourage goodwill should you choose to come back, and also to get good references. It would be nice if things really worked like that. I have been dropped into somebody else's half finished project plenty of times after that person left for another job at short notice. I suspect that in this case the guy would not have been sued if he hadn't gone to a direct competitor. I don't live in the USA but over here companies have also used lawsuits like this, or threatened to do so, to intimidate their employees into not switching jobs. Of course they reserved the right to fire the employee at a moments notice, after all, what could be more natural than expecting complete loyalty from the employee but at the same time reserving the right to treat him/her like a commodity? When this issue was finally tested in court in this country the employee was backed by lawyers form his trade-association/union and the case was shot down in court even though the employer had put a clause into the guy's contract. The clause apparently violated laws about freedom of employment. The former employer had to pay the costs of the proceedings so this threat has lost a lot of it's terror value on this side of the Atlantic. Of course laws may differ in the USA.... Personally I will treat an employer with no more respect I get from him. The better the employer the nicer I will be about quitting...
ROFL. Further, try cloning 15 of the things in a classroom and try to get Safari to work full stop... Eh?? The only problem I ever had with Safari is that some web apps (web-mail, version control systems, confguration interfaces, etc..) aren't certified for it which is easily solved by using Firefox in those few cases. For regular web surfing Safari works just fine except for a handful of sites created by developers who can't be bothered to test their site on IE+Windows because Firefox has such a 'small market share' [sic] anyway.
They're starting with the small ones, because we all know what would happen if they started with the big ones. It has been my experience that the bigger a company gets and the more money there is floating around the less the PHBs care about workstation OS licenses. It's the little companies who are more likely to try to pinch pennies by cheating on Windows licenses and software licenses in general. When a company gets to a certain size the cost of Workstation OS licenses tend to take second place to the licenses they have to buy for much more complex production software products where the costs can rapidly spiral into huge sums of money that can dwarf what ever they are paying for Windows workstation OS licenses. Most of the larger companies I have worked for actually made regular efforts to check the licensing status of their various departments and paid up the Workstation OS licenses without giving it much thought. Most of the effort went into wringing the last bit of value out of the obscenely expensive production software.
Just wait until they merge and become Skynet. Then we'll really be in trouble. ... And since most of these computers run Windows I suppose Skynet will have a cybernetic version of Steve Ballmer's personality? Wow.... this raises so many questions.... Is it possible to make a chair shaped atomic warhead? Will the Terminators look like Microsoft sales reps?.....
I recently had to fix a HP laptop with a reinstall of XP they'd done only 1 month ago (from the supplied CDs and the XP key stuck to it) and yes WGA failed because it couldn't update itself with the latest version. It wouldn't login without a 5 second timer on the WGA warning and many, many popups. It looked like spyware and other nasties were preventing some.dlls registering and this was stopping WGA from running. But the stupid thing is that because of this, XP couldn't download windows updates. Had to start again with a re-format and re-install. I can't imagine that this would be an isolated case. ...it depends on your point of view. If you are a Windows user your story doubtless evokes a lot of empathy from your fellows. If one is a Linux or OS.X user the original comment as well as your own story is quite simply funny because we don't have this problem so we can afford to indulge in a little Schadenfreude.
I'm sick of being altruistic while selfish bastards get all the money. Why are you complaining? Now that you know which portion of your brain you have to get a doctor to remove your altruism problem should be easily fixed. A glorious career for you as a selfish, greedy, backstabbing bastard is practically assured to follow!!!
I am not sure the question makes sense. Engineering is about solving problems. That isn't a rote field, but teaching the solving of problems is done by example. Ideally you want to educate somebody able to solve a novel problem. <rant> The problem is that engineering students are spoon-fed book-learning in the traditional system but they are rarely forced to apply that learning to solving a real problem that accurately simulates what they'll be expected to do when they start working for a living. Engineering studies should try to compromise between the traditional spoon-feeding of knowledge and some way of simulating what you will do most of the time in the real world which is solving problems using the book-knowledge but in an economical way that results in low costs and labor times but still incorporates enough inspired design work to make the product easy to maintain and scalable when it is time to develop it further. I'm a software developer myself and I see all to many engineers who threw away all sorts of things they learned in design classes in school such as UML, in favor of (badly) writing undocumented crap-code; and keep in mind that writing crappy code *badly* is quite an achievement. I'd for example like to see a teaching system in say, Software Engineering or Comp. Sci. where students are made to develop some software during the first term and then develop it further the second term adding features and complexity. They would quickly realize as the project becomes more complex why things like clean, well structured code UML diagrams code documentation and good initial design are important. That way if they wrote a crappy app during first term just to pass the term it would come back to bite them. That's what happens in the real world if you do bad design it bites you in the balls later.
The problem of spoon-feeding people knowledge is actually much more widespread than just Engineering courses. Even at primary school level kids are spoon-fed mathematics and physics knowledge but rarely given the task of solving real world problems that would make them realize that this knowledge is actually good for something. I served mathematics like a jail sentence until my first year of Engineering school when I was finally put in a position where I had to actually use it to do interesting things which made me realize that this 'boring crap' was actually pretty useful stuff that's used absolutely everywhere. </rant>
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Anyone considering building some sort of database application has the option of spending a couple months (with change left over) from the money they would spend on an Oracle license, and invest it in learning PostgreSQL. At the current rate of developement, it will in all likelihood solve any future problem they could have. For free. No worries about licenses. Anyone in a startup where money is tight and time is cheap should be considering PostgreSQL. That's only partly true. PostgreSQL is a nice database for small businesses or even in larger companies or corporations for small to medium projects. You can save a bundle on Oracle licenses if you use Postgres wisely just like you can save a bundle on Red Hat Server licenses if you use Centos wisely. I'm not even going to get into the debate as to why I'd choose Postges over MySql since that discussion has a disappointing habit of degenerating into a flamewar. I have seen Postgres used numerous times in the Corp world and where it failed was usually in projects that went from small to very large and highly loaded with great speed. Basically it did not scale well. The problem was not so much the issue of missing features in Postgres since the feature set is growing at a steady pace, the problem was with stability. As the projects grew larger, the traffic went up and it became imperative that the database be available 24/7 with next to 0 down time Postgres didn't work out all that well because of stability issues. This will change as Postgres matures but at the moment developers should think hard about when they use Postgres instead of Oracle or some other high end database. In some situations it will work in others you will end up porting your Postgres system to a proprietary database after getting burned and changing databases in mid stream can be a bitch. You might want to do that because the proprietary product is more stable but even if it isn't the most important reasons would be that it comes with guaranteed vendor support and because there are plenty of Oracle Certified mercenaries you can bring in to help you an emergency. When you are loosing the equivalent of the price of a new server every few of hours or so because your database is down, the idea of throwing hardware, Oracle consultants and Oracle licenses at the problem, becomes less of an issue. In the end I think Postgres and other similar OSS database have the potential to do to the database market what Linux did to the *nix server market, it will eat up the low end niche of the market, especially when it grows the kind of support base Linux now has. At the moment the only support I can get for Postgres databases where I live and work is by advertising for people with experience and hope somebody bites, there are four companies here that hire out Oracle specialists as consultants and all offer 24/7 emergency services. The prices are obscene but it's comforting to know the option is available
As always this is my experience, your milage may vary.
Nota Bene - These are my personal opinions of these apps, your milage may vary.
figure out the various office formats and save their docs to them. Why can't MS work that out What kind of an animal is a 'schlub'? And why is it's preferred habitat the underwear of dudes@Sun.com? Perhaps the whole problem could be solved by breeding some more shlubs and setting them free in the underwear of dudes@Microsoft.com?
... maybe they could start peer reviewingDisclaimer: The above message is intended to make absolutely no sense at all, if it failed in this the author would like to apologize in advance.
The thing about Germany is that at the moment it's a country that is in dire need of radical economic and regulatory reform but as a leading politician from one of it's neighboring countries observed: "Economic reform is something the Germans seem to have a deep rooted primal fear of." Just take a look at the last elections in Germany, Social Democrats and Christian democrats in a coalition government. Either one on their own I can live with but a coalition is like putting a pack of hyenas in a pen with a pride of lions and expecting to have a quitet day at the Zoo. The Christ Democrats probably would have won the election, (If only because people thought that there was no way they could possibly f*ck things up any worse than Schröder did). Then Angela Merkel started talking about economic reform and deregulating the job market and the Social Democrats breathed a collective sigh of relief as their poll ratings went up again. Of course Stoiber's comments about the East Germans didn't help either, talk about putting your foot in your mouth! Basically Angela Merkel was right though, economic reform is something Germany desperately needs and the longer it is postponed the worse the transition will be.
</rant>
There should be limits on what can be done legally. And that script kiddie should be jailed, too. <rant>
That's true, on the other hand you have to see things from law enforcement's point of view. I saw a documentary recently about child pornography. The reporters interviewed an FBI agent who is part of a task force that combats child-porn, child-prostitution and child-abuse. He described a case they have been working on for something like 2-3 years. It involves a tech savvy pedophile who regularly posts pictures of him self abusing a little girl in a pretty savage way. The FBI has no practical way of tracking him down if they stay within the strict framework of the law. This pedophile is clever enough to post his pictures in ways that ensure he can't be easily tracked, both the victim and he him self are disguised in such a way that they can't be recognized and there is nothing that is shown in any of the material he posts that can be used to narrow his location down any further than that he probably lives somewhere in the USA or Canada. Effectively the FBI has been doomed to watch this child growing up in the pictures they download off the net as it spends it's youth being savagely abused. I can understand why some law enforcement officers want us to allow them, under special circumstances of course, to employ precisely the kind of methods this hacked used. If we don't the odds favor many pedophiles in that they will probably get away with inflicting their perversions on innocent children and posting a record of that abuse on the Internet. I am fully aware of the abuse potential of allowing law-enforcement to hack computers as part of an investigation but I also deeply doubt that the vast majority of the law enforcement community is out to use such investigative tools as a stepping stone in their diabolical efforts to use Orwell's 1984 as a roadmap for creating a totalitarian surveillance state. The people we truly have to worry might rob us of our liberty will use hacking to further their cause regardless of whether the law allows it or not.
Oh... and I am sorry if I scared you even more.
</rant>
Regardless of the exact implementation details there should be an open Linux standard that all desktop suites and all Linux distros could implement on their own but that would provide inter-operability. It should be a system that makes provision for easy installation of GUI apps for novices (preferably drag-and-drop), and by packages for advanced users (both for GUI apps and command-line apps, drivers etc..). The standard should also require the ability to track any configuration files the app generates in standard system folders after installation. Of course the scheme would be a compromise that would sacrifice some functionality for standardization and there would always be distros that would recoil from it in disgust go the way their beliefs on OSS-puritanism dictate but at least it would give business oriented distro's like Suse and Red Hat some UI consistency.
Oh.... And you can come out of hiding now... your book passed the ORGA test this time.
Being a professional and finishing up your projects is a good way to encourage goodwill should you choose to come back, and also to get good references. It would be nice if things really worked like that. I have been dropped into somebody else's half finished project plenty of times after that person left for another job at short notice. I suspect that in this case the guy would not have been sued if he hadn't gone to a direct competitor. I don't live in the USA but over here companies have also used lawsuits like this, or threatened to do so, to intimidate their employees into not switching jobs. Of course they reserved the right to fire the employee at a moments notice, after all, what could be more natural than expecting complete loyalty from the employee but at the same time reserving the right to treat him/her like a commodity? When this issue was finally tested in court in this country the employee was backed by lawyers form his trade-association/union and the case was shot down in court even though the employer had put a clause into the guy's contract. The clause apparently violated laws about freedom of employment. The former employer had to pay the costs of the proceedings so this threat has lost a lot of it's terror value on this side of the Atlantic. Of course laws may differ in the USA.... Personally I will treat an employer with no more respect I get from him. The better the employer the nicer I will be about quitting...
I recently had to fix a HP laptop with a reinstall of XP they'd done only 1 month ago (from the supplied CDs and the XP key stuck to it) and yes WGA failed because it couldn't update itself with the latest version. It wouldn't login without a 5 second timer on the WGA warning and many, many popups.
It looked like spyware and other nasties were preventing some
...it depends on your point of view. If you are a Windows user your story doubtless evokes a lot of empathy from your fellows. If one is a Linux or OS.X user the original comment as well as your own story is quite simply funny because we don't have this problem so we can afford to indulge in a little Schadenfreude.
The problem is that engineering students are spoon-fed book-learning in the traditional system but they are rarely forced to apply that learning to solving a real problem that accurately simulates what they'll be expected to do when they start working for a living. Engineering studies should try to compromise between the traditional spoon-feeding of knowledge and some way of simulating what you will do most of the time in the real world which is solving problems using the book-knowledge but in an economical way that results in low costs and labor times but still incorporates enough inspired design work to make the product easy to maintain and scalable when it is time to develop it further. I'm a software developer myself and I see all to many engineers who threw away all sorts of things they learned in design classes in school such as UML, in favor of (badly) writing undocumented crap-code; and keep in mind that writing crappy code *badly* is quite an achievement. I'd for example like to see a teaching system in say, Software Engineering or Comp. Sci. where students are made to develop some software during the first term and then develop it further the second term adding features and complexity. They would quickly realize as the project becomes more complex why things like clean, well structured code UML diagrams code documentation and good initial design are important. That way if they wrote a crappy app during first term just to pass the term it would come back to bite them. That's what happens in the real world if you do bad design it bites you in the balls later.
The problem of spoon-feeding people knowledge is actually much more widespread than just Engineering courses. Even at primary school level kids are spoon-fed mathematics and physics knowledge but rarely given the task of solving real world problems that would make them realize that this knowledge is actually good for something. I served mathematics like a jail sentence until my first year of Engineering school when I was finally put in a position where I had to actually use it to do interesting things which made me realize that this 'boring crap' was actually pretty useful stuff that's used absolutely everywhere.
</rant>