Even if the computer is yours, its still their network, bandwidth, and physical space. This means they are bending over backwards to even let you go to personal websites like your bank.
No, going to any website I want is what I can do by default on any internet-connected PC.
What the employer is doing is going out of their way - or "bending over backwards", if you prefer - to prevent employees from doing this things.
You have zero expectation of privacy at work. Do you think it's fair to sit on Facebook all day while at work or even pay your bills?
This is what's called a false dichotomy (or non-sequitur, if you want to get fancy).
Mostly I hear questions like this at work from people who are just getting their first job and who seem to think they have this sense of entitlement with regards to everything. Face it, the job market sucks right now and for anyone just entering it, you're at the mercy of employers who have the luxury right now of many more qualified applicants than open positions. If you're using their computer and their network, you play by their rules. You are a wage slave just like all the other people in your building.
Indeed, and it is this disgraceful attitude many employers bring to the table that forces the creation of regulations to make them act in a more reasonable and acceptable fashion.
With regards to whether you should quit your job, only you can answer that. I can tell you there are plenty of good places to work that don't do anything like that, but only you can answer whether or not it's worth working at one of them.
If the answer is basic dignity or financial ruin, then the real problem lies in the question.
Sorry, but I work my ass off. While it is not my job to make sure you do yours, it does piss me off to no end when somebody spends the majority of their day screwing off on Facebook/Twitter/Whatever.
Then, if they are not doing their job, tell their boss to fire them.
It does not give you justification for snooping on the vast majority of people who are able to balance their work duties and personal lives.
seriously, the sense of entitlement is a little annoying
I know what you mean. Personally, I'm disgusted that my decadent coworkers don't even understand how fortunate they are that our glorious <strike>Lord</strike>employer even has running water at work, let alone allows them such outrageous luxuries as furniture and air conditioning.
The sense of entitlement in the modern worker is out of control. I've heard some of them believe they should be provided not only toilets, but toilet paper, without any stipend being taken from their wage at all !
Browse your porn (or whatever it is you do that you don't want your employer watching) from your smartphone. Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do.
No.
Fuck 'em if they can't handle the idea people have lives outside of work and sometimes need to deal with those lives.
Morally bankrupt employers who cannot handle the fact that their employees won't spend every second labouring deserve nothing more than contempt.
Which is still more respect than subservient scum like you should be shown.
The technical argument for combining flash and spinning media in a single package is weak to nonexistent. It is far better to have the devices at different levels in the storage hierarchy separate and fully under control of the OS and applications, and have both devices be cheaper. The use case for spinning media in portable devices is vanishing fast and increasingly you will only see spinning media in online archive setups and huge databases. There is no advantage whatsoever to combining flash and spinning media in those setups, and only disadvantages like mismatched media lifetime.
The technical argument is as good (and the same) as the one supporting caching raid controllers.
I was talking about the PC side. Of course I know the Mac side had ADB ports, which were if anything more sophisticated than PS/2 (you could daisychain them). Without the suckaz attitude, the ADB ports would probably still be there on Macs, just like PS/2 ports are still there on desktop PCs.
Rubbish.
Just a couple of generations of machines with both ports would have seen ADB disappear a decade ago and been much more consumer friendly.
False. You need additional parts and expose a physical port on board in order to implement a port of any kind, which a) increases cost and b) increases chance of failure.
Legacy free boards are available for people who want them. Unsurprisingly, they rarely cost less (ie: the cost argument is bunk).
A failure in a component you are not using is irrelevant. Ie: the increasing chance of failure argument is bunk.
USB may have existed on PC's at that time, but there was little or nothing which used it. I remember buying (and still own) converters for serial-to-USB, parallel-to-USB etc for my Windows devices so they would work with my first iMac. PC's were still very much in the USB dark age at that time, and obtaining a device that worked without issues was difficult. Not impossible, but wow was USB a wasted port on PC's in those days. Even a Logitech QuickCam I bought around that time was parallel, not USB. Zip drives were still parallel or SCSI. Freaking Laplink cables were parallel or serial -- not USB.
Er, yeah, that's because the vast majority of PCs out there didn't have USB ports at that time.
Is it really that big a deal that Apple had a functional, working, production-ready USB first? Are you guys really measuring e-peens over this?
It's not a big deal to me. I am merely correcting a commonly made mistake. You seem to be the one getting worked up about PCs having USB ports before Macs, and the original claim I replied to about USB possibly being a "Macs only" port being wrong.
Without that "no-legacy-support-suckaz! attitude," we might have been stuck with PS/2 for 5-6 more years.
Macs never had PS/2 ports.
It is very difficult to get rid of bad old standards if you don't have that kind of willpower. Think about how long it took us to get rid of the bloody floppy port from PC motherboards! It looks like it's finally gone from new boards, but it was still there during Core 2 Duo days.
And unused on most of them, causing no harm whatsoever.
As others have noted, Windows 95 2.1's support for USB was only partial.
"Partial" is still infinitely more than "none".
And the iMac predates Windows 98 by a couple of months.
Original iMac released: May 6 1998. Windows 98 RTM: May 15 1998. Windows 98 Retail release: June 25 1998.
I also distinctly remember PC types poo-pooing the Useless Serial Bus in newsgroups, and even on Slashdot, until Windows 98 came out (upon which the PC types were able to enjoy the range of peripherals that the iMac triggered).
Right. Because in the 6 weeks between the widest dates above, the whole world changed to USB only.
If you really were reading newsgroups at that time, you'd be well aware that USB offered next to nothing over traditional connectivity on the PC for years after the iMac was released.
You realise that USB was an Intel standard that was pioneered exclusively on Macs, right?
If by "pioneered exclusively" you mean "available a year or two after it appeared on PCs", yes.
The only thing Apple "pioneered" with regards to USB - thanks to The Steve - was their (now standard procedure) no-legacy-support-suckaz! attitude by flipping straight from ADB to USB with no transition period.
No, it's my quite extensive experience. I've been using OS X since it was still a beta called Rhapsody (and Macs as a platform for even longer than that). I have half a dozen OSX-capable Macs in my house - ranging from a G3 (that's a _real_ "ancient Mac" in context, by the way, with specs still in the megabytes and megahertz magnitude) to a 27" i7 iMac - plus the ones I have influenced friends and family into purchasing and thus see fairly regularly as well.
I do not believe you because I've been using Macs long enough to have experienced just about every annoyance they can produce. OS X was an utter dog even on the fastest hardware Apple produced for the first ~3 years after its release, and remains sluggish on anything less than a well-specced G5, so to say you've never seen "pauses" in "a decade of use" is, at best, being very liberal with the truth.
Don't try and bullshit me about how OS X and Windows compare. I know better. That's why I don't believe you.
Those licenses use rights given to the author by copyright to enforce rules that are the opposite of ones intended by copyright law. If there was no copyright, those licenses would be unnecessary.
Completely arse-about-face. If there were no Copyright, "copyleft" licenses wouldn't be possible (well, practically possible, legal contracts between individuals could possibly achieve the same thing).
Without Copyright, copyleft licenses are just like BSD-style licenses. That is to say, they have no "teeth".
If you want the _results_ of a copyleft license (ie: legally enforced sharing of code) you need Copyright. No Copyright, no GPL.
But, I've NEVER seen OS X do that. In fact, I've only seen it "freeze" the cursor for a second or two (the worst "screen update" issue I've seen using OS X), and that only about four or five times in a decade of use. I've never seen it doing what you describe, or even anything remotely close.
Then MacOS should be objectively the best OS, as it has good desktop and usable command line. I dunno. I've never had a Mac, but I've been thinking about it.
It's not the "usable command line" that makes "some php and other code only available or work much better on Linux", it's because the vast majority of open source projects target Linux first and foremost - other platforms are nearly always second-class citizens.
Dabbling in OSS software outside of Linux (and even outside of popular Linux distros) is frequently an endeavour fraught with frustration and heartache.
Well I, for one, am at the edge of my seat to see if the rest of the world is as gullible as Australian technolgy consumers.
I guess you must have missed the part where consumer groups in Europe have also been attacking the "4G" label.
As far as Apple is concerned, I'm not sure that's as true as you believe it is. I'd like to see some proof of this. I can think of a lot of anecdotal evidence that strongly suggests otherwise. Hoodoo Gurus, Men at Work, and INXS were no where internationally until they came and chamed American consumers. Even The Beatles, for for that matter, weren't huge until they conquered America. The same is true of most artists, even Jimi Hendrix... toured the world before coming (back) to America and actually striking it big.
You mean they weren't big in America until they made it big in America ? Amazing !
Americans have a nasty habit of assuming just because something isn't popular there, it isn't popular anywhere else. Not to mention all your examples above are 20+ years old.
Yes, in America, it is the spender that is responsible for the spending: "buyer beware."
For the buyer to "beware", the seller must not misrepresent their product.
Your statements are tremendously prejudicial.
Because I think deceptive advertising should be stamped out ?
Frankly, I think it's time Apple completely ignored the AU market. They should do what Google did in China.... leave. If you want Apple to specifically design and make a device that is compatible with AU 4G networks, this is just about the worst way to convince them. You'll catch more flies with honey.
The point being missed here (other than the whole blatant lying part) is that "4G networks in Australia" and "4G networks in parts of the world that aren't the USA" are synonymous.
The USA is a big market, to be sure, but it's not as big as the rest of the world. The rest of the world all uses the same mobile phone networks, which are different to America's. On top of that, the rest of the world generally has actual consumer protection laws, unlike America. You lie about "4G" to Australia, you lie about "4G" to the rest of the world.
And here we see the deception of the Libertarian viewpoint distilled. It's ok to defraud your customers, so long as whatever you're saying can be considered true somewhere in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as you think your employer letting you deal with your life outside of work is a "perk", you're part of the problem.
No, going to any website I want is what I can do by default on any internet-connected PC.
What the employer is doing is going out of their way - or "bending over backwards", if you prefer - to prevent employees from doing this things.
This is what's called a false dichotomy (or non-sequitur, if you want to get fancy).
Indeed, and it is this disgraceful attitude many employers bring to the table that forces the creation of regulations to make them act in a more reasonable and acceptable fashion.
If the answer is basic dignity or financial ruin, then the real problem lies in the question.
Then, if they are not doing their job, tell their boss to fire them.
It does not give you justification for snooping on the vast majority of people who are able to balance their work duties and personal lives.
I know what you mean. Personally, I'm disgusted that my decadent coworkers don't even understand how fortunate they are that our glorious <strike>Lord</strike>employer even has running water at work, let alone allows them such outrageous luxuries as furniture and air conditioning.
The sense of entitlement in the modern worker is out of control. I've heard some of them believe they should be provided not only toilets, but toilet paper, without any stipend being taken from their wage at all !
No.
Fuck 'em if they can't handle the idea people have lives outside of work and sometimes need to deal with those lives.
Morally bankrupt employers who cannot handle the fact that their employees won't spend every second labouring deserve nothing more than contempt.
Which is still more respect than subservient scum like you should be shown.
The technical argument for combining flash and spinning media in a single package is weak to nonexistent. It is far better to have the devices at different levels in the storage hierarchy separate and fully under control of the OS and applications, and have both devices be cheaper. The use case for spinning media in portable devices is vanishing fast and increasingly you will only see spinning media in online archive setups and huge databases. There is no advantage whatsoever to combining flash and spinning media in those setups, and only disadvantages like mismatched media lifetime.
The technical argument is as good (and the same) as the one supporting caching raid controllers.
Since SSDs typically write slower than a spinning hard drive, what would be the point of caching writes on them??
They don't. THAT'S the point.
On the grand scale ? No. It completely perverts the whole idea of "investing" and encourages nothing but speculation.
Rubbish.
Just a couple of generations of machines with both ports would have seen ADB disappear a decade ago and been much more consumer friendly.
Legacy free boards are available for people who want them. Unsurprisingly, they rarely cost less (ie: the cost argument is bunk).
A failure in a component you are not using is irrelevant. Ie: the increasing chance of failure argument is bunk.
Er, yeah, that's because the vast majority of PCs out there didn't have USB ports at that time.
It's not a big deal to me. I am merely correcting a commonly made mistake. You seem to be the one getting worked up about PCs having USB ports before Macs, and the original claim I replied to about USB possibly being a "Macs only" port being wrong.
Macs never had PS/2 ports.
And unused on most of them, causing no harm whatsoever.
Which, as noted, is still infinitely more than "none".
However, this talk about semantics is ignoring the real point: at no stage was there ever any possibility of USB being "Apple exclusive" port.
"Partial" is still infinitely more than "none".
Original iMac released: May 6 1998. Windows 98 RTM: May 15 1998. Windows 98 Retail release: June 25 1998.
Right. Because in the 6 weeks between the widest dates above, the whole world changed to USB only.
If you really were reading newsgroups at that time, you'd be well aware that USB offered next to nothing over traditional connectivity on the PC for years after the iMac was released.
If by "pioneered exclusively" you mean "available a year or two after it appeared on PCs", yes.
The only thing Apple "pioneered" with regards to USB - thanks to The Steve - was their (now standard procedure) no-legacy-support-suckaz! attitude by flipping straight from ADB to USB with no transition period.
No, there wasn't.
Yes. That is to say, about a year before the first Mac to have builtin USB ports even shipped.
No, it's my quite extensive experience. I've been using OS X since it was still a beta called Rhapsody (and Macs as a platform for even longer than that). I have half a dozen OSX-capable Macs in my house - ranging from a G3 (that's a _real_ "ancient Mac" in context, by the way, with specs still in the megabytes and megahertz magnitude) to a 27" i7 iMac - plus the ones I have influenced friends and family into purchasing and thus see fairly regularly as well.
I do not believe you because I've been using Macs long enough to have experienced just about every annoyance they can produce. OS X was an utter dog even on the fastest hardware Apple produced for the first ~3 years after its release, and remains sluggish on anything less than a well-specced G5, so to say you've never seen "pauses" in "a decade of use" is, at best, being very liberal with the truth.
Don't try and bullshit me about how OS X and Windows compare. I know better. That's why I don't believe you.
Completely arse-about-face. If there were no Copyright, "copyleft" licenses wouldn't be possible (well, practically possible, legal contracts between individuals could possibly achieve the same thing).
Without Copyright, copyleft licenses are just like BSD-style licenses. That is to say, they have no "teeth".
If you want the _results_ of a copyleft license (ie: legally enforced sharing of code) you need Copyright. No Copyright, no GPL.
I don't believe you.
It's not the "usable command line" that makes "some php and other code only available or work much better on Linux", it's because the vast majority of open source projects target Linux first and foremost - other platforms are nearly always second-class citizens.
Dabbling in OSS software outside of Linux (and even outside of popular Linux distros) is frequently an endeavour fraught with frustration and heartache.
I guess you must have missed the part where consumer groups in Europe have also been attacking the "4G" label.
You mean they weren't big in America until they made it big in America ? Amazing !
Americans have a nasty habit of assuming just because something isn't popular there, it isn't popular anywhere else. Not to mention all your examples above are 20+ years old.
For the buyer to "beware", the seller must not misrepresent their product.
Because I think deceptive advertising should be stamped out ?
The point being missed here (other than the whole blatant lying part) is that "4G networks in Australia" and "4G networks in parts of the world that aren't the USA" are synonymous.
The USA is a big market, to be sure, but it's not as big as the rest of the world. The rest of the world all uses the same mobile phone networks, which are different to America's. On top of that, the rest of the world generally has actual consumer protection laws, unlike America. You lie about "4G" to Australia, you lie about "4G" to the rest of the world.
And here we see the deception of the Libertarian viewpoint distilled. It's ok to defraud your customers, so long as whatever you're saying can be considered true somewhere in the world.
The obvious solution being, of course, to fine business entities as a proportion of annual profits averaged over, say, the last 5 years.
As I mentioned in my original post, I own Macs - 3 of them to be precise.
Probably not, but that's because anyone who uses it will simply assume it will work.