Good question. It seems to make more sense that you are dealing with the merchant and not the manufacturer, at that point. That contract would be with whoever you are purchasing from, which is most like a store. They would've probably purchased from a wholesale channel vendor, who likely purchased from the manufacturer.
Anything has to be made clear unless it is part of law. If you don't present the contract term, there is no chance for you to dispute that term. If all they present is a price, then that's the only term that you're agreeing to.
That is part of why people dispute the legality of EULAs, this new "box-wrap" license, and other things. If you can't see the terms ahead of time, how can you reasonably be bound by them?
In other words, the question can't really be answered, right now. That's part of what the story is about, and there will be appeals and such about it. It seems to me that this is another circumstance that, by all rights, should not be legal under existing law.
Depending on what you're doing, the resolutions can be different things. The current common standard resolutions are:
NTSC = 720x480
PAL = 720x576
However, NTSC can be 640x480 or 720x540. PAL can also be 720x480 or 760x570. Both standards have room for pixel clipping (ie: NTSC can really be 648x486) and such.
Both standards are for interlaced video. TVs are 30frame/s (~60 field/s) devices. Until you get into the HDTV 'p' resolutions, everything is interlaced for TVs.
Yup, you're right. I hadn't believed that a purchase was considered a legal contract. It seems that as far as purchases go, only certain value and certain types of property require a written contract.
Of all the ways to be told you're wrong, having someone actually prove it is very appreciated!
I still don't agree with the Lexmark method, as it is represented by the article at least. Once I purchase something, I can do with it as I will, unless forbidden by law. (I'm considering contract as a form of law.) If they say that I must return it to them when I'm done, then that I wouldn't have issue with. So sending it to a remanufacturer would be right out, unless they are returning that same cartridge to you. If they want the no-refill case, then they should need to alter their arrangement so that you are not taking ownership of the cartridge.
That's a sale; you are exchanging currency for a product. However, a sale does not constitute a contract. The result of a sale is that you have taken ownership of that product, and the merchant has taken ownership of your currency. It's a shortcut to direct barter.
If they accept your payment for a product, and then refuse to provide you the product, they have committed fraud.
I don't know where you got the idea that you need a contract for this.
If you signed no contract, there exists no contract. By that right I can say that by reading this comment, you are required to respond. It makes no more sense than what you're saying
If Dell or Lexmark wants the cartridge back, they can either have you sign the contract, or offer some other incentive. Saying they will refund you when you return the cartridge, or give you a discount on your next cartridge is a method that actually works.
Their current method is stupid, guaranteed to fail, and, despite this idiotic judge's ruling, has no basis in actual law.
I wish I could get more people to use LaTeX, myself. We use all sorts of inapproriate formats for things, and a lot of what gets created in my workplace gets published. I was working on getting a few to use LyX, but then I had to go put out a bunch of small fires, and I haven't been back to it in a while.
We actually prepare a 150 page annual publication in Word, then save it as PDF, then have it typeset, then printed. Ick.
The format is, in theory, compatible. They're all bloated OLE memory dump based files.
Moving from Windows to Mac can screw it up, having different printers can screw it up, and sometimes one version of Word just decides that it doesn't *like* that file from another version. Sometimes Word can't open files that it created itself. Sometimes different versions will render completely different.
Hell, sometimes you have to open a Word doc in OpenOffice, save it, and then go back to Word. If you ever open a document and it comes up blank, Word probably decided it's having a bad day. Try the OOo trick and it comes back.
Basically, OOo is more version compatible with Word docs than Word is.
Also, don't forget the new Office format is XML. That makes it incompatible with all other versions of Office.
I've been using one called MUNIS for a while. It's not perfect, but it is very complete and mature. However, it's also sort of targetted at the public sector.
Their data is stored in an Informix database, by default, and it runs on quite a few platforms. Including Linux, Windows, Mac, and UNIX. It *can* use any SQL database you want, though they push Informix.
You can already do that, though. You could use any number of commercial tools, or you can use MS products like NetMeeting. A lot of software does application sharing. Worst case, you use the *telephone* and something like VNC.
This is a non-issue. The only things that will come of this is more sloppy MS programming, a whole giant heap of security problems, and another feature that's barely used, but adds 30MB to the distribution, and 10MB of RAM use.
I hope these kind of lies on MS' part does not make Mass. sway. I'm pushing open formats through in my town, and having the State do the same makes it a whole lot easier.
No, it's still not theft. If I went to your house, plugged into your network, and used it, that would be theft. If I connect to your webserver and download the same file repeatedly, I would be a jerk, but I wouldn't be stealing.
You cannot steal something offered freely and publicly. If someone manages to slam your link and maxes out some hosting company's bandwidth cap on you, then that sucks. If you don't want someone to be able to do that, either use technological means to prevent it, or don't offer it publicly.
It's like if I put out a bowl of candy on a little table on the sidewalk. There are no signs that say "you may only take one", just a bowl of candy. Some people take none, some one, some a handful, and maybe you get some jerk that eats half the bowl. It happens and that's kind of a shame, but that jerk didn't *steal* the candy, he was just being a jerk.
Linking to a graphic on a webserver is the same thing as linking to a HTML file. If you don't want someone doing it, then don't offer it.
There are ads both because some people recognised a place to make a profit, and some people try to offset the cost of their publicly available services. Membership makes a site not public, so they don't really have a place an argument about public content.
Hotlinking is the same exact procedure as what you did to link the content on your site. Someone puts an embed, img, or whatever in some HTML, and the UA retrieves the content. The only difference between what *you* say is fine, and what *you* say is theft is the location of that HTML file.
So it's fine for you to link to the stuff, but not for me? Well shit, then you better not put it on the internet, or you better hope I'm nice enough to heed your invisible request to not link to your content. Most people out there won't link to your stuff if you ask nicely for them not to. That's still only "most", and you can't change the view of the other people. All you can do is try to prevent them from doing it.
Anyway, the point is that nobody can "steal" your bandwidth by downloading content that you made publically available. You're giving it away, for free, and people are using it, for free. That's the way this whole thing works.
In any system there are jerks that go and try to screw it up for everyone else; this is all that's happening. You can try to stop the jerks from doing it, or you can pack up and go home. But it still doesn't make it theft.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to recommend programs with names like Firefox, Thunderbird, and worst of all, GIMP? People think that you messing with them, and others see a program with a name like that installed, and cause quite a commotion.
They're all good programs, and I do recommend them to people, but it's making adoption quite difficult for some of them.
Here are a few other programs that *really* should rename themselves: GRUB, Slackware, LyX, LaTeX, and countless others. So many of them are wonderful programs that are having an absolutely amount of difficulty being deployed and recommended simply because of names with negative or offensive connotations.
I think you've hit the crux of the issue. Nobody did anything illegal; there was no theft of any type. The problem was the complete lack of manners. Nobody asked to use the game, nobody said there was a problem with it, there was no communication at all.
You see this kind of thing everywhere. There is no politeness, no manners. People don't hold doors, help out with flat tires, or check up on their neighbors. Everyone acts like they shouldn't care about any other person. It makes the world a lonely and depressing place when most people are living that way.
So, according to you, linking without permission is stealing. It doesn't matter who links to who because it's all the same thing. I can link to Slashdot, but I'm not stealing anything. Some other site links to me, and that's not a problem, either.
Also, visiting your website without permission is stealing. I didn't ask if I could use your bandwidth, so it's theft, right?
You can't special case everything based on what you are allowed to do, and what everyone else is allowed to do. You put up a webserver, which means that you are offering a public resource, including the content and bandwidth required to supply the content. Whether the visitor is some random person, or someone pointed there by a company, is irrelevant. They're all visitors to a public resource that you intentionally made available.
If he didn't want people being able to link to his content, then he shouldn't have publically published the content. It's as simple as that.
All that's happened here is that some webmaster was rude, and some other webmaster was rude in return.
Or maybe, he put up the slaughterhouse pictures to screw with the burger company. That seems to be the most likely answer in this.
It was rude to link to the game without asking, and it was rude to put up the pictures the way he did. I'd say the latter is less rude than the former, but whatever.
If you put it on your publically accessible web server, and let everyone get the file, then yes, it is public. Your bandwidth bill is kind of just too bad for you. You made it a public resource by offering content for public consumption.
You're being the typical "I can't understand the difference between depriving someone of property, and duplicating an infinite resource" type of person. If you steal a TV, now the store doesn't have the TV. If someone camps on your lawn to admire the lawn gnome, they are on *your lawn* and that means you can't be there.
The real world is different from the internet. They are not the same, you cannot use this form of analogy and make any sense.
If you don't want people to be able to use your bandwidth, then don't offer public services. Otherwise, people accessing your publicly available files is your problem.
That's not theft, that's you being ignorant and part of the problem. If you publish something on the web, you are allowing people to link to it. That's just how it works, and it's how it was intended to work. You don't like it, and that's tough for you. Don't publish on the web, then.
As for his files on his server, what I choose to do with my files on my server is my business, too. And one of the things I can decide to do is place a line of text in one of *my* files that causes the site visiter to download one of *his* files. Still my files on my server, and his files on his server. According to *yours own* logic, that makes what Fuddruckers did just peachy.
Windows dropped the POSIX and OS/2 subsystems, anyway. They haven't been in there since Win2000, I believe. They certainly aren't there in WinXP/2k3.
I always hated going from doing UNIX programming to Windows programming. They have overly complicated ways of doing the most simple things. For example, getting a socket you can't just do the normal socket procedure. You first have to make a WinSock call to set up the socket, then all the normal BSD calls can use it.
IT is an infrastructure department. Their job is to keep everything running, maintain data integrity, and enforce the policies that are set down. The legal department is completely different. They *must* disclose the reason for a legal action, and if they just tell you "no, you can't" then you don't know how to proceed to rectify the situation. With IT, there is no situation like this; you are given a tool and associated software, along with the policy relating to it's use.
Again, IT is *not* a generic service department, it's an infrastructure support department. Part of what many IT departments do is support people in the use of the equipment. Your job as an IT department is to do what your employer tells you to do. This means keeping everything running and enforcing policy.
You're right that it isn't IT Vs. Users. However, part of the job of IT is to enforce policy. If the users circumvent that policy, then IT has to do something about it. You can certianly *help* by explaining the why of the policies, but it isn't your job to defend it. If they don't like it, they can deal with the chain of command, otherwise they can deal.
I have *never* seen IT policy change like the winds, and I certainly don't change my IT policies lightly, either. They evolve to take into account new issues. Sometimes you have to amend them because of new tech, sometimes because of new problems, etc. Sometimes changes come from upper management, and then even IT doesn't get to do anything but enforce it.
It sounds to me like you just have never been in a position to deal with policy on the enforcement side.
There *are* perfectly logical reasons for why those policies. It is not the job of IT to explain those reasons; it is the job of IT to do the IT-related work. If you want to know why a policy is what it is, you can try to ask, or you can try to find out. The IT people are probably too busy to sit there and try to explain all of this to a layman that refuses to even attempt to learn anything on their own.
Really, it doesn't matter what the users want. An IT manager should *care* what they want, and form policy around it. However, if you do what the users want, you have an infrastructure that doesn't work, has no security, and can never be maintained. That means you have to tell users to "stuff it", to a point.
You follow the policies of your workplace because those are the conditions of working there. If you disagree, you say something. If it is perceived as a problem (ie: enough people complained), and a change is deemed required, then policy will get changed.
I think you just missed the difference that I intended between !, *, and -. !=important, *=nice, -=whatever/already solved.
Accounts: Admin/User isn't perfect, but that is largely a result of application software trying to write things to the wrong places (ie: HKLM or Program Files). Take a look at http://nonadmin.editme.com/ if you don't know about it already.
FUS: FUS is generally unnecessary. You can do almost everything with "Run As", and the worst problem I've had with it was solved by "Run As"ing cmd, and then opening iexplore or whatever and doing permissions, etc. I never have to log out a user unless I'm rebooting the machine, or trying to get rid of that damned Outlook desktop icon.
Imaging: The other poster on this comment explained that well. It's really just not a big problem to begin with.
Recovery Discs: I have a Linux boot disk that resets passwords and does Registry manipulation. I have recovery console CDs that fix more serious issues. Anything that takes more than 15 or 20 minutes is more quickly solved by reimaging the machine.
Shell: I agree, having a better shell in Windows won't make me complain. MS just isn't adding anything that isn't already available. This is a user desktop machine, so this isn't important.
Scheduler: Also agreed, improvements are welcome. It just isn't a real issue that they are solving that is worth the OS upgrade. We're still talking about a user desktop, so this doesn't matter.
You might find them useful, so you will probably buy Vista. Many, many other people see this update as solving nothing that isn't already solved. That's really what Vista is... just an update. I'm not wasting time, money, and energy doing a round of MS updates, along with all the massive headaches new MS software always comes with, unless I get something truly good out of it.
I'm downplaying all those updates because they *really* don't improve Windows very much. They certainly don't offer anything that makes the upgrade worth the time, let alone the price tag.
I'm not sure why any of those are that earth shattering. I have almost all of that right now, and can get the rest if I wanted to.
As a network admin with Win2k/XP:
-Users don't run as Administrator by default in a domain -Fast switching isn't useful in most domains !Better error logging is always nice !Diagnostics are nice *You can do system images for fairly disparate hardware already, but not completely different. -You should already have firewalls -There are already public recovery disks -UPS/Building backup power, and you're not using suspend/hibernate anyway -You can already do advanced management -You can already get real shells *I'm sure a more advanced task scheduler is useful _somewhere_ -PC remote management with a web server? Why? -WRP - The users aren't admin, they shouldn't be able to change anything important already -WDS - You already have imaging and remote install services
AJAX is definitely a bit hackish on top of HTML. After all, HTML is designed to be hypertext markup, not presentation format. However, the user already has the browser, so using making use of what they already have is great. You can also drive the backend in a much more flexible manner. If you could just code to XHTML and CSS2 and know that most browsers supported all the tags, your life would be much easier.
This shouldn't surprise you, really. You're trying to emulate a user interface using a document with scripting capability. If you can pull it off, then you maintain a lot of the too often overlooked things about the web. You can do all the screen scraping, indexing, etc without going crazy. You can manipulate everything about your information with text parsers, which is extremely useful.
Flash isn't without its place, but to start coding your site using just Flash is a mistake. I am not about to argue that client/server will die, conversely, I think it's the right way of doing many things. I just also think Flash is the wrong way to do client/server.
I have a lot of reasons to dislike Flash. Some are because of things like the vendor controlled format and the restrictive licensing. I happen to think that we should be moving *to* completely open, non-proprietary formats, not moving off of them. Others are the serious abuse of Flash that many people do. The Flash menues when you could do that with HTML/CSS, embedding your site content in Flash, obfuscating the locations, etc.
Flash is not the "best way" to create web apps. It is simply one of the ways to do so. Any design technique that locks out (by the Flash license, by lack of viewer, by lack of all html readers having a reader, etc) a significant amount of the web is not the best way. The difference between things like AJAX, HTML forms, and Flash is that AJAX works on almost everything, including screen reader systems, HTML forms works on all but the very first browsers, and Flash works on IE, Mozilla, and those few browsers that emulate one of their plugin interfaces. That means Flash is the least likely one to work.
As another poster pointed out, Flash breaks everything that made the web the web. You remove accessibility completely, you remove search completely, you remove UA controlled presentations completely. Part of the "appeal" of Flash is even to actively prevent people from getting the SWF file offline. But hey, we don't need useful markup, screen readers, offline storage, searching, font scaling, search engines, or anything else - because bad web apps programmers and incompetent site designers have decided that Flash is the next messiah. Here's a good for you, do you think Google would work if everything was some stupid Flash-based site? (Hey, lets index hundreds of millions of sites that use vector graphics for all their text! That should be doable, if we have a few hundred supercomputers, excellent programmers, and most people use the same technique - yeah!)
FWIW, I agressively avoid Flash only sites. The format has its place, but creating sites and web apps are not that place. I also avoid sites that have Flash sound, Flash menues, heavy Flash advertising, or that place all their content in Flash. Learn to write HTML instead of half-assed Flash sites (and by half-assed, I mean sites written in Flash).
Anyway, laptops are PCs that are also "mobile devices". The license at the time the article was submitted prohibited any "mobile device", which would thereby prohibit laptops.
You are right that MM isn't stupid. They managed to take a niche product and get it used all over the Internet, and then convince people like you that it's essential! That's good marketing, right there. It still doesn't make *Flash* something worthwhile, necessary, or good.
Furthermore, the term that makes you liable to repay them if they decide to audit you is outright lunacy. That being a known condition might even make more than a few admin and PHB types demand the software be removed from their corporate networks! Who would want the possibilty that MacroMedia could do such a thing to you? Sure, they *probably* won't, but you can't be absolutely certain!
Slashdot Mirror
Good question. It seems to make more sense that you are dealing with the merchant and not the manufacturer, at that point. That contract would be with whoever you are purchasing from, which is most like a store. They would've probably purchased from a wholesale channel vendor, who likely purchased from the manufacturer.
Anything has to be made clear unless it is part of law. If you don't present the contract term, there is no chance for you to dispute that term. If all they present is a price, then that's the only term that you're agreeing to.
That is part of why people dispute the legality of EULAs, this new "box-wrap" license, and other things. If you can't see the terms ahead of time, how can you reasonably be bound by them?
In other words, the question can't really be answered, right now. That's part of what the story is about, and there will be appeals and such about it. It seems to me that this is another circumstance that, by all rights, should not be legal under existing law.
Depending on what you're doing, the resolutions can be different things. The current common standard resolutions are:
NTSC = 720x480
PAL = 720x576
However, NTSC can be 640x480 or 720x540. PAL can also be 720x480 or 760x570. Both standards have room for pixel clipping (ie: NTSC can really be 648x486) and such.
Both standards are for interlaced video. TVs are 30frame/s (~60 field/s) devices. Until you get into the HDTV 'p' resolutions, everything is interlaced for TVs.
Yup, you're right. I hadn't believed that a purchase was considered a legal contract. It seems that as far as purchases go, only certain value and certain types of property require a written contract.
Of all the ways to be told you're wrong, having someone actually prove it is very appreciated!
I still don't agree with the Lexmark method, as it is represented by the article at least. Once I purchase something, I can do with it as I will, unless forbidden by law. (I'm considering contract as a form of law.) If they say that I must return it to them when I'm done, then that I wouldn't have issue with. So sending it to a remanufacturer would be right out, unless they are returning that same cartridge to you. If they want the no-refill case, then they should need to alter their arrangement so that you are not taking ownership of the cartridge.
That's a sale; you are exchanging currency for a product. However, a sale does not constitute a contract. The result of a sale is that you have taken ownership of that product, and the merchant has taken ownership of your currency. It's a shortcut to direct barter.
If they accept your payment for a product, and then refuse to provide you the product, they have committed fraud.
I don't know where you got the idea that you need a contract for this.
If you signed no contract, there exists no contract. By that right I can say that by reading this comment, you are required to respond. It makes no more sense than what you're saying
If Dell or Lexmark wants the cartridge back, they can either have you sign the contract, or offer some other incentive. Saying they will refund you when you return the cartridge, or give you a discount on your next cartridge is a method that actually works.
Their current method is stupid, guaranteed to fail, and, despite this idiotic judge's ruling, has no basis in actual law.
I wish I could get more people to use LaTeX, myself. We use all sorts of inapproriate formats for things, and a lot of what gets created in my workplace gets published. I was working on getting a few to use LyX, but then I had to go put out a bunch of small fires, and I haven't been back to it in a while.
We actually prepare a 150 page annual publication in Word, then save it as PDF, then have it typeset, then printed. Ick.
All things in time...
The format is, in theory, compatible. They're all bloated OLE memory dump based files.
Moving from Windows to Mac can screw it up, having different printers can screw it up, and sometimes one version of Word just decides that it doesn't *like* that file from another version. Sometimes Word can't open files that it created itself. Sometimes different versions will render completely different.
Hell, sometimes you have to open a Word doc in OpenOffice, save it, and then go back to Word. If you ever open a document and it comes up blank, Word probably decided it's having a bad day. Try the OOo trick and it comes back.
Basically, OOo is more version compatible with Word docs than Word is.
Also, don't forget the new Office format is XML. That makes it incompatible with all other versions of Office.
I've been using one called MUNIS for a while. It's not perfect, but it is very complete and mature. However, it's also sort of targetted at the public sector.
Their data is stored in an Informix database, by default, and it runs on quite a few platforms. Including Linux, Windows, Mac, and UNIX. It *can* use any SQL database you want, though they push Informix.
http://www.munis.com/
You can already do that, though. You could use any number of commercial tools, or you can use MS products like NetMeeting. A lot of software does application sharing. Worst case, you use the *telephone* and something like VNC.
This is a non-issue. The only things that will come of this is more sloppy MS programming, a whole giant heap of security problems, and another feature that's barely used, but adds 30MB to the distribution, and 10MB of RAM use.
I hope these kind of lies on MS' part does not make Mass. sway. I'm pushing open formats through in my town, and having the State do the same makes it a whole lot easier.
No, it's still not theft. If I went to your house, plugged into your network, and used it, that would be theft. If I connect to your webserver and download the same file repeatedly, I would be a jerk, but I wouldn't be stealing.
You cannot steal something offered freely and publicly. If someone manages to slam your link and maxes out some hosting company's bandwidth cap on you, then that sucks. If you don't want someone to be able to do that, either use technological means to prevent it, or don't offer it publicly.
It's like if I put out a bowl of candy on a little table on the sidewalk. There are no signs that say "you may only take one", just a bowl of candy. Some people take none, some one, some a handful, and maybe you get some jerk that eats half the bowl. It happens and that's kind of a shame, but that jerk didn't *steal* the candy, he was just being a jerk.
Linking to a graphic on a webserver is the same thing as linking to a HTML file. If you don't want someone doing it, then don't offer it.
There are ads both because some people recognised a place to make a profit, and some people try to offset the cost of their publicly available services. Membership makes a site not public, so they don't really have a place an argument about public content.
Hotlinking is the same exact procedure as what you did to link the content on your site. Someone puts an embed, img, or whatever in some HTML, and the UA retrieves the content. The only difference between what *you* say is fine, and what *you* say is theft is the location of that HTML file.
So it's fine for you to link to the stuff, but not for me? Well shit, then you better not put it on the internet, or you better hope I'm nice enough to heed your invisible request to not link to your content. Most people out there won't link to your stuff if you ask nicely for them not to. That's still only "most", and you can't change the view of the other people. All you can do is try to prevent them from doing it.
Anyway, the point is that nobody can "steal" your bandwidth by downloading content that you made publically available. You're giving it away, for free, and people are using it, for free. That's the way this whole thing works.
In any system there are jerks that go and try to screw it up for everyone else; this is all that's happening. You can try to stop the jerks from doing it, or you can pack up and go home. But it still doesn't make it theft.
Heh, it.slashdot.org will run through it, though.
Result: Failed validation, 104 errors
Address: http://it.slashdot.org/
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML 3.2
That's not so hot at all! Lots and lots of table syntax errors and other things...
Unfortunately, I have to agree with you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to recommend programs with names like Firefox, Thunderbird, and worst of all, GIMP? People think that you messing with them, and others see a program with a name like that installed, and cause quite a commotion.
They're all good programs, and I do recommend them to people, but it's making adoption quite difficult for some of them.
Here are a few other programs that *really* should rename themselves: GRUB, Slackware, LyX, LaTeX, and countless others. So many of them are wonderful programs that are having an absolutely amount of difficulty being deployed and recommended simply because of names with negative or offensive connotations.
I think you've hit the crux of the issue. Nobody did anything illegal; there was no theft of any type. The problem was the complete lack of manners. Nobody asked to use the game, nobody said there was a problem with it, there was no communication at all.
You see this kind of thing everywhere. There is no politeness, no manners. People don't hold doors, help out with flat tires, or check up on their neighbors. Everyone acts like they shouldn't care about any other person. It makes the world a lonely and depressing place when most people are living that way.
So, according to you, linking without permission is stealing. It doesn't matter who links to who because it's all the same thing. I can link to Slashdot, but I'm not stealing anything. Some other site links to me, and that's not a problem, either.
Also, visiting your website without permission is stealing. I didn't ask if I could use your bandwidth, so it's theft, right?
You can't special case everything based on what you are allowed to do, and what everyone else is allowed to do. You put up a webserver, which means that you are offering a public resource, including the content and bandwidth required to supply the content. Whether the visitor is some random person, or someone pointed there by a company, is irrelevant. They're all visitors to a public resource that you intentionally made available.
If he didn't want people being able to link to his content, then he shouldn't have publically published the content. It's as simple as that.
All that's happened here is that some webmaster was rude, and some other webmaster was rude in return.
Or maybe, he put up the slaughterhouse pictures to screw with the burger company. That seems to be the most likely answer in this.
It was rude to link to the game without asking, and it was rude to put up the pictures the way he did. I'd say the latter is less rude than the former, but whatever.
If you put it on your publically accessible web server, and let everyone get the file, then yes, it is public. Your bandwidth bill is kind of just too bad for you. You made it a public resource by offering content for public consumption.
You're being the typical "I can't understand the difference between depriving someone of property, and duplicating an infinite resource" type of person. If you steal a TV, now the store doesn't have the TV. If someone camps on your lawn to admire the lawn gnome, they are on *your lawn* and that means you can't be there.
The real world is different from the internet. They are not the same, you cannot use this form of analogy and make any sense.
If you don't want people to be able to use your bandwidth, then don't offer public services. Otherwise, people accessing your publicly available files is your problem.
That's not theft, that's you being ignorant and part of the problem. If you publish something on the web, you are allowing people to link to it. That's just how it works, and it's how it was intended to work. You don't like it, and that's tough for you. Don't publish on the web, then.
As for his files on his server, what I choose to do with my files on my server is my business, too. And one of the things I can decide to do is place a line of text in one of *my* files that causes the site visiter to download one of *his* files. Still my files on my server, and his files on his server. According to *yours own* logic, that makes what Fuddruckers did just peachy.
Windows dropped the POSIX and OS/2 subsystems, anyway. They haven't been in there since Win2000, I believe. They certainly aren't there in WinXP/2k3.
I always hated going from doing UNIX programming to Windows programming. They have overly complicated ways of doing the most simple things. For example, getting a socket you can't just do the normal socket procedure. You first have to make a WinSock call to set up the socket, then all the normal BSD calls can use it.
IT is an infrastructure department. Their job is to keep everything running, maintain data integrity, and enforce the policies that are set down. The legal department is completely different. They *must* disclose the reason for a legal action, and if they just tell you "no, you can't" then you don't know how to proceed to rectify the situation. With IT, there is no situation like this; you are given a tool and associated software, along with the policy relating to it's use.
Again, IT is *not* a generic service department, it's an infrastructure support department. Part of what many IT departments do is support people in the use of the equipment. Your job as an IT department is to do what your employer tells you to do. This means keeping everything running and enforcing policy.
You're right that it isn't IT Vs. Users. However, part of the job of IT is to enforce policy. If the users circumvent that policy, then IT has to do something about it. You can certianly *help* by explaining the why of the policies, but it isn't your job to defend it. If they don't like it, they can deal with the chain of command, otherwise they can deal.
I have *never* seen IT policy change like the winds, and I certainly don't change my IT policies lightly, either. They evolve to take into account new issues. Sometimes you have to amend them because of new tech, sometimes because of new problems, etc. Sometimes changes come from upper management, and then even IT doesn't get to do anything but enforce it.
It sounds to me like you just have never been in a position to deal with policy on the enforcement side.
Eh, this guy is just a know-nothing troll.
Everybody worth their salt knows you have to lock down users a bit, restrict admin privs, and quota limited shared resources.
Google doesn't keep 2GB for everyone on the planet. They use the incredibly complex incantations of "compress" and "overbook".
There *are* perfectly logical reasons for why those policies. It is not the job of IT to explain those reasons; it is the job of IT to do the IT-related work. If you want to know why a policy is what it is, you can try to ask, or you can try to find out. The IT people are probably too busy to sit there and try to explain all of this to a layman that refuses to even attempt to learn anything on their own.
Really, it doesn't matter what the users want. An IT manager should *care* what they want, and form policy around it. However, if you do what the users want, you have an infrastructure that doesn't work, has no security, and can never be maintained. That means you have to tell users to "stuff it", to a point.
You follow the policies of your workplace because those are the conditions of working there. If you disagree, you say something. If it is perceived as a problem (ie: enough people complained), and a change is deemed required, then policy will get changed.
I think you just missed the difference that I intended between !, *, and -. !=important, *=nice, -=whatever/already solved.
Accounts: Admin/User isn't perfect, but that is largely a result of application software trying to write things to the wrong places (ie: HKLM or Program Files). Take a look at http://nonadmin.editme.com/ if you don't know about it already.
FUS: FUS is generally unnecessary. You can do almost everything with "Run As", and the worst problem I've had with it was solved by "Run As"ing cmd, and then opening iexplore or whatever and doing permissions, etc. I never have to log out a user unless I'm rebooting the machine, or trying to get rid of that damned Outlook desktop icon.
Imaging: The other poster on this comment explained that well. It's really just not a big problem to begin with.
Recovery Discs: I have a Linux boot disk that resets passwords and does Registry manipulation. I have recovery console CDs that fix more serious issues. Anything that takes more than 15 or 20 minutes is more quickly solved by reimaging the machine.
Shell: I agree, having a better shell in Windows won't make me complain. MS just isn't adding anything that isn't already available. This is a user desktop machine, so this isn't important.
Scheduler: Also agreed, improvements are welcome. It just isn't a real issue that they are solving that is worth the OS upgrade. We're still talking about a user desktop, so this doesn't matter.
You might find them useful, so you will probably buy Vista. Many, many other people see this update as solving nothing that isn't already solved. That's really what Vista is... just an update. I'm not wasting time, money, and energy doing a round of MS updates, along with all the massive headaches new MS software always comes with, unless I get something truly good out of it.
I'm downplaying all those updates because they *really* don't improve Windows very much. They certainly don't offer anything that makes the upgrade worth the time, let alone the price tag.
I'm not sure why any of those are that earth shattering. I have almost all of that right now, and can get the rest if I wanted to.
As a network admin with Win2k/XP:
-Users don't run as Administrator by default in a domain
-Fast switching isn't useful in most domains
!Better error logging is always nice
!Diagnostics are nice
*You can do system images for fairly disparate hardware already, but not completely different.
-You should already have firewalls
-There are already public recovery disks
-UPS/Building backup power, and you're not using suspend/hibernate anyway
-You can already do advanced management
-You can already get real shells
*I'm sure a more advanced task scheduler is useful _somewhere_
-PC remote management with a web server? Why?
-WRP - The users aren't admin, they shouldn't be able to change anything important already
-WDS - You already have imaging and remote install services
AJAX is definitely a bit hackish on top of HTML. After all, HTML is designed to be hypertext markup, not presentation format. However, the user already has the browser, so using making use of what they already have is great. You can also drive the backend in a much more flexible manner. If you could just code to XHTML and CSS2 and know that most browsers supported all the tags, your life would be much easier.
This shouldn't surprise you, really. You're trying to emulate a user interface using a document with scripting capability. If you can pull it off, then you maintain a lot of the too often overlooked things about the web. You can do all the screen scraping, indexing, etc without going crazy. You can manipulate everything about your information with text parsers, which is extremely useful.
Flash isn't without its place, but to start coding your site using just Flash is a mistake. I am not about to argue that client/server will die, conversely, I think it's the right way of doing many things. I just also think Flash is the wrong way to do client/server.
I have a lot of reasons to dislike Flash. Some are because of things like the vendor controlled format and the restrictive licensing. I happen to think that we should be moving *to* completely open, non-proprietary formats, not moving off of them. Others are the serious abuse of Flash that many people do. The Flash menues when you could do that with HTML/CSS, embedding your site content in Flash, obfuscating the locations, etc.
Flash is not the "best way" to create web apps. It is simply one of the ways to do so. Any design technique that locks out (by the Flash license, by lack of viewer, by lack of all html readers having a reader, etc) a significant amount of the web is not the best way. The difference between things like AJAX, HTML forms, and Flash is that AJAX works on almost everything, including screen reader systems, HTML forms works on all but the very first browsers, and Flash works on IE, Mozilla, and those few browsers that emulate one of their plugin interfaces. That means Flash is the least likely one to work.
As another poster pointed out, Flash breaks everything that made the web the web. You remove accessibility completely, you remove search completely, you remove UA controlled presentations completely. Part of the "appeal" of Flash is even to actively prevent people from getting the SWF file offline. But hey, we don't need useful markup, screen readers, offline storage, searching, font scaling, search engines, or anything else - because bad web apps programmers and incompetent site designers have decided that Flash is the next messiah. Here's a good for you, do you think Google would work if everything was some stupid Flash-based site? (Hey, lets index hundreds of millions of sites that use vector graphics for all their text! That should be doable, if we have a few hundred supercomputers, excellent programmers, and most people use the same technique - yeah!)
FWIW, I agressively avoid Flash only sites. The format has its place, but creating sites and web apps are not that place. I also avoid sites that have Flash sound, Flash menues, heavy Flash advertising, or that place all their content in Flash. Learn to write HTML instead of half-assed Flash sites (and by half-assed, I mean sites written in Flash).
Anyway, laptops are PCs that are also "mobile devices". The license at the time the article was submitted prohibited any "mobile device", which would thereby prohibit laptops.
You are right that MM isn't stupid. They managed to take a niche product and get it used all over the Internet, and then convince people like you that it's essential! That's good marketing, right there. It still doesn't make *Flash* something worthwhile, necessary, or good.
Furthermore, the term that makes you liable to repay them if they decide to audit you is outright lunacy. That being a known condition might even make more than a few admin and PHB types demand the software be removed from their corporate networks! Who would want the possibilty that MacroMedia could do such a thing to you? Sure, they *probably* won't, but you can't be absolutely certain!
BTW, SVG isn't for writing sites in, either.