Nah, I'm not mad or anything - in fact, I find the project itself to be silly, I guess it's the "new ask slashdot - same as the old ask slashdot" - aka "do my homework for me" meets "I'm too lazy to google".
At that point, Microsoft will have violated their announcement a decade ago about releasing signing keys for XP when they no longer have activation servers. Then everyone who still has XP can sue them for a full refund, plus damages.
Besides, it's not like you *need* a key to run XP. After all, you won't be hitting Microsoft for updates, right?
It's called "the anonymity of the crowd." If you think about it, following you around in a public place is called stalking for that reason. You have a right to go about your public business without undue and/or unwanted scrutiny, though less than you used to.
It's the same with the tweets - you agreed to post them for people to read in near-real time, not to be fodder for people to look at "forever and ever, world without end, amen and pass the gravy."
There's also the problem of context, both literal and historical. And that people can and do change their opinions, and that sometimes they have legit reasons for wanting stuff to be forgotten in the dustbin of time.
There's also the problem of "emergent data" - conclusions that are drawn when you combine various data sets. For example, given enough data from enough different sources, someone might be able to link, with +90% certainty you with the poster looking for help in a support forum for rape and abuse victims, then use that as an excuse to pass you over for a job because you might have "issues".
The long and the short of it is that people didn't sign up for this, and Twitter is wrong to do it. And so is the LoC. If Twitter were doing this directly, there'd be h*** to pay. That the LoC is using taxpayer funds just makes it worse.
As a further follow-up - you completely ignored the copyrights question. They want to mirror their whole computer drive, which would of necessity include the OS.
On top of that, most "all you can eat" web hosting agreements don't allow you to use the account for "online backup" purposes - the files have to be part of a functioning website, and certain filetypes are banned (such as executables).
Now, if the poster DID have a 100mpbs connection, as you "pulled out of the air" to make your case, they still couldn't use a cheapie service - individual users are limited to a small % of total system resources (usually ~2% from the ones I've seen) over a set interval - so while they *might* be able to upload @ 100mbps for a minute or two, it's not going to be sustained for hours, never mind days.
So, they're now looking at their own dedicated server... a LOT more expensive, and often requiring a 1-year contract. Even then, the TOS won't allow for copyright violations, so unless they're using BSD or Linux, they're out of luck with "mirroring their whole hard drive" (and if they were using a F/LOSS OS, they would have most likely specified things like available bandwidth).
This is an art student looking for a cheap solution - this is not someone who has the $$$ to spend on an 100mb uplink. Otherwise, they'd just host it directly off their own machine, as others have proposed.
Your proposed loophole - that maybe they have access to a uni account with gobs of bandwidth, but unis now have safeguards in place for bandwidth hogs, same as everyone else. Saturating a 100mb/s uplink for any period of time will get your account first throttled, then blocked - and that's assuming that nobody else you've p***ed off on your local lan segment don't first hunt you down and physically disconnect you with extreme prejudice to your equipment.
Why would they sell you an XP key for $20 when they can force you to spend several times as much?
BTW - just because XP won't be supported any more doesn't mean that the bits won't continue to work. Any attempt to put a back-door time-bomb kill-switch in it would result in massive lawsuits.
hey better at least have a *plan* even if implementation hasn't started yet....
doomsday (which is april 8th, 2014, btw) is not *that* far off, especially for a 'larger corporation' that has no current plan at all..... are all your IT guys gonna retire before then or something, so they consider it SEP?
They'll ask for a government bail-out "for all new IT infrastructure", funnel the $$$ to their buddies and large bonuses to themselves for "dealing with the crisis of their own making", and laugh at the 99%.
So yes, it is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) == Yours and Mine.
Let them go bust instead. The long-term pain of bail-outs isn't worth the short-term reprieve.
And Microsoft will be happy to sell companies "extended support contracts" for Win7 when it's officially out of the rotation. Same with Win8 and Win9, etc., a few years later... just lather-rinse-repeat.
It's about making money, not what's best for the customer. And you have to be joking about people migrating - if they didn't when Vista came out, they won't. The linux desktop is a total fubar (latest examples are the mass migration going on from Ubuntu to Mint. My own latest experience is upgrading opensuse to 12.1 - my wi-fi is broken again, my "linux supported printer" still isn't, neither is my camcorder, it ATE almost a decade of email - an unforgiveable sin, dual monitors not supported any more, etc.) There will NEVER be a "year of the linux desktop". End of story. People will switch to a BSD-based desktop first (hint: it's called OSX).
Doesn't that mean that developers would have to be licensed by the state? And that the developers would be required to write bug-free code or be held responsible?
They're licensed by their professional corporation, which sets the standards for practice in their state/province.
And yes, they would be responsible for their code. So, no more "just f***ing push it out, we can patch it later" from bosses. Same as engineers, a company that insisted on that would find that they could no longer hire anyone.
The "traditional market" is a combination of consumers and bulk business users. The consumer market doesn't use XP much any more (outside of the Asian pirate community). The businesses still stuck on XP are slowly migrating as their old hardware dies, or switching to other devices... BUT... (there's always a "but") Windows 8 fulfills Microsoft's goal of moving back to a more frequent release model, thereby enabling them to EOL earlier versions quicker.
They don't want a repeat of XP, where an old OS cannibalizes future sales, ever again. You'll see annual "new versions", same as the iPhone (Balmer steals another Apple trick).
From the summary ("I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure") it's some stupid "performance art".
500 gigabytes (5 terabits). Assuming a consumer 10mb down/1mb uplink, it would take (not counting protocol overhead) 1,389 hours (58 days) for the initial upload, by which time we can assume at least some of the data has changed.
Not to mention that if the author has a non-free OS or applications on that computer, they'll be violating plenty of copyrights.
Nolo: Your Legal Companion. Retrieved 2008-06-26. "A legal structure authorized by state law for a fairly narrow list of licensed professions, including lawyers, doctors, accountants, many types of higher-level health providers and often architects. Unlike a regular corporation, a professional corporation does not absolve a professional for personal liability for her own negligence or malpractice. The main reason why groups of professions choose this organizational structure is that, unlike a general partnership, owners are not personally liable for the malpractice of other owners. In some states, limited liability partnerships offer this same benefit and may be more desirable for other reasons."
Engineers have to be a member of their state or provincial professional order or corporation to practice, same as lawyers, etc. Of course, the day that software programmers have to adhere to the same code of ethics as professional engineers is the day that they'll have to tell their bosses that it would be both unprofessional and unethical to do 50% (conservative number) of what they're being asked to do in the way that they're doing it, because of lack of proper resources and poorly documented procedures.
[southern_drawl]
What yur fancy-pants degrees really mean...
First, there's yer basic Bee Ess. Y'all know what Bee Ess stands for, right, honey?
Then you got yer Em Ess. That there's jus' More of the Same Bee Ess.
And for those who really like to shovel it, you got yer Pee-Aich-Dee - that's like More of the Same Bee Ess, but now Piled Higher 'n' Deeper
[/southern_drawl]
grade_inflation + for_profit_colleges = education_debt_bubble. People now owe more in student debt than all other forms of consumer debt combined.
A software developer on the other hand, can float free on the Internet, making money in mercenary ways, with no deep loyalties, if he/she so desires
... it's like this guy has never heard of outsourcing to cheap 3rd-world and eastern European countries and crap sites like elance.
Or this...
An ex-Microsoft engineer is valuable anywhere in the economy if he voices support for buying Microsoft wherever he goes.
He's never read the posters on the minimsft blog, all swearing that after being "managed out", they will never, ever recommend Microsoft products.
A talented high-school kid who starts hacking away at an iPhone app at 14 is likely to stay in orbit around Apple for his/her entire career.
Really? So none of those iPhone or Android devs got their start on anything but Apple or... what? Gmail?
Of course, it's all based on a false premise:
Today, this abstract point specifically translates to: people who can invest in developers, developers, and everybody else. This means that if you are in apparently more fundamental professions - perhaps you are a baker with a small business - you are effectively useless, not because bread isn't important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage. If your bakery doesn't have an iPhone app, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp.
And god forbid, if you donâ(TM)t have a skill, like baking, which the developer-centric economy can actually use, you are in deep trouble.
The bakers and butchers will still be eating when Groupon is bankrupt. And almost nobody gives a crap about Yelp. They get their recommendations from friends, not strangers trying to game the system. And certainly not from an iPhone app spamming them with "Eat at Joe's".
Like so much from Forbes, this is just more idiot drivel!
I'm immediately concerned by: "position of programmer and sole IT personnel" and: "thriving e-commerce company" together in the same sentence.
First thing to do is find out why. Why was there only one IT person, and why did they quit? Look through the junk on all the systems - if they were half-way intelligent, you'll find an external email address in some source somewhere. Ping them and ask what really happened.
I always tell clients that their projects can be good, fast and cheap - pick any two. Good and cheap will not be fast, fast and good will not be cheap and fast and cheap...
Optimist much?
You can't just throw money at a project to "make it go faster." It can be good, but it won't be fast, and it won't be cheap. If you want it fast, it will be crap and it won't be cheap. If you want it cheap, it won't be fast and it won't be good. See "The Mythical Man-Month". Or meditate on why "adding more people just makes a late project later" is VERY true:-)
Someone's trying it - they're offering $11 an hour for developers. And with the lousy job market, they'll get bites. What they won't get is quality, but quality is NOT job 1 any more - "oh shiny!!!" is.
âoeIâ(TM)m wondering if youâ(TM)re availableâ"my partner says we just need an American programmer to get in their and clean up a few things to get us out the door, we figure it would take the right person 10 hours, instead of 50 or more with these guys.â
Riiiight - and when you start cleaning up, you get to see fundamental problems - your "oh it will only take 10 hours" assumes that it will take 1/5 the time to clean up the mess than it did to make it in the first place. Life doesn't work that way. Ask anyone with kids.
You've pretty much nailed it on the head - lousy project management - the same problem that is endemic in the industry, as people all focus on "wow" as opposed to boring. It benefits them individually in the short term, but in the long run the entire ecosystem, including them, suffers the consequences.
It's one consequence of the "ship the prototype" mentality. "It's 'good enough' - we'll just fix any bugs in an update". Like documentation, it never gets done adequately before the next version, and all those "I'll fix it next time I look at that piece of code" good intentions get lost in the rush and excitement of "new features, boys and girls!"
If they had to ship on CD/DVD and sink or swim with the resulting product, maybe things would be different, maybe not... but you can't have it both ways - an insane feature race as well as a race to the bottom in terms of costs because people are used to getting it all for free, and fork fork fork.
Think of it... if I'm not going to use Linux as a desktop environment any more (just for servers) then why should I have to put up with the whole "600 different linux distros" mess? FreeBSD is a great server OS, and it has the majority of all *BSD installs (even without counting OSX which was derived from it).
The Linux desktop is an out-and-out failure. The underlying kernel is good, but who needs the fragmentation?
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, I'm not mad or anything - in fact, I find the project itself to be silly, I guess it's the "new ask slashdot - same as the old ask slashdot" - aka "do my homework for me" meets "I'm too lazy to google".
Besides, it's not like you *need* a key to run XP. After all, you won't be hitting Microsoft for updates, right?
It's called "the anonymity of the crowd." If you think about it, following you around in a public place is called stalking for that reason. You have a right to go about your public business without undue and/or unwanted scrutiny, though less than you used to.
It's the same with the tweets - you agreed to post them for people to read in near-real time, not to be fodder for people to look at "forever and ever, world without end, amen and pass the gravy."
There's also the problem of context, both literal and historical. And that people can and do change their opinions, and that sometimes they have legit reasons for wanting stuff to be forgotten in the dustbin of time.
There's also the problem of "emergent data" - conclusions that are drawn when you combine various data sets. For example, given enough data from enough different sources, someone might be able to link, with +90% certainty you with the poster looking for help in a support forum for rape and abuse victims, then use that as an excuse to pass you over for a job because you might have "issues".
The long and the short of it is that people didn't sign up for this, and Twitter is wrong to do it. And so is the LoC. If Twitter were doing this directly, there'd be h*** to pay. That the LoC is using taxpayer funds just makes it worse.
Don't ask me - ask the > 10,000 people per week who are switching from Ubuntu to Mint :-)
I'm "sort of tempted" to give it a try myself ... "just cuz". Who knows?
Not me ... but nice try :-)
As a further follow-up - you completely ignored the copyrights question. They want to mirror their whole computer drive, which would of necessity include the OS.
On top of that, most "all you can eat" web hosting agreements don't allow you to use the account for "online backup" purposes - the files have to be part of a functioning website, and certain filetypes are banned (such as executables).
Now, if the poster DID have a 100mpbs connection, as you "pulled out of the air" to make your case, they still couldn't use a cheapie service - individual users are limited to a small % of total system resources (usually ~2% from the ones I've seen) over a set interval - so while they *might* be able to upload @ 100mbps for a minute or two, it's not going to be sustained for hours, never mind days.
So, they're now looking at their own dedicated server ... a LOT more expensive, and often requiring a 1-year contract. Even then, the TOS won't allow for copyright violations, so unless they're using BSD or Linux, they're out of luck with "mirroring their whole hard drive" (and if they were using a F/LOSS OS, they would have most likely specified things like available bandwidth).
So no, it Aint Gonna Happen.
This is an art student looking for a cheap solution - this is not someone who has the $$$ to spend on an 100mb uplink. Otherwise, they'd just host it directly off their own machine, as others have proposed.
Your proposed loophole - that maybe they have access to a uni account with gobs of bandwidth, but unis now have safeguards in place for bandwidth hogs, same as everyone else. Saturating a 100mb/s uplink for any period of time will get your account first throttled, then blocked - and that's assuming that nobody else you've p***ed off on your local lan segment don't first hunt you down and physically disconnect you with extreme prejudice to your equipment.
So no, it Ain't Gonna Happen.
Total loot: $7,820,347.96 in cash, $298.88 in cheques. So far, they've gotten back $1,801,073.18, for a net loss of $6,019,573.66
Extrapolated to an entire year, that would still be under $25 million net. A rounding error compared to all the US bank bail-outs.
Why would they sell you an XP key for $20 when they can force you to spend several times as much?
BTW - just because XP won't be supported any more doesn't mean that the bits won't continue to work. Any attempt to put a back-door time-bomb kill-switch in it would result in massive lawsuits.
They'll ask for a government bail-out "for all new IT infrastructure", funnel the $$$ to their buddies and large bonuses to themselves for "dealing with the crisis of their own making", and laugh at the 99%.
So yes, it is SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) == Yours and Mine.
Let them go bust instead. The long-term pain of bail-outs isn't worth the short-term reprieve.
And Microsoft will be happy to sell companies "extended support contracts" for Win7 when it's officially out of the rotation. Same with Win8 and Win9, etc., a few years later ... just lather-rinse-repeat.
It's about making money, not what's best for the customer. And you have to be joking about people migrating - if they didn't when Vista came out, they won't. The linux desktop is a total fubar (latest examples are the mass migration going on from Ubuntu to Mint. My own latest experience is upgrading opensuse to 12.1 - my wi-fi is broken again, my "linux supported printer" still isn't, neither is my camcorder, it ATE almost a decade of email - an unforgiveable sin, dual monitors not supported any more, etc.) There will NEVER be a "year of the linux desktop". End of story. People will switch to a BSD-based desktop first (hint: it's called OSX).
They're licensed by their professional corporation, which sets the standards for practice in their state/province.
And yes, they would be responsible for their code. So, no more "just f***ing push it out, we can patch it later" from bosses. Same as engineers, a company that insisted on that would find that they could no longer hire anyone.
The "traditional market" is a combination of consumers and bulk business users. The consumer market doesn't use XP much any more (outside of the Asian pirate community). The businesses still stuck on XP are slowly migrating as their old hardware dies, or switching to other devices ... BUT ... (there's always a "but") Windows 8 fulfills Microsoft's goal of moving back to a more frequent release model, thereby enabling them to EOL earlier versions quicker.
They don't want a repeat of XP, where an old OS cannibalizes future sales, ever again. You'll see annual "new versions", same as the iPhone (Balmer steals another Apple trick).
The *real* Citicorp hack was getting bailed out with $308 billion in loan guarantees, and NOBODY going to jail.
From the summary ("I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure") it's some stupid "performance art".
500 gigabytes (5 terabits). Assuming a consumer 10mb down/1mb uplink, it would take (not counting protocol overhead) 1,389 hours (58 days) for the initial upload, by which time we can assume at least some of the data has changed.
Not to mention that if the author has a non-free OS or applications on that computer, they'll be violating plenty of copyrights.
Bottom line: AGH (Ain't Gonna Happen).
I've been using them for a few years now ... and iweb isn't about to disappear any time soon.
This is just their way of getting attention for their bread and butter - some very nice servers+bandwidth at a very nice price.
Before they made the split, you could have signed up for the 10-year deal for as low as $1.67/month.
Engineers have to be a member of their state or provincial professional order or corporation to practice, same as lawyers, etc. Of course, the day that software programmers have to adhere to the same code of ethics as professional engineers is the day that they'll have to tell their bosses that it would be both unprofessional and unethical to do 50% (conservative number) of what they're being asked to do in the way that they're doing it, because of lack of proper resources and poorly documented procedures.
[southern_drawl] ...
What yur fancy-pants degrees really mean
First, there's yer basic Bee Ess. Y'all know what Bee Ess stands for, right, honey?
Then you got yer Em Ess. That there's jus' More of the Same Bee Ess.
And for those who really like to shovel it, you got yer Pee-Aich-Dee - that's like More of the Same Bee Ess, but now Piled Higher 'n' Deeper
[/southern_drawl]
grade_inflation + for_profit_colleges = education_debt_bubble. People now owe more in student debt than all other forms of consumer debt combined.
Overheated market?
What overheated market?
When I see stupidity like this:
Or this ...
He's never read the posters on the minimsft blog, all swearing that after being "managed out", they will never, ever recommend Microsoft products.
Really? So none of those iPhone or Android devs got their start on anything but Apple or ... what? Gmail?
Of course, it's all based on a false premise:
The bakers and butchers will still be eating when Groupon is bankrupt. And almost nobody gives a crap about Yelp. They get their recommendations from friends, not strangers trying to game the system. And certainly not from an iPhone app spamming them with "Eat at Joe's".
Like so much from Forbes, this is just more idiot drivel!
First thing to do is find out why. Why was there only one IT person, and why did they quit? Look through the junk on all the systems - if they were half-way intelligent, you'll find an external email address in some source somewhere. Ping them and ask what really happened.
Optimist much?
You can't just throw money at a project to "make it go faster." It can be good, but it won't be fast, and it won't be cheap. If you want it fast, it will be crap and it won't be cheap. If you want it cheap, it won't be fast and it won't be good. See "The Mythical Man-Month". Or meditate on why "adding more people just makes a late project later" is VERY true :-)
Someone's trying it - they're offering $11 an hour for developers. And with the lousy job market, they'll get bites. What they won't get is quality, but quality is NOT job 1 any more - "oh shiny!!!" is.
Riiiight - and when you start cleaning up, you get to see fundamental problems - your "oh it will only take 10 hours" assumes that it will take 1/5 the time to clean up the mess than it did to make it in the first place. Life doesn't work that way. Ask anyone with kids.
You've pretty much nailed it on the head - lousy project management - the same problem that is endemic in the industry, as people all focus on "wow" as opposed to boring. It benefits them individually in the short term, but in the long run the entire ecosystem, including them, suffers the consequences.
It's one consequence of the "ship the prototype" mentality. "It's 'good enough' - we'll just fix any bugs in an update". Like documentation, it never gets done adequately before the next version, and all those "I'll fix it next time I look at that piece of code" good intentions get lost in the rush and excitement of "new features, boys and girls!"
If they had to ship on CD/DVD and sink or swim with the resulting product, maybe things would be different, maybe not ... but you can't have it both ways - an insane feature race as well as a race to the bottom in terms of costs because people are used to getting it all for free, and fork fork fork.
Think of it ... if I'm not going to use Linux as a desktop environment any more (just for servers) then why should I have to put up with the whole "600 different linux distros" mess? FreeBSD is a great server OS, and it has the majority of all *BSD installs (even without counting OSX which was derived from it).
The Linux desktop is an out-and-out failure. The underlying kernel is good, but who needs the fragmentation?