I don't see why anyone is offended by this attempt to rename DRM to make it sound more innocuous. They're just following the example of the folks who decided to rebrand "giving away something that doesn't belong to me" as "sharing".
In the days of Lotus 123 R1 and dBASE III, diskettes were hacked to prevent duplication without copy-prevention-cracking software, or required parallel-port dongles to be attached to run the software. Consumers revolted against this, arguing that they had a right to make backup copies, and that the failure of a dongle or its drivers shouldn't lock them out of their data. Developers relented.
For a while. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was a complete turnover of software execs. Maybe they foolishly thought their new copy-prevention schemes lacked the old ones' fundamental flaws. Probably because the internet changed one-to-one piracy into a one-to-many operation, and you all proved to them that the consumers' cries of "trust us" couldn't be believed. So plenty of blame to go around.
When I was in my early 30s, I took a break from my IT career and went to art school. Which includes a fair amount of computer usage these days, and even some coding (Flash ActionScript, for example), but also working with wood, charcoals, pencils, oil paint, watercolors, etc. I can't say it was a great "career move", because it certainly hasn't brought me riches or fame or job security, but you'll hear no complaints from me either.
I used to work for a college IT director who posed the following question in response to every non-trivial request for new technology: What is the problem for which this is the solution? If the requester couldn't provide a clear and compelling answer, they usually ended up dropping the request on their own, or in some cases he'd have to tell them "no". The advocates of giving laptops to schoolkids have never provided a clear and compelling answer. (This is assuming that you already have computer labs available. If you don't, then that's the best solution to your computer-literacy problem.)
The request for instructions in writing is part of the process of demonstrating to them how serious the infraction is. If the boss doesn't issue the instruction he knows it won't be done, and if it does he knows he's probably going to have perjure himself in court over it. Believe it or not, but people do think twice about compounding their offenses by committing perjury on top of them.
Please shut up about things you don't know anything about.
Then you can add a line on your resume about how you initiated a project which saved your company x dollars in liability, and stopped a manager from destroying and embarassing it.
When I finally got my employer to start paying for software licenses instead of pirating it, I added an item to my resume under "accomplishments" that said pretty much the same thing. I didn't mention that it was a Senior VP that I saved the company from.
Even in states with "at will" employment, you might still have some legal recourse with a "wrongful termination" suit in a situation like this. You won't get your job back, but you might get some other court-imposed judgment out of them (i.e. cash).
As in so many Ask Slashdots, the answer to this one includes the instruction, "Consult an attorney". The OP needs to find out what his legal rights are in his jurisdiction. In the meantime, document this situation clearly: Put your objections into a memo, addressed to everyone up the chain of command, and request the instructions to install unlicensed software in writing. Following Orders With Objection puts you in a better position than Just Following Orders.
In case you haven't already pursued this, try to find someone in executive management who is willing to listen to you. Talk to the Legal department or the company's counsel. The senior execs will probably never listen to you (mine never have), but they might listen to someone else in management. This is the approach I took in my first job out of college, where the entire corporate office was being run on a single retail copy of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect, and POs for new computers would come back from Purchasing with the software line-items crossed out "because we already have this". Once Executive Management understood the possible consequences of this approach, I was finally allowed to buy software with all new PCs, and eventually the pirated installs found their way into landfills and the company was legal.
Oh yeah, it's also stupid because better software exists and they have "standardized" on the worst.
That has got to be the lamest justification for defying company policy I've ever read. You will be fired for that, and there's hardly a contract in the world that would prevent them. I'd stick to the "I was asked to do something unlawful" defense and shut the frack up with the snotty "I know better" insubordination.
Part of what schools are teaching is that one needs to take responsibility for one's actions, which have consequences. Breaking the rules and doing things that you've been told not to do - no matter how ingeniously it's done - is not something that's going to get you pat on the head in the real world. Screw around with someone else's system, and you can expect the people who run it to screw back.
You know, no one congratulated me on my ingenuity and craftsmanship when I was able to buy beer with my doctored driver's license. "Why am I being blamed for the fact that the store owner couldn't identify a fake ID?" I protested. God, I was a brat.
Teenagers keep asking to be treated like adults, then whine about it when they are.
Translation: "I am a sensitive and misunderstood flower, who must be watered with love and affection, regardless of how anti-social my actions might be."
The only way you're going to get a full-time position approved is if someone with some serious clout and/or leadership in the school system (wherever the budgets are set) is convinced that it's essential to the school meeting its state-mandated educational outcomes. You need that kind of champion, or it simply won't happen.
The chances of getting a part-time position approved are better. A well-placed champion would be very helpful, but not essential, because the cost difference and level of commitment between PT and FT is huge. Even if both would be non-union at-will employment, it's much easier for an school to back out of hiring a part-timer... and as bad as that sounds from your persective, it's exactly what a school administrator wants to hear when being asked to add yet another non-teaching piece of overhead to the budget. She'll want an escape plan. And keep in mind that the cost difference between FT and PT isn't just the difference between 40 and 40-N hours of pay; it's insurance, vacation time, retirement plans, and all the other reasons you want this to be full-time instead of part-time.
Trust me: I'm a part-timer (32 hours/week) working for a state university. The job really needs to be full-time; everyone except the budgeting officer says so. But the only way the position got created was by making it part-time, just below the university's threshhold for paying bennies. Making it PT also helps the university show the people who're trying to trim their budget further that they're already being stingy with the purse. And even though I routinely work up to 40 hours a week (and could do 50 without running out of work), my boss has been unable (so far) to get the position converted to full-time; getting that status up-front would have been impossible.
What country do you live in? To a school of that size here in the US, $100K is a huge amount of money, and would have to be paid for by eliminating one or more other positions. Their end-of-year budget-burning tends to involved stocking up on next month's classroom supplies. To a school, IT is nothing but an expense, and the only way to justify spending more is to demonstrate that it is essential to the operations of the school, not that it will merely make the teachers more "efficient". Citing secretarial "productivity improvements" as cost savings wouldn't get you far, and whether a teacher spends X% of class time teaching or (X-N)% of class time teaching doesn't save them a penny, so why would it impress the budgeting committee? I can imagine what the voters would say to the Board of Ed when they explain that they took a teacher out of the classroom and increased class sizes, so they could hire a full-time computer guy. The word "recall" would probably come up.
Todd Rundgren did a tour back in 1990ish in which he used a Mac (li'l desktop, not a laptop of course) as a musical instrument. I distinctly remember him grooving on-stage playing the, um, keyboard.
Putting a patch over one eye (and still wearing the 3D glasses) ought to solve any problems caused by the 3D effect. With the projection technology on Meet the Robinsons, I didn't notice any bleed-thru of the "other" image on either eye, so you should end up simply seeing a single 2D image, just like ye olde flat cinematographie.
Apple design has always revolved around the Rounded Rectangle. They've flirted with gumdrops and clamshells, and the edges got a bit pointed during the non-Jobs era, but the original Mac's UI and case design were based on the rounded rectangle, the OS API has always contained primitives for drawing rounded rectangles, and the industrial designs keep coming back to that shape. Look at the current iMac, the front view of the Mac Pro, the top view of the Mac Mini/AppleTV, the full-size iPods and iPhone, or any of the MacBooks: rounded rectangles. Sic semper.
Dell certainly hasn't "always" sold through the Web, because the Web didn't exist in the 1980s. Trust me: when I bought my PC's Limited Turbo XT back in 1987, the advert in (probably) PC Magazine contained only a phone number and a mailing address; nary a URL to be found. Maybe young Mike briefly tried pushing his boxes through local stores when he first started building them, but it was definitely a direct-sales-based operation by the time anyone outside of Austin noticed the company. Customer-direct sales of custom-built machines was the marketing niche that made Michael Dell.
May your dilithium crystals be fully charged, your matter/anti-matter reaction balanced, your wee bairns well cared for, and the transport to your final shore leave free of malfunctions.
Start with past incidents the department's been through, where the boss had to intervene/make a judgment call/rally the troops. Depending on who else is in the room you might have to be careful about describing the situation in too much detail (lest the jerk who never documents his code and won't reply to e-mails recognize himself), but this ensures that you're testing him with examples he's likely to encounter, and you can compare his answer with what the manager at the time did (good or bad). Or to be a little politically safer, go back to your own previous jobs for examples. Or rent DVDs of Office Space and The Office.:)
For someone who doesn't have some buzzwords handy to describe their philosophy, or can't pick the right ones to describe themselves, you can make it a multiple choice question.
I'd be especially interested in hear each candidate articulate their "management philosophy". While this is likely to lead to a fair amount of buzzword regurgitation, you can discern a bit about what they'd be like to work for from their choice of buzzwords and the connecting tissue that they have to supply themselves to craft a paragraph around them. You also need to know what kind of management style the department/team needs; don't automatically go for the guy who promises the least supervision and the most perks to his staff. Some standard "how would you handle the following scenario..." story problems can also be revealing.
Finally, does Kucinich this this will help him get elected President?
I don't think he has any illusions of actually winning the nomination. He's not running for president to get elected president; he's running for president to advance his political agenda. Same with this.
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I don't see why anyone is offended by this attempt to rename DRM to make it sound more innocuous. They're just following the example of the folks who decided to rebrand "giving away something that doesn't belong to me" as "sharing".
They learned it. Then they forgot it.
In the days of Lotus 123 R1 and dBASE III, diskettes were hacked to prevent duplication without copy-prevention-cracking software, or required parallel-port dongles to be attached to run the software. Consumers revolted against this, arguing that they had a right to make backup copies, and that the failure of a dongle or its drivers shouldn't lock them out of their data. Developers relented.
For a while. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was a complete turnover of software execs. Maybe they foolishly thought their new copy-prevention schemes lacked the old ones' fundamental flaws. Probably because the internet changed one-to-one piracy into a one-to-many operation, and you all proved to them that the consumers' cries of "trust us" couldn't be believed. So plenty of blame to go around.
When I was in my early 30s, I took a break from my IT career and went to art school. Which includes a fair amount of computer usage these days, and even some coding (Flash ActionScript, for example), but also working with wood, charcoals, pencils, oil paint, watercolors, etc. I can't say it was a great "career move", because it certainly hasn't brought me riches or fame or job security, but you'll hear no complaints from me either.
Ignore the troll; he's a pathologically obsessive Redmondophobe.
I used to work for a college IT director who posed the following question in response to every non-trivial request for new technology: What is the problem for which this is the solution? If the requester couldn't provide a clear and compelling answer, they usually ended up dropping the request on their own, or in some cases he'd have to tell them "no". The advocates of giving laptops to schoolkids have never provided a clear and compelling answer. (This is assuming that you already have computer labs available. If you don't, then that's the best solution to your computer-literacy problem.)
The request for instructions in writing is part of the process of demonstrating to them how serious the infraction is. If the boss doesn't issue the instruction he knows it won't be done, and if it does he knows he's probably going to have perjure himself in court over it. Believe it or not, but people do think twice about compounding their offenses by committing perjury on top of them.
Please shut up about things you don't know anything about.
Even in states with "at will" employment, you might still have some legal recourse with a "wrongful termination" suit in a situation like this. You won't get your job back, but you might get some other court-imposed judgment out of them (i.e. cash).
As in so many Ask Slashdots, the answer to this one includes the instruction, "Consult an attorney". The OP needs to find out what his legal rights are in his jurisdiction. In the meantime, document this situation clearly: Put your objections into a memo, addressed to everyone up the chain of command, and request the instructions to install unlicensed software in writing. Following Orders With Objection puts you in a better position than Just Following Orders.
In case you haven't already pursued this, try to find someone in executive management who is willing to listen to you. Talk to the Legal department or the company's counsel. The senior execs will probably never listen to you (mine never have), but they might listen to someone else in management. This is the approach I took in my first job out of college, where the entire corporate office was being run on a single retail copy of Lotus 123 and WordPerfect, and POs for new computers would come back from Purchasing with the software line-items crossed out "because we already have this". Once Executive Management understood the possible consequences of this approach, I was finally allowed to buy software with all new PCs, and eventually the pirated installs found their way into landfills and the company was legal.
Part of what schools are teaching is that one needs to take responsibility for one's actions, which have consequences. Breaking the rules and doing things that you've been told not to do - no matter how ingeniously it's done - is not something that's going to get you pat on the head in the real world. Screw around with someone else's system, and you can expect the people who run it to screw back.
You know, no one congratulated me on my ingenuity and craftsmanship when I was able to buy beer with my doctored driver's license. "Why am I being blamed for the fact that the store owner couldn't identify a fake ID?" I protested. God, I was a brat.
Teenagers keep asking to be treated like adults, then whine about it when they are.
Translation: "I am a sensitive and misunderstood flower, who must be watered with love and affection, regardless of how anti-social my actions might be."
The only way you're going to get a full-time position approved is if someone with some serious clout and/or leadership in the school system (wherever the budgets are set) is convinced that it's essential to the school meeting its state-mandated educational outcomes. You need that kind of champion, or it simply won't happen.
The chances of getting a part-time position approved are better. A well-placed champion would be very helpful, but not essential, because the cost difference and level of commitment between PT and FT is huge. Even if both would be non-union at-will employment, it's much easier for an school to back out of hiring a part-timer... and as bad as that sounds from your persective, it's exactly what a school administrator wants to hear when being asked to add yet another non-teaching piece of overhead to the budget. She'll want an escape plan. And keep in mind that the cost difference between FT and PT isn't just the difference between 40 and 40-N hours of pay; it's insurance, vacation time, retirement plans, and all the other reasons you want this to be full-time instead of part-time.
Trust me: I'm a part-timer (32 hours/week) working for a state university. The job really needs to be full-time; everyone except the budgeting officer says so. But the only way the position got created was by making it part-time, just below the university's threshhold for paying bennies. Making it PT also helps the university show the people who're trying to trim their budget further that they're already being stingy with the purse. And even though I routinely work up to 40 hours a week (and could do 50 without running out of work), my boss has been unable (so far) to get the position converted to full-time; getting that status up-front would have been impossible.
What country do you live in? To a school of that size here in the US, $100K is a huge amount of money, and would have to be paid for by eliminating one or more other positions. Their end-of-year budget-burning tends to involved stocking up on next month's classroom supplies. To a school, IT is nothing but an expense, and the only way to justify spending more is to demonstrate that it is essential to the operations of the school, not that it will merely make the teachers more "efficient". Citing secretarial "productivity improvements" as cost savings wouldn't get you far, and whether a teacher spends X% of class time teaching or (X-N)% of class time teaching doesn't save them a penny, so why would it impress the budgeting committee? I can imagine what the voters would say to the Board of Ed when they explain that they took a teacher out of the classroom and increased class sizes, so they could hire a full-time computer guy. The word "recall" would probably come up.
Todd Rundgren did a tour back in 1990ish in which he used a Mac (li'l desktop, not a laptop of course) as a musical instrument. I distinctly remember him grooving on-stage playing the, um, keyboard.
Putting a patch over one eye (and still wearing the 3D glasses) ought to solve any problems caused by the 3D effect. With the projection technology on Meet the Robinsons, I didn't notice any bleed-thru of the "other" image on either eye, so you should end up simply seeing a single 2D image, just like ye olde flat cinematographie.
Apple design has always revolved around the Rounded Rectangle. They've flirted with gumdrops and clamshells, and the edges got a bit pointed during the non-Jobs era, but the original Mac's UI and case design were based on the rounded rectangle, the OS API has always contained primitives for drawing rounded rectangles, and the industrial designs keep coming back to that shape. Look at the current iMac, the front view of the Mac Pro, the top view of the Mac Mini/AppleTV, the full-size iPods and iPhone, or any of the MacBooks: rounded rectangles. Sic semper.
Dell certainly hasn't "always" sold through the Web, because the Web didn't exist in the 1980s. Trust me: when I bought my PC's Limited Turbo XT back in 1987, the advert in (probably) PC Magazine contained only a phone number and a mailing address; nary a URL to be found. Maybe young Mike briefly tried pushing his boxes through local stores when he first started building them, but it was definitely a direct-sales-based operation by the time anyone outside of Austin noticed the company. Customer-direct sales of custom-built machines was the marketing niche that made Michael Dell.
May your dilithium crystals be fully charged, your matter/anti-matter reaction balanced, your wee bairns well cared for, and the transport to your final shore leave free of malfunctions.
Energise.
Start with past incidents the department's been through, where the boss had to intervene/make a judgment call/rally the troops. Depending on who else is in the room you might have to be careful about describing the situation in too much detail (lest the jerk who never documents his code and won't reply to e-mails recognize himself), but this ensures that you're testing him with examples he's likely to encounter, and you can compare his answer with what the manager at the time did (good or bad). Or to be a little politically safer, go back to your own previous jobs for examples. Or rent DVDs of Office Space and The Office. :)
For someone who doesn't have some buzzwords handy to describe their philosophy, or can't pick the right ones to describe themselves, you can make it a multiple choice question.
I'd be especially interested in hear each candidate articulate their "management philosophy". While this is likely to lead to a fair amount of buzzword regurgitation, you can discern a bit about what they'd be like to work for from their choice of buzzwords and the connecting tissue that they have to supply themselves to craft a paragraph around them. You also need to know what kind of management style the department/team needs; don't automatically go for the guy who promises the least supervision and the most perks to his staff. Some standard "how would you handle the following scenario..." story problems can also be revealing.
As long as you're intelligent enough to understand what a "metaphor" is, Stevens' description is actually pretty good.
(I'm all for ridiculing the man on political grounds, but going after the guy for this is just childish.)
Maybe you should sit down and read the Constitution, rather than just assuming that your heroes are incapable of wrongdoing.