This move seems totally contrary to Google's corporate ethos thus far
I have to beg to differ; it may go against what they've said (and I've been exercising my sarcasm rights over the whole "don't be evil" thing for years, and catching much grief for it here on Slashdot), but their actions have been putting the lie to that mantra for a long time. It's just getting more obvious and harder for their fans to defend.
I didn't see this (There's no avoiding Google+) reported on Slashdot, but I may have missed it. (Or maybe nobody thought it was particularly interesting.) Wall Street Journal talks about how Google+ has been a non-starter so far, so now Google are wielding their might and forcing people to sign up for Google+ accounts as they use other Google services. Create a GMail, YouTube, Zagat review, etc., account - automatically get a public by default Google+ page.
I've posted several times on Slashdot about how and why I use Yahoo Mail, Yahoo search, MapQuest or Bing maps, etc. Part of it is convenience and preference - I like Yahoo Mail and have had the same account for, oh, 15 years or so now - but another major part of it is because I don't trust Google. And I'm increasingly glad that I have almost ceased using Google for the last two or three years.
I assume, then, that you have no interest or passion in your life that revolves around anything someone else may see as pointless or a time waster. Most hobbies or leisure activities are not that interesting to a vast majority of the public, and they wouldn't understand your frustration if something you enjoyed disappeared with little warning.
World of Warcraft? I've never played it, so I don't care if it goes away. But other people surely would, and I don't begrudge them their enjoyment. Or any other MMORPG, for that matter.
I like model trains, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, windsurfing, and lots of other things. Most of those interests are not that valuable in the grand scheme of things. So what? They're hobbies.
Or, as girlintraining puts it, you're a heartless bastard.
I do not think you've been paying attention otherwise you'd see how ridiculous that statement is. How many of us could even recognise him on sight? We've got more chance with a B grade actor.
I do not think you understand what it means to rule by the cult of personality. In the geek world, everyone knows who Linus is. He is revered, held up as an icon, almost worshipped. People ask, "what would Linus do?" His personal story (where he grew up, where he lives, his career moves) is known in detail by thousands of geeks. Just because you don't know what he looks like does not preclude a cult of personality. How many people actually know what Charles Manson looks like? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
It's not considered acceptable in the wider world; most people barely know who he is and certainly don't know about these childish tantrums.
Slashdotters seem to be falling over themselves to make excuses for him. Imagine if this report was of Steve Ballmer shouting and yelling at a Windows developer.
There are many posts on this thread stating this is how you get quality software. No, it isn't; it's how you alienate volunteers. The way you get quality software is by being a grown-up:
That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up.
This is how the software that controls the space shuttle gets done. Linus may rule by the cult of personality, but it's not a particularly good way to ensure provably correct software in a situation where it simply MUST work.
What's going on here is the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that defines the drive for group perfection -- a drive that is aggressively intolerant of ego-driven hotshots. In the shuttle group's culture, there are no superstar programmers. The whole approach to developing software is intentionally designed not to rely on any particular person.
I'm not familiar with that trip, but it has to be some kind of an edge condition. Out of interest I looked it up on Amtrak's site and it's two trains. (Does Amtrak even operate in Canada?)
Nevertheless, for the trips I take, Amtrak is much faster and far more enjoyable. I take the train when I'm going from Philadelphia to New York, Washington DC, or occasionally Boston.
* By the time I've fought with traffic around NYC, or made the detour, or fought with traffic around DC, the train has already arrived. * Oh, hey, I'm on the train - I don't have to fight with traffic. That's a win in my book. * And I'm not driving. I can do work on my laptop, read a book, or snooze.
I like trains. Amtrak is more expensive than the local services, but I get a guaranteed seat instead of having to stand the whole way.
If it's "stealing" why isn't anyone charged with theft? They're charged with copyright infringement. Doesn't that tell you that it's copying not stealing?
Who on earth cares? The point is it's illegal and wrong. Does it matter what you call it, or do mere definitions and semantics make something better or worse?
"You just stole money from me! You're a thief!"
"Why, no, I merely changed some digital indicators to increase an arbitrary number called a 'balance' in my electronic bank records and effect a corresponding decrease on the same data cell in your electronic bank records."
"Oh, well, that's all right then. Now I feel ever so much happier."
I hope your faux moral superiority comforts you at night when your children are sentenced to served time in a debtor's prison.
You're talking about people who choose not to take/steal things based on principle, even when it's trivially easy and "everyone's doing it". You are, moreover, taking the side of those who claim it's their right to do the opposite and acquire music, movies, and software, even when it's illegal, because of some theorized "digital rights", or because of a vague claim of "information wants to be free", or because "it benefits everyone in the end".
And you have the audacity to sneer at your opponents for "faux moral superiority" (while posting as an anonymous coward). How pathetic.
You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death.
Perhaps in your mind. I'll grant that it's been debated to death, and - surprise! - those who like to take stuff for free to which they are not entitled will proclaim loudly that it's NOT STEALING.
At most, you can claim a victory of semantics. Of intent? Nowhere close.
I'll let others do the usual list of reasons why pirating is better for all mankind
Excepting those who don't get paid for their hard efforts.
and just point out that the digital rights referred to may be the access to resources on the internet (TPB)
Access all the resources you like, so long as it's not focused, even if "only" partially, on something illegal.
being allowed to host a proxy (as they had doe)
Nothing wrong there, host all the proxies you like, so long as it's not focused on something illegal.
or redirect (as some others do).
Redirect to your heart's content, so long as you're not focusing on something illegal. Wait, am I repeating myself?
It's not about digital rights. All the so-called "rights" you list are not at risk.
And despite the raving spewing forth, doing illegal stuff is also not at risk.
If you're really serious about digital rights and so forth, learn some marketing and put forth a proposal as to how business models should evolve. Back it up with numbers and hard data (not just "if only everyone did this, then such-and-such would work" or "me and my friends would support this, go on, give it a try"). The cop-out I see all the time on Slashdot is "business models need to evolve". So suggest this magical evolutionary path, then. If you can come up with a realistic and feasible roadmap, you'll make a lot of money. Otherwise you're just taking stuff because you can and because you're too damn cheap to pay.
Everything else is sophistry, and the reality is that no matter how much business models evolve they will most likely be a losing proposition regardless because people like being able to get stuff for free with low risk of getting caught breaking the law.
"Digital rights"? Please...what about the right to produce something, choose a business model that says "I want to be paid for this artifact up front, not when or if you feel like it", and bear the consequences of people rejecting your chosen business model by NOT BUYING YOUR PRODUCT and doing without it rather than just taking it?
For what it's worth, I'm not looking to win any argument; I think there are very few people here on Slashdot who will be swayed out of their firmly held beliefs (whether they agree with you or with me).
I am speaking up and saying that if faced with the proposition whereby I accept there are going to be many more cameras monitoring me in public in return for the assurance that it will make a significant difference in saving the lives and/or psyches of over a hundred children in 2013, and another hundred or two hundred in 2014, and another hundred or more in 2015, and so on, then I am fully willing to go with that.
Slashdotters have turned "think of the children" into a sarcastic unmeaning catch-phrase, but when I think of the children - as individuals, as little boys and girls who have been slaughtered before they had a chance to start life - and I think of the trade-off, it is not even a question for me. These are my priorities. They are different from many other individuals' priorities. So be it.
Recording my movements every day? I'm really not that concerned about someone choosing to watch where I go and what I do. I'm simply not that interesting that someone would pick me, out of millions of others, to stalk. You probably aren't either. Very few people are that interesting. And you can make your "what if" arguments ad nauseam and they will not sway my beliefs. I am sure nothing in this post will do anything other than to make you disgusted. If you are disgusted with me and my lack of awareness of what freedom means...oh well. We are two anonymous typists on a silly internet forum. Compared to 10 or 15 or 20 six and seven year old children being buried a week before Christmas, that means not a damn thing to me.
Roughy 500 kids go permanently missing each year in the USA and are presumed dead. Millions of public monitoring cameras would surely reduce that number. Are you willing to sacrified the freedom to go about your daily business unwatched in order to save an order of magnitude more children?
Really? Hell yes. I really would. Cameras watching me in public, and you claim it'll save 500 kids every year? At the risk of some unknown government low-level staffer seeing me pick my nose in public? Or scratch my butt in public?
Sign me up. Yes, that's worth it. What freedom am I losing? Again, public monitoring cameras??? I don't think there's a moment during the day when I'm in public that I'm not in sight of someone. I think you've got pretty silly standards of what constitutes freedom.
How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises?
1. Consultants do make sense in many cases, such as when you want to configure a complex piece of niche software. Do you hire a consultant for six weeks, and get them to come back in once a year for further consulting work, or hire two full time employees, train them up, let them learn all the mistakes, etc? Consultant = much more cost effective. 2. How do you explain the problems? Several ways. People can't write good requirements. That is where SO many projects go awry; misunderstandings, misinterpretations, etc., because of vague or incorrect requirements. I've also seen people hire consultants, pay them lots of money, and proceed to ignore their recommendations, then wonder why things go stupid. Infighting and insecurity. Geeks get threatened and don't cooperate with the consultants. People lie. Amazing, I know, but in-house techs find they're out of their depth and don't call for help because they fear repercussions. Sales people exaggerate. This is stated SO MUCH on this site, until it's inconvenient. But really, sales people will sometimes say something to make the sale and the consultants get stuck trying to implement it.
All of this is beside the point. It shouldn't come as a huge surprise, however, to people who read this site regularly that there are a lot of people who term themselves experts and have no idea what they're doing, and/or just simply don't understand the differences between running a ten server network compared to a thousand server network.
Agreed. One of the biggest flaws with Microsoft products, in my opinion, and the reason why they get such a raw deal, is the pretty GUIs make it seem like anyone can configure them. The problem is that setting something up so it looks like it's working is a world apart from setting something up so it's working correctly and according to best practices.
GUIs can certainly cut down on silly mistakes due to typos in long complicated command lines, for instance, but if the admin doesn't understand what is going on behind the scenes then they'll end up with, well, the kind of situation that the grandparent poster is describing.
If lawyer says you can go ahead and stop working on this contract until things get resolved, then l
That's a glaringly incomplete sentence, isn't it...
I had in mind a caveat to this. If lawyer says it's okay, and you have other work that you can do, then go ahead and reassign your employees. You may as well get some cash flow going. But keep in mind that if large multinational resolves things very quickly and says "mea culpa, now get back to work immediately please", you probably want to be able to jump. If you come back and say "well, sorry, it'll be two weeks", they will probably understand. It's trickier if you have programmers tied up on something else that's going to go on for the next two months.
If you don't have other work, well, it's a ponderous situation. Is it better to have programmers sitting idle, or to have them working on stuff which is technically billable but you're still struggling to get paid for? The headaches of running a business, I'm afraid.
Yep we run couple hundred windows servers. They require 24x7 baby-sitting. And weekly scheduled reboots lest they run out of juice.
Then your Windows admins don't know what they're doing. If you're not exaggerating - if it truly is the norm for your Windows servers to require perpetual baby-sitting and to be rebooted regularly - I suggest you call in Microsoft for a health check. Depending on your level of agreement, it may be free; if it isn't, the recovered time in man hours will more than make up for it. If you're not exaggerating.
Source: I have been team lead/lead consultant for companies that run hundreds or thousands of Windows servers in 24x7x365 environments. There is simply no excuse in 2012 for weekly rebooting to be the accepted norm.
Yes, it was more common back in the late 90s. But today? No excuse, and I am serious in my suggestion that you call in MS for a health check. It's in their best interest to help you fix whatever shambles is present in your environment that necessitates this.
Just in case anyone thinks this is a good idea (and evidently some of you do, as this is currently scored +4 Insightful)...
No. Don't. You'll be sued, and you'll lose.
It might feel good. It might seem fair. There are plenty of people here who'll say they deserve it. They may even be somewhat correct. Don't do it.
If they're a large multi-national corporation, however, I doubt an external small vendor would have access to do this, fortunately.
Lastly, one should always carefully consider if one really wants to take advice from someone who's suggesting quite major actions of high impact and who gets confused between simple homonyms. (Joe_Dragon, you mean "their".)
The most likely explanation is not malice, but that the right person hasn't done their goods receipt so A/P can release the funds. Or they made a screw-up, closed a project or a funding source by mistake, and now need to go through three levels of horror and approvals to get the funding back.
Go and see a lawyer. The charge for the few hours of work will sting but it's surely going to be much less than you're owed. Take careful note of Step 2. Well, ask the lawyer about step 2 and take careful note of what they say. If you can do so, cease your work (hopefully you've got short term work you can get your employees to do in the meantime) and let the client know politely why you're doing so. (Get the lawyer to do it; they're much better at that kind of thing, and they're not going to get emotional. As Joce640k says, businesses are run by grown-ups.) It may feel satisfying to write a screed of anger, but it doesn't get results in the business world. Go out for a drink with a friend and rant to them, if you'll feel better. But be professional in your business dealings.
If lawyer says you can go ahead and stop working on this contract until things get resolved, then l
I wouldn't advise approaching the competitor, at least until you've heard the lawyer's opinion (yes, that too could be a breach of contract on your part).
Don't try the "name and shame" game. As others point out:
* Beware of libel lawsuits. * Where will you go for the "naming" part? *... that will agree to publish (newspapers are afraid of libel too, and it's probably not that interesting as a story, and classifieds in a big paper/commercial site are more expensive than the lawyer option)? *...that's big enough that the company will notice? * And even if they notice, they most likely won't care.
...we could get everyone else to top using Twitter or other modern social networking...
Slashdot is social networking. I do find it funny/sad that Slashdotters love to rail against Facebook and do this on their own niche social networking site.
Most social media is talking at each other, not to each other.
Not in my experience. It crashes daily on me, often more than once a day. And the pseudo-Macintosh sad face "Aw snap..." message wasn't cute the first time. Now it's beyond irritating. Don't hearken back to a 20 year old theme in a vain attempt to try to be cute when you've imploded; at the very least give me some kind of error message. (I suppose that's verboten in the Google "less is more" universe, which is why you also strip down the browser interface so much that not only are semi-relevant buttons and menu items removed from view but controls I want to actually use on a regular basis have also disappeared! Dammit, Google...)
Tabs are hopeless; if I right-click on an interesting link and open in a new tab, I'll see the original page when I click to that tab. In order to display the correct information, I must refresh the page.
On my company issued locked down laptop, I have a choice between IE 7 (!) and Chrome. Chrome has become so unstable and irritating that I only use it on pages where IE 7 simply won't work.
Building your own, if you know what you're doing and know what you want is usually cheaper.
No, it's not, unless you have some extremely specific requirements, and even then it's unlikely.
Go ahead, price it out. The massive volume discounts that a Dell or an HP gets, combined with an extremely sophisticated supply chain, make it cheaper for them to build on an assembly line than the price of the individual components. That's before I count the value of my time.
If you enjoy assembling PCs, great. Have fun, treat it as a hobby.
If you want something extremely specific, then maybe it really will work out cheaper.
You're half right - if the file is found in the start directory, no need to go to the search path. As for the rest of it, I think this comment and your response says it all. Remember that you can't control how other applications may edit the path, nor what versions of dependencies they may place on the system. The comment about the path being user specific is just irrelevant.
If you're concerned about isolation at this level, you can always use dedicated servers at the application layer or the data layer or where ever you're likely to run into problems. Presumably anyone who's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software won't balk at this.
Slashdot Mirror
This move seems totally contrary to Google's corporate ethos thus far
I have to beg to differ; it may go against what they've said (and I've been exercising my sarcasm rights over the whole "don't be evil" thing for years, and catching much grief for it here on Slashdot), but their actions have been putting the lie to that mantra for a long time. It's just getting more obvious and harder for their fans to defend.
I didn't see this (There's no avoiding Google+) reported on Slashdot, but I may have missed it. (Or maybe nobody thought it was particularly interesting.) Wall Street Journal talks about how Google+ has been a non-starter so far, so now Google are wielding their might and forcing people to sign up for Google+ accounts as they use other Google services. Create a GMail, YouTube, Zagat review, etc., account - automatically get a public by default Google+ page.
I've posted several times on Slashdot about how and why I use Yahoo Mail, Yahoo search, MapQuest or Bing maps, etc. Part of it is convenience and preference - I like Yahoo Mail and have had the same account for, oh, 15 years or so now - but another major part of it is because I don't trust Google. And I'm increasingly glad that I have almost ceased using Google for the last two or three years.
I assume, then, that you have no interest or passion in your life that revolves around anything someone else may see as pointless or a time waster. Most hobbies or leisure activities are not that interesting to a vast majority of the public, and they wouldn't understand your frustration if something you enjoyed disappeared with little warning.
World of Warcraft? I've never played it, so I don't care if it goes away. But other people surely would, and I don't begrudge them their enjoyment. Or any other MMORPG, for that matter.
I like model trains, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, windsurfing, and lots of other things. Most of those interests are not that valuable in the grand scheme of things. So what? They're hobbies.
Or, as girlintraining puts it, you're a heartless bastard.
Linus may rule by the cult of personality
I do not think you've been paying attention otherwise you'd see how ridiculous that statement is. How many of us could even recognise him on sight? We've got more chance with a B grade actor.
I do not think you understand what it means to rule by the cult of personality. In the geek world, everyone knows who Linus is. He is revered, held up as an icon, almost worshipped. People ask, "what would Linus do?" His personal story (where he grew up, where he lives, his career moves) is known in detail by thousands of geeks. Just because you don't know what he looks like does not preclude a cult of personality. How many people actually know what Charles Manson looks like? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
It's not considered acceptable in the wider world; most people barely know who he is and certainly don't know about these childish tantrums.
Slashdotters seem to be falling over themselves to make excuses for him. Imagine if this report was of Steve Ballmer shouting and yelling at a Windows developer.
There are many posts on this thread stating this is how you get quality software. No, it isn't; it's how you alienate volunteers. The way you get quality software is by being a grown-up:
That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up.
This is how the software that controls the space shuttle gets done. Linus may rule by the cult of personality, but it's not a particularly good way to ensure provably correct software in a situation where it simply MUST work.
What's going on here is the kind of nuts-and-bolts work that defines the drive for group perfection -- a drive that is aggressively intolerant of ego-driven hotshots. In the shuttle group's culture, there are no superstar programmers. The whole approach to developing software is intentionally designed not to rely on any particular person.
I'm not familiar with that trip, but it has to be some kind of an edge condition. Out of interest I looked it up on Amtrak's site and it's two trains. (Does Amtrak even operate in Canada?)
Nevertheless, for the trips I take, Amtrak is much faster and far more enjoyable. I take the train when I'm going from Philadelphia to New York, Washington DC, or occasionally Boston.
* By the time I've fought with traffic around NYC, or made the detour, or fought with traffic around DC, the train has already arrived.
* Oh, hey, I'm on the train - I don't have to fight with traffic. That's a win in my book.
* And I'm not driving. I can do work on my laptop, read a book, or snooze.
I like trains. Amtrak is more expensive than the local services, but I get a guaranteed seat instead of having to stand the whole way.
If it's "stealing" why isn't anyone charged with theft? They're charged with copyright infringement. Doesn't that tell you that it's copying not stealing?
Who on earth cares? The point is it's illegal and wrong. Does it matter what you call it, or do mere definitions and semantics make something better or worse?
"You just stole money from me! You're a thief!"
"Why, no, I merely changed some digital indicators to increase an arbitrary number called a 'balance' in my electronic bank records and effect a corresponding decrease on the same data cell in your electronic bank records."
"Oh, well, that's all right then. Now I feel ever so much happier."
I hope your faux moral superiority comforts you at night when your children are sentenced to served time in a debtor's prison.
You're talking about people who choose not to take/steal things based on principle, even when it's trivially easy and "everyone's doing it". You are, moreover, taking the side of those who claim it's their right to do the opposite and acquire music, movies, and software, even when it's illegal, because of some theorized "digital rights", or because of a vague claim of "information wants to be free", or because "it benefits everyone in the end".
And you have the audacity to sneer at your opponents for "faux moral superiority" (while posting as an anonymous coward). How pathetic.
You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death.
Perhaps in your mind. I'll grant that it's been debated to death, and - surprise! - those who like to take stuff for free to which they are not entitled will proclaim loudly that it's NOT STEALING.
At most, you can claim a victory of semantics. Of intent? Nowhere close.
I'll let others do the usual list of reasons why pirating is better for all mankind
Excepting those who don't get paid for their hard efforts.
and just point out that the digital rights referred to may be the access to resources on the internet (TPB)
Access all the resources you like, so long as it's not focused, even if "only" partially, on something illegal.
being allowed to host a proxy (as they had doe)
Nothing wrong there, host all the proxies you like, so long as it's not focused on something illegal.
or redirect (as some others do).
Redirect to your heart's content, so long as you're not focusing on something illegal. Wait, am I repeating myself?
It's not about digital rights. All the so-called "rights" you list are not at risk.
And despite the raving spewing forth, doing illegal stuff is also not at risk.
If you're really serious about digital rights and so forth, learn some marketing and put forth a proposal as to how business models should evolve. Back it up with numbers and hard data (not just "if only everyone did this, then such-and-such would work" or "me and my friends would support this, go on, give it a try"). The cop-out I see all the time on Slashdot is "business models need to evolve". So suggest this magical evolutionary path, then. If you can come up with a realistic and feasible roadmap, you'll make a lot of money. Otherwise you're just taking stuff because you can and because you're too damn cheap to pay.
Everything else is sophistry, and the reality is that no matter how much business models evolve they will most likely be a losing proposition regardless because people like being able to get stuff for free with low risk of getting caught breaking the law.
"Digital rights"? Please...what about the right to produce something, choose a business model that says "I want to be paid for this artifact up front, not when or if you feel like it", and bear the consequences of people rejecting your chosen business model by NOT BUYING YOUR PRODUCT and doing without it rather than just taking it?
For what it's worth, I'm not looking to win any argument; I think there are very few people here on Slashdot who will be swayed out of their firmly held beliefs (whether they agree with you or with me).
I am speaking up and saying that if faced with the proposition whereby I accept there are going to be many more cameras monitoring me in public in return for the assurance that it will make a significant difference in saving the lives and/or psyches of over a hundred children in 2013, and another hundred or two hundred in 2014, and another hundred or more in 2015, and so on, then I am fully willing to go with that.
Slashdotters have turned "think of the children" into a sarcastic unmeaning catch-phrase, but when I think of the children - as individuals, as little boys and girls who have been slaughtered before they had a chance to start life - and I think of the trade-off, it is not even a question for me. These are my priorities. They are different from many other individuals' priorities. So be it.
Recording my movements every day? I'm really not that concerned about someone choosing to watch where I go and what I do. I'm simply not that interesting that someone would pick me, out of millions of others, to stalk. You probably aren't either. Very few people are that interesting. And you can make your "what if" arguments ad nauseam and they will not sway my beliefs. I am sure nothing in this post will do anything other than to make you disgusted. If you are disgusted with me and my lack of awareness of what freedom means...oh well. We are two anonymous typists on a silly internet forum. Compared to 10 or 15 or 20 six and seven year old children being buried a week before Christmas, that means not a damn thing to me.
Roughy 500 kids go permanently missing each year in the USA and are presumed dead. Millions of public monitoring cameras would surely reduce that number. Are you willing to sacrified the freedom to go about your daily business unwatched in order to save an order of magnitude more children?
Really? Hell yes. I really would. Cameras watching me in public, and you claim it'll save 500 kids every year? At the risk of some unknown government low-level staffer seeing me pick my nose in public? Or scratch my butt in public?
Sign me up. Yes, that's worth it. What freedom am I losing? Again, public monitoring cameras??? I don't think there's a moment during the day when I'm in public that I'm not in sight of someone. I think you've got pretty silly standards of what constitutes freedom.
How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises?
1. Consultants do make sense in many cases, such as when you want to configure a complex piece of niche software. Do you hire a consultant for six weeks, and get them to come back in once a year for further consulting work, or hire two full time employees, train them up, let them learn all the mistakes, etc? Consultant = much more cost effective.
2. How do you explain the problems? Several ways. People can't write good requirements. That is where SO many projects go awry; misunderstandings, misinterpretations, etc., because of vague or incorrect requirements. I've also seen people hire consultants, pay them lots of money, and proceed to ignore their recommendations, then wonder why things go stupid. Infighting and insecurity. Geeks get threatened and don't cooperate with the consultants. People lie. Amazing, I know, but in-house techs find they're out of their depth and don't call for help because they fear repercussions. Sales people exaggerate. This is stated SO MUCH on this site, until it's inconvenient. But really, sales people will sometimes say something to make the sale and the consultants get stuck trying to implement it.
All of this is beside the point. It shouldn't come as a huge surprise, however, to people who read this site regularly that there are a lot of people who term themselves experts and have no idea what they're doing, and/or just simply don't understand the differences between running a ten server network compared to a thousand server network.
Agreed. One of the biggest flaws with Microsoft products, in my opinion, and the reason why they get such a raw deal, is the pretty GUIs make it seem like anyone can configure them. The problem is that setting something up so it looks like it's working is a world apart from setting something up so it's working correctly and according to best practices.
GUIs can certainly cut down on silly mistakes due to typos in long complicated command lines, for instance, but if the admin doesn't understand what is going on behind the scenes then they'll end up with, well, the kind of situation that the grandparent poster is describing.
If lawyer says you can go ahead and stop working on this contract until things get resolved, then l
That's a glaringly incomplete sentence, isn't it...
I had in mind a caveat to this. If lawyer says it's okay, and you have other work that you can do, then go ahead and reassign your employees. You may as well get some cash flow going. But keep in mind that if large multinational resolves things very quickly and says "mea culpa, now get back to work immediately please", you probably want to be able to jump. If you come back and say "well, sorry, it'll be two weeks", they will probably understand. It's trickier if you have programmers tied up on something else that's going to go on for the next two months.
If you don't have other work, well, it's a ponderous situation. Is it better to have programmers sitting idle, or to have them working on stuff which is technically billable but you're still struggling to get paid for? The headaches of running a business, I'm afraid.
Yep we run couple hundred windows servers. They require 24x7 baby-sitting. And weekly scheduled reboots lest they run out of juice.
Then your Windows admins don't know what they're doing. If you're not exaggerating - if it truly is the norm for your Windows servers to require perpetual baby-sitting and to be rebooted regularly - I suggest you call in Microsoft for a health check. Depending on your level of agreement, it may be free; if it isn't, the recovered time in man hours will more than make up for it. If you're not exaggerating.
Source: I have been team lead/lead consultant for companies that run hundreds or thousands of Windows servers in 24x7x365 environments. There is simply no excuse in 2012 for weekly rebooting to be the accepted norm.
Yes, it was more common back in the late 90s. But today? No excuse, and I am serious in my suggestion that you call in MS for a health check. It's in their best interest to help you fix whatever shambles is present in your environment that necessitates this.
Just in case anyone thinks this is a good idea (and evidently some of you do, as this is currently scored +4 Insightful)...
No. Don't. You'll be sued, and you'll lose.
It might feel good. It might seem fair. There are plenty of people here who'll say they deserve it. They may even be somewhat correct. Don't do it.
If they're a large multi-national corporation, however, I doubt an external small vendor would have access to do this, fortunately.
Lastly, one should always carefully consider if one really wants to take advice from someone who's suggesting quite major actions of high impact and who gets confused between simple homonyms. (Joe_Dragon, you mean "their".)
Agreed with most of what Joce640k writes.
The most likely explanation is not malice, but that the right person hasn't done their goods receipt so A/P can release the funds. Or they made a screw-up, closed a project or a funding source by mistake, and now need to go through three levels of horror and approvals to get the funding back.
Go and see a lawyer. The charge for the few hours of work will sting but it's surely going to be much less than you're owed. Take careful note of Step 2. Well, ask the lawyer about step 2 and take careful note of what they say. If you can do so, cease your work (hopefully you've got short term work you can get your employees to do in the meantime) and let the client know politely why you're doing so. (Get the lawyer to do it; they're much better at that kind of thing, and they're not going to get emotional. As Joce640k says, businesses are run by grown-ups.) It may feel satisfying to write a screed of anger, but it doesn't get results in the business world. Go out for a drink with a friend and rant to them, if you'll feel better. But be professional in your business dealings.
If lawyer says you can go ahead and stop working on this contract until things get resolved, then l
I wouldn't advise approaching the competitor, at least until you've heard the lawyer's opinion (yes, that too could be a breach of contract on your part).
Don't try the "name and shame" game. As others point out:
* Beware of libel lawsuits. ... that will agree to publish (newspapers are afraid of libel too, and it's probably not that interesting as a story, and classifieds in a big paper/commercial site are more expensive than the lawyer option)? ...that's big enough that the company will notice?
* Where will you go for the "naming" part?
*
*
* And even if they notice, they most likely won't care.
G+ is not quite the same business model.
G+ has a business model?
...we could get everyone else to top using Twitter or other modern social networking...
Slashdot is social networking. I do find it funny/sad that Slashdotters love to rail against Facebook and do this on their own niche social networking site.
Most social media is talking at each other, not to each other.
Yep, sounds like Slashdot.
Oh the irony...
Amazing that it supports ECC since Intel seems committed to making you pay through the nose for stuff like that.
Damn, but Slashdot is a sad place these days.
Not in my experience. It crashes daily on me, often more than once a day. And the pseudo-Macintosh sad face "Aw snap..." message wasn't cute the first time. Now it's beyond irritating. Don't hearken back to a 20 year old theme in a vain attempt to try to be cute when you've imploded; at the very least give me some kind of error message. (I suppose that's verboten in the Google "less is more" universe, which is why you also strip down the browser interface so much that not only are semi-relevant buttons and menu items removed from view but controls I want to actually use on a regular basis have also disappeared! Dammit, Google...)
Tabs are hopeless; if I right-click on an interesting link and open in a new tab, I'll see the original page when I click to that tab. In order to display the correct information, I must refresh the page.
On my company issued locked down laptop, I have a choice between IE 7 (!) and Chrome. Chrome has become so unstable and irritating that I only use it on pages where IE 7 simply won't work.
Clear GPL violations, even this relatively small ones, should not be tolerated.
Whereas copyright violations, even major ones, should be not only tolerated but encouraged?*
* I don't know if doragasu is a copyright violater or not. This is aimed at the copyright infringing masses on /.
Someone is copying and pasting this exact same troll in a number of stories.
Building your own, if you know what you're doing and know what you want is usually cheaper.
No, it's not, unless you have some extremely specific requirements, and even then it's unlikely.
Go ahead, price it out. The massive volume discounts that a Dell or an HP gets, combined with an extremely sophisticated supply chain, make it cheaper for them to build on an assembly line than the price of the individual components. That's before I count the value of my time.
If you enjoy assembling PCs, great. Have fun, treat it as a hobby.
If you want something extremely specific, then maybe it really will work out cheaper.
But don't think it's a cost saving measure.
Why start with an insult?
You're half right - if the file is found in the start directory, no need to go to the search path. As for the rest of it, I think this comment and your response says it all. Remember that you can't control how other applications may edit the path, nor what versions of dependencies they may place on the system. The comment about the path being user specific is just irrelevant.
If you're concerned about isolation at this level, you can always use dedicated servers at the application layer or the data layer or where ever you're likely to run into problems. Presumably anyone who's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on software won't balk at this.