If I were Dell, I wouldn't be worried. MSFT won't be any better at selling hardware than they are at anything else.
Seems to me Microsoft has been wildly successful at selling software so far, whatever you think about the quality of that software or the manner in which they sell it.
I read the post about the worst jobs for a couple of minutes before getting fed up with all the inane comments from people who didn't read the article. It's probably pertinent however:
Do you flinch when your inbox dings? The people manning secure@microsoft.com receive approximately 100,000 dings a year, each one a message that something in the Microsoft empire may have gone terribly wrong. Teams of Microsoft Security Response Center employees toil 365 days a year to fix the kinks in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and all the behemoth's other products. It's tedious work. Each product can have multiple versions in multiple languages, and each needs its own repairs (by one estimate, Explorer alone has 300 different configurations). Plus, to most hackers, crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star, so the assault is relentless. According to the SANS Institute, a security research group, Microsoft products are among the top five targets of online attack. Meanwhile, faith in Microsoft security is ever-shakier--according to one estimate, 30 percent of corporate chief information officers have moved away from some Windows platforms in recent years. "Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place," says Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center. "They have to patch so much software on a case-by-case basis. And all in a world that just doesn't have time to wait."
Every FBI agent who asked for/took information not legally allowed should be sacked immediately, they either don't know the law they are enforcing or are deliberately breaking it themselves. No excuses, they should be sacked.
Every sysadmin who had a system crash should be sacked immediately; they either don't know the systems they are adminstering or are deliberately crashing them themselves. No excuses, they should be sacked.
Except, wasn't that the later reason? I thought the initial reason given was because they showed soap operas which were offensive to the public moral good.
Yes! Thank you for bringing this up! I live in the US now, but grew up in another country and never understood this. I knew the history of it being an abbreviation for coeducational...I just was always puzzled about the common use for the same reason you describe.
And the same with freshmen by the way. And while we're at it, what does sophomore actually mean?
And I base that on what they do with Microsoft Research.
As for the rest of this article, already 95% of the comments are completely worthless "boo Microsoft is so evil" themes. If you want to make an impact in the business world you'd better try and come up with something a little more mature than that.
I read another comment that said "Microsoft-funded means automatic ignore, especially on Slashdot". Close but no cigar. One, did you ever stop to count just how many MS stories get posted to Slashdot? The "editors" know that's a sure way to get loads of angry comments, which translates into page views which translates into $$$. (Given how much Slashdotters love to use that puerile M$ tag, maybe any Microsoft story should now get tagged as $la$hdot flamebait.)
And two, no matter the reaction on/., that does not translate into the corporate world ignoring them. This sort of study, at the most innocuous level, will make little to no impact. It will not incite CTOs the world over to burst into angry vitriolic nonsense of the ilk being shown on Slashdot. Or...it might just strike a nerve with them, and therefore a blow against GPL, open source, Linux, etc.
Don't know where you are, but I'm living in Pennsylvania. The single most prevalent comment I get when people find out I'm from New Zealand is, "New Zealand? Why on earth did you ever leave that paradise?"
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
Umm...for what it's worth, my department's cheques do go to Redmond. (We have another group that works with Linux.) We do have premier support, but it's nowhere near the top tier of the various premier support options. And yet...
When I call with a SEV-A, the first thing they do is verify that I or someone else will be on the case 24x7 until the issue is resolved, because that's the level of commitment that Microsoft guarantees to me. My TAM is immediately woken and gets on the line to make sure I get what I need.
After two hours and no resolution, they automatically ask if I want a ROSS (Remote On-Site Support Engineer) sent out to fix it. This is someone who as soon as I say "jump" will get on a plane and fly out here, and is a top notch support engineer for SQL Server or SMS or whatever product I'm working on.
At some point (I think it's three hours from memory), a page will automatically get sent to Steve Ballmer. No, he's not going to call me (yes, haha, insert flying chairs comment, whatever). Point is: escalation happens and they are dead serious if I say this problem is impacting my entire company. If I've been down for two hours and the determination is I need someone on site, they will find the best guy for the job and fly him to me if that's what it takes.
That's what I consider enterprise level support, and yes you pay for it. But at least I know if I pay the bucks (and remember we don't have the ultimate top tier of support) then there is a mammoth support structure working to get me back up and running and everyone on the other end of the line is acutely aware of how many senior level management people are being notified and coming back to ask questions on what I need, do we have the right people, is there some guy in England or California we need to wake up, etc.
Any remote distribution product has a fairly high learning curve, and SMS is no exception. This is as much about the infrastructure as it is about the product being distributed. You will often find it necessary to hack apart MSIs, do some intriguing scripting, etc, because vendors are terrible at providing standardized ways of distributing their software in an automated scriptable manner. Adobe (as you mention them specifically), from what I've heard, is especially bad at this. That said, there are many, many people doing the same thing who are willing to share their experiences in mailing lists and on web sites.
Check the requirements and supported platforms for your product before you plunk down your company's cash. For SMS, that includes the service pack level as supportability can change. I'm looking specifically at your use of Windows 98, which I think is not supported in SMS 2003. But check and make sure.
By the way, skipping back to my first point...what duffbeer703 says about MS blaming issues on the 3rd party distribution tool is, in my experience, not as bad as it sounds. (Caveat: we have premier support so they tend to be a lot nicer to us.) But, in general, I've found MS to be pretty helpful on support, and that extends to "best efforts" even if they do point the finger at your other product. That said...remember your other third party product, even if you use SMS, is the products you're trying to distribute.
Good luck. SMS works really well for us, but we have a fairly solid grounding in it. As I mentioned, it's a steep learning curve no matter what product you choose, and you may find there are various system requirements that you might find onerous (do you run AD, for example?). Remember SMS is more than mere software distribution; it's also a huge inventory gatherer which adds to the complexity of running it.
I seem to remember reading somewhere (on Slashdot, in fact) that he regularly sells off lots of shares in order to (amongst other things) prevent speculation and/or distress if he were to sell them off sporadically.
Interesting to whom, precisely? Hyperion's marketing department? Scant technical details and really only notable for the link to the photos of Google's new Sydney office which are kind of interesting, I suppose, in an "ooh wow shiny...okay what's next?" kind of way.
Agreed. People get things out of all proportion, and this is not just on Slashdot. Seriously...maybe it's because life, to me, is just so much fun. But more than that, it's the most precious thing you have. Take that away, and all the rest of it becomes moot. Sounds stupidly obvious, but apparently most people don't take any time to occasionally stop and reflect on that exact point.
John Donne said:
No man is an island, entire of itself...
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...
And so never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee
(Apologies for misquoting; this is from memory because I'm too lazy to look it up.)
So I'm stupid and/or lazy because I prefer IE to Firefox. Hmm...and how telling this gets moderated insightful. I'll be generous and presume it is because one can in fact contend that a developer who only supports IE these days is a bit out of touch with what's happening with Firefox.
But because I do take exception to being so categorized, I'll comment that I have IE, Firefox, and Netscape Navigator installed on my current laptop and use IE about 80% of the time. Firefox is usually quicker, but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer. I've articulated some of the reasons in past posts, so I won't go into it here. Just wanted to inform you that there are one or two intelligent, hard-working geeks about who actually happen to prefer IE.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Isn't it, ultimately, about choice? Right?
i just had to switch to gmail today,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.
assholes.
Right, imagine the nerve...they decided to start charging a nominal fee for a specific remote method of access to their otherwise entirely free e-mail service.
Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service. But why be petty about it and call them names?
And, as you say, there's always a price. Same with gmail. You're the consumer; decide whether the service is worth the price and act as you see fit on that basis.
The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely.
That means it's not available on the general download site; you have to ring up and ask for it. That's all. Unless you have premier support, in which case it's available on the premier site.
And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.
I have no idea who or what Consumerist is, but the story I looked at had this in the first three paragraphs.
We predicted an RIAA landlslide, but they only managed a 53.8% majority over Halliburton's 46.2%
The message is clear. The internet cares deeply about being able to download music illegally.
Mmm-hmm...not too sure who Consumerist polled, but I'm fairly confident that a truly representative poll of mainstream America would not provide that sort of skewed data.
And then according to another post...
they pitted the RIAA against United Airlines, U-Haul, Exxon, and Halliburton
So you're not exactly talking a scientific survey here.
In short, this is mildly amusing and vindicative for puerile geeks to salivate over, but as far as having any integrity or usefulness whatsoever? Oh please...
No, really not, actually. I agree 100%, and I work with Microsoft products for a living and will often defend them against the more egregious slurs posted on Slashdot.
But in this case they've blown it. We called them a year ago to ask them about their plans for the change to DST and they asked "what change?". They only really started to come out with patches a couple of months ago.
CRM? Don't get me started...they kept on finding new components to be patched, server and client, said they'd release the patches in early March (!), finally promised to release on February 28th, and then two days before release date came out and said they'd found some problems and the release would be delayed for another few days. And by the way, if you have more CRM clients to be patched than can be easily handled manually and you don't run your users as local admins, then you're in trouble because it's nigh impossible to get CRM patches distributed over SMS.
The Exchange/Outlook tools are a nightmare. The rebasing tool causes all appointments set in the three week period between new DST time and old DST time to be sent out again so all our users came in to work one morning to find their inboxes filled with dozens of appointments which had been resent. And the whole dismal complicated procedure is so complex we've been told it'll achieve perhaps a 90% success rate and there will be problems that we have to fix manually.
No, ordinarily I'll at least be able to defend Microsoft against Linux zealots and fans, but this time they messed up. Big. That the people we talked to didn't even know this was coming a year ago until we alerted them is just wrong, and it has very plainly been downhill from there.
How sweet. Tell me; why did you decide the article was dumb and not even worthy of being read? The Slashdot summary convinced you of all details?
Young lady has graduated from Yale with impeccable credentials.
Despite this, she finds she cannot get a job.
It turns out some fools with nothing better to do are making lurid conversation, commenting about her physical attributes, the size of her chest, etc.
And there are people contributing to the thread pretending to be her, just to get their kicks. This makes it look even worse, as if she's involved.
Although it's not provable this is the cause, EVERYTHING else is impeccable in her presentation to prospective employers.
To a very great degree of confidence, it appears this stupidity masquerading under the guise of free speech has destroyed her career before it even begins.
Further, the conversations about her have degenerated to the point where people are threatening physical and sexual violence.
She's now jobless, has little hope of a career, and is fearful for her safety. Just because some idiots are getting their kicks in the relative anonymity of a bulletin board.
And everything is being smugly and self-righteously defended as "but it's a free speech issue"
So tell me how you justify your pontificating? Here's a concept: with great power (and great freedom) comes great responsibility. If you take advantage of the power/freedom and glibly ignore the responsibility to use it wisely, is it still a black and white freedom of speech issue?
You want to have inviolable freedom of speech and pretend there's no gray area? Then people will have their lives destroyed for no better reason than people are bored one day, and your society will become meaner, more violent, and less civilized. What gives you the right to enforce that on someone else?
Simple solution: just stop paying it. If the IRS takes you to court, simply point out that the IRS tax code is not based on or empowered by any law. After all, for you to be committing a crime, you have to be breaking a law.
So how long ago did you stop paying it, and what's happened since?
Oh, and so as to not get off-topic...I usually use TurboTax, but this year I've had a headache of a year with buying a house and all kinds of other complexities, so I'm going the tax preparer way. For the sake of a hundred dollars or so, it's just worth the peace of mind for me this year.
In New Zealand I always just filled out the forms by hand. Here? Not a chance...it's insanely complicated. The cost of TurboTax is dwarfed by the amount of time I'd spend doing it by hand.
I do have Firefox installed on my system -- actually, I'm typing this post in it right now. I like how fast it is compared to IE on some pages. And there are occasionally some sites where it just seems to be having a slow takes-forever-to-load day in IE, so I fire up Firefox and bang, it's right there. But then I also some days find the reverse is true.
More to the point, though, there are things that, as a casual Firefox user, I just can't be bothered figuring out. Example: about 10% of the time, when I click on a hyperlink, Firefox downloads it to my system instead of following the link. What the... okay, that's annoying.
And, by the way, while I'm at it, how about the fact it automatically downloads updates and then forces them to install the next time I open Firefox, without asking me. So, of course, because I'm working on a work laptop and standard user permissions are non-admin, it takes forever to start up because it ultimately fails to install those updates. Doesn't stop it from trying the next time, though...again without asking me.
And back to my original complaint...when I do want to download something, I have no option where to put it; the downloaded file automatically goes on to my desktop. I don't want it there! I want it...well, I want it where ever I want that particular file, which changes depending on the file. Why can't I browse and tell Firefox where to put it instead of being arbitrarily forced to put it in the same inappropriate location?
Those of you who are about to dash off replies telling me I'm stupid, of course I can, it's right under this menu or this is how you do it and what an idiot I am...you're missing the point. I'm sure most if not all of these complaints are addressed somewhere. But these are first impressions and they are negative impressions to me.
End result: I used Firefox for a while and still use it quite a lot...but I use IE just as much because there are some ways it does things which are friendlier to me. By the way, I know the tech in the cube next to me also tried Firefox and eventually discarded it because there were too many niggling little annoyances and she preferred the way IE did things. Anecdotal, I know, but there you are.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were Dell, I wouldn't be worried. MSFT won't be any better at selling hardware than they are at anything else.
Seems to me Microsoft has been wildly successful at selling software so far, whatever you think about the quality of that software or the manner in which they sell it.
I read the post about the worst jobs for a couple of minutes before getting fed up with all the inane comments from people who didn't read the article. It's probably pertinent however:
Do you flinch when your inbox dings? The people manning secure@microsoft.com receive approximately 100,000 dings a year, each one a message that something in the Microsoft empire may have gone terribly wrong. Teams of Microsoft Security Response Center employees toil 365 days a year to fix the kinks in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and all the behemoth's other products. It's tedious work. Each product can have multiple versions in multiple languages, and each needs its own repairs (by one estimate, Explorer alone has 300 different configurations). Plus, to most hackers, crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star, so the assault is relentless. According to the SANS Institute, a security research group, Microsoft products are among the top five targets of online attack. Meanwhile, faith in Microsoft security is ever-shakier--according to one estimate, 30 percent of corporate chief information officers have moved away from some Windows platforms in recent years. "Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place," says Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Internet Storm Center. "They have to patch so much software on a case-by-case basis. And all in a world that just doesn't have time to wait."
Every FBI agent who asked for/took information not legally allowed should be sacked immediately, they either don't know the law they are enforcing or are deliberately breaking it themselves. No excuses, they should be sacked.
Every sysadmin who had a system crash should be sacked immediately; they either don't know the systems they are adminstering or are deliberately crashing them themselves. No excuses, they should be sacked.
Except, wasn't that the later reason? I thought the initial reason given was because they showed soap operas which were offensive to the public moral good.
Yes! Thank you for bringing this up! I live in the US now, but grew up in another country and never understood this. I knew the history of it being an abbreviation for coeducational...I just was always puzzled about the common use for the same reason you describe.
And the same with freshmen by the way. And while we're at it, what does sophomore actually mean?
And I base that on what they do with Microsoft Research.
/., that does not translate into the corporate world ignoring them. This sort of study, at the most innocuous level, will make little to no impact. It will not incite CTOs the world over to burst into angry vitriolic nonsense of the ilk being shown on Slashdot. Or...it might just strike a nerve with them, and therefore a blow against GPL, open source, Linux, etc.
As for the rest of this article, already 95% of the comments are completely worthless "boo Microsoft is so evil" themes. If you want to make an impact in the business world you'd better try and come up with something a little more mature than that.
I read another comment that said "Microsoft-funded means automatic ignore, especially on Slashdot". Close but no cigar. One, did you ever stop to count just how many MS stories get posted to Slashdot? The "editors" know that's a sure way to get loads of angry comments, which translates into page views which translates into $$$. (Given how much Slashdotters love to use that puerile M$ tag, maybe any Microsoft story should now get tagged as $la$hdot flamebait.)
And two, no matter the reaction on
Think about it.
Can two or more standards be, by definitation, standard? (sic)
Feet and inches / metres
Pounds and ounces / kilograms
Don't know where you are, but I'm living in Pennsylvania. The single most prevalent comment I get when people find out I'm from New Zealand is, "New Zealand? Why on earth did you ever leave that paradise?"
Once you go from there to the support issues, RH take an even bigger beating. 'Just reboot it' is NOT the first (and for 3 hours, only) option I want to hear when I have a production server locked up. And 3 hours to escalate to second line is NOT good enough for a platinum contract (Premium in RH terms?). If I wanted that kind of solution and support, I'd go back to sending my cheques to Redmond.
Umm...for what it's worth, my department's cheques do go to Redmond. (We have another group that works with Linux.) We do have premier support, but it's nowhere near the top tier of the various premier support options. And yet...
When I call with a SEV-A, the first thing they do is verify that I or someone else will be on the case 24x7 until the issue is resolved, because that's the level of commitment that Microsoft guarantees to me. My TAM is immediately woken and gets on the line to make sure I get what I need.
After two hours and no resolution, they automatically ask if I want a ROSS (Remote On-Site Support Engineer) sent out to fix it. This is someone who as soon as I say "jump" will get on a plane and fly out here, and is a top notch support engineer for SQL Server or SMS or whatever product I'm working on.
At some point (I think it's three hours from memory), a page will automatically get sent to Steve Ballmer. No, he's not going to call me (yes, haha, insert flying chairs comment, whatever). Point is: escalation happens and they are dead serious if I say this problem is impacting my entire company. If I've been down for two hours and the determination is I need someone on site, they will find the best guy for the job and fly him to me if that's what it takes.
That's what I consider enterprise level support, and yes you pay for it. But at least I know if I pay the bucks (and remember we don't have the ultimate top tier of support) then there is a mammoth support structure working to get me back up and running and everyone on the other end of the line is acutely aware of how many senior level management people are being notified and coming back to ask questions on what I need, do we have the right people, is there some guy in England or California we need to wake up, etc.
A couple of cautions.
Any remote distribution product has a fairly high learning curve, and SMS is no exception. This is as much about the infrastructure as it is about the product being distributed. You will often find it necessary to hack apart MSIs, do some intriguing scripting, etc, because vendors are terrible at providing standardized ways of distributing their software in an automated scriptable manner. Adobe (as you mention them specifically), from what I've heard, is especially bad at this. That said, there are many, many people doing the same thing who are willing to share their experiences in mailing lists and on web sites.
Check the requirements and supported platforms for your product before you plunk down your company's cash. For SMS, that includes the service pack level as supportability can change. I'm looking specifically at your use of Windows 98, which I think is not supported in SMS 2003. But check and make sure.
By the way, skipping back to my first point...what duffbeer703 says about MS blaming issues on the 3rd party distribution tool is, in my experience, not as bad as it sounds. (Caveat: we have premier support so they tend to be a lot nicer to us.) But, in general, I've found MS to be pretty helpful on support, and that extends to "best efforts" even if they do point the finger at your other product. That said...remember your other third party product, even if you use SMS, is the products you're trying to distribute.
Good luck. SMS works really well for us, but we have a fairly solid grounding in it. As I mentioned, it's a steep learning curve no matter what product you choose, and you may find there are various system requirements that you might find onerous (do you run AD, for example?). Remember SMS is more than mere software distribution; it's also a huge inventory gatherer which adds to the complexity of running it.
Also check out previous Ask Slashdot articles. No, not identical to what you're asking, but still some good points.
I seem to remember reading somewhere (on Slashdot, in fact) that he regularly sells off lots of shares in order to (amongst other things) prevent speculation and/or distress if he were to sell them off sporadically.
This is the bit that gets me in the summary:
ZDNet has a short but interesting piece
Interesting to whom, precisely? Hyperion's marketing department? Scant technical details and really only notable for the link to the photos of Google's new Sydney office which are kind of interesting, I suppose, in an "ooh wow shiny...okay what's next?" kind of way.
John Donne said:
(Apologies for misquoting; this is from memory because I'm too lazy to look it up.)
So I'm stupid and/or lazy because I prefer IE to Firefox. Hmm...and how telling this gets moderated insightful. I'll be generous and presume it is because one can in fact contend that a developer who only supports IE these days is a bit out of touch with what's happening with Firefox.
But because I do take exception to being so categorized, I'll comment that I have IE, Firefox, and Netscape Navigator installed on my current laptop and use IE about 80% of the time. Firefox is usually quicker, but IE gives a browsing experience that, in general, I prefer. I've articulated some of the reasons in past posts, so I won't go into it here. Just wanted to inform you that there are one or two intelligent, hard-working geeks about who actually happen to prefer IE.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Isn't it, ultimately, about choice? Right?
i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.
assholes.
Right, imagine the nerve...they decided to start charging a nominal fee for a specific remote method of access to their otherwise entirely free e-mail service.
Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service. But why be petty about it and call them names?
And, as you say, there's always a price. Same with gmail. You're the consumer; decide whether the service is worth the price and act as you see fit on that basis.
The Reg reports that Microsoft has a hotfix for what sounds like a subset of the more general problem complained about on TechNet; but they will only give it to customers who ask nicely.
That means it's not available on the general download site; you have to ring up and ask for it. That's all. Unless you have premier support, in which case it's available on the premier site.
And a hotfix is fussier to install than a proper patch.
?
How so?
I have no idea who or what Consumerist is, but the story I looked at had this in the first three paragraphs.
We predicted an RIAA landlslide, but they only managed a 53.8% majority over Halliburton's 46.2%
The message is clear. The internet cares deeply about being able to download music illegally.
Mmm-hmm...not too sure who Consumerist polled, but I'm fairly confident that a truly representative poll of mainstream America would not provide that sort of skewed data.
And then according to another post...
they pitted the RIAA against United Airlines, U-Haul, Exxon, and Halliburton
So you're not exactly talking a scientific survey here.
In short, this is mildly amusing and vindicative for puerile geeks to salivate over, but as far as having any integrity or usefulness whatsoever? Oh please...
+5 Insightful? Okay. But irrelevant to the actual article.
Or, if you prefer, you extend it to hardware to say you're fussy enough that you will build your own system rather than buying a Dell/whatever.
Put it the other way around: Dell did not get to be a hardware distributor to satisfy Mr. Dell's fussiness. It was to make a profit.
The rest of the article follows on from there.
No, really not, actually. I agree 100%, and I work with Microsoft products for a living and will often defend them against the more egregious slurs posted on Slashdot.
But in this case they've blown it. We called them a year ago to ask them about their plans for the change to DST and they asked "what change?". They only really started to come out with patches a couple of months ago.
CRM? Don't get me started...they kept on finding new components to be patched, server and client, said they'd release the patches in early March (!), finally promised to release on February 28th, and then two days before release date came out and said they'd found some problems and the release would be delayed for another few days. And by the way, if you have more CRM clients to be patched than can be easily handled manually and you don't run your users as local admins, then you're in trouble because it's nigh impossible to get CRM patches distributed over SMS.
The Exchange/Outlook tools are a nightmare. The rebasing tool causes all appointments set in the three week period between new DST time and old DST time to be sent out again so all our users came in to work one morning to find their inboxes filled with dozens of appointments which had been resent. And the whole dismal complicated procedure is so complex we've been told it'll achieve perhaps a 90% success rate and there will be problems that we have to fix manually.
No, ordinarily I'll at least be able to defend Microsoft against Linux zealots and fans, but this time they messed up. Big. That the people we talked to didn't even know this was coming a year ago until we alerted them is just wrong, and it has very plainly been downhill from there.
So tell me how you justify your pontificating? Here's a concept: with great power (and great freedom) comes great responsibility. If you take advantage of the power/freedom and glibly ignore the responsibility to use it wisely, is it still a black and white freedom of speech issue?
You want to have inviolable freedom of speech and pretend there's no gray area? Then people will have their lives destroyed for no better reason than people are bored one day, and your society will become meaner, more violent, and less civilized. What gives you the right to enforce that on someone else?
Coming to this discussion on Slashdot, that bastion of principle, free speech, and privacy, and finding the following banner ads:
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Simple solution: just stop paying it. If the IRS takes you to court, simply point out that the IRS tax code is not based on or empowered by any law. After all, for you to be committing a crime, you have to be breaking a law.
So how long ago did you stop paying it, and what's happened since?
Oh, and so as to not get off-topic...I usually use TurboTax, but this year I've had a headache of a year with buying a house and all kinds of other complexities, so I'm going the tax preparer way. For the sake of a hundred dollars or so, it's just worth the peace of mind for me this year.
In New Zealand I always just filled out the forms by hand. Here? Not a chance...it's insanely complicated. The cost of TurboTax is dwarfed by the amount of time I'd spend doing it by hand.
I do have Firefox installed on my system -- actually, I'm typing this post in it right now. I like how fast it is compared to IE on some pages. And there are occasionally some sites where it just seems to be having a slow takes-forever-to-load day in IE, so I fire up Firefox and bang, it's right there. But then I also some days find the reverse is true.
More to the point, though, there are things that, as a casual Firefox user, I just can't be bothered figuring out. Example: about 10% of the time, when I click on a hyperlink, Firefox downloads it to my system instead of following the link. What the... okay, that's annoying.
And, by the way, while I'm at it, how about the fact it automatically downloads updates and then forces them to install the next time I open Firefox, without asking me. So, of course, because I'm working on a work laptop and standard user permissions are non-admin, it takes forever to start up because it ultimately fails to install those updates. Doesn't stop it from trying the next time, though...again without asking me.
And back to my original complaint...when I do want to download something, I have no option where to put it; the downloaded file automatically goes on to my desktop. I don't want it there! I want it...well, I want it where ever I want that particular file, which changes depending on the file. Why can't I browse and tell Firefox where to put it instead of being arbitrarily forced to put it in the same inappropriate location?
Those of you who are about to dash off replies telling me I'm stupid, of course I can, it's right under this menu or this is how you do it and what an idiot I am...you're missing the point. I'm sure most if not all of these complaints are addressed somewhere. But these are first impressions and they are negative impressions to me.
End result: I used Firefox for a while and still use it quite a lot...but I use IE just as much because there are some ways it does things which are friendlier to me. By the way, I know the tech in the cube next to me also tried Firefox and eventually discarded it because there were too many niggling little annoyances and she preferred the way IE did things. Anecdotal, I know, but there you are.
Wow, it's not hard...there's a link on his page to the official site for PINE, and one of the first things you see on that site is:
Pine® - a Program for Internet News & Email