OK, most of it taste rather nasty hot (especially UCC), but some are good cold, with Gergia being better than msot and Georgia's Mountain Blend being actually quite tasty. Years ago at a coffee machine in the countryside of Kagoshima-Ken, near a bridge where I was fishing, I had a Dydo flavor called Almond Cappucino (IIRC; was definitely almond something, but this a long time ago); thereafter, I checked every Dydo machine I encountered all over the country, but never again saw it anywhere. That was also my last time in Kagoshima, so perhaps it's a local flavor. If so, it must be very local, because I never saw it in Fukuoka(-shi), which I later traveled to several times.
OK, so this must be at least borderline OT, but I hope someone will at least find it interesting. Too bad there's not a +1 Natsukashii mod:)
... does sexist imagery only bother women when it's women who are portrayed that way? After all, aren't male video game heroes usually portrayed as large, muscular, hard as nails, and tough enough to scare a Terminator off? In other words, an idealized male form? And how often do you hear women complaining about this? Never. I also wonder if they'd be happier if female characters in video games looked more like what you see at Walmart on a Sunday afternoon? (Nothing against Walmart, I like the place, but female shoppers there do seem fatter than average). That would, after all, be a much better reflection of reality in a society where so many people are so fat. Or would that also be sexist and demeaning?
Also in this vein, I think a better word for large-breasted female characters in games would better be described as sexual imagery. Depicting some, most, or even all female characters with big tits is not sexist, especially when you consider that many women spend thousands of dollars on fake boobs, and a good number of others at least wish they had bigger ones, even if they don't actually go to the trouble of getting implants. I prefer small ones myself, so I'm glad that not all women feel like they need to get bigger tits at the doctor's office.
And in case anyone who might be offended by any of this or be thinking "No woman would touch this guy with a 10 foot pole!" yes, I'm married. My wife is intelligent, thin, gorgeous, and good at just about everything (computers excepted). And she would also agree with all of this.
I've been in the sysadmin and security fields for a number of years. As many others have written, this is SOP in many shops and is exactly what they *should* do. Yes, it's also true that a really nefarious person would have already planted all of his/her backdoors, trojans, whatever, well before resigning, but not all nefarious people are that smart, and some people just get a bug up their ass at the last minute and do something foolish (it's not common, but neither is it non-existent). Plus, if you think they might be a bad actor, or you just have really stringent security policies, you can put the person on leave and immediately start a security audit of everything they touched or might have touched.
If I gave notice tomorrow,I would not only expect to be immediately placed on administrative leave, I would hope for it. Beats showing up for work those two weeks:) But since I'm a manager, I probably wouldn't get that lucky. If you were a sysadmin on my staff, I'd pull your access immediately and put you on leave, too. It wouldn't be personal, or any kind of reflection on your work. It's business, and it's good security policy.
As far as how to resign professionally, speaking as a person who was rank and file for a long time and who currently managages a security staff of eight people, a letter of resignation should contain just the facts, and the bare minimum at that. It should state that you are resigning, and the effective date. That's it. And it should be written in polite and professional language. It doesn't need to say why (that's none of anyone's business), and really shouldn't. If you just can't help yourself, "To pursue other opportunities" is the best thing to say.
Whether you have another job or not, or where, or why (really) you're quitting is not any of anyone's business. If people ask, you can tell them, or you can politely respond that you'd rather not say. Or tell a small lie and say you're going to pursue other opportunities, but aren't yet sure what shape they will take. Even if one of my staff resigned and told me that, and I later found out they had another job with our competition, I wouldn't be angry (OK, maybe I'm not your average boss, either); they don't owe me that truth. Why you're resigning and what you're going to do next is your business. All you owe your company apart from a letter of resignation as described above is a final two weeks of work up to your usual standard, if they do choose to have you work rather than put you on administrative leave.
Kmail can also successfully accept Outlook invitations, I do it all the time. We don't use Exchange so I've never tried using it with OWA, but the idea that there is no replacement on Linux for Outlook is just plain wrong, indeed. In fact, on occasions when I'm forced to use Outlook, I'm always annoyed because both Kontact and Evolution are *better* PIMs than Outlook. From a purely email perspective, Outlook is the worst MUA I've ever used, bar none. The calendaring and stuff is fine, I'd put it even with Kontact and Evolution on that score. It's the superiority of those two as mail clients that puts them solidly ahead of Outlook.
Also, if an organization is deploying Linux across the desktop, I would think they'd also want to ditch their Exchange server in favor of a Linux-based solution as well (Kolab and Open Exchange spring to mind immediately). They'd save a ton on licensing costs, plus speed and security improvements. Granted, Exchange 12 is going to address a lot of those issues very well (it's pretty good, honestly), but it's not here yet, either. And there's still the licensing cost to consider.
That still doesn't work, because Microsoft didn't write the software that infected the PC. They just took what had been written for the express purpose of creating zombies, and let it infect a PC on purpose, then sat back to see who used the zombie.
That is very much like a car that calls up thief and says "Hey, I'm sitting here at Pike and 5th with a broken window, no alarm, and I've already been hotwired and the engine's running. Come and get me."
Here's an even better analogy: car thieves steal a load of LoJack devices and compromise them such that they will not only give the location of your car to the thieves, but will disable your alarm, unlock the doors, and start the engine for them (this isn't possible, but bear with me). The police become aware of these devices, obtain one on the street, and install it in a car. The car phones home, they wait until the thief shows up, then make the bust. Entrapment? Not even close, because they did not induce the thief to do something s/he would not have otherwise done.
Or to use a prostitution bust analogy, when a female officer dresses like a prostitute and hangs out on a street corner, she is signalling availability (much like the zombie does), but the John comes over there out of his own free will; she doesn't go to him and convince him to do it. When a zombie announces itself on an IRC channel, it is not inducing anyone to do anything they would not otherwise do; everyone in that forum is there for exactly that reason.
And, just in case you think that has not sufficiently shredded your argument, it isn't entrapment unless the police do it; Microsoft is not the police.
Even infecting the computer in the first place was not entrapment, for two reasons:
First, it's only entrapment if law enforcement does it. A private individual or corporation cannot entrap you.
Second, even if law enforcement did it, this would not be entrapment. This was the equivalent of leaving a car sitting on the street, with the driver's side window already broken, the ignition already hotwired, and the engine running. If you see it, hop in, take off, and get busted one block later by the police who were watching the car, you were not entrapped. You acted completely of your own volition. It's the same with undercover police officers posing as prostitute or drug dealers, and arresting you when you try to make the buy; you weren't entrapped because you approached them.
Now, if you were sitting on a park bench minding your own business and a police officer came up to you and tried to convince you (by cash, persuasion, or whatever) to go over there and steal that car sitting across the street and you were convinced and did it, that would be entrapment. It's not something you otherwise have done, but they came to you and convinced you to do it.
You forgot "brining it online." I don't think a computer filled with salt water would be very useful, and I don't understand why it was necessary to brine it online. You'd think it would be easier to brine it at the beach.
I agree with you about the "playing catch-up with MS" thing, except on one point: in many areas, we are way ahead of Windows already. It's just a matter of educating people of that truth. Case in point: the desktop. I use KDE, but this applies equally well to GNOME: on those occassions when I am forced to use a Windows machine (remote connection to my corporate network, for example. It requires a smartcard and PIN and connects to a Windows VPN; that's unsupported in Linux AFAIK), the primitiveness of the UI makes me feel like I'm living in caveman days. No native virtual desktops, and every add-on virtual desktop solution that I've tried is a horrible kludge, with not a fraction of the functionality available in KDE/GNOME/.
Then there's Windows Update. Red Hat's update, Ximian's Red Carpet, Mandrake's urpmi, and any Debian-based system, have been technologically ahead of that for *years*. And, you NEVER have to reboot after an update, unless you installed a new kernel and want to use it, and even that can be done any time, at your convenience.
And of course, the huge superiority of any *nix shell over the Windows command line.
The only major browser that doesn't yet have tabbed browsing (except in the IE 7 betas) is an MS product.
And on and on and on.
That doesn't mean Windows doesn't do anything well (it does) and it doesn't mean that Windows doesn't do some things better than Linux and other Free OSes and Free software do them (it does), but the balance is clearly in favor of Linux, et al, in most areas.
I started to dabble in Linux in the late 1990s because some people whose ability I tremendously respected used it and FreeBSD. It was hard to get started back in those days, not like now. In spite of that, two years after I started dabbling, I was an exclusive Linux user and wound up working as a sysadmin. It was a very thorough conversion.
What Linux really did for me, and this is what really hooked me into it, is that it put the fun back in computing. It was like back in the DOS days, experimenting with the load order for drivers in extended memory, only even more fun than that. As I learned more, I discovered that it was not only more fun, but more functional, and I completely switched off of Windows.
In those days, I had no anti-MS sentiment. Indeed, I generally held Microsoft and its products in fairly high regard. Windows 95 was a huge leap forward over 3.x, no mistake about it. Winword was a great word processor. Etc. The anti-MS sentiment came later, and was a result of MS actions in the marketplace and a whole slew of products which I could now see in a whole new light. In many areas, Microsoft is its own worst enemy, and its policies and actions have done nearly as much to fuel the Linux movement as Linux evangelists have. Back in the nineties, people in the Linux community used to joke about "World Domination Now," except they werent' really joking. Now we (by which I mean the broader OSS community, not just Linux) are there in many areas and getting there in others. If the playing field was really level (that is, not going against a huge installed base covering 90% of the world's PCs), we would own the playing field by now. Give it five years and we probably will anyway. That may sound optimistic, but look back five years and you'll see that most of the optimistic projections were right.
Yes, you can still try a man-in-the-middle-attack. However, security is not a binary condition (you're either totally secure or wide open), it's relative. AKA, I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you. This is also the principle behind car alarms: there are car alarms that can be defeated, some more easily than others, but the main point of a car alarm is to make my car a more difficult/less attractive target than the one next to it.
Similarily, what does a Smartcard authentication system over https do for you, as opposed to a simple username and password over https?
It raises the bar, while also making people without a Smartcard more attractive targets. Compromising a username and password is fairly easy - people fall for phishing attacks all the time. If a Smartcard and PIN are also needed, a man-in-the-middle attack doesn't do you much good. You can't get my PIN (you'd also need a keystroke logger on my computer for that) and even if you had it, unless you also stole my Smartcard you'd still be SOL.
Not to mention that a man-in-the-middle attack is far harder to achieve than sending out a phishing mail or doing a brute-force attack against a weak password. Anyone can send out phishing mails or use a password-attack script; far fewer people have the wherewithal to mount a successful man-in-the-middle attack. So if I have a Smartcard + PIN that I need to use to authenticate to my bank and you don't, I've outrun you. I don't have to worry as much about the bear.
Where I work, we use Smartcards and PINs for authentication to our network, in addition to a userid and a high-quality password that must be changed regularly and may not closely resemble the old one. How does this raise security? In two ways: first, if someone gains unauthorized accesss to a computer inside one of our facilities, they can't do much with it unless they also have a card and PIN. Assuming they stole a card and got inside the building and found a computer in an isolated place and put the card in, they'd still need the PIN, and brute-forcing it would take a while because it's 6 digits minimum (mine is longer). Of course, you also only get a few tries before the PIN is disabled.
The second case is if someone were to steal my laptop in an airport, from my trunk, etc. It has a VPN client to our company network, but that won't do you any good without the Smartcard and PIN, either.
In both cases, our network is made far more secure by using Smartcards and PINs. It is not only the accepted wisdom that "something you have and something you know" is far more secure than a username/password-only system, it is just plain correct.
Many banks in Europe have been using one-time PADs for years; it's about time US banks are getting with the program on security, and disappointing that they're only doing it because somebody made them. If any bank here could offer me Smartcard + PIN or one-time PAD authentication today, they'd have my business right now.
I think "officially laid to rest" is stronger than the actual situation. The Oct. 7 announcement states that there will be no more gaim-vv releases but that they are working on merging with gaim and code will (not might, but will) be added to gaim.
IMO, that's how it should have been done from the outset.
Veering back toward the the response of so many posters, both here and in the comments for TFA, gaim is pretty good at the basics (better than either AOL's or Yahoo's official clients) and IMO isn't ugly, either. Kopete looks nicer/more Mac-like, but some of its functionality is goofy. I love KDE but use gaim for my IM b/c I just can't stand Kopete.
The trouble is, the basics aren't enough. The main point of TFA, really, is "Where's the voice and webcam support?" This is a major stumbling block in open-source IM, and it doesn't affect just young people. I'm in my early forties and Linux has been my exclusive desktop OS for over five years. My wife is in her thirties and would also be a Linux user except for one thing: Yahoo Messenger, and specifically the voice/video features, is her number one app (ahead of even email) for keeping in touch with her family and friends overseas. Any platform that doesn't support that doesn't work for her, and that's why we have a Win2K box (Yahoo Messenger on Mac doesn't support voice, either, or I'd buy her a Mac).
It's all about the applications for a lot of people, and IM is the only area that immediately comes to mind where there is really a huge gap between capabilities of open-source clients versus proprietary ones. People can point to gaim-vv or to gyach-e (Eeeeeeuuuuuuw! Have you ever looked at the source code for that?! I feel the nausea coming on again just from thinking about it. I and one of my staff members tried for three days to get it to build, without success; eventually I ran a binary RPM through alien), but both of those projects are really in their infancy WRT both functionality and reliability. I've tried both and eventually concluded that I was better off just living without those features until they are more stable (they have cute little tricks like making a 2.5 GHz P4 with a gig or RAM go to 100% CPU utilization and stay there when receiving video. This happened multiple times and my only out was to kill X; charming).
Need a good office suite? OSS has you covered. Browser? Take your pick. The only proprietary browser that's as good as the OSS offerings is Opera, and it also runs on Linux. Email? Same situation? Groupware? Maybe a little rough around the edges, but we're basically there. Security tools? The list is long but distinguished. SQL databases? PostgresQL and MySQL are two of the most popular in the world, take your pick. Development tools? There are probably more OSS tools than proprietary ones available these days, and whether you prefer vi, (X)emacs, or a full-blown IDE, OSS has something for you. This list could go on and on, but I think you all get the point.
However, turn to IM, and OSS is years behind the times. The author of TFA had it right. I know none of us really like hearing that there's something OSS doesn't do as well as proprietary software, and we especially don't like hearing that proprietary is kicking our asses in some area, but sometimes it's true. This is one of those times.
Having a world-class IM, with voice, video, etc., is crucial for OSS at this juncture. I hope people who are working on major OSS IM clients like gaim or Kopete are reading this thread and also read TFA and realize how important this is.
And yes, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. If what is needed is to pay gaim developers to get this done in a reasonable time frame, I will donate 50 bucks, which is more than I've spent on software in years. I hope everyone else who wants advanced voice and video features in OSS IM will also be willing to pony up whatever they can afford to get the job done.
That's a pretty good analysis, except for one thing: liberals do not have non-activist heroes. Liberals want activist judges (activist only in line with their own political ideas, of course). Judges who aren't (leftist) activists don't sit well with liberals.
Scalia is an originalist,as you point out, and since I am a conservative, yes, I think he's great. Supreme Court Justices who believe that the Constitution is a "living document" and that we ought to look at what the laws are like in other countries (!) are completely off-base.
Now, before all you leftists jump me and start calling me names rather than attacking my arguments, let me state clearly here that my definition of a non-activist/originalist/constructionist/good judge is not one who will overturn (insert some controversial issue here; Roe V. Wade will do) or who personally opposes (insert some controversial issue here; Roe V. Wade will do). My definition of a good Supreme Court Justice is one who interprets the Constitution as written, who does not regard it as a "living document" and attempt to legislate from the bench. The Constitution was not intended by its authors to be modified by the Supreme Court. They included a modification process, which has been utilized a number of times, and it does not involve the Court in any way. That process is the amendment process. When the Supreme Court legislates from the bench, it is usurping the role of the legislature.
Yes, that means I believe the Court should never have agreed to hear Roe V. Wade. If it ever does so again, and should it then reverse itself, it should not then ban abortion; that, too, would be legislating from the bench. It should return the issue to the legislature, where it belongs.
If Microsoft made a release of Windows with some extra CLI utilities bundled in and called it Microsoft EnterpriseLinux, we'd probably be quite pissy about trademark infringement, but that's essentially what the OpenSSH people did.
Well, no. If you read the OpenSSH project history here and the original SSH license here, it is clear that OpenSSH is not infringing anything.
The licence used for the version on which OpenSSH was based states that it can be freely used for any purpose, that derived works must be clearly identified as derived works (OpenSSH is so identified), and that if they are incompatible with the RFC protocol, they may not be called SSH or Secure Shell. By implication, the OpenSSH team could have just called it "SSH" and they would still not be infringing, under the terms of the original license, which allows derivative works to be called simply "SSH" or "Secure Shell," as I read it.
Since those days, SSH has become a commercial, proprietary, and monetized product, and they may not like the fact that it was once under a free license that allowed projects like OpenSSH to happen, but instead of whining about "They did just what they were allowed to do, boohoohoo!" they should just get out there and compete on merits like everyone else. Price, too, is a merit, and if the higher cost and proprietary license of SSH is not, in the eye of the purchaser, justified by any superior technical merits it may have, that's tough.
StarOffice isn't Fugly. Xemacs is fugly, but I still use it. There are probably more (millions more) of people using StarOffice/OpenOffice.org (more of the latter than the former, I suspect) than are using Xemacs. Heck, Windows doesn't exactly have a great-looking UI either, but people use it all over the place, so f?ugliness is not necessarily a deciding factor. It's a factor, to some extent, but won't stop people from using the killer.
Will the killer come out of the blue and be simultaneously dismissed by Dvorak and lauded by O'Reilly? Maybe. Maybe not. Linux is a great potential killer for proprietary OSes, and has been so treated, but that doesn't mean all killers will be. SO/OO.org is getting a lot of notice these days. It's the most commonly used office suite on *nix boxes and is getting some use on Windows as well. While I personally prefer Koffice (much faster and nicer looking) it's import capabilities for MS Office files still suck.
Regarding transparency, most MS Office file imports into SO/OO.org are transparent now. I have no trouble with most Word and Excel docs, and this will only get better. As for the difficult cases, any tool that helps solve those is good and can only help the situation.
You raise some valid points, but I think dismissing SO/OO.org as the killer is quite premature. It may well be the one.
And if we didn't keep it, we wouldn't turn it over to the UN, which is the most corrupt and incompetent organization on the face of the earth.
If you don't like US control of the root nameservers for something we invented, I suggest you just stop using it and invent your own Internet. See how far it gets you. See if it works as well. See if anyone uses it.
"You" could mean you, personally, but it also means "You, the countries whining about this."
Oh,and let's not forget how much of the spam in the world is relayed through "Developing nations" either through complicity with spammers (China) or having the whole country set up as one big open proxy (ROK, Brazil, Argentina). Of course, there are large chunks of Europe that are the same way (Wanadoo.insert-country-domain-here. Does anyone know if there are any hosts on Wanadoo that aren't open proxies?:-p).
Also, as others have mentioned, China is not exactly a friend of a free Internet. I bet they'd just love to have control of a root nameserver; it would make filtering out free speech so much easier. I don't know how many of you have ever lived in a communist country (not many, I suspect, so you probably have no idea what it's like), but I spent most of a year in one when I was working overseas. Talking with some other ex-pat IT people and some of our local staff, I expressed that it would be cool to have a Linux user group there. They told me that we'd need a permit from the government to form any sort of a group, and that it would be difficult if we were all locals, and impossible because some of use weren't. Send a root nameserver there? I don't think so.
I'll probably be modded flamebait by half the mods, and troll by the other half, because I had the audacity to come out here and tell the truth.
While that is often true, "enterprise" can indeed have a legit meaning. I work for a company that targets (largely, but not exclusively; we have some pretty small customers, too) the enterprise market.
Enterprise, in this sense, means large clients who need systems that gracefully scale to large numbers of users. You have 150,000 seats and need a five nines of uptime SLA? No problem. We can do that (and have been exceeding five nines of uptime for seven years).
I haven't RTFAd, but that may be what SSH is talking about. Or it could be just marketing droid speak. Like I said, I didn't RTFA. But, "enterprise" can be a legitimately used term.
1) There aren't quite as many packages in Ubuntu, even with Universe and Multiverse enabled, but there are still tons;
2) Things "just work" to a much greater extent than in mainline Debian.
And a very important similarity, for me is that everything that works in mainline Debian works in Ubuntu, too. A number of mainline Debian developers are also Ubuntu developers, so I don't expect that to change.
The above things, plus the basic approach of taking snapshots of Testing or Unstable, stabilizing them, and releasing them on a six-month schedule, is what drew me to convert all of my systems from Sid to (K)ubuntu. I've never regretted it.
Amen to that. I freely admit that each of the nine developers I manage is a better programmer than I am. However, it's not my job to be the best programmer on the team. I'm not even very good as a programmer, honestly, and never will be. But I'm very good at managing people who are.
My job is to find good find people (where good = technically skilled and - this is really important - has a good personality fit with the rest of the team) and recruit them to our team.
Once they're on it, my job is to get them integrated into what they do, although much of that now is left to my three technical leads, one of whom will succeed me as manager when I move up (or out) one day.
My job is to keep bureaucratic BS of all kinds away from them so that they can focus on their jobs. Happily, there's not much BS in this company.
My job is to set goals, manage projects, and review performance.
My job is to make sure my people have good morale, keep everyone pulling in the same direction, and keep them motivated.
Note that if I've done the first things right (finding and recruiting good people and keeping BS away from them) those last points are very easy. Choose the right people and they'll be almost self-managing. Just point them in the direction you need them to go, keep them happy, and they'll produce for you.
And yes, my job is to keep our costs within bounds we can afford. I am, after all, a manager and have that responsibility to my company. Fortunately, that too is fairly easy if I have done all of the other things right.
All that being said, I nevertheless sympathize with the original poster's lament. I am not technically incompetent like her/his boss is made out to be; I'm just not as a good a programmer as the people I manage, but hey, it's not my job to be as good as them. It's my job to manage them. Like you said, it's how good I am at my job that matters, not how good I am at theirs.
Still, I am not technically incompetent, as the OP describes her/his boss. I have solid work experience as a sysadmin and network engineer and I am better than my staff in those areas. And, I love technology, I've been crazy about computers since the first time I saw one. So I do appreciate the OP's lament.
What would I do about it? I'd advance my skills as far as I could in that job (or as far as I could stand to work there, whichever came first) and then move on. I have worked under an incompetent manager (not just technically incompetent, but incompetent at managing, too) just once, and that's how I dealt with the situation. When I moved on, it was to a much better position at a much better salary, with a much better manager, who in turn recruited me away from that place to follow him when he took a new job himself.
Corporations have all the same constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, etc., that individuals do. The issue is not that it was a corporation doing this. It could have been an individual doing it over a DSL line and the constitutional issues (or lack thereof) would have been the same.
The issue here, as many others have noted, is that freedom of speech guarantees that you can say what you want to say. It doesn't guarantee that anyone will listen, nor does it mandate that anyone has to allow you to use their forum to say it, nor does it allow you to force people to listen if they don't want to. If you're standing on a street corner expounding on your political position and I walk by without listening to you (the equivalent of a spam filter), that's tough. You can't (legally) grab me and make me stop and listen. What the dating service attempted to do in court was grab 59,000 people and make them stop and listen, while simultaneously trying to force UT to provide a forum at no charge. The court recognized what anyone less stupid than a spammer understands: that you can't make people listen and you can't force them to provide a forum.
I have to say that you and Nexx are both right, as contradictory as that might sound at first reading.
I am caucasian, and lived and worked in Japan for nearly a decade. After I married my (Vietnamese) wife, she also lived in Japan for a while.
During my time in Japan, I sometimes encountered racism. Most often of the "benign" type; that is, people (who have usually seldom if ever interacted with a foreigner) assuming that all foreigners cannot speak Japanese well if at all, cannot (if they are non-Asian) use chopsticks, don't know to take their shoes off when entering a house, that sort of things, only to be surprised to find that I speak Japanese well, can use chopsticks more "correctly" than many Japanese, and knew and followed typical Japanese customs, both in others' homes and in my own. I have a problem with even calling this racism; mostly, it's just ignorance.
Occassionally, I encountered real racism, such as people trying to provoke a fight with me because I was a foreigner, business that will not server foreigners, that sort of thing, but it was really not very common. Most Japanese are very kind, very helpful, and very honest, as you experienced.
My wife's experiences were similar to mine, except one is the inverse: people would assume that because she is Asian, she could speak Japanese well (most non-Japanese Asians in Japan do) and I couldn't even count the number of times that Japanese reacted with surprise to see me interpreting Japanese for her rather than the other way around.
Now that we have returned to the United States, it's unlikely we will ever live in Japan again. We have kids and a house and jobs here and all that. But if the opportunity were to some day arise to return to Japan for a while when our kids are older, we'd probably both jump at the chance. On balance, we have a huge collection of fond memories of Japan and not very many unpleasant ones. The worst thing there for me would actually be the relatively cold winter weather (compared to southern California) or for her the hot, humid summers (which I love but she does not).
However, there are other ethnic groups who might have a different take. I'm told that south Asians experience a lot more racism in Japan than caucasians or other east Asians do.
Finally, with regard to an earlier poster's comment about a third generation Japanese Korean who did not have Japanese citizenship, there are many of them. Mostly, their grandparents were brought to Japan as slave laborers before or during WW II. They gained citizenship at the time but had it stripped away again after the war. The current status of Japanese Koreans is that they may acquire Japanese citizenship, but many of them choose not to, because of the discrimination of the past (and present) and the circumstances under which their families were brought to Japan. There are those who make much of the fact that there are Korean-Japanese who do not hold Japanese citizenship, but they always seem to gloss over the fact that it's voluntary; it is no longer imposed by the state. Most of those who refuse Japanese citizenship maintain ROK citizenship, but some of them hold DPRK citizenship and there is intense rivalry between those camps.
Why should wireless be any different? The best analogy I can give in the meatspace world is that of a fruit tree.
Let's say I plant an apple tree in my yard, and it grows to the point where some of its branches are sticking over the fence and are in my yard. In most places, fruit on the branches that are on my side of the fence is yours to pick if your care to, and even in places where I can't pick it, fruit that falls off into your yard is certainly yours.
If I don't like that you can pick the fruit on those branches, I have one recourse: cut them off.
Similarily, if I choose - either with full knowledge or simply by choosing to not educate myself about how to secure my wireless network - to let my wireless network broadcast an open signal to your house, I shouldn't have any complaint if you pick those apples, uh, use that signal.
Somehow, people think it's different because it's the Internet and pass stupid laws.
Now, if I secure my wireless network/server/workstation/router/whatever, even if the security method consists solely of a motd message that says "Access to this network without the owner's written authorization is unlawful trespass and will be prosecuted" but the root account is wide open, you're busted if you touch it. I cut the overhanging branches off my apple tree, and if you come onto my side of the fence trying to pick them, that's trespass.
Like others have noted, as I read his letter I could only think "Just what did he expect would happen if he delivered a letter like that to an employer that was knowingly involved in these activities?" The only thing more surprising than his naivete in giving them that letter was that I read all the way to the end only to find that was *not* a letter of resignation. If I received a letter in that tone from any of the people I manage, irrespective of specific content, I would assume I was reading a letter of (probably immediate) resignation.
That they are only out to screw him over seems pretty obvious, but his apparent lack of wordly understanding of these matters has given them every possible opportunity to do so. To anyone in a similar situation, my advice (as a manager, for whatever that may be worth), is to:
1) Prepare yourself financially to be unemployed;
2) Prepare your documentation of all allegations;
3) Make a backup set and put it in some secret offsite location that no one could reasonably either know about or get a search warrant for;
4a) Get a lawyer;
4b) Submit your letter of resignation, and don't say why. If pressed for an answer, just say you want to take some time off, then pursue other opportunities;
5) Finally, when you are no longer employed at that company, go to the police with your evidence.
The order of 4b and 5 could be reversed on advice of counsel, and if you want to move 4a up to, say, 1a, well, it's never too early to have a lawyer in a situation like that.
Well, it's been in the neighborhood of 15 years since I've either purchased or read a copy of PC Magazine, and Dvorak's spew is a one of the reasons why.
I had already decided by the early 1990s that Dvorak was a troll on his better days and just a fool the rest of the time.
The sad thing is that when I started reading PC Magazine in the 1980s, Dvorak often had useful and relevant opinion pieces, but by the end of the 1980s/very early 1990s, he rarely had anything worthwhile to say and was even more rarely right. It's sad that he was once so much better than this.
Which makes me ask as an aside, where but in journalism can someone be so consistently and blatantly wrong for so long and still have the same job, let alone any job? OK, maybe as a government bureaucrat...:p
But hey, if he washed out at PC Magazine I'm sure Newsweek will make him an offer. They don't seem to much care about truth, accuracy, or doing their homework. And if that doesn't work out, there's always CBS:)
Slashdot Mirror
OK, most of it taste rather nasty hot (especially UCC), but some are good cold, with Gergia being better than msot and Georgia's Mountain Blend being actually quite tasty. Years ago at a coffee machine in the countryside of Kagoshima-Ken, near a bridge where I was fishing, I had a Dydo flavor called Almond Cappucino (IIRC; was definitely almond something, but this a long time ago); thereafter, I checked every Dydo machine I encountered all over the country, but never again saw it anywhere. That was also my last time in Kagoshima, so perhaps it's a local flavor. If so, it must be very local, because I never saw it in Fukuoka(-shi), which I later traveled to several times.
:)
OK, so this must be at least borderline OT, but I hope someone will at least find it interesting. Too bad there's not a +1 Natsukashii mod
... does sexist imagery only bother women when it's women who are portrayed that way? After all, aren't male video game heroes usually portrayed as large, muscular, hard as nails, and tough enough to scare a Terminator off? In other words, an idealized male form? And how often do you hear women complaining about this? Never. I also wonder if they'd be happier if female characters in video games looked more like what you see at Walmart on a Sunday afternoon? (Nothing against Walmart, I like the place, but female shoppers there do seem fatter than average). That would, after all, be a much better reflection of reality in a society where so many people are so fat. Or would that also be sexist and demeaning?
Also in this vein, I think a better word for large-breasted female characters in games would better be described as sexual imagery. Depicting some, most, or even all female characters with big tits is not sexist, especially when you consider that many women spend thousands of dollars on fake boobs, and a good number of others at least wish they had bigger ones, even if they don't actually go to the trouble of getting implants. I prefer small ones myself, so I'm glad that not all women feel like they need to get bigger tits at the doctor's office.
And in case anyone who might be offended by any of this or be thinking "No woman would touch this guy with a 10 foot pole!" yes, I'm married. My wife is intelligent, thin, gorgeous, and good at just about everything (computers excepted). And she would also agree with all of this.
"Don't have a cow, man."
:) But since I'm a manager, I probably wouldn't get that lucky. If you were a sysadmin on my staff, I'd pull your access immediately and put you on leave, too. It wouldn't be personal, or any kind of reflection on your work. It's business, and it's good security policy.
I've been in the sysadmin and security fields for a number of years. As many others have written, this is SOP in many shops and is exactly what they *should* do. Yes, it's also true that a really nefarious person would have already planted all of his/her backdoors, trojans, whatever, well before resigning, but not all nefarious people are that smart, and some people just get a bug up their ass at the last minute and do something foolish (it's not common, but neither is it non-existent). Plus, if you think they might be a bad actor, or you just have really stringent security policies, you can put the person on leave and immediately start a security audit of everything they touched or might have touched.
If I gave notice tomorrow,I would not only expect to be immediately placed on administrative leave, I would hope for it. Beats showing up for work those two weeks
As far as how to resign professionally, speaking as a person who was rank and file for a long time and who currently managages a security staff of eight people, a letter of resignation should contain just the facts, and the bare minimum at that. It should state that you are resigning, and the effective date. That's it. And it should be written in polite and professional language. It doesn't need to say why (that's none of anyone's business), and really shouldn't. If you just can't help yourself, "To pursue other opportunities" is the best thing to say.
Whether you have another job or not, or where, or why (really) you're quitting is not any of anyone's business. If people ask, you can tell them, or you can politely respond that you'd rather not say. Or tell a small lie and say you're going to pursue other opportunities, but aren't yet sure what shape they will take. Even if one of my staff resigned and told me that, and I later found out they had another job with our competition, I wouldn't be angry (OK, maybe I'm not your average boss, either); they don't owe me that truth. Why you're resigning and what you're going to do next is your business. All you owe your company apart from a letter of resignation as described above is a final two weeks of work up to your usual standard, if they do choose to have you work rather than put you on administrative leave.
Kmail can also successfully accept Outlook invitations, I do it all the time. We don't use Exchange so I've never tried using it with OWA, but the idea that there is no replacement on Linux for Outlook is just plain wrong, indeed. In fact, on occasions when I'm forced to use Outlook, I'm always annoyed because both Kontact and Evolution are *better* PIMs than Outlook. From a purely email perspective, Outlook is the worst MUA I've ever used, bar none. The calendaring and stuff is fine, I'd put it even with Kontact and Evolution on that score. It's the superiority of those two as mail clients that puts them solidly ahead of Outlook.
Also, if an organization is deploying Linux across the desktop, I would think they'd also want to ditch their Exchange server in favor of a Linux-based solution as well (Kolab and Open Exchange spring to mind immediately). They'd save a ton on licensing costs, plus speed and security improvements. Granted, Exchange 12 is going to address a lot of those issues very well (it's pretty good, honestly), but it's not here yet, either. And there's still the licensing cost to consider.
OK, you've got me there :)
Somebody please mod parent up, that made me laugh out loud.
That still doesn't work, because Microsoft didn't write the software that infected the PC. They just took what had been written for the express purpose of creating zombies, and let it infect a PC on purpose, then sat back to see who used the zombie.
That is very much like a car that calls up thief and says "Hey, I'm sitting here at Pike and 5th with a broken window, no alarm, and I've already been hotwired and the engine's running. Come and get me."
Here's an even better analogy: car thieves steal a load of LoJack devices and compromise them such that they will not only give the location of your car to the thieves, but will disable your alarm, unlock the doors, and start the engine for them (this isn't possible, but bear with me). The police become aware of these devices, obtain one on the street, and install it in a car. The car phones home, they wait until the thief shows up, then make the bust. Entrapment? Not even close, because they did not induce the thief to do something s/he would not have otherwise done.
Or to use a prostitution bust analogy, when a female officer dresses like a prostitute and hangs out on a street corner, she is signalling availability (much like the zombie does), but the John comes over there out of his own free will; she doesn't go to him and convince him to do it. When a zombie announces itself on an IRC channel, it is not inducing anyone to do anything they would not otherwise do; everyone in that forum is there for exactly that reason.
And, just in case you think that has not sufficiently shredded your argument, it isn't entrapment unless the police do it; Microsoft is not the police.
Even infecting the computer in the first place was not entrapment, for two reasons:
First, it's only entrapment if law enforcement does it. A private individual or corporation cannot entrap you.
Second, even if law enforcement did it, this would not be entrapment. This was the equivalent of leaving a car sitting on the street, with the driver's side window already broken, the ignition already hotwired, and the engine running. If you see it, hop in, take off, and get busted one block later by the police who were watching the car, you were not entrapped. You acted completely of your own volition. It's the same with undercover police officers posing as prostitute or drug dealers, and arresting you when you try to make the buy; you weren't entrapped because you approached them.
Now, if you were sitting on a park bench minding your own business and a police officer came up to you and tried to convince you (by cash, persuasion, or whatever) to go over there and steal that car sitting across the street and you were convinced and did it, that would be entrapment. It's not something you otherwise have done, but they came to you and convinced you to do it.
You forgot "brining it online." I don't think a computer filled with salt water would be very useful, and I don't understand why it was necessary to brine it online. You'd think it would be easier to brine it at the beach.
I agree with you about the "playing catch-up with MS" thing, except on one point: in many areas, we are way ahead of Windows already. It's just a matter of educating people of that truth. Case in point: the desktop. I use KDE, but this applies equally well to GNOME: on those occassions when I am forced to use a Windows machine (remote connection to my corporate network, for example. It requires a smartcard and PIN and connects to a Windows VPN; that's unsupported in Linux AFAIK), the primitiveness of the UI makes me feel like I'm living in caveman days. No native virtual desktops, and every add-on virtual desktop solution that I've tried is a horrible kludge, with not a fraction of the functionality available in KDE/GNOME/.
Then there's Windows Update. Red Hat's update, Ximian's Red Carpet, Mandrake's urpmi, and any Debian-based system, have been technologically ahead of that for *years*. And, you NEVER have to reboot after an update, unless you installed a new kernel and want to use it, and even that can be done any time, at your convenience.
And of course, the huge superiority of any *nix shell over the Windows command line.
The only major browser that doesn't yet have tabbed browsing (except in the IE 7 betas) is an MS product.
And on and on and on.
That doesn't mean Windows doesn't do anything well (it does) and it doesn't mean that Windows doesn't do some things better than Linux and other Free OSes and Free software do them (it does), but the balance is clearly in favor of Linux, et al, in most areas.
I started to dabble in Linux in the late 1990s because some people whose ability I tremendously respected used it and FreeBSD. It was hard to get started back in those days, not like now. In spite of that, two years after I started dabbling, I was an exclusive Linux user and wound up working as a sysadmin. It was a very thorough conversion.
What Linux really did for me, and this is what really hooked me into it, is that it put the fun back in computing. It was like back in the DOS days, experimenting with the load order for drivers in extended memory, only even more fun than that. As I learned more, I discovered that it was not only more fun, but more functional, and I completely switched off of Windows.
In those days, I had no anti-MS sentiment. Indeed, I generally held Microsoft and its products in fairly high regard. Windows 95 was a huge leap forward over 3.x, no mistake about it. Winword was a great word processor. Etc.
The anti-MS sentiment came later, and was a result of MS actions in the marketplace and a whole slew of products which I could now see in a whole new light. In many areas, Microsoft is its own worst enemy, and its policies and actions have done nearly as much to fuel the Linux movement as Linux evangelists have. Back in the nineties, people in the Linux community used to joke about "World Domination Now," except they werent' really joking. Now we (by which I mean the broader OSS community, not just Linux) are there in many areas and getting there in others. If the playing field was really level (that is, not going against a huge installed base covering 90% of the world's PCs), we would own the playing field by now. Give it five years and we probably will anyway. That may sound optimistic, but look back five years and you'll see that most of the optimistic projections were right.
Yes, you can still try a man-in-the-middle-attack. However, security is not a binary condition (you're either totally secure or wide open), it's relative. AKA, I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you. This is also the principle behind car alarms: there are car alarms that can be defeated, some more easily than others, but the main point of a car alarm is to make my car a more difficult/less attractive target than the one next to it.
Similarily, what does a Smartcard authentication system over https do for you, as opposed to a simple username and password over https?
It raises the bar, while also making people without a Smartcard more attractive targets. Compromising a username and password is fairly easy - people fall for phishing attacks all the time. If a Smartcard and PIN are also needed, a man-in-the-middle attack doesn't do you much good. You can't get my PIN (you'd also need a keystroke logger on my computer for that) and even if you had it, unless you also stole my Smartcard you'd still be SOL.
Not to mention that a man-in-the-middle attack is far harder to achieve than sending out a phishing mail or doing a brute-force attack against a weak password. Anyone can send out phishing mails or use a password-attack script; far fewer people have the wherewithal to mount a successful man-in-the-middle attack. So if I have a Smartcard + PIN that I need to use to authenticate to my bank and you don't, I've outrun you. I don't have to worry as much about the bear.
Where I work, we use Smartcards and PINs for authentication to our network, in addition to a userid and a high-quality password that must be changed regularly and may not closely resemble the old one. How does this raise security? In two ways: first, if someone gains unauthorized accesss to a computer inside one of our facilities, they can't do much with it unless they also have a card and PIN. Assuming they stole a card and got inside the building and found a computer in an isolated place and put the card in, they'd still need the PIN, and brute-forcing it would take a while because it's 6 digits minimum (mine is longer). Of course, you also only get a few tries before the PIN is disabled.
The second case is if someone were to steal my laptop in an airport, from my trunk, etc. It has a VPN client to our company network, but that won't do you any good without the Smartcard and PIN, either.
In both cases, our network is made far more secure by using Smartcards and PINs. It is not only the accepted wisdom that "something you have and something you know" is far more secure than a username/password-only system, it is just plain correct.
Many banks in Europe have been using one-time PADs for years; it's about time US banks are getting with the program on security, and disappointing that they're only doing it because somebody made them. If any bank here could offer me Smartcard + PIN or one-time PAD authentication today, they'd have my business right now.
I think "officially laid to rest" is stronger than the actual situation. The Oct. 7 announcement states that there will be no more gaim-vv releases but that they are working on merging with gaim and code will (not might, but will) be added to gaim.
IMO, that's how it should have been done from the outset.
Veering back toward the the response of so many posters, both here and in the comments for TFA, gaim is pretty good at the basics (better than either AOL's or Yahoo's official clients) and IMO isn't ugly, either. Kopete looks nicer/more Mac-like, but some of its functionality is goofy. I love KDE but use gaim for my IM b/c I just can't stand Kopete.
The trouble is, the basics aren't enough. The main point of TFA, really, is "Where's the voice and webcam support?" This is a major stumbling block in open-source IM, and it doesn't affect just young people. I'm in my early forties and Linux has been my exclusive desktop OS for over five years. My wife is in her thirties and would also be a Linux user except for one thing: Yahoo Messenger, and specifically the voice/video features, is her number one app (ahead of even email) for keeping in touch with her family and friends overseas. Any platform that doesn't support that doesn't work for her, and that's why we have a Win2K box (Yahoo Messenger on Mac doesn't support voice, either, or I'd buy her a Mac).
It's all about the applications for a lot of people, and IM is the only area that immediately comes to mind where there is really a huge gap between capabilities of open-source clients versus proprietary ones. People can point to gaim-vv or to gyach-e (Eeeeeeuuuuuuw! Have you ever looked at the source code for that?! I feel the nausea coming on again just from thinking about it. I and one of my staff members tried for three days to get it to build, without success; eventually I ran a binary RPM through alien), but both of those projects are really in their infancy WRT both functionality and reliability. I've tried both and eventually concluded that I was better off just living without those features until they are more stable (they have cute little tricks like making a 2.5 GHz P4 with a gig or RAM go to 100% CPU utilization and stay there when receiving video. This happened multiple times and my only out was to kill X; charming).
Need a good office suite? OSS has you covered. Browser? Take your pick. The only proprietary browser that's as good as the OSS offerings is Opera, and it also runs on Linux. Email? Same situation? Groupware? Maybe a little rough around the edges, but we're basically there. Security tools? The list is long but distinguished. SQL databases? PostgresQL and MySQL are two of the most popular in the world, take your pick. Development tools? There are probably more OSS tools than proprietary ones available these days, and whether you prefer vi, (X)emacs, or a full-blown IDE, OSS has something for you. This list could go on and on, but I think you all get the point.
However, turn to IM, and OSS is years behind the times. The author of TFA had it right. I know none of us really like hearing that there's something OSS doesn't do as well as proprietary software, and we especially don't like hearing that proprietary is kicking our asses in some area, but sometimes it's true. This is one of those times.
Having a world-class IM, with voice, video, etc., is crucial for OSS at this juncture. I hope people who are working on major OSS IM clients like gaim or Kopete are reading this thread and also read TFA and realize how important this is.
And yes, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. If what is needed is to pay gaim developers to get this done in a reasonable time frame, I will donate 50 bucks, which is more than I've spent on software in years. I hope everyone else who wants advanced voice and video features in OSS IM will also be willing to pony up whatever they can afford to get the job done.
That's a pretty good analysis, except for one thing: liberals do not have non-activist heroes. Liberals want activist judges (activist only in line with their own political ideas, of course). Judges who aren't (leftist) activists don't sit well with liberals.
Scalia is an originalist,as you point out, and since I am a conservative, yes, I think he's great. Supreme Court Justices who believe that the Constitution is a "living document" and that we ought to look at what the laws are like in other countries (!) are completely off-base.
Now, before all you leftists jump me and start calling me names rather than attacking my arguments, let me state clearly here that my definition of a non-activist/originalist/constructionist/good judge is not one who will overturn (insert some controversial issue here; Roe V. Wade will do) or who personally opposes (insert some controversial issue here; Roe V. Wade will do). My definition of a good Supreme Court Justice is one who interprets the Constitution as written, who does not regard it as a "living document" and attempt to legislate from the bench. The Constitution was not intended by its authors to be modified by the Supreme Court. They included a modification process, which has been utilized a number of times, and it does not involve the Court in any way. That process is the amendment process. When the Supreme Court legislates from the bench, it is usurping the role of the legislature.
Yes, that means I believe the Court should never have agreed to hear Roe V. Wade. If it ever does so again, and should it then reverse itself, it should not then ban abortion; that, too, would be legislating from the bench. It should return the issue to the legislature, where it belongs.
Well, no. If you read the OpenSSH project history here and the original SSH license here, it is clear that OpenSSH is not infringing anything.
The licence used for the version on which OpenSSH was based states that it can be freely used for any purpose, that derived works must be clearly identified as derived works (OpenSSH is so identified), and that if they are incompatible with the RFC protocol, they may not be called SSH or Secure Shell. By implication, the OpenSSH team could have just called it "SSH" and they would still not be infringing, under the terms of the original license, which allows derivative works to be called simply "SSH" or "Secure Shell," as I read it.
Since those days, SSH has become a commercial, proprietary, and monetized product, and they may not like the fact that it was once under a free license that allowed projects like OpenSSH to happen, but instead of whining about "They did just what they were allowed to do, boohoohoo!" they should just get out there and compete on merits like everyone else. Price, too, is a merit, and if the higher cost and proprietary license of SSH is not, in the eye of the purchaser, justified by any superior technical merits it may have, that's tough.
StarOffice isn't Fugly. Xemacs is fugly, but I still use it. There are probably more (millions more) of people using StarOffice/OpenOffice.org (more of the latter than the former, I suspect) than are using Xemacs. Heck, Windows doesn't exactly have a great-looking UI either, but people use it all over the place, so f?ugliness is not necessarily a deciding factor. It's a factor, to some extent, but won't stop people from using the killer.
Will the killer come out of the blue and be simultaneously dismissed by Dvorak and lauded by O'Reilly? Maybe. Maybe not. Linux is a great potential killer for proprietary OSes, and has been so treated, but that doesn't mean all killers will be. SO/OO.org is getting a lot of notice these days. It's the most commonly used office suite on *nix boxes and is getting some use on Windows as well. While I personally prefer Koffice (much faster and nicer looking) it's import capabilities for MS Office files still suck.
Regarding transparency, most MS Office file imports into SO/OO.org are transparent now. I have no trouble with most Word and Excel docs, and this will only get better. As for the difficult cases, any tool that helps solve those is good and can only help the situation.
You raise some valid points, but I think dismissing SO/OO.org as the killer is quite premature. It may well be the one.
Hmmm, well, see, it works like this.
:-p).
We invented it.
We own the nameservers.
We're going to keep it.
And if we didn't keep it, we wouldn't turn it over to the UN, which is the most corrupt and incompetent organization on the face of the earth.
If you don't like US control of the root nameservers for something we invented, I suggest you just stop using it and invent your own Internet. See how far it gets you. See if it works as well. See if anyone uses it.
"You" could mean you, personally, but it also means "You, the countries whining about this."
Oh,and let's not forget how much of the spam in the world is relayed through "Developing nations" either through complicity with spammers (China) or having the whole country set up as one big open proxy (ROK, Brazil, Argentina).
Of course, there are large chunks of Europe that are the same way (Wanadoo.insert-country-domain-here. Does anyone know if there are any hosts on Wanadoo that aren't open proxies?
Also, as others have mentioned, China is not exactly a friend of a free Internet. I bet they'd just love to have control of a root nameserver; it would make filtering out free speech so much easier. I don't know how many of you have ever lived in a communist country (not many, I suspect, so you probably have no idea what it's like), but I spent most of a year in one when I was working overseas. Talking with some other ex-pat IT people and some of our local staff, I expressed that it would be cool to have a Linux user group there. They told me that we'd need a permit from the government to form any sort of a group, and that it would be difficult if we were all locals, and impossible because some of use weren't. Send a root nameserver there? I don't think so.
I'll probably be modded flamebait by half the mods, and troll by the other half, because I had the audacity to come out here and tell the truth.
While that is often true, "enterprise" can indeed have a legit meaning. I work for a company that targets (largely, but not exclusively; we have some pretty small customers, too) the enterprise market.
Enterprise, in this sense, means large clients who need systems that gracefully scale to large numbers of users. You have 150,000 seats and need a five nines of uptime SLA? No problem. We can do that (and have been exceeding five nines of uptime for seven years).
I haven't RTFAd, but that may be what SSH is talking about. Or it could be just marketing droid speak. Like I said, I didn't RTFA. But, "enterprise" can be a legitimately used term.
I used to run Debian Sid on all my systems.
Now I run Kubuntu Hoary on all my systems.
The differences I've noted are:
1) There aren't quite as many packages in Ubuntu, even with Universe and Multiverse enabled, but there are still tons;
2) Things "just work" to a much greater extent than in mainline Debian.
And a very important similarity, for me is that everything that works in mainline Debian works in Ubuntu, too. A number of mainline Debian developers are also Ubuntu developers, so I don't expect that to change.
The above things, plus the basic approach of taking snapshots of Testing or Unstable, stabilizing them, and releasing them on a six-month schedule, is what drew me to convert all of my systems from Sid to (K)ubuntu. I've never regretted it.
I'd get one of these.
My job is to find good find people (where good = technically skilled and - this is really important - has a good personality fit with the rest of the team) and recruit them to our team.
Once they're on it, my job is to get them integrated into what they do, although much of that now is left to my three technical leads, one of whom will succeed me as manager when I move up (or out) one day.
My job is to keep bureaucratic BS of all kinds away from them so that they can focus on their jobs. Happily, there's not much BS in this company.
My job is to set goals, manage projects, and review performance.
My job is to make sure my people have good morale, keep everyone pulling in the same direction, and keep them motivated.
Note that if I've done the first things right (finding and recruiting good people and keeping BS away from them) those last points are very easy. Choose the right people and they'll be almost self-managing. Just point them in the direction you need them to go, keep them happy, and they'll produce for you.
I'm a big fan of Joel Spoelsky's writings.
And yes, my job is to keep our costs within bounds we can afford. I am, after all, a manager and have that responsibility to my company. Fortunately, that too is fairly easy if I have done all of the other things right.
All that being said, I nevertheless sympathize with the original poster's lament. I am not technically incompetent like her/his boss is made out to be; I'm just not as a good a programmer as the people I manage, but hey, it's not my job to be as good as them. It's my job to manage them. Like you said, it's how good I am at my job that matters, not how good I am at theirs.
Still, I am not technically incompetent, as the OP describes her/his boss. I have solid work experience as a sysadmin and network engineer and I am better than my staff in those areas. And, I love technology, I've been crazy about computers since the first time I saw one. So I do appreciate the OP's lament.
What would I do about it? I'd advance my skills as far as I could in that job (or as far as I could stand to work there, whichever came first) and then move on. I have worked under an incompetent manager (not just technically incompetent, but incompetent at managing, too) just once, and that's how I dealt with the situation. When I moved on, it was to a much better position at a much better salary, with a much better manager, who in turn recruited me away from that place to follow him when he took a new job himself.
Corporations have all the same constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, etc., that individuals do. The issue is not that it was a corporation doing this. It could have been an individual doing it over a DSL line and the constitutional issues (or lack thereof) would have been the same.
The issue here, as many others have noted, is that freedom of speech guarantees that you can say what you want to say. It doesn't guarantee that anyone will listen, nor does it mandate that anyone has to allow you to use their forum to say it, nor does it allow you to force people to listen if they don't want to. If you're standing on a street corner expounding on your political position and I walk by without listening to you (the equivalent of a spam filter), that's tough. You can't (legally) grab me and make me stop and listen. What the dating service attempted to do in court was grab 59,000 people and make them stop and listen, while simultaneously trying to force UT to provide a forum at no charge. The court recognized what anyone less stupid than a spammer understands: that you can't make people listen and you can't force them to provide a forum.
I have to say that you and Nexx are both right, as contradictory as that might sound at first reading.
I am caucasian, and lived and worked in Japan for nearly a decade. After I married my (Vietnamese) wife, she also lived in Japan for a while.
During my time in Japan, I sometimes encountered racism. Most often of the "benign" type; that is, people (who have usually seldom if ever interacted with a foreigner) assuming that all foreigners cannot speak Japanese well if at all, cannot (if they are non-Asian) use chopsticks, don't know to take their shoes off when entering a house, that sort of things, only to be surprised to find that I speak Japanese well, can use chopsticks more "correctly" than many Japanese, and knew and followed typical Japanese customs, both in others' homes and in my own. I have a problem with even calling this racism; mostly, it's just ignorance.
Occassionally, I encountered real racism, such as people trying to provoke a fight with me because I was a foreigner, business that will not server foreigners, that sort of thing, but it was really not very common. Most Japanese are very kind, very helpful, and very honest, as you experienced.
My wife's experiences were similar to mine, except one is the inverse: people would assume that because she is Asian, she could speak Japanese well (most non-Japanese Asians in Japan do) and I couldn't even count the number of times that Japanese reacted with surprise to see me interpreting Japanese for her rather than the other way around.
Now that we have returned to the United States, it's unlikely we will ever live in Japan again. We have kids and a house and jobs here and all that. But if the opportunity were to some day arise to return to Japan for a while when our kids are older, we'd probably both jump at the chance. On balance, we have a huge collection of fond memories of Japan and not very many unpleasant ones. The worst thing there for me would actually be the relatively cold winter weather (compared to southern California) or for her the hot, humid summers (which I love but she does not).
However, there are other ethnic groups who might have a different take. I'm told that south Asians experience a lot more racism in Japan than caucasians or other east Asians do.
Finally, with regard to an earlier poster's comment about a third generation Japanese Korean who did not have Japanese citizenship, there are many of them. Mostly, their grandparents were brought to Japan as slave laborers before or during WW II. They gained citizenship at the time but had it stripped away again after the war. The current status of Japanese Koreans is that they may acquire Japanese citizenship, but many of them choose not to, because of the discrimination of the past (and present) and the circumstances under which their families were brought to Japan. There are those who make much of the fact that there are Korean-Japanese who do not hold Japanese citizenship, but they always seem to gloss over the fact that it's voluntary; it is no longer imposed by the state. Most of those who refuse Japanese citizenship maintain ROK citizenship, but some of them hold DPRK citizenship and there is intense rivalry between those camps.
Why should wireless be any different? The best analogy I can give in the meatspace world is that of a fruit tree.
Let's say I plant an apple tree in my yard, and it grows to the point where some of its branches are sticking over the fence and are in my yard. In most places, fruit on the branches that are on my side of the fence is yours to pick if your care to, and even in places where I can't pick it, fruit that falls off into your yard is certainly yours.
If I don't like that you can pick the fruit on those branches, I have one recourse: cut them off.
Similarily, if I choose - either with full knowledge or simply by choosing to not educate myself about how to secure my wireless network - to let my wireless network broadcast an open signal to your house, I shouldn't have any complaint if you pick those apples, uh, use that signal.
Somehow, people think it's different because it's the Internet and pass stupid laws.
Now, if I secure my wireless network/server/workstation/router/whatever, even if the security method consists solely of a motd message that says "Access to this network without the owner's written authorization is unlawful trespass and will be prosecuted" but the root account is wide open, you're busted if you touch it. I cut the overhanging branches off my apple tree, and if you come onto my side of the fence trying to pick them, that's trespass.
Like others have noted, as I read his letter I could only think "Just what did he expect would happen if he delivered a letter like that to an employer that was knowingly involved in these activities?" The only thing more surprising than his naivete in giving them that letter was that I read all the way to the end only to find that was *not* a letter of resignation. If I received a letter in that tone from any of the people I manage, irrespective of specific content, I would assume I was reading a letter of (probably immediate) resignation.
That they are only out to screw him over seems pretty obvious, but his apparent lack of wordly understanding of these matters has given them every possible opportunity to do so. To anyone in a similar situation, my advice (as a manager, for whatever that may be worth), is to:
1) Prepare yourself financially to be unemployed;
2) Prepare your documentation of all allegations;
3) Make a backup set and put it in some secret offsite location that no one could reasonably either know about or get a search warrant for;
4a) Get a lawyer;
4b) Submit your letter of resignation, and don't say why. If pressed for an answer, just say you want to take some time off, then pursue other opportunities;
5) Finally, when you are no longer employed at that company, go to the police with your evidence.
The order of 4b and 5 could be reversed on advice of counsel, and if you want to move 4a up to, say, 1a, well, it's never too early to have a lawyer in a situation like that.
Well, it's been in the neighborhood of 15 years since I've either purchased or read a copy of PC Magazine, and Dvorak's spew is a one of the reasons why.
:)
Somehow I doubt I'm unique in that
I had already decided by the early 1990s that Dvorak was a troll on his better days and just a fool the rest of the time.
:p
:)
The sad thing is that when I started reading PC Magazine in the 1980s, Dvorak often had useful and relevant opinion pieces, but by the end of the 1980s/very early 1990s, he rarely had anything worthwhile to say and was even more rarely right. It's sad that he was once so much better than this.
Which makes me ask as an aside, where but in journalism can someone be so consistently and blatantly wrong for so long and still have the same job, let alone any job? OK, maybe as a government bureaucrat...
But hey, if he washed out at PC Magazine I'm sure Newsweek will make him an offer. They don't seem to much care about truth, accuracy, or doing their homework. And if that doesn't work out, there's always CBS