I've seen some processes (JVM!) that apparently were armed to the teeth and willing to take up the entire CPU at the cost of bringing down the host OS. You underestimate their ability!:-)
Yeah, his testing was rife with this kind of inconsistency. If you're looking to see if things are hackable during the install, you can't pick and choose the services you turn on after the install and then run your scans.
Definitely biased. Loved that FreeBSD had nothing at all turned on... and got perfect goo-goo-gah-gah wonderful text.
Not for long. The institutions will wait until the sell-offs finish, pronounce the stock a "value" stock at it's collapsed price, and pump it up again, soon. Then the CEO can continue his sales of his options, which grossed him 5.5 million in less than six months in 2006.
The CEO didn't set his compensation level, the Board of Directors did. They're so far removed from reality they don't even know or care what a store looks like, let alone runs.
I posted the CEO's stock trades since 2002 here under another post... feel free to hunt it down. He made more than 5.5 million dollars in 2006, in less than half a year.
Greed is greed. Where are the shareholders saying, "STOP"? Nowhere. Why? They're all invested in MUTUAL FUNDS via their 401K's and couldn't care less that the Board are all golfing buddies with the analysts running the mutual funds. As long as the sheep get their 8% a year, they're happy... while the CEO takes 5.5 million in value out of the organization in less than 6 months, and no one bats an eye...
Don't worry, the guys at the top of Circuit City still "get it"... the dream thing that is...
But they have had to curtail their greed lately... the last serious stock sales by insiders was in 2006. Gosh, wonder if they knew something.
"No CC insider has purchased company stock this year. The last buy occurred when WOO CAROLYN YAUYAN purchased 3 shares on July 20, 2006. In the last 5 years insiders have on average purchased 22,118 shares each year."
June 1, 2006 Mccollough Warren Alan Sale 50,000 29.95-30.34 490,629 $1,507,878 May 1, 2006 Mccollough Warren Alan Sale 50,000 28.10-28.75 490,629 $1,420,956 Hardymon James F Sale 2,709 28.81-28.82 5,472 $78,054 Salovaara Mikael Sale 2,709 28.84-28.84 46,406 $78,128 April 20, 2006 Clark George Daniel Jr Sale 19,736 28.04-28.11 154,300 $554,053 Feigin Barbara S Sale 2,709 28.00-28.00 8,191 $75,852 April 19, 2006 Mccollough Warren Alan Sale 50,000 27.70-27.75 490,629 $1,386,371 April 18, 2006 Sieger Marc J Sale 9,759 27.50-27.50 39,740 $268,373 April 3, 2006 Mccollough Warren Alan Sale 44,100 24.00-24.36 496,529 $1,064,455 Mccollough Warren Alan Sale 5,900 24.37-24.49 490,629 $144,094
Mr. Mccollough made 5.52 million in half a year in 2006, just in stock options. Not including salary.
Poor dear. He must be down to bread crumbs, water, and standing in the unemployment lines by now.
The American dream today seems to include non-oversight of stock options grants vs. shareholder value. Know why? People don't invest anymore, they buy mutual funds and let the golf buddies of these people keep tabs on things.
Ah, but that's the "beauty" of the American system... they CAN sue like toddlers.
What's supposed to happen after that is that the real owners of Diebold (public shareholders) then hold the idiots in charge accountable for wasting so much money on lawyers.
Won't happen though, investors buy through Mutual Funds these days and don't care.
By the way, their PR department does not care about what the Legal department does.
In fact, if they're like most companies, Legal struts around like they run the place (and they do, because the investors/shareholders will fire the CxO types, not the lawyers) and no one dares cross them... if they're like most public companies today.
Corporate Lawyers exist for only one purpose... to continue their own existence. If PR or Marketing or anything else get in the way, those department's employees will be replaced with new ones that comply with all the desires of the Legal department.
You forgot about the machines that lose drives or other hardware during their first power-cycle in years...
We've been struggling with older Solaris boxes that have been running for one, two, three years straight that no one at customer's sites have been paying attention to, that either can't be rebooted (all mirrored drives failed -- can't apply the patches until parts arrive and mirrors are resynched), or that once rebooted lose various hardware...
I wonder (for those on service contracts) what Sun's inventory on drives and motherboards looks like right now?
Out of one group of ten customers, three have had major hardware failures either noticed before the patches were applied or during the reboot necessary. And that's just the last two weeks... there's more to come.
The later laptops have multi-touch touchpads, and by turning on the feature in the system setup, and then dropping two fingers on the touchpad and clicking the single mouse button, you get a right-click functionality.
It's so intuitive after a while, that I find I try to do it on my wife's older iBook and also on my work IBM T43... neither of which supports multi-touch on the touchpad, and find that I only get a left-click, and pause for a moment wondering what happened.
Also all other Macs happily accept three-button USB mice with scroll wheels, etc... and Apple's Mighty Mouse also has similar features with squeeze-to-right-click capability.
All of the Apple solutions for accessing a context menu via fancy pointing devices are pretty simple, and not as "one-click-button"-centric as most people probably think they are... while they still maintain the rule that everything must be available from a single-click-button interface.
Quite a touch of class from the UI designers, compared to most everything else out there.
They don't need a legal basis to sue. Anyone can generally sue for anything.
It doesn't mean they can win the suit.
Sadly, it's a viable (but sad) legal tactic to just annoy the hell out of other businesses with lawsuits, and with the cost of a legal defense being what it is today -- you can sometimes run the other guy out of money so fast, he'll settle or not do what he's doing.
I don't condone the above, but that's reality.
You may not make it to court, but you'll pay through the nose for an attorney to defend yourself.
Hopefully you can afford to float the money until the attorney wins back court costs from the idiots, or you can afford to pay it outright.
Today's reality is, if you can't afford to pay for your legal defense, companies and individuals who can... get what they want.
Eerp. Wrong again. I am producing tools that make money, 'they' are just the operators of the tools, and if they can't learn to operate the tools, then we fire them and hire some monkey who can.
So generally your attitude is that all of the "little user" employees are there for your pleasure and enjoyment, and have no purpose other than to manually manipulate your tools? (Pun intended.)
Pretty much what I've seen in the real world of business is that people who have your attitude may think you're running things, but you foster hate and discontent from "your" employees at every turn. They perform only to "specification" and never excel because your attitude is not one of true leadership, it's just childish bullying learned at around 6th grade and you never moved on. You'll keep working in your barely adequate little petty way thinking you do a great job until a real leader comes along and leads those employees to a) be highly motivated, b) make your life hell as they get better at manipulating the tools and find all your bugs/flaws. B is inevitable because you're not perfect... your day will come.
Actually the people responsible for the hiring at my company are about as clueless as the people they have hired to operate the machinery. And it's not that the people they hired weren't intelligent, they were just as arrogant, beligerent and untrainable as you appear to be. They seemed to think that they were precious and the lifeless machinery would be taken care of automagically for their superior selves by the carpet fluff mechanics in the corner. I guess what happened next was a shock then (see below).
Wow, what a punk. I dare you to e-mail that same comment to the HR Director of your organization and see if they agree. Where do you work? Let's find out.
What's really funny about your comments is that you also immediately turned it around into a personal attack on me, attempting to bully me. You don't know me, nor do I care what you think I know or don't know... but just for your edification if you're paying any attention at all here: I happen to be a sysadmin who's been happily maintaining, installing and designing large scale telecom and ISP systems for almost... wow, 20 years now?
Yeah... sure you know what you're talking about, kid. How long have you been doing this?
Maybe, but I doubt it. The role I am in now can be accomplished by very few people even in the IT industry. Those glorious users whose praises you sing on the other hand are a dime a dozen. We can replace them any time. This is because the value add has shifted to those who build even better and faster 'machines', and no longer rests with the operators of those tools.
What is it chief? You're either making up bullshit or you're REALLY insecure about it. You think you'll be relevant in 10 years? 5? You think I can't find 20 people to replace you tomorrow if I needed to for some reason?
Good luck with that "indispensability" thing. I've watched better men than you run over by technology changing faster than they could adapt. Truthfully I relish in watching it squash the ones with high and mighty attitudes like yours. Some learn from it, most leave crying. All who have your attitude eventually leave, mentally broken of their superman fantasies.
Hey, be our guest. If it is so easy, fire away. Build your servers, keep them running all by yourselves. It's just point and click and a few wizards right? [shakes head]
It *will* get that easy -- it'll just take time. I doubt your job or anything like it will exist at all in computing in 20 years.
You seem to like talking the bullshit and won't actually say WHAT you do or for WHOM, which makes the whole conversation just the rantings of a person who THINKS they're important. Feel free to answer those two questions and we can have an ADULT conversation there, kiddo. (Kiddo being figurative, you might be 50+ years old, but you still ACT like a kid, so you can be treated ap
So why haven't we already seen an auto manufacturer put BOTH systems into their cars as a feature? That'd take care of the problem completely.
All this bullshit about needing "partners"... screw that, make a dual-receiver for both systems that can be installed in every car in your line and the problem is gone for your car's customers forever, and you'll build brand loyalty from the folks who are thankful for having a choice again.
You shouldn't be using the most complex device humankind has ever created if you are going to get all upset about a few error messages. You should be fucking [sic] gratefull that you get to use such a piece of equipment at all.
Nope. Company management REQUIRES that people use the computers for certain tasks and REQUIRES you to help them do so. Any other attitude is bullshit; you're no better than the person who doesn't know how to use the machine. You're the machine repairman and they're the machine user. That's all. If you can't help them use the machine, you're the company's problem, not them. They're producing products or services that make money. You're overhead.
Actually it's a failure of the purchasing officer who doesn't know anything about printers (or which brands give you simple understandable messages that the printer is out of paper (like my $150 Lexmark which has the incredibly cryptic message 'Printer is out of paper')
Where's your document showing which printers the purchasing officer should buy to maximize end-user helpfulness? Ah yes, no one really has time to write such drivel -- so he bought what looked like it saved the company money. If it didn't, let him know for next time or you're still -- the majority of the problem, since you're the machine repairman/expert.
And so when the software changes naol.com to aol.com (to help you) then I'm sure you will be on the phone whinging about that too. Why don't you type more carefully? Or double check your message before clicking send? Does an envelope correct your spelling when you write out the wrong address? Does your telephone automatically correct the number you are dialling?
The only one I agree with. The end-user entered the wrong thing. But remember the days when bounces were copied to "postmaster" and the mail admin HELPED people with their mail problems? Yeah, you probably don't. Long distant past.
Exactly, so they shouldn't be wasting time by being too fucking lazy to check their work (or the address of an email) before they send it out to a client. In fact, any employee that wastes their time and the IT department's time and the company's time because they are a lazy moron should be fired.
Spoken like a true holier-than-thou asshole. We're so glad you're in the industry with us, making us all look bad. Did you ever stop to think that people responsible for the hiring already took care of hiring the right person for the job at hand, INCLUDING their skill level and salary requirements -- and that might have limited the level of intelligence of the end-users you're dealing with? Hiring and firing are NOT your job. But HELPING people use the machines IS your job. If they could use them perfectly without you, you wouldn't have a job. If you continue to berate them for NOT knowing how to use the machines you'll also be out of a job, eventually -- they WILL remember what a prick you are, when layoffs roll around and you try to get hired at the next company. The world's too small for you to be such an asshole. Really.
Hey tell that to the post office when you try and send a Datsun through the post. Hey! I'm the customer. Stop whinging and arrange for the transport of my Datsun.
Total bullshit. Your internet connection (any company internet connection) can handle a damn 75 MB file... somehow.)
Yes, and lucky for you IT people are not very good at office politics or your lazy incompetent ass would have been fired already.
Trust me -- it'll eventually be the other way around if IT people don't learn to behave as normal humans and part of the corporate team and not like they're God's gift to the office. Computers are just a tool. If the tool is so "complex" it requires a fleet of truly talented people who are total ASSHOLES to run it, or I can use a filing cabinet, a couple of smart and organized secretaries with a phone and a fax machine to do the same job tracking my customer base...
Actually you just embodied all of the bad social behavior the article talks about. Grow up son, and help your end-users make or retain company money. IT, even as powerful as it has become with its own "CIO" title in the upper eschelons of most companies, is still OVERHEAD.
You cost the company money. If you don't help the company make or retain at least as much as you cost, you'll be done. Bottom lines are still bottom lines.
Now, if you treat end-users badly -- that end will come sooner than later. Because they're the accountants and lawyers in your company and they KNOW how much putting up with your BS *really* costs in dollars and cents. Keep pissing them off, they'll figure out how to replace you with a pencil, a pen, and a filing cabinet.
It's just a way to get RedHat (which is boring and lifeless these days) back in the press. Business is business, and any news is news.
Cox is just pumping up his net worth, no worse or better than any other company big wig.
See through the hype surrounding the initials "DRM" and think about the real world outcome of Alan Cox turning in such a patent... RedHat gets noticed again, Cox gets noticed again... etc. Merry-go-round.
Nothing new to see here, move along, or join the parade of Slashdot Lemmings to run and squeal and jump for hyped up joy, making themselves no better off, but making Cox and the gang quite a bit of real world monetary value.
Not that handing money to them isn't probably a good thing, compared to handing it to others... but people, really -- it's just a marketing ploy. No better/worse than the ones from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't quite realize what you said there, I think; You're right, but for all the wrong reasons.
T1 = synchronous digital transport.
PRI = ISDN service (Primary Rate Interface) provided over a T1 or E1 circuit.
So yeah... A T1 shouldn't be any less reliable than a T1. You're exactly right.
"Average" and "Corporate" don't factor into it at all.
Try not to mix 'em up. PRI is just a protocol specification for the stuff riding on a T1.
I've seen some processes (JVM!) that apparently were armed to the teeth and willing to take up the entire CPU at the cost of bringing down the host OS. You underestimate their ability! :-)
So quit whining and put it IN the bug tracker. Sheesh.
Yeah, his testing was rife with this kind of inconsistency. If you're looking to see if things are hackable during the install, you can't pick and choose the services you turn on after the install and then run your scans.
Definitely biased. Loved that FreeBSD had nothing at all turned on... and got perfect goo-goo-gah-gah wonderful text.
Whatever. He's a tard. Moving right along...
Not for long. The institutions will wait until the sell-offs finish, pronounce the stock a "value" stock at it's collapsed price, and pump it up again, soon. Then the CEO can continue his sales of his options, which grossed him 5.5 million in less than six months in 2006.
The CEO didn't set his compensation level, the Board of Directors did. They're so far removed from reality they don't even know or care what a store looks like, let alone runs.
I posted the CEO's stock trades since 2002 here under another post... feel free to hunt it down. He made more than 5.5 million dollars in 2006, in less than half a year.
Greed is greed. Where are the shareholders saying, "STOP"? Nowhere. Why? They're all invested in MUTUAL FUNDS via their 401K's and couldn't care less that the Board are all golfing buddies with the analysts running the mutual funds. As long as the sheep get their 8% a year, they're happy... while the CEO takes 5.5 million in value out of the organization in less than 6 months, and no one bats an eye...
But they have had to curtail their greed lately... the last serious stock sales by insiders was in 2006. Gosh, wonder if they knew something.
"No CC insider has purchased company stock this year. The last buy occurred when WOO CAROLYN YAUYAN purchased 3 shares on July 20, 2006. In the last 5 years insiders have on average purchased 22,118 shares each year."
Mr. Mccollough made 5.52 million in half a year in 2006, just in stock options. Not including salary.
Poor dear. He must be down to bread crumbs, water, and standing in the unemployment lines by now.
The American dream today seems to include non-oversight of stock options grants vs. shareholder value. Know why? People don't invest anymore, they buy mutual funds and let the golf buddies of these people keep tabs on things.
Ah, but that's the "beauty" of the American system... they CAN sue like toddlers.
What's supposed to happen after that is that the real owners of Diebold (public shareholders) then hold the idiots in charge accountable for wasting so much money on lawyers.
Won't happen though, investors buy through Mutual Funds these days and don't care.
By the way, their PR department does not care about what the Legal department does.
In fact, if they're like most companies, Legal struts around like they run the place (and they do, because the investors/shareholders will fire the CxO types, not the lawyers) and no one dares cross them... if they're like most public companies today.
Corporate Lawyers exist for only one purpose... to continue their own existence. If PR or Marketing or anything else get in the way, those department's employees will be replaced with new ones that comply with all the desires of the Legal department.
Ask Slashdot or call the manufacturer, let's see... which one will make me look more like a huge retard not qualified to do my job?
Sheesh...
Welcome to Wikipedia's world.
Wikipedia says you won the lotto and you're sending us all your money, too.
You forgot about the machines that lose drives or other hardware during their first power-cycle in years...
We've been struggling with older Solaris boxes that have been running for one, two, three years straight that no one at customer's sites have been paying attention to, that either can't be rebooted (all mirrored drives failed -- can't apply the patches until parts arrive and mirrors are resynched), or that once rebooted lose various hardware...
I wonder (for those on service contracts) what Sun's inventory on drives and motherboards looks like right now?
Out of one group of ten customers, three have had major hardware failures either noticed before the patches were applied or during the reboot necessary. And that's just the last two weeks... there's more to come.
The later laptops have multi-touch touchpads, and by turning on the feature in the system setup, and then dropping two fingers on the touchpad and clicking the single mouse button, you get a right-click functionality.
It's so intuitive after a while, that I find I try to do it on my wife's older iBook and also on my work IBM T43... neither of which supports multi-touch on the touchpad, and find that I only get a left-click, and pause for a moment wondering what happened.
Also all other Macs happily accept three-button USB mice with scroll wheels, etc... and Apple's Mighty Mouse also has similar features with squeeze-to-right-click capability.
All of the Apple solutions for accessing a context menu via fancy pointing devices are pretty simple, and not as "one-click-button"-centric as most people probably think they are... while they still maintain the rule that everything must be available from a single-click-button interface.
Quite a touch of class from the UI designers, compared to most everything else out there.
Yeah, we're sick of everybody coming here anyway... stay home if you're planning on moving here.
If you'd like to visit to ski, then you're okay. We like your money.
If you're going to move here, get rid of the BMW and learn to drive in the damn snow.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that builds conferencing equipment and I live in Denver.)
Remember:
They don't need a legal basis to sue. Anyone can generally sue for anything.
It doesn't mean they can win the suit.
Sadly, it's a viable (but sad) legal tactic to just annoy the hell out of other businesses with lawsuits, and with the cost of a legal defense being what it is today -- you can sometimes run the other guy out of money so fast, he'll settle or not do what he's doing.
I don't condone the above, but that's reality.
You may not make it to court, but you'll pay through the nose for an attorney to defend yourself.
Hopefully you can afford to float the money until the attorney wins back court costs from the idiots, or you can afford to pay it outright.
Today's reality is, if you can't afford to pay for your legal defense, companies and individuals who can... get what they want.
Or as they say: "The best justice money can buy."
... if you're willing to run Debian. The RT packages are decent, if a little old, and work fine.
You apt-get install and set up your MTA to send mail to it, and you're basically done.
Haven't seen an oven without a rotating carousel being sold in many years now, chief.
Eerp. Wrong again. I am producing tools that make money, 'they' are just the operators of the tools, and if they can't learn to operate the tools, then we fire them and hire some monkey who can.
... wow, 20 years now?
So generally your attitude is that all of the "little user" employees are there for your pleasure and enjoyment, and have no purpose other than to manually manipulate your tools? (Pun intended.)
Pretty much what I've seen in the real world of business is that people who have your attitude may think you're running things, but you foster hate and discontent from "your" employees at every turn. They perform only to "specification" and never excel because your attitude is not one of true leadership, it's just childish bullying learned at around 6th grade and you never moved on. You'll keep working in your barely adequate little petty way thinking you do a great job until a real leader comes along and leads those employees to a) be highly motivated, b) make your life hell as they get better at manipulating the tools and find all your bugs/flaws. B is inevitable because you're not perfect... your day will come.
Actually the people responsible for the hiring at my company are about as clueless as the people they have hired to operate the machinery. And it's not that the people they hired weren't intelligent, they were just as arrogant, beligerent and untrainable as you appear to be. They seemed to think that they were precious and the lifeless machinery would be taken care of automagically for their superior selves by the carpet fluff mechanics in the corner. I guess what happened next was a shock then (see below).
Wow, what a punk. I dare you to e-mail that same comment to the HR Director of your organization and see if they agree. Where do you work? Let's find out.
What's really funny about your comments is that you also immediately turned it around into a personal attack on me, attempting to bully me. You don't know me, nor do I care what you think I know or don't know... but just for your edification if you're paying any attention at all here: I happen to be a sysadmin who's been happily maintaining, installing and designing large scale telecom and ISP systems for almost
Yeah... sure you know what you're talking about, kid. How long have you been doing this?
Maybe, but I doubt it. The role I am in now can be accomplished by very few people even in the IT industry. Those glorious users whose praises you sing on the other hand are a dime a dozen. We can replace them any time. This is because the value add has shifted to those who build even better and faster 'machines', and no longer rests with the operators of those tools.
What is it chief? You're either making up bullshit or you're REALLY insecure about it. You think you'll be relevant in 10 years? 5? You think I can't find 20 people to replace you tomorrow if I needed to for some reason?
Good luck with that "indispensability" thing. I've watched better men than you run over by technology changing faster than they could adapt. Truthfully I relish in watching it squash the ones with high and mighty attitudes like yours. Some learn from it, most leave crying. All who have your attitude eventually leave, mentally broken of their superman fantasies.
Hey, be our guest. If it is so easy, fire away. Build your servers, keep them running all by yourselves. It's just point and click and a few wizards right? [shakes head]
It *will* get that easy -- it'll just take time. I doubt your job or anything like it will exist at all in computing in 20 years.
You seem to like talking the bullshit and won't actually say WHAT you do or for WHOM, which makes the whole conversation just the rantings of a person who THINKS they're important. Feel free to answer those two questions and we can have an ADULT conversation there, kiddo. (Kiddo being figurative, you might be 50+ years old, but you still ACT like a kid, so you can be treated ap
So why haven't we already seen an auto manufacturer put BOTH systems into their cars as a feature? That'd take care of the problem completely.
All this bullshit about needing "partners"... screw that, make a dual-receiver for both systems that can be installed in every car in your line and the problem is gone for your car's customers forever, and you'll build brand loyalty from the folks who are thankful for having a choice again.
Exactly.
Nope. Company management REQUIRES that people use the computers for certain tasks and REQUIRES you to help them do so. Any other attitude is bullshit; you're no better than the person who doesn't know how to use the machine. You're the machine repairman and they're the machine user. That's all. If you can't help them use the machine, you're the company's problem, not them. They're producing products or services that make money. You're overhead.
Actually it's a failure of the purchasing officer who doesn't know anything about printers (or which brands give you simple understandable messages that the printer is out of paper (like my $150 Lexmark which has the incredibly cryptic message 'Printer is out of paper')
Where's your document showing which printers the purchasing officer should buy to maximize end-user helpfulness? Ah yes, no one really has time to write such drivel -- so he bought what looked like it saved the company money. If it didn't, let him know for next time or you're still -- the majority of the problem, since you're the machine repairman/expert.
And so when the software changes naol.com to aol.com (to help you) then I'm sure you will be on the phone whinging about that too. Why don't you type more carefully? Or double check your message before clicking send? Does an envelope correct your spelling when you write out the wrong address? Does your telephone automatically correct the number you are dialling?
The only one I agree with. The end-user entered the wrong thing. But remember the days when bounces were copied to "postmaster" and the mail admin HELPED people with their mail problems? Yeah, you probably don't. Long distant past.
Exactly, so they shouldn't be wasting time by being too fucking lazy to check their work (or the address of an email) before they send it out to a client. In fact, any employee that wastes their time and the IT department's time and the company's time because they are a lazy moron should be fired.
Spoken like a true holier-than-thou asshole. We're so glad you're in the industry with us, making us all look bad. Did you ever stop to think that people responsible for the hiring already took care of hiring the right person for the job at hand, INCLUDING their skill level and salary requirements -- and that might have limited the level of intelligence of the end-users you're dealing with? Hiring and firing are NOT your job. But HELPING people use the machines IS your job. If they could use them perfectly without you, you wouldn't have a job. If you continue to berate them for NOT knowing how to use the machines you'll also be out of a job, eventually -- they WILL remember what a prick you are, when layoffs roll around and you try to get hired at the next company. The world's too small for you to be such an asshole. Really.
Hey tell that to the post office when you try and send a Datsun through the post. Hey! I'm the customer. Stop whinging and arrange for the transport of my Datsun.
Total bullshit. Your internet connection (any company internet connection) can handle a damn 75 MB file... somehow.)
Yes, and lucky for you IT people are not very good at office politics or your lazy incompetent ass would have been fired already.
Trust me -- it'll eventually be the other way around if IT people don't learn to behave as normal humans and part of the corporate team and not like they're God's gift to the office. Computers are just a tool. If the tool is so "complex" it requires a fleet of truly talented people who are total ASSHOLES to run it, or I can use a filing cabinet, a couple of smart and organized secretaries with a phone and a fax machine to do the same job tracking my customer base...
Well - you figure
Actually you just embodied all of the bad social behavior the article talks about. Grow up son, and help your end-users make or retain company money. IT, even as powerful as it has become with its own "CIO" title in the upper eschelons of most companies, is still OVERHEAD.
You cost the company money. If you don't help the company make or retain at least as much as you cost, you'll be done. Bottom lines are still bottom lines.
Now, if you treat end-users badly -- that end will come sooner than later. Because they're the accountants and lawyers in your company and they KNOW how much putting up with your BS *really* costs in dollars and cents. Keep pissing them off, they'll figure out how to replace you with a pencil, a pen, and a filing cabinet.
Sounds about right. Pilots, structural/civil engineers, and others would agree.
Seriously -- don't encourage this retarded behavior.
Do you want to live a world where everyone should get a license for everything, "just to make sure"?
Fight the urge to think that an employer screwing with someone like this is "normal".
That's what they want you to think. That's what their lawyers want you to think. That's what some judges and many law-makers want you to think.
It keeps you in line.
Haven't you ever heard of having someone sign a disclaimer? Sheesh...
It's just a way to get RedHat (which is boring and lifeless these days) back in the press. Business is business, and any news is news.
Cox is just pumping up his net worth, no worse or better than any other company big wig.
See through the hype surrounding the initials "DRM" and think about the real world outcome of Alan Cox turning in such a patent... RedHat gets noticed again, Cox gets noticed again... etc. Merry-go-round.
Nothing new to see here, move along, or join the parade of Slashdot Lemmings to run and squeal and jump for hyped up joy, making themselves no better off, but making Cox and the gang quite a bit of real world monetary value.
Not that handing money to them isn't probably a good thing, compared to handing it to others... but people, really -- it's just a marketing ploy. No better/worse than the ones from Microsoft.