Another popular argument that software piracy isn't bad as long as you can't afford to purchase the software. Nice try, but the end result is the same: you are using software that you haven't paid for. Whether or not you could have afforded what you have stolen is irrelevant.
I disagree with the notion that software copying is harmful 100% of the time. The best example I can give is Photoshop.
Photoshop is basically the gold standard for image manipulation in the graphic design world. You won't see a graphic design job ad that doesn't want at least some knowledge of Photoshop. Where does the new pool of young "Photoshop" talent come from? Universities.
Guess where almost 100% of Photoshop installs are pirated? At the universities! (They were while I went to unversity, anyway...) So when they graduate, their employers have 95-99% of their potential applicants with Photoshop experience. why in the world would he pick something else and pay to "re-train" all these people?
The answer, as we're seeing in the Open Office vs. MS Office vs. Star Office world, is that they won't do it. Adobe makes a buttload of money on Photoshop, and no small part of that is thanks to the copies pirated in various Universities around the world.
Very basic brand marketing technique... Get the new generation of Photo manipulation software to see it as "the tool of choice of the pros" and you've guaranteed that their non-technical bosses will approve purchase of the next version of photoshop.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and you dominate the market.
Wow, this guy really needs to get a life - this reads like a Dear Penthouse letter or something. For a lawyer, he has no tact....
And he's a terrible writer! Just an explosion of formless detail. Why don't dumb girls like Network Engineers again? At least I can formulate a decent setence...
I sure wouldn't hire a lawyer who couldn't write. Hell no... There's so many lawyers out there I can hold out for somebody with some kind of commandd of the language... I leave judgement of his moral compass (not for having the relationship, womanizing, or anything, but for talking about it puclicly) to you. Then again, we are talking about a lawyer here, so a moral compass may be too much to ask.
I mean, just because it is legal, doesn't make it a classy, wise, or "right" thing to do. No matter how stupid the girl is.
Who didn't, in their youth, say or do things in a relationship that you now regret and would never do again? Said things that were outlandishly stupid, that you've learned from? How happy would you be about your dirty laundry being aired?
1. AOL are the copyright holders and as such the code was never released by them under the GPL so it's not under the GPL now and never has been.
2. AOL don't own the copyright and as such the code is, and always will be , subject to the GPL.
I humbly suggest possibility #3...
3. AOL owns the copyright, and is trying to test whether they can "retract" a decision to release code under the GPL.
This is actually a critical point... If AOL can "retract" this decision, what stops them from "taking back" Mozilla? What keeps SAP from "taking back" SAPdb? Many open-source projects get code from, or are even started thanks to the largesse of, large corporate interests.
If they can establish in court that it is okay for AOL to "retract" an officially GPL'ed release, how long before a major player starts buying companies that have "right of retraction" on their open source competitors and exercising those rights?
Windows Update is flawed. I did a search the other week to find out more information on why some of our Windows 2000 workstations were suggesting old patches needed to be applied.
For example, I've downloaded, installed, and rebooted as required for the security update from Feb 13 for MSXML 4.0 and the bloody thing still keeps coming back!
I don't know if this is true anymore, but back in the NT4.0 bad old days, adding or removing a winders component forced you to reinstall ALL service packs and patches. Is it possible that you added a patch out of order at some point (ie. You said "No thianks" to one of the recommended updates) and that is the problem?
I really don't think it's possible for each of 30 people to be aware of all 30 other articles.
Bullshit. When I worked foy the University Daily Paper we had no problem avoiding duplicate stories all over the paper... And we ran FAR MORE THAN 30 STORIES A DAY.
In my example it was a bunch of drunk/high/rushing out to get laid coward students--Can't professionals who are being paid do their damn job right do AT LEAST as good as the wasted college kids?
Corporations and governments are willing to pay the price of Windows to ensure that they have support and stability.
What support? MS requires you to PAY for technical support. Their web-site is extremely user-unfriendly, a real PITA to get useful information out of. In the end, if you want support for Microsoft software, you pay for it in the form of a Full-time Employee who supports your network, or by buying "Per Incident" support from MS.
What stability? There's a new "Security Patch" issued every two days that must be thoroughly tested to insure that it doesn't bring the entire office down in flames. (See story about Win 2k/XP patch from last month that made even the fastest machines crawl.)
While OSS doesn't eliminate the need to hire an FTE to support your network, it does drastically reduce your licensing expenses. In our office we just build the cost of licenses for MS software in the price of any PC we buy because otherwise the departments would bitch a blue streak about how much "extra" all that "Included" software costs them. (I know this because we used to break it down for them, and three times annually some manager would pitch a bitch about how "IT Should Be Paying For My Licensing Costs".)
Only $19.95 buys you access to the unintelligible lyrics of your favorite artists... Since we don't print them in the CD Liner Notes anymore just to make you insane.
I personally think this is a bad model for business and anyone relying on Microsoft for their business is effectively negligent, but that is my opinion.
Hear hear! I can't moderate this discusison because I've posted to it, but I wish I could.
It is this negligence that forces me to keep my resume ready at all times. You never know when a surprise software audit will come along and earn your company a budget busting fine that results in me "no longer fitting in the budget."
You are correct, and Microsoft has specifically said that using Ghost is a violation of their EULA.
Good luck getting that to stand up in court. Especially since with Windows 2000 Microsoft released their own "Ghost" software that makes images of a system drive and allows you to distribute that "image" to clients over a network.
The only difference I can discern between Ghost and MS' implementation is that the MS way results in you buying more licenses (for an extra, dedicated server machine) and an extra CAL. Plus, the MS way "recommends" that you have a couple of these distribution servers sitting around--one main and one "backup." Of course that means another license and another CAL...
And thus, further locking you in in to their kabaal of evil/crapware.
I'll run it by our lawyer today, because obviously I'm concerned that we're violating a license that could leave us open to large fines. Of course, without Ghost, I instantly need an extra three to five employees, so I don't see it going away any time soon, even if he says we're in breach of contract.
Most corporations may use GHOST, but are usually violating a large number of license agreements in the process. That can mean big problems later.
As an everyday user of Ghost (and, FWIW, I think it rocks) I must ask you to elaborate on your contention that Ghost somehow inherently violates the license agreements of software.
I don't see how: Your license fee is per installed usage of the software. Why does it matter that I installed the software at the same time as the OS? How is this different from restoring a backup copy off of a tape? Or does that also violate licensing agreements?
At our site we (meticulously, I might add) track each license of each program. Each workstation has a physical license page for each installed package in a physical folder (in addition to our electronic tracking.) There are two enormous file cabinets near my cube that represent the paper licenses for ALL of our systems. Is it a pain in the ass to maintain? Sure, but a lot less of a pain than installing everything from CD. Software installed via Ghost image is tracked very damn carefully to ensure compliance with the license agreement.
Sure, if we just ghosted machines willy-nilly, and ended up using more copies than we'd paid for, that would be a problem. But we're not, and "not enough licenses" is a seperate problem, unrelated to Ghost or other disk imaging software.
Also, to use GHOST, you have to have a _very_ uniform hardware platform.
We have two laptop styles, and two desktop styles. If we add a new kind, I'm in the habit of ghosting the first one so any subsequent machines will have an image to work from.
I fail to understand your anti-Ghost sentiment. Most of your arguments seem to be based on ignorance of its actual use in the real world.
I agree that pot should be legalized, but you have to recognize that so long as the majority of the US is against it, the US government is going to try very hard to keep Canada from doing it.
...I'd agree with you except that a majority of Americans do not support the current marijuana witch hunt.
In fact, the War on (some) Drugs has little to do with the will of the people, and everything to do with being a scapegoat for hysteria, and a way to justify egregious pork budget increases.
And it is a witch hunt... People are so scared of the flowers of a harmless plant that job applicants are mercillessly rejected if they "Test positive" for marijuana. In some states, the "pot paranoia" is so pervasive that they've enacted "Smoke a joint, lose your driver license" laws to further stigmatize marijuana smokers. Without a driver license, where can you work in this country? If you live in a city that doesn't have GREAT public transportation (thats most of them) you simply won't get a job.
In the U.S., felons (for non-Americans, a felon is somebody convicted of a "serious" crime) can't vote. Even though arrests for drugs are about proportional to the proportion of the various races in our society, minorities serve vastly longer sentences than whites arrested for the same offense... They are three times less likely to be offered "diversionary sentencing" (ie. non-jail) to avoid felony conviction, and FIVE TIMES more likely to do jail time for a first-offense.
Of course, since white people in the U.S. on average have more money than their minority counterparts they can afford a lawyer who can get them out of trouble without jail.
So even though it might not have been the original intent, what you have is a de facto concerted effort to disenfrachise "undesirables."
The only advice I have is to write your congressmen and tell them you want legalized buds-- And keep your eyes peeled for cops.
the Entrouage email/calendar/pim app is a lot more sane than Outlook (though is lacking full Excange integration).
It is interesting to me that we don't hear more complaints about this rather large shortcoming. You could almost say Entourage effectively cripples replacing a lot of PCs with small, reliable iMacs, since many companies depend on the groupware functionality of Exchange/Outlook. If Entourage can't provide that to the Mac users, there won't BE any enterprise mac users--or at least, any enterprise Mac users that don't also have to have a seperate PC with its inherent Windows License and extra Exchange CAL, and Office license.
Since I always use my Mom as a "Joe/Jane Average" computer user example, lets pretend her office wanted to go entirely Mac tomorrow on the desktop, but still keep their Exchange server and domain controllers running Win2k.
Their custom business apps are actually terminal sessions on a couple of unix boxes, and their ERP/Purchasing system is provided via web-interface.
They could do it, except for one freakin' problem. They "need" (psychologically, not in reality) their groupware to be MS Exchange compatible because it would be "too hard" to switch to something else. But entourage doesn't do that. So they're screwed.
Sure, they could ditch the calendaring through exchange and setup an intranet apache server with everybody's iCal calendar published to it--it would be pretty neat and not involve any more damn CALs. But the mental hurdle of non-tech users in positions of authority to jump is sooo hight--and MS knows this.
Sure, they've "announced" that it will eventually work. "Eventually". But does anybody really expect it to be flawless? Without a single, solitary, "red-headed stepchild" workaround or hack to make it work right?
What I'm hearing from recruters is that if you have good skills, there are jobs out there.
If you DO have good skills and aren't getting calls, I'd seriously re-think your resume. I know it sounds like COMPLETE BS, but wording counts.
Indeed, I can testify that this is a VERY important step to take. In fact, I recommend to all my friends that they have pro re-write their resumes. The reason?
I was out of work for 14 months. Not even a tiny nibble. Then I read an article about "re-energizing" my job search, and one of the suggestions (besides check your own references to see what responses they give) is to get a professionally written resume.
I did it. It cost like $150, but she did a kick-ass job, and I got an offer for an IT job about two weeks later.
She told me she knows a lot of people who make their own resume and just list their duties, dates, and degrees, then can't fathom why they aren't getting interviews/offers. The fact is, employers can get a pretty good idea of what your duties were based on your title. What they really want to see is stories where you kicked ass on some problem or project, and how you did it.
Examples:
BAD: Wrote C++/C code for enterprise application eWidget 2.5 before deadline. Assisted other developers.
GOOD: Coordinated with development team to ensure eWidget 2.5 application was code complete in advance of the agreed upon date. Led efforts by working non-required overtime hours to check code written by junior developers.
Granted, even with a good resume you still have to slam-dunk the interview to get hired, but the well-written resume frames your experiences in a good light, and gives you the opportunity to have an interview.
If people were really just checking out an album and artist then buying the music there won't be an issue. Are you really claiming that most people run out and buy the album they just downloaded? I haven't had a single person say they later bought an album they downloaded. This is about people getting something for nothing and trying to rationalize it. I've had more than one say not being paid helped the artists as well.
Then let me introduce myself to you. I have (on many occasions) bought CDs I would have never dreamed of considering after downloading tracks and really liking them. This got me interested in (short list): The Orb, Ween, and Wilco among many many others.
Do I buy everything I download? No. But, if I don't like it enough to buy it the files usually end up getting erased. If your position is that I should have to pay for all music I'm "exposed" to thats just, well, fucked. There are also situations where you CAN'T buy on CD stuff you can download... Live cuts, for example, are often included on obscure imports that not everybody has access to.
Nobody ever said "No artist should get paid", you're the only one repeating that mantra and trying to put it in our mouths. What we want is a FAIR way to buy music--fair that is, for the consumer AND the artist. The current system is only fair to the congomerates and screws both artist and consumer. The consumer overpays for EVERYTHING, the artist gets pennies per album sold, and the conglomerate invents non-existent "expenses" to justify keeping the rest of the money themselves.
Consumers deserve the right to purchase digital files of the music they desire. They deserve the right to preview the music BEFORE they commit money to a purchase, and they deserve the right to NOT buy the stuff they don't like. If I like one song on the new John Mayer album (for example) but hate the remaining songs, my options are 1) Buy the whole thing for one song, or 2) download the song from p2p. The label has not created a mechanism to satisfy my needs as a consumer, so I have made my own. Call this "rationalizing" if you want... In a manner of speaking, I suppose you're right that I am "rationalizing" something that may technically be unethical. BUT, by the same token, your endorsement of "Pay $15-$20 to enjoy one song" is also a rationalization of your chosen industry's backwards, equally unethical business model.
Ever hear the expression "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?" Applies pretty well here.
You contridicted yourself by saying "You can't own an idea." then mention copyright laws.
Let me first acknowledge that the person you're replying to is probably a little more extreme than a lot of people. BUT...
Even though I disagree with the way he expresses his opinion (telling you to get a job was rather childish) he is correct. The conglomerates themselves have invalidated the entire concept of copyright by acting outside the boundaries (and spirit) of the original intent of copyright. To ensure innovators innovated, and to insure that useful ideas weren't kept out of the public's hands forever... One of many measures essentially enacted to prevent the formation of an ultra-wealthy aristocracy.
They didn't intend to allow conglomerates to keep culturally enriching materials out of the public domain forever, yet that is essentially where we're at, and essentially the point of view you're arguing.
I can't wait for somebody to become a big star by financing his own recordings, promoting himself with unencumbered p2p delivered mp3 (or oggs or whatever) of songs, perhaps embedding his web-site name in one of the ID3 fields so people who really liked it could logon and buy cds, t-shirts, and tickets to see him in concert.
It will eventually happen, and if your music is good enough, it could be you. The critical difference is that somebody who becomes huge this way gets to keep all the profits, keep ownership (for a time) of the rights to his songs, and not be a slave to some idiot in a suit's concerns about your record and whether there are any "singles" on it. Every artist who sides with the RIAA and their ilk only lengthen their time of servitude under an oppressive regime.
What if I were to say you could live in your house you built for 17 years then we get to take it away from you.
Hello Apples, meet Oranges. A house is physical property. It can be taken away. A song can't be taken away unless I take all your tapes and erase your memory of it. The law plainly intends for copyrights to eventually expire, why can't you (and the RIAA) accept that rather than trying to sue everybody into submission?
Using your logic, how is playing the radio loud any different than Napster? I'm allowing many people to "enjoy" "your" music but only paying for one copy. For that matter, why is Napster different than a radio station? Sure, radio stations pay for the right to broadcast music, but the per song breakdown is pretty small. The reason the labels had this arrangement in the first place was PROMOTIONS.
Why won't the labels license Napster-like services to provide unlimited downloads? It would be the same as radio--better really because the user would hear exactly as much of what they are interested in as they want--lose interest fast? Decide the artist sucks? Erase file.
Every "starving musician" I've ever met who is vehemently anti-Napster invariably has some pie-in-the-sky dream of living the life of a rock star--fame, fortune, big money, and chicks everwhere. All of them desperately want to believe that those three things are achieved on merit, but they aren't. They're based on promotional budget, production budget, and access to good drugs.
But my company's IS dept. is still very content on making me reboot whenever I try to do something "luxurious," like having two applications open at the same time.
Perhaps you need to upgrade your legacy IS people. Under NT/2k/XP you shouldn't need to re-boot except when windows asks you nicely to. (IMO it asks much too often, but that's a seperate argument...)
Perhaps some of your "legacy" IS people are still in the "re-boot" habit from the days of 9x/ME when re-boot really did solve 80% of our "weirdo-helpdesk tickets."
Would be if you wanted to offer flexible wireless access in your business--say a coffee shop or something with a small number of users. You could support everybody, Apple, PC, whatever, and not have to worry about people bitching that their card "just doesn't work here."
Now show me a heavy-duty pro version of the tri-band wifi router and I'll be super interested.
Where things go off course is that Nelson Mandela was trying to free people from the rule of immoral laws.
Except this is how groups like al qaeda and hamas justify themselves: They're trying to "free" Arabs from immoral/"evil" secular and/or zionist government influences. I agree with you, the world isn't so easily divided into good vs. evil (or "us vs terrorists"), but there has to be more to it than just "feeling oppressed." I mean, I felt oppressed by my old boss--I didn't car-bomb his office...
Not that I find Nelson Mandela and al qaeda morally equivalent--I don't. But there has to be some other distinction because oppression is in the eye of the beholder. What seems totally unacceptable to me might be okay in the eyes of others, and vice-versa. For example: In the Netherlands the government can appeal if it loses a criminal case. In the U.S., we call it double-jeoprady and clearly wrong. There, it is normal standard procedure.
I'm on a cable modem and it doesn't accept mail from my mail server either... If I try to send to my friend's Compuserve (owned by AOL now) address... I'm on a cable modem. The way the message is phrased, they make it sound like I'm the cause of the spam woes... I mean, that is just ridiculous. My server is secured, I am very selective about who is allowed to relay.
Here's the message it sends back as it appears in my mail server log:
00:08:31 5 SMTP-409(cs.com) Disconnect Received 00:08:31 5 SMTP-409(cs.com) Disconnect Confirmed 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-The IP address you're using to connect to AOL is either open to the\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit\r 00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.\r
1) Since when has CNN, NBC, etc had a strong conservative bias?? Obviously, I'm watching the wrong channel. When 90% of journalists working for a 24 cable news channel voted liberal in the previous 3 elections, that has a tendency to skew the reporting of that particular channel.
Uh...Do you have any evidence to back that up? A link to a survey? An exit poll? Anything? I know plenty of conservative journalists... (Having been, at one point, a journalism student in the state of Indiana.)
2) Notice that Clinton was never criticized on TV for the things that actually mattered. Campaign donations from foreign countries is the kind of thing that causes presidents to get impeached (and they actually get kicked out). CNN was more interested in cigars and stained dresses.
Sorry, but you must have been asleep during those controversies. There was widespread press criticism of the president in that scandal. Also, the "focus" on cigars and stained dresses should be traced back to a witch-hunt launched by Clinton's political adversaries. Is it a coincidence that the first democrat to be elected and serve TWO FULL TERMS (since...what, FDR?) was "investigated" endlessly by conservative political appointees who, after many years and $40 million of tax money could only "get" him on the technicality that he didn't wish to disclose an extra-marital affair when the investigation was supposedly focused on a real estate deal?
3) And if you consider PBS to be unbiased, what exactly do you call liberal?
The biggest white elephant ever from the conservatives is the "liberal media" one. If the widespread "liberal" bias really existed, I would expect to see widespread outright opposition to President Bush's policies, since he is a Republican.
Yet the opposite is true. The networks are giving us non-stop, nearly pornographic (positive) coverage of this war and there are very few dissenting voices on the airwaves right now.
Again, you'd think if the media was so "liberal" they would show civillian casualty numbers which (once again) it appears will end up in the multiple thousands. I haven't heard even ONE PEEP on American television about civillian casualties... Except for when they hit a busload of civiliians with a missile, we heard about THAT "accident." But after the bombing of a residential area where potentially hundreds of civilians could have been affected... nothing. Not one peep.
To be serious for a moment, I could live with Network Guru or Captain of the Infrastructure. My favorite "dot-com boom" job title was "Great and Powerful Network Magician". I think that was at Peapod.com.
I saw the ad and knew I should never ever work at a place with such an absurd name for its employees... They also had stuff like "Perl/C++ Code Wizard".
Bush and previous US presidents have been bullying the rest of the world for decades. Come live in south america for a couple of years, and maybe you'll understand.
Ah, but the terrorists didn't come from South America, did they? So "bullying the world" is not a sufficient explanation for why Arabs are flying around the world to attack American interests. There does appear to be something peculiar to the Middle East, be it cultural, political, or what have you.
Contrary to what you say, "bullying the world" (although a vast oversimplification of the mistakes we've made) actually is the biggest problem (that we have control over.) The second one is the religous difference and the history of that schism. The combination of the two is quite volatile. Everytime we say something in a foreign policy debate, they hear that statement, plus the following: "Or we'll come and kill you all, like we've tried to before."
Remember the Crusades? Where Christians went to "cleanse" the holy land of "infidels." Remember that "cleanse" in this context means "to kill everybody." This is a powerful historical lesson for muslims... Even though the crusades were a long time ago, cultural memory of genocide does not fade quickly.
Besides this, the Arabs have political differences with us: - We give their governments orders through threat of force of arms (The list here is so long I'm not even going to bother.) - We support dictators who brutally oppress their population (see also Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Pinochet, and the Taliban.) - We're giving guns, helicopters, airplanes, and other weapons to Israel, who is using them oppress a cultural minority (the Palestinians.)
In other words, our broken foreign policy has made us enemies, everywhere. Look at the Phillipines... A friendly nation with a government we installed at one point that got really corrupt... (Anybody remember how many pairs of shoes that broad owned? Was it something like 50,000 pair?)
Flash forward fifty years, and there's an Al Qaeda splinter group living in the South of the Phillipines and attacking Americans and Phillipinos to gain leverage to get their own country. Why do they want it? They're being oppressed by a government we support. Therefore, we're also on their list.
Multiply times 100 and you quickly arrive at where we are now. If we continue down this destructive path, picture a future where Manhattan is like Tel Aviv... Everybody is afraid, there's cops and soldiers all over the place, and still there's an attack every few days/weeks/hours.
This is because the deadline probably crept up on the affected agencies and they hadn't made any proactive measures to insure the document's declassification.
Now that the deadline has actually approached, they have their pants down and don't know what to do.
Pardon my saying so, but boo-fucking-hoo. Whatever moron was responsible for this deserves to be fired--immediately. I have lost a job for being too good at what I do (ie. being a threat to my boss' fat salary.) It makes me sick enough to spit when I think about some of the people I have dealt with inside the government who had jobs during my recent unemployment.
I read the sentence "Letting a deadline creep up on you" as "Failing to do even the bare minimum over the course of 25 years." In the real world, getting a project and doing nothing about it gets you fired. Shit, the morons who couldn't review these docs in 25-years probably got promoted to manager, since it was "their turn to be promoted."
Want better performance from your government? End the culture of lifetime employment "If you want it."
If the government employed anybody but the absolute bottom of the talent-barrel (there are exceptions) our country would have a better, more efficient government. First step? Fire your incompetents and bad-attitudes. In reality, there are many talented people in government whose achievments are being held back by the "stereotypical" government worker.
Make the "I'm 52, three years from a pension, and don't give a shit about you or your stupid problems" crowd a distant memory. Roll them right the fuck out the door.
This may sound cruel, but what fantasy world are these people living in? A paycheck is not a god-given right--it is something you earn through your performance in your field. In the real world, doing a shit-job consistently gets you fired. Why is the government any different?
The final irony here is how hard the Bushies have hammered the "Saddam had 12-years to disarm" spin so hard, and now they're failing to disclose information they've had TWENTY-FIVE YEARS to review. Makes you wish the internet supported "Smell-o-vision" so scientist could finally find out what hypocrisy smells like.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with the notion that software copying is harmful 100% of the time. The best example I can give is Photoshop.
Photoshop is basically the gold standard for image manipulation in the graphic design world. You won't see a graphic design job ad that doesn't want at least some knowledge of Photoshop. Where does the new pool of young "Photoshop" talent come from? Universities.
Guess where almost 100% of Photoshop installs are pirated? At the universities! (They were while I went to unversity, anyway...) So when they graduate, their employers have 95-99% of their potential applicants with Photoshop experience. why in the world would he pick something else and pay to "re-train" all these people?
The answer, as we're seeing in the Open Office vs. MS Office vs. Star Office world, is that they won't do it. Adobe makes a buttload of money on Photoshop, and no small part of that is thanks to the copies pirated in various Universities around the world.
Very basic brand marketing technique... Get the new generation of Photo manipulation software to see it as "the tool of choice of the pros" and you've guaranteed that their non-technical bosses will approve purchase of the next version of photoshop.
Lather, rinse, repeat, and you dominate the market.
And he's a terrible writer! Just an explosion of formless detail. Why don't dumb girls like Network Engineers again? At least I can formulate a decent setence...
I sure wouldn't hire a lawyer who couldn't write. Hell no... There's so many lawyers out there I can hold out for somebody with some kind of commandd of the language... I leave judgement of his moral compass (not for having the relationship, womanizing, or anything, but for talking about it puclicly) to you. Then again, we are talking about a lawyer here, so a moral compass may be too much to ask.
I mean, just because it is legal, doesn't make it a classy, wise, or "right" thing to do. No matter how stupid the girl is.
Who didn't, in their youth, say or do things in a relationship that you now regret and would never do again? Said things that were outlandishly stupid, that you've learned from? How happy would you be about your dirty laundry being aired?
I humbly suggest possibility #3...
3. AOL owns the copyright, and is trying to test whether they can "retract" a decision to release code under the GPL.
This is actually a critical point... If AOL can "retract" this decision, what stops them from "taking back" Mozilla? What keeps SAP from "taking back" SAPdb? Many open-source projects get code from, or are even started thanks to the largesse of, large corporate interests.
If they can establish in court that it is okay for AOL to "retract" an officially GPL'ed release, how long before a major player starts buying companies that have "right of retraction" on their open source competitors and exercising those rights?
I don't know if this is true anymore, but back in the NT4.0 bad old days, adding or removing a winders component forced you to reinstall ALL service packs and patches. Is it possible that you added a patch out of order at some point (ie. You said "No thianks" to one of the recommended updates) and that is the problem?
Bullshit. When I worked foy the University Daily Paper we had no problem avoiding duplicate stories all over the paper... And we ran FAR MORE THAN 30 STORIES A DAY.
In my example it was a bunch of drunk/high/rushing out to get laid coward students--Can't professionals who are being paid do their damn job right do AT LEAST as good as the wasted college kids?
What support? MS requires you to PAY for technical support. Their web-site is extremely user-unfriendly, a real PITA to get useful information out of. In the end, if you want support for Microsoft software, you pay for it in the form of a Full-time Employee who supports your network, or by buying "Per Incident" support from MS.
What stability? There's a new "Security Patch" issued every two days that must be thoroughly tested to insure that it doesn't bring the entire office down in flames. (See story about Win 2k/XP patch from last month that made even the fastest machines crawl.)
While OSS doesn't eliminate the need to hire an FTE to support your network, it does drastically reduce your licensing expenses. In our office we just build the cost of licenses for MS software in the price of any PC we buy because otherwise the departments would bitch a blue streak about how much "extra" all that "Included" software costs them. (I know this because we used to break it down for them, and three times annually some manager would pitch a bitch about how "IT Should Be Paying For My Licensing Costs".)
Only $19.95 buys you access to the unintelligible lyrics of your favorite artists... Since we don't print them in the CD Liner Notes anymore just to make you insane.
Chickenboner.com doesn't have anything at the link posted in the parent post... Anybody get a mirror of it before it got pulled?
Hear hear! I can't moderate this discusison because I've posted to it, but I wish I could.
It is this negligence that forces me to keep my resume ready at all times. You never know when a surprise software audit will come along and earn your company a budget busting fine that results in me "no longer fitting in the budget."
Good luck getting that to stand up in court. Especially since with Windows 2000 Microsoft released their own "Ghost" software that makes images of a system drive and allows you to distribute that "image" to clients over a network.
The only difference I can discern between Ghost and MS' implementation is that the MS way results in you buying more licenses (for an extra, dedicated server machine) and an extra CAL. Plus, the MS way "recommends" that you have a couple of these distribution servers sitting around--one main and one "backup." Of course that means another license and another CAL...
And thus, further locking you in in to their kabaal of evil/crapware.
I'll run it by our lawyer today, because obviously I'm concerned that we're violating a license that could leave us open to large fines. Of course, without Ghost, I instantly need an extra three to five employees, so I don't see it going away any time soon, even if he says we're in breach of contract.
As an everyday user of Ghost (and, FWIW, I think it rocks) I must ask you to elaborate on your contention that Ghost somehow inherently violates the license agreements of software.
I don't see how: Your license fee is per installed usage of the software. Why does it matter that I installed the software at the same time as the OS?
How is this different from restoring a backup copy off of a tape? Or does that also violate licensing agreements?
At our site we (meticulously, I might add) track each license of each program. Each workstation has a physical license page for each installed package in a physical folder (in addition to our electronic tracking.) There are two enormous file cabinets near my cube that represent the paper licenses for ALL of our systems. Is it a pain in the ass to maintain? Sure, but a lot less of a pain than installing everything from CD. Software installed via Ghost image is tracked very damn carefully to ensure compliance with the license agreement.
Sure, if we just ghosted machines willy-nilly, and ended up using more copies than we'd paid for, that would be a problem. But we're not, and "not enough licenses" is a seperate problem, unrelated to Ghost or other disk imaging software.
We have two laptop styles, and two desktop styles. If we add a new kind, I'm in the habit of ghosting the first one so any subsequent machines will have an image to work from.
I fail to understand your anti-Ghost sentiment. Most of your arguments seem to be based on ignorance of its actual use in the real world.
In fact, the War on (some) Drugs has little to do with the will of the people, and everything to do with being a scapegoat for hysteria, and a way to justify egregious pork budget increases.
And it is a witch hunt... People are so scared of the flowers of a harmless plant that job applicants are mercillessly rejected if they "Test positive" for marijuana. In some states, the "pot paranoia" is so pervasive that they've enacted "Smoke a joint, lose your driver license" laws to further stigmatize marijuana smokers. Without a driver license, where can you work in this country? If you live in a city that doesn't have GREAT public transportation (thats most of them) you simply won't get a job.
In the U.S., felons (for non-Americans, a felon is somebody convicted of a "serious" crime) can't vote. Even though arrests for drugs are about proportional to the proportion of the various races in our society, minorities serve vastly longer sentences than whites arrested for the same offense... They are three times less likely to be offered "diversionary sentencing" (ie. non-jail) to avoid felony conviction, and FIVE TIMES more likely to do jail time for a first-offense.
Of course, since white people in the U.S. on average have more money than their minority counterparts they can afford a lawyer who can get them out of trouble without jail.
So even though it might not have been the original intent, what you have is a de facto concerted effort to disenfrachise "undesirables."
The only advice I have is to write your congressmen and tell them you want legalized buds-- And keep your eyes peeled for cops.
It is interesting to me that we don't hear more complaints about this rather large shortcoming. You could almost say Entourage effectively cripples replacing a lot of PCs with small, reliable iMacs, since many companies depend on the groupware functionality of Exchange/Outlook. If Entourage can't provide that to the Mac users, there won't BE any enterprise mac users--or at least, any enterprise Mac users that don't also have to have a seperate PC with its inherent Windows License and extra Exchange CAL, and Office license.
Since I always use my Mom as a "Joe/Jane Average" computer user example, lets pretend her office wanted to go entirely Mac tomorrow on the desktop, but still keep their Exchange server and domain controllers running Win2k.
Their custom business apps are actually terminal sessions on a couple of unix boxes, and their ERP/Purchasing system is provided via web-interface.
They could do it, except for one freakin' problem. They "need" (psychologically, not in reality) their groupware to be MS Exchange compatible because it would be "too hard" to switch to something else. But entourage doesn't do that. So they're screwed.
Sure, they could ditch the calendaring through exchange and setup an intranet apache server with everybody's iCal calendar published to it--it would be pretty neat and not involve any more damn CALs. But the mental hurdle of non-tech users in positions of authority to jump is sooo hight--and MS knows this.
Sure, they've "announced" that it will eventually work. "Eventually". But does anybody really expect it to be flawless? Without a single, solitary, "red-headed stepchild" workaround or hack to make it work right?
Indeed, I can testify that this is a VERY important step to take. In fact, I recommend to all my friends that they have pro re-write their resumes. The reason?
I was out of work for 14 months. Not even a tiny nibble. Then I read an article about "re-energizing" my job search, and one of the suggestions (besides check your own references to see what responses they give) is to get a professionally written resume.
I did it. It cost like $150, but she did a kick-ass job, and I got an offer for an IT job about two weeks later.
She told me she knows a lot of people who make their own resume and just list their duties, dates, and degrees, then can't fathom why they aren't getting interviews/offers. The fact is, employers can get a pretty good idea of what your duties were based on your title. What they really want to see is stories where you kicked ass on some problem or project, and how you did it.
Examples:
BAD: Wrote C++/C code for enterprise application eWidget 2.5 before deadline. Assisted other developers.
GOOD: Coordinated with development team to ensure eWidget 2.5 application was code complete in advance of the agreed upon date. Led efforts by working non-required overtime hours to check code written by junior developers.
Granted, even with a good resume you still have to slam-dunk the interview to get hired, but the well-written resume frames your experiences in a good light, and gives you the opportunity to have an interview.
Then let me introduce myself to you. I have (on many occasions) bought CDs I would have never dreamed of considering after downloading tracks and really liking them. This got me interested in (short list): The Orb, Ween, and Wilco among many many others.
Do I buy everything I download? No. But, if I don't like it enough to buy it the files usually end up getting erased. If your position is that I should have to pay for all music I'm "exposed" to thats just, well, fucked. There are also situations where you CAN'T buy on CD stuff you can download... Live cuts, for example, are often included on obscure imports that not everybody has access to.
Nobody ever said "No artist should get paid", you're the only one repeating that mantra and trying to put it in our mouths. What we want is a FAIR way to buy music--fair that is, for the consumer AND the artist. The current system is only fair to the congomerates and screws both artist and consumer. The consumer overpays for EVERYTHING, the artist gets pennies per album sold, and the conglomerate invents non-existent "expenses" to justify keeping the rest of the money themselves.
Consumers deserve the right to purchase digital files of the music they desire. They deserve the right to preview the music BEFORE they commit money to a purchase, and they deserve the right to NOT buy the stuff they don't like. If I like one song on the new John Mayer album (for example) but hate the remaining songs, my options are 1) Buy the whole thing for one song, or 2) download the song from p2p. The label has not created a mechanism to satisfy my needs as a consumer, so I have made my own. Call this "rationalizing" if you want... In a manner of speaking, I suppose you're right that I am "rationalizing" something that may technically be unethical. BUT, by the same token, your endorsement of "Pay $15-$20 to enjoy one song" is also a rationalization of your chosen industry's backwards, equally unethical business model.
Ever hear the expression "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?" Applies pretty well here.
Let me first acknowledge that the person you're replying to is probably a little more extreme than a lot of people. BUT...
Even though I disagree with the way he expresses his opinion (telling you to get a job was rather childish) he is correct. The conglomerates themselves have invalidated the entire concept of copyright by acting outside the boundaries (and spirit) of the original intent of copyright. To ensure innovators innovated, and to insure that useful ideas weren't kept out of the public's hands forever... One of many measures essentially enacted to prevent the formation of an ultra-wealthy aristocracy.
They didn't intend to allow conglomerates to keep culturally enriching materials out of the public domain forever, yet that is essentially where we're at, and essentially the point of view you're arguing.
I can't wait for somebody to become a big star by financing his own recordings, promoting himself with unencumbered p2p delivered mp3 (or oggs or whatever) of songs, perhaps embedding his web-site name in one of the ID3 fields so people who really liked it could logon and buy cds, t-shirts, and tickets to see him in concert.
It will eventually happen, and if your music is good enough, it could be you. The critical difference is that somebody who becomes huge this way gets to keep all the profits, keep ownership (for a time) of the rights to his songs, and not be a slave to some idiot in a suit's concerns about your record and whether there are any "singles" on it. Every artist who sides with the RIAA and their ilk only lengthen their time of servitude under an oppressive regime.
Hello Apples, meet Oranges. A house is physical property. It can be taken away. A song can't be taken away unless I take all your tapes and erase your memory of it. The law plainly intends for copyrights to eventually expire, why can't you (and the RIAA) accept that rather than trying to sue everybody into submission?
Using your logic, how is playing the radio loud any different than Napster? I'm allowing many people to "enjoy" "your" music but only paying for one copy. For that matter, why is Napster different than a radio station? Sure, radio stations pay for the right to broadcast music, but the per song breakdown is pretty small. The reason the labels had this arrangement in the first place was PROMOTIONS.
Why won't the labels license Napster-like services to provide unlimited downloads? It would be the same as radio--better really because the user would hear exactly as much of what they are interested in as they want--lose interest fast? Decide the artist sucks? Erase file.
Every "starving musician" I've ever met who is vehemently anti-Napster invariably has some pie-in-the-sky dream of living the life of a rock star--fame, fortune, big money, and chicks everwhere. All of them desperately want to believe that those three things are achieved on merit, but they aren't. They're based on promotional budget, production budget, and access to good drugs.
Perhaps you need to upgrade your legacy IS people. Under NT/2k/XP you shouldn't need to re-boot except when windows asks you nicely to. (IMO it asks much too often, but that's a seperate argument...)
Perhaps some of your "legacy" IS people are still in the "re-boot" habit from the days of 9x/ME when re-boot really did solve 80% of our "weirdo-helpdesk tickets."
Would be if you wanted to offer flexible wireless access in your business--say a coffee shop or something with a small number of users. You could support everybody, Apple, PC, whatever, and not have to worry about people bitching that their card "just doesn't work here."
Now show me a heavy-duty pro version of the tri-band wifi router and I'll be super interested.
Exactly... Even though I didn't think of it, it fits my point very well...
Except this is how groups like al qaeda and hamas justify themselves: They're trying to "free" Arabs from immoral/"evil" secular and/or zionist government influences. I agree with you, the world isn't so easily divided into good vs. evil (or "us vs terrorists"), but there has to be more to it than just "feeling oppressed." I mean, I felt oppressed by my old boss--I didn't car-bomb his office...
Not that I find Nelson Mandela and al qaeda morally equivalent--I don't. But there has to be some other distinction because oppression is in the eye of the beholder. What seems totally unacceptable to me might be okay in the eyes of others, and vice-versa. For example: In the Netherlands the government can appeal if it loses a criminal case. In the U.S., we call it double-jeoprady and clearly wrong. There, it is normal standard procedure.
I'm on a cable modem and it doesn't accept mail from my mail server either... If I try to send to my friend's Compuserve (owned by AOL now) address... I'm on a cable modem. The way the message is phrased, they make it sound like I'm the cause of the spam woes... I mean, that is just ridiculous. My server is secured, I am very selective about who is allowed to relay.
Here's the message it sends back as it appears in my mail server log:
00:08:31 5 SMTP-409(cs.com) Disconnect Received
00:08:31 5 SMTP-409(cs.com) Disconnect Confirmed
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-The IP address you're using to connect to AOL is either open to the\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-free relaying of e-mail, is serving as an open proxy, or is a dynamic\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-(residential) IP address. AOL cannot accept further e-mail\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-transactions from your server until either your server is closed to free\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-relaying/proxy, or your ISP removes your IP address from their list of\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550-dynamic IP addresses. For additional information, please visit\r
00:08:31 4 SMTP-409(cs.com) Input Line: 550 http://postmaster.info.aol.com.\r
Uh...Do you have any evidence to back that up? A link to a survey? An exit poll? Anything? I know plenty of conservative journalists... (Having been, at one point, a journalism student in the state of Indiana.)
Sorry, but you must have been asleep during those controversies. There was widespread press criticism of the president in that scandal. Also, the "focus" on cigars and stained dresses should be traced back to a witch-hunt launched by Clinton's political adversaries. Is it a coincidence that the first democrat to be elected and serve TWO FULL TERMS (since...what, FDR?) was "investigated" endlessly by conservative political appointees who, after many years and $40 million of tax money could only "get" him on the technicality that he didn't wish to disclose an extra-marital affair when the investigation was supposedly focused on a real estate deal?
The biggest white elephant ever from the conservatives is the "liberal media" one. If the widespread "liberal" bias really existed, I would expect to see widespread outright opposition to President Bush's policies, since he is a Republican.
Yet the opposite is true. The networks are giving us non-stop, nearly pornographic (positive) coverage of this war and there are very few dissenting voices on the airwaves right now.
Again, you'd think if the media was so "liberal" they would show civillian casualty numbers which (once again) it appears will end up in the multiple thousands. I haven't heard even ONE PEEP on American television about civillian casualties... Except for when they hit a busload of civiliians with a missile, we heard about THAT "accident." But after the bombing of a residential area where potentially hundreds of civilians could have been affected... nothing. Not one peep.
...I like being called Big Daddy.
To be serious for a moment, I could live with Network Guru or Captain of the Infrastructure. My favorite "dot-com boom" job title was "Great and Powerful Network Magician". I think that was at Peapod.com.
I saw the ad and knew I should never ever work at a place with such an absurd name for its employees... They also had stuff like "Perl/C++ Code Wizard".
Contrary to what you say, "bullying the world" (although a vast oversimplification of the mistakes we've made) actually is the biggest problem (that we have control over.) The second one is the religous difference and the history of that schism. The combination of the two is quite volatile. Everytime we say something in a foreign policy debate, they hear that statement, plus the following: "Or we'll come and kill you all, like we've tried to before."
Remember the Crusades? Where Christians went to "cleanse" the holy land of "infidels." Remember that "cleanse" in this context means "to kill everybody." This is a powerful historical lesson for muslims... Even though the crusades were a long time ago, cultural memory of genocide does not fade quickly.
Besides this, the Arabs have political differences with us:
- We give their governments orders through threat of force of arms (The list here is so long I'm not even going to bother.)
- We support dictators who brutally oppress their population (see also Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Pinochet, and the Taliban.)
- We're giving guns, helicopters, airplanes, and other weapons to Israel, who is using them oppress a cultural minority (the Palestinians.)
In other words, our broken foreign policy has made us enemies, everywhere. Look at the Phillipines... A friendly nation with a government we installed at one point that got really corrupt... (Anybody remember how many pairs of shoes that broad owned? Was it something like 50,000 pair?)
Flash forward fifty years, and there's an Al Qaeda splinter group living in the South of the Phillipines and attacking Americans and Phillipinos to gain leverage to get their own country. Why do they want it? They're being oppressed by a government we support. Therefore, we're also on their list.
Multiply times 100 and you quickly arrive at where we are now. If we continue down this destructive path, picture a future where Manhattan is like Tel Aviv... Everybody is afraid, there's cops and soldiers all over the place, and still there's an attack every few days/weeks/hours.
Pardon my saying so, but boo-fucking-hoo. Whatever moron was responsible for this deserves to be fired--immediately. I have lost a job for being too good at what I do (ie. being a threat to my boss' fat salary.) It makes me sick enough to spit when I think about some of the people I have dealt with inside the government who had jobs during my recent unemployment.
I read the sentence "Letting a deadline creep up on you" as "Failing to do even the bare minimum over the course of 25 years." In the real world, getting a project and doing nothing about it gets you fired. Shit, the morons who couldn't review these docs in 25-years probably got promoted to manager, since it was "their turn to be promoted."
Want better performance from your government? End the culture of lifetime employment "If you want it."
If the government employed anybody but the absolute bottom of the talent-barrel (there are exceptions) our country would have a better, more efficient government. First step? Fire your incompetents and bad-attitudes. In reality, there are many talented people in government whose achievments are being held back by the "stereotypical" government worker.
Make the "I'm 52, three years from a pension, and don't give a shit about you or your stupid problems" crowd a distant memory. Roll them right the fuck out the door.
This may sound cruel, but what fantasy world are these people living in? A paycheck is not a god-given right--it is something you earn through your performance in your field. In the real world, doing a shit-job consistently gets you fired. Why is the government any different?
The final irony here is how hard the Bushies have hammered the "Saddam had 12-years to disarm" spin so hard, and now they're failing to disclose information they've had TWENTY-FIVE YEARS to review. Makes you wish the internet supported "Smell-o-vision" so scientist could finally find out what hypocrisy smells like.