Your laptops should have been replaced quickly. They weren't. So call a higher-up and complain. I happen to know how these things work. You complain to every single person in the store until someone makes it happen.
OK so far.
However; you're probably a dickhead. And if you are, I can easily understand why they'd put you through hell.
My, aren't we jumping to conclusions rather further than is healthy for us. Nowhere did he say anything that led me to believe he was unreasonable or abusive to the store employees. If that's your default mindset regarding customers, perhaps you should seek alternate employment, because your idea of "customer service" is sadly lacking. Besides that, even dickhead customers are customers, and are entitled to a basic level of service that this guy is apparently not getting.
Bad luck falls on some people, and Apple tries to be expedient with requests for new hardware, but you're not the only one, so be patient.
If this is a situation where demand for spare parts and replacements is that high, Apple better get on the ball and meet the demand, or guys like this one will (justifiably) flame them to a crisp in public. If it's not high, Apple and its agents have even less excuse.
If I buy a new car, a purchase of the same order of magnitude for most people as an iBook, and the power windows suddenly fail to work on it one morning two months later, you better believe that dealer is going to give me a free loaner with a smile, an apology, and a promise (that they'll keep if they're smart) that my car will be ready for me within a reasonable, mutually-agreed-on period. To do otherwise, except in situations that are genuinely beyond the dealer's control (like the factory that makes the windows blowing up), is to invite me to call up every media outlet in a 50-mile radius and let their consumer reporter know what kind of service buyers at that dealership are getting.
As far as you choosing XP for a computing environment for your boss rather than OS X.... you're a fucking moron and you know it. That's not Apple's fault. Own your own shit. That's why you run Apple in the first place.
Had you bothered to read his comment rather than quickly (and badly) skim it, you would have noted that he was trying to get the existing install of XP replaced, and his boss, after seeing his difficulties getting service from Apple, nixed that idea.
That, by the way, is a constantly recurring theme I've seen in the neo-Jobs era of Apple: doing less for fewer people, more slowly, whenever possible. Jobs' dislike of giving customers options that will just "confuse" them is legendary and goes all the way back to the Lisa, and measures taken on his watch to reduce the quantity and quality of Apple's support have been manifest and got Apple slapped down at least once by the FTC (the 1-800-SOS-APPL fiasco).
But what do I know?
Indeed.
I'm just one of the top guys in my region.
One of the top guys in what? Being an obnoxious prick?
If and only if you have GIMP 1.2.x or higher, select a painting tool (pencil, paintbrush, etc.). Click where you want the line to start. Now hold down Shift and click where you want it to end.
In my opinion this should go in the Interface Hall of Shame if it isn't there already. What kind of interface designer thinks it's a good idea to make such a simple, common task so difficult to discover? Why couldn't they just have a straight line tool like every other paint program on the planet since at least MacPaint way back in 1985?
This skates rather too close to the old "Love it or leave it" canard for comfort.
You can't control where you're born, or (till you strike out on your own) where you grow up. Some people, through a confluence of circumstances not their fault, are unable (financially or otherwise) to just pack up and move because where they are is an undesirable place to live.
Take a good look around Southeast DC or East Baltimore (to pick two examples I'm passingly familiar with). Realize that most of the people living in the war zones in both places are just trying to keep their heads down and make the next rent payment, hopefully without getting shot on their way out of the market every weekend. Moving for most of them is not an option because they have no resources to go job hunting, apartment hunting, or anything hunting.
It's good to examine one's options, but it's also good to be aware that often those who have the fewest options are those who could use them the most.
There's also the point that it's unfair to penalize the victim of mistreatment by putting the burden on them to move away, get a new job, leave friends and possibly family behind, etc.
What I was getting at in my post is that the fairest process is one equally applied. To let Microsoft game the industry and then have Eolas not get their due according to the rules of the industry isn't right either. We should be happy that if something unfair goes around, it comes around, unless you'd rather we shrug off the only sense of justice we'll likely have in IP law for years.... We shouldn't bitch if a company that is known for manuiplating the system finally becomes the victim.
I would rather have bad law applied fairly in a few cases than bad law applied unfairly in all.
Your argument above is perilously close to "they cheated, so now I'm going to cheat them -- that's fair!"
The way to redress a wrong is not by committing another wrong against the accused. We don't let convicted criminals go on procedural technicalities because the US is a bunch of pansy-ass liberals -- we do it because every aspect of the judicial process must be as fair as possible for reasons the architects of our government understood at first hand. If unfairness happens, you can't use it to justify more acts of unfairness -- that way lies madness and the complete collapse of any semblance we have left of equal treatment under the law.
Microsoft may have profited by unfair manipulation of the patent system, but that doesn't make it right or fair for Eolas to profit by unfairly manipulating the same system at Microsoft's expense. Robbing a gangster at gunpoint is still felony armed robbery, even if the money you took from him was all made by selling illegal drugs to schoolkids.
You seem to have overreacted to the suggestion that we should be happy when immoral procedures finally punish those whom they usually benefit. Excessive idealization and abstraction of morals does that to people.
You may call it "excessive", but principles tend, by their definition, to be absolute. We do not say it's OK to steal from someone if it's just a quarter and they're a multibillionaire CEO -- we still consider it wrong because stealing is wrong. (Ethical debates about stealing bread to feed your starving family elsewhere, please.) There is absolutely no room in a well-run judicial system for the justification of one unfairness by the existence of another.
Shouldn't you like that someone who actually created something get money from Microsoft, whether or not it was done in a fair system? Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
NO!
It does matter how the outcome is achieved. The ends do not justify the means, not even when it's a university professor trying to extort money from Microsoft. One reason we have the (few, and eroding all the time, but still meaningful) civil liberties we do in America is because the whole foundation of our legal system is the idea that there must be a fair process, not just a fair result.
To throw that away for the sake of dinging MS a paltry couple of billion is to undercut the foundation of our own remaining few liberties. I don't know about you, but to me that's destroying the village in order to save it.
Wait a minute... part of the deal with 3.5" floppy drive technology was regarding quality standards. One can't emprint the "HD" logo on the disk without conforming to the quality-centric standards.
ALL 3.5" HD disks can be written thousands of times. In addition, as I understand it, there was an optional quality standard regarding the readability of the disks.
...in theory. In reality imprinting the HD logo on the disk is not a challenging manufacturing process, and it wouldn't surprise me to find AOL bought their floppies from the absolute lowest bidder, who cut as many corners as allowed (and some not) on the manufacturing to make some extra bucks.
PLEASE check your facts before talking nonsense.
All I know is the behavior I observed in (over the years) a couple of hundred floppies.
And why would you remove the label? Just use a sharpie over the existing label!
Usually they were glossy coated plastic and markers wouldn't take, and/or looked ugly with that garish label under your writing.
I just did a test install on a machine that's getting reimaged anyway. It installed, rebooted, gave me the startup wizard, logged me in and then just sat there. I had to open IE manually and at no point (during install, initial setup or launching IE) was I prompted to use Windows Update. This is XP Pro SP1a from an original OS disk provided with a Dell system.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps there are group policies or other measures in place on your network that mandate a visit to Windows Update the first time IE is opened. If that's the case, remember that home users are not going to be on a domain and thus will not have the benefit of clueful network admins enforcing such policies.
The author of TFA did not have to deliberately avoid anything; from my experience there was nothing for him to avoid.
"Breaking" and entering doesn't necessarily require destructive methods to gain access. Walking through a door uninvited with unlawful intent is as much B&E as smashing it down. It's much the same way "assault" doesn't require physical contact: the mere threat (verbal or nonverbal) of physical harm is an assault. Committing actual harm is a battery, which is why you so often see the term "assault and battery" -- it's two separate but related offenses.
I suppose you could commit a battery without a preceding assault, if you snuck up on the victim and bashed him in the head before he knew you were there, but what fun would that be, eh?
Actually, I found the AOL floppies tended to uniformly be crap. They were essentially only intended for a single write and (maybe) a few reads. Plus, I don't know what glue they used on the labels, but I could never get an AOL floppy label to come off clean.
I'm not sure what version of Windows you use, but on the XP and 2000 installs I've done, I've never seen IE automatically start up Windows Update the first time it launches. It does start up a little "Connect me to the Internet" thing, but that's nothing to do with Windows Update.
The first point, which we all know, is that Windows sucks. However, his main point has nothing to do with the vulnerabilities per se, and everything to do with the culpability of the sites and software authors that knowingly use security holes to install these programs without notice to or consent from the user, and in fact make it as hard as possible to detect them and remove them because they know full well their business depends on keeping the software there by any means necessary, ethical or not.
If I leave my door unlocked, I'm an idiot, but if you then walk in and steal my TV while I'm gone and sell it at the local pawnshop you're still just as much a criminal as if you smashed a steel door in with an APC: an unlocked door is not in itself an invitation to enter and make oneself at home. The same principle applies here: the sites and software authors are not the legitimate businesspeople they try to convince everyone they are.
Speaking of Kinko's, I worked there for about a year and a half. A lot of the time I'd see yellow dots on color-laser customer originals that was being scanned for enlargement to poster size. I'd always remove them during cleanup, because it was easy if you knew Photoshop. They were really obvious when you blew the image up 450% on the screen to get rid of dust (a dust speck on an 8.5 x 11 will look like a big drop of ink at 36 x 48).
Up till now I've always assumed the dots I saw (usually in empty areas, and always in a regular, widely-spaced square grid pattern) were the scanner picking up the paper tone as a very light yellow and trying to dither to match. But was I actually seeing these anti-counterfeiting dots? And if so, was I committing a felony by removing them?:)
I never noticed our Tektronix color lasers (780/7700) putting them on its output, nor the Xerox DocuColor four-color xerographic copiers (DC12/DC2045/DC6060), although the only ones I really gave the eagle-eye inspection to a lot were the DC output since the Teks were in the customer area and we usually only heard about those when they were out of toner or paper. You could see them on the customer originals if you really looked and turned the paper so the light shone off the toner, but you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them.
And if any of you out there in Kinko-land have a grid chart in your store that gives you enlargement and reduction proportions so you don't have to play with the damned wheel, yeah, I made up that chart.
The article didn't say where the assignments came from. Could have been his boss. Could have been other superiors.
Actually it did, in the part I clipped:
The communication problems were going to be solved by a clearly defined task list that "had to be done" by Friday with the posibility of it changing if higher priority things came along. In the words of my supervisor "This is a very aggressive schedule are you sure you can get it done -- it will require a lot of extra hours." I agreed to it, partially to clear the air between us and partially because it was now late in the project and we had to ship the pig.
Well the week cruised by with me not hearing a peep from my supervisor except in reply to almost daily status reports I was sending him (on my own perogative, to forestall any suprises). I worked my butt off and completed the list. I had several "great job" emails from my supervisor during this time.
Then things went nuts. On monday, when I came in, I was pulled into a meeting (on 5 minutes notice) with my supervisor and our HR contact. Apparently my work the week before was "unacceptable." I got everything done on the list, but I didn't get every single new thing added by everyone else. Now we had discussed this in the previous meetings and I wasn't supposed to prioritize stuff from anyone except from my supervisor, and he also said we'd talk if something new was supposed to replace anything on my must do list.
So the sequence of events was:
1. His boss gave him a list of tasks.
2. Other people added to the list
3. He completed the items added by his boss.
4. He completed some, but not all, of the items added by others.
So he does say where the tasks came from, and unless he's outright lying, he completed everything he was supposed to on the list by COB Friday.
Contrast that with this guy: a game programmer. Paid to sit by himself and code all day for entertainment purposes. His boss hands him a long list of assignments, some of which come last minute. A network administrator would say "fine" and finish the job, regardless of the fact that it ate up some of us weekend.
You missed the part where these assignments didn't come from his boss. They came from other people. As he stated in his entry, which you obviously didn't read or retained little of, he was supposed to and did prioritize and complete items given him by his boss. Other items were, according to his understanding as given to him in a previous meeting, subject to his own prioritization:
Well the week cruised by with me not hearing a peep from my supervisor except in reply to almost daily status reports I was sending him (on my own perogative, to forestall any suprises). I worked my butt off and completed the list. I had several "great job" emails from my supervisor during this time.... Now we had discussed this in the previous meetings and I wasn't supposed to prioritize stuff from anyone except from my supervisor, and he also said we'd talk if something new was supposed to replace anything on my must do list.
Then he came in on Monday and started work on the (as he understood it, non-required) items he didn't get to the previous week, and was still reamed for not meeting expectations which were never communicated to him.
SilentChris wrote:
I knew going headfirst into system administration that I'd work some crappy hours. Things break, people mess up, it happens. But I don't sit around like a pussy programmer and complain that my 6-digit salary isn't enough, or I have "special needs" when the company moves. He wasn't part of upper-management, he doesn't have the right to make those decisions.
First of all, get off the completely immature "pussy programmers vs. manly sysadmins" trip. I'm a sysadmin too, and from your comments you wouldn't last two days in the shops most of the admins I know run. They have no tolerance (nor do I) for that kind of artificial ego-inflating crap.
Second, he and I and you all have every right to decide what we consider acceptable. And if the company decides to meet your or my or his demands, they better make good on their promise. They had the choice at the beginning to say, for example, "No, we just can't do that kind of relocation package, here's what we can do" or just "See ya later, you greedy bastard." But they decided to hire him. To my mind that's not being a pussy, it's smart negotiating to extract whatever you can out of an employer who most people here know can more than afford it.
Don't imagine that being a grunt employee in the computer gaming industry is a bed of wine and roses with a hot blonde secretary who gives you blowjobs every day after you knock off at 2 in the afternoon (except Fridays, which you take off and she comes over to clean your house, wash your BMW, and then spend the rest of the day in bed with you in full bondage gear). If you really think that, you obviously haven't ever worked in the industry and probably don't know anyone worth anything who has.
Fatbabies and the old Lum the Mad covered EA's management incompetence in excruciating detail, with the occasional referenced to Fuckedcompany when juicy memos would land in employees' inboxes.
I worked for a game developer (Kesmai) that was bought by EA in early 2000 (the buy was announced in late 1999).
A couple of links from around then will tell the tale:
EA From the Inside I/II (LtM - I is a couple of entries below II. Sadly the links to the actual scanned memo are no longer extant, it was a stunner.)
EA has been about maximizing profit and minimizing expenses first, and customer satisfaction second, and the health and well-being of its employees almost dead last, for a long time now.
Well, here they just don't care about election integrity:
The election rules for Baltimore City blatantly favor the two major parties -- election judges are recruited from the two majors, and then, if they are unable to fill the number of slots with Republicans and Democrats, they start choosing from third-party/unaffiliated voters. Also, the Chief Judges for each precinct are always a Republican and a Democrat.
The entire state has mandatory use of touch-screen voting machines with no paper receipt. Various court challenges to the DRE machines themselves or to the lack of a receipt, or the lack of a paper-ballot alternative, have been struck down. You must use a touch-screen machine if one is available to you, or your vote will not be counted.
I'm not holding out much hope of a truly fair and secure election here.
goon america wrote (quoting the official Texas Republican Party platform):
We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal in order to retain our military bases in Panama, to preserve our right to transit through the Canal, and to prevent the establishment of Chinese missile bases in Panama.
[my additional emphasis on last phrase]
Am I out of the loop on this one, or did the Chinese missile bases come in out of way left field? Have the ChiComs been getting up to dickens with the current Panamanian leadership?
There was that one episode with the guy who stole the technology for KITT's (yeah, should be with periods, but I just can't be arsed) weapons and defensive technology and applied it to a semi, which proceeded to wipe up the asphalt with KITT at one point. (I think that one was a two-parter, with the aftermath of the first big battlebeing the end of the first episode -- "Will KITT survive? Will he and Michael be able to stop the enemy in time? Etc.!")
Although I can't actually remember what the truck was called, or if it even had a name of its own.
That was the episode that confirmed Kubrick was right -- damaged AIs speak in very slow, simple sentences about three octaves below their normal range.
I think the author typoed on his number of addresses (maybe he tried to insert an exponent and then in a cut-n-paste it got dropped). Back-of-the-envelope calculations tell us:
30 bits ~= 1 billion
Current world population ~= 6 billion or so
128 bits ~= 2^98 billion ~= 10^30 billion
Even when there are 256 billion people running around this planet (and, one assumes, others as well), there will be 90 bits of address space for each of us. Not that anybody is going to get 90 bits of address space even now, but if I read this right that's 26 SLA's, or a little less than 5 bits of SLA address space.
...the customer has the original media, but it's defective (people do horrible things to CDs because they think they're indestructible) and can't be booted from or even read.
...the OS has had so many service packs since it was released that by the time you download and install all the updates, you're already pwned. After seeing a fresh Windows XP install get Sassered in less than 60 seconds, I want to kill LSASS too.
...the customer has licensed software whose license depends on the SID of a particular Windows install and the installer won't continue if the SID is different from the one the license was generated for.
Yeah, yeah, firewall, toolkit CD, spare hard drive, blah blah blah. How far do you want to take that? "What kind of half-assed tech doesn't carry around the kit to build a complete multi-tier corporate network from scratch?"
The bottom line is no one should ever have to reinstall the OS just to get rid of malware. Right, wish in one hand, etc.
When I went home for my sister's graduation last June, my parents were in a similar situation to this reporter. They had Windows XP and had never downloaded a Windows Update. Ever. There was too much stuff on the computer (financial records, etc.) to just blow it away and format from scratch.
After about 6-7 hours of actual work and about 36 hours of downloading (yes, dialup, in a rural area to boot), I had the system back to what appeared to be normal. They haven't reported difficulties since then, so I assume it's more or less stayed that way. Ad-Aware, Spybot, Norton Antivirus, mostly judicious and occasional heavy-handed use of regedit, and several boots into Safe Mode were the key. It's tedious, but it can be done, and sometimes should be done.
A lot of times reinstalling from scratch is somewhere between a false economy and a disaster waiting to happen.
Large business infrastructure items are almost universally leased instead of bought and probably always will be. It just makes good business sense -- when you have a long-term lease commitment, lots of stuff tends to be included like maintenance and basic supplies, and you have the benefit of having equipment now that you can make money off of (hopefully enough to pay for the lease fees), vs. not having it and thus not making as much, which means you can't save any money to pay for it and you end up never getting it.
When you go into, say, a Kinko's, odds are every single machine in that store, right down to the 11-inch laminator in the customer area, is leased, with a maintenance contract (if it's not leased, then it probably was leased for so long that it went off-lease and became owned by the store.) Look on the side or top of the stuff in there and you'll see a label with the lessor info: who to call, what the number is, the equipment serial number, etc.
When equipment breaks a lease saves simple hassle in the business too -- instead of having to trust some employee to monkey around in there (which you may or may not be able to spare man-hours for), you just take it out of service, have another store produce orders if need be, and call the lease company. And trust me, when you're talking about a half-million-dollar copier, you do not want to have to eat major repair costs because your screwdriver slipped and you skewered the main vacuum tube or dented the motherboard on the controller.
One outfit I freelanced for was a beer distributor in the Charlottesville, VA area. They gave me a choice: I could either take my fee in cash, or in trade -- beer from their warehouse at the wholesale rate. Anything I wanted.
One trade, I got hold of a case (20 bottles, IIRC) of Paulaner Oktoberfest for $30. Man, was I popular at the next party.
And of course any number of other customers offered me a free beer after finishing the work. That was usually the start of the Q&A session, which always boiled down to "what did you do, why did you need to do it, and is there anything I can do about it so it won't cost me too much from now on?"
Three years ago almost to the day, I started working at comScore Networks. My offer letter contained, among other provisions, the following:
In addition to my salary, I would be paid a bonus of up to 20% of my annual pay, in cash, quarterly, subject to a good performance review (there were benchmarks established -- so much percent of the bonus for reaching so high a level of objectives met).
They'd pay off my relocation expenses from my previous company. If I left within a year, I'd pay those expenses back.
Sometime around the end of June, when my first performance review was due, a memo went out. The bonus plan was becoming an annual payout at the fiscal year-end, instead of quarterly, and it was going to be half cash, half stock options. Much grumbling, but in the economy of late 2001, having a job was better than not having one.
Then right after September 11 (October 2, in fact), a bunch of us got laid off. The bonus-payout issue was raised. We were told (this is priceless) that a memo had gone out the day before, but our team hadn't gotten it because our project manager had forgotten to distribute it to us. The alleged memo said that effective with the last quarter (the first one where the deferred-bonus plan was in effect), all bonus payout was to be annual, at the end of the fiscal year, but now it would be all stock options.
Essentially what they did was, in stages and retroactive to the previous two quarters, convert a quarterly cash bonus retroactively to an annual stock-option award. That didn't sit well with me, and with the "keeping my job" incentive removed, I decided to see what my options were.
To make a long story short, the Virginia Department of Labor & Industry agreed with my interpretation, that since no employee signed any paperwork acknowledging the change in the bonus plan, the original offer letter's terms should stand. That I know of I'm the only person who fought them on this, but they didn't make me sign a confidentiality agreement so I made sure my co-workers knew. By the last day of December 2001 I had in my hand a check for 10% of my salary (6 months' worth of bonus) minus my relocation expenses. I probably could have quibbled over the meaning of "leave" versus "involuntarily terminated without cause", but by then I needed the money rather badly.
Get all the terms of your employment up front, in writing, and keep that paperwork safe!
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That's an official Gimp tutorial? Does it really have to sound so insulting?
I had the same thought, actually. Then again it fits with the attitude the interface just oozes at you.
I work for Apple at an Apple Store.
Your laptops should have been replaced quickly. They weren't. So call a higher-up and complain. I happen to know how these things work. You complain to every single person in the store until someone makes it happen.
OK so far.
However; you're probably a dickhead. And if you are, I can easily understand why they'd put you through hell.
My, aren't we jumping to conclusions rather further than is healthy for us. Nowhere did he say anything that led me to believe he was unreasonable or abusive to the store employees. If that's your default mindset regarding customers, perhaps you should seek alternate employment, because your idea of "customer service" is sadly lacking. Besides that, even dickhead customers are customers, and are entitled to a basic level of service that this guy is apparently not getting.
Bad luck falls on some people, and Apple tries to be expedient with requests for new hardware, but you're not the only one, so be patient.
If this is a situation where demand for spare parts and replacements is that high, Apple better get on the ball and meet the demand, or guys like this one will (justifiably) flame them to a crisp in public. If it's not high, Apple and its agents have even less excuse.
If I buy a new car, a purchase of the same order of magnitude for most people as an iBook, and the power windows suddenly fail to work on it one morning two months later, you better believe that dealer is going to give me a free loaner with a smile, an apology, and a promise (that they'll keep if they're smart) that my car will be ready for me within a reasonable, mutually-agreed-on period. To do otherwise, except in situations that are genuinely beyond the dealer's control (like the factory that makes the windows blowing up), is to invite me to call up every media outlet in a 50-mile radius and let their consumer reporter know what kind of service buyers at that dealership are getting.
As far as you choosing XP for a computing environment for your boss rather than OS X.... you're a fucking moron and you know it. That's not Apple's fault. Own your own shit. That's why you run Apple in the first place.
Had you bothered to read his comment rather than quickly (and badly) skim it, you would have noted that he was trying to get the existing install of XP replaced, and his boss, after seeing his difficulties getting service from Apple, nixed that idea.
That, by the way, is a constantly recurring theme I've seen in the neo-Jobs era of Apple: doing less for fewer people, more slowly, whenever possible. Jobs' dislike of giving customers options that will just "confuse" them is legendary and goes all the way back to the Lisa, and measures taken on his watch to reduce the quantity and quality of Apple's support have been manifest and got Apple slapped down at least once by the FTC (the 1-800-SOS-APPL fiasco).
But what do I know?
Indeed.
I'm just one of the top guys in my region.
One of the top guys in what? Being an obnoxious prick?
If and only if you have GIMP 1.2.x or higher, select a painting tool (pencil, paintbrush, etc.). Click where you want the line to start. Now hold down Shift and click where you want it to end.
In my opinion this should go in the Interface Hall of Shame if it isn't there already. What kind of interface designer thinks it's a good idea to make such a simple, common task so difficult to discover? Why couldn't they just have a straight line tool like every other paint program on the planet since at least MacPaint way back in 1985?
You can't control where you're born, or (till you strike out on your own) where you grow up. Some people, through a confluence of circumstances not their fault, are unable (financially or otherwise) to just pack up and move because where they are is an undesirable place to live.
Take a good look around Southeast DC or East Baltimore (to pick two examples I'm passingly familiar with). Realize that most of the people living in the war zones in both places are just trying to keep their heads down and make the next rent payment, hopefully without getting shot on their way out of the market every weekend. Moving for most of them is not an option because they have no resources to go job hunting, apartment hunting, or anything hunting.
It's good to examine one's options, but it's also good to be aware that often those who have the fewest options are those who could use them the most.
There's also the point that it's unfair to penalize the victim of mistreatment by putting the burden on them to move away, get a new job, leave friends and possibly family behind, etc.
What, you think there are no gay men teaching college classes? (Or, women with suitable "plugins".)
What I was getting at in my post is that the fairest process is one equally applied. To let Microsoft game the industry and then have Eolas not get their due according to the rules of the industry isn't right either. We should be happy that if something unfair goes around, it comes around, unless you'd rather we shrug off the only sense of justice we'll likely have in IP law for years.... We shouldn't bitch if a company that is known for manuiplating the system finally becomes the victim.
I would rather have bad law applied fairly in a few cases than bad law applied unfairly in all.
Your argument above is perilously close to "they cheated, so now I'm going to cheat them -- that's fair!"
The way to redress a wrong is not by committing another wrong against the accused. We don't let convicted criminals go on procedural technicalities because the US is a bunch of pansy-ass liberals -- we do it because every aspect of the judicial process must be as fair as possible for reasons the architects of our government understood at first hand. If unfairness happens, you can't use it to justify more acts of unfairness -- that way lies madness and the complete collapse of any semblance we have left of equal treatment under the law.
Microsoft may have profited by unfair manipulation of the patent system, but that doesn't make it right or fair for Eolas to profit by unfairly manipulating the same system at Microsoft's expense. Robbing a gangster at gunpoint is still felony armed robbery, even if the money you took from him was all made by selling illegal drugs to schoolkids.
You seem to have overreacted to the suggestion that we should be happy when immoral procedures finally punish those whom they usually benefit. Excessive idealization and abstraction of morals does that to people.
You may call it "excessive", but principles tend, by their definition, to be absolute. We do not say it's OK to steal from someone if it's just a quarter and they're a multibillionaire CEO -- we still consider it wrong because stealing is wrong. (Ethical debates about stealing bread to feed your starving family elsewhere, please.) There is absolutely no room in a well-run judicial system for the justification of one unfairness by the existence of another.
Shouldn't you like that someone who actually created something get money from Microsoft, whether or not it was done in a fair system? Are we going to be stupid enough to let people like MS manuiplate patent law and bitch when someone little gets his?
NO!
It does matter how the outcome is achieved. The ends do not justify the means, not even when it's a university professor trying to extort money from Microsoft. One reason we have the (few, and eroding all the time, but still meaningful) civil liberties we do in America is because the whole foundation of our legal system is the idea that there must be a fair process, not just a fair result.
To throw that away for the sake of dinging MS a paltry couple of billion is to undercut the foundation of our own remaining few liberties. I don't know about you, but to me that's destroying the village in order to save it.
Wait a minute... part of the deal with 3.5" floppy drive technology was regarding quality standards. One can't emprint the "HD" logo on the disk without conforming to the quality-centric standards.
ALL 3.5" HD disks can be written thousands of times. In addition, as I understand it, there was an optional quality standard regarding the readability of the disks.
PLEASE check your facts before talking nonsense.
All I know is the behavior I observed in (over the years) a couple of hundred floppies.
And why would you remove the label? Just use a sharpie over the existing label!
Usually they were glossy coated plastic and markers wouldn't take, and/or looked ugly with that garish label under your writing.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps there are group policies or other measures in place on your network that mandate a visit to Windows Update the first time IE is opened. If that's the case, remember that home users are not going to be on a domain and thus will not have the benefit of clueful network admins enforcing such policies.
The author of TFA did not have to deliberately avoid anything; from my experience there was nothing for him to avoid.
I suppose you could commit a battery without a preceding assault, if you snuck up on the victim and bashed him in the head before he knew you were there, but what fun would that be, eh?
Actually, I found the AOL floppies tended to uniformly be crap. They were essentially only intended for a single write and (maybe) a few reads. Plus, I don't know what glue they used on the labels, but I could never get an AOL floppy label to come off clean.
I'm not sure what version of Windows you use, but on the XP and 2000 installs I've done, I've never seen IE automatically start up Windows Update the first time it launches. It does start up a little "Connect me to the Internet" thing, but that's nothing to do with Windows Update.
If I leave my door unlocked, I'm an idiot, but if you then walk in and steal my TV while I'm gone and sell it at the local pawnshop you're still just as much a criminal as if you smashed a steel door in with an APC: an unlocked door is not in itself an invitation to enter and make oneself at home. The same principle applies here: the sites and software authors are not the legitimate businesspeople they try to convince everyone they are.
Up till now I've always assumed the dots I saw (usually in empty areas, and always in a regular, widely-spaced square grid pattern) were the scanner picking up the paper tone as a very light yellow and trying to dither to match. But was I actually seeing these anti-counterfeiting dots? And if so, was I committing a felony by removing them? :)
I never noticed our Tektronix color lasers (780/7700) putting them on its output, nor the Xerox DocuColor four-color xerographic copiers (DC12/DC2045/DC6060), although the only ones I really gave the eagle-eye inspection to a lot were the DC output since the Teks were in the customer area and we usually only heard about those when they were out of toner or paper. You could see them on the customer originals if you really looked and turned the paper so the light shone off the toner, but you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them.
And if any of you out there in Kinko-land have a grid chart in your store that gives you enlargement and reduction proportions so you don't have to play with the damned wheel, yeah, I made up that chart.
Actually it did, in the part I clipped:
The communication problems were going to be solved by a clearly defined task list that "had to be done" by Friday with the posibility of it changing if higher priority things came along. In the words of my supervisor "This is a very aggressive schedule are you sure you can get it done -- it will require a lot of extra hours." I agreed to it, partially to clear the air between us and partially because it was now late in the project and we had to ship the pig.
Well the week cruised by with me not hearing a peep from my supervisor except in reply to almost daily status reports I was sending him (on my own perogative, to forestall any suprises). I worked my butt off and completed the list. I had several "great job" emails from my supervisor during this time.
Then things went nuts. On monday, when I came in, I was pulled into a meeting (on 5 minutes notice) with my supervisor and our HR contact. Apparently my work the week before was "unacceptable." I got everything done on the list, but I didn't get every single new thing added by everyone else. Now we had discussed this in the previous meetings and I wasn't supposed to prioritize stuff from anyone except from my supervisor, and he also said we'd talk if something new was supposed to replace anything on my must do list.
So the sequence of events was:
1. His boss gave him a list of tasks.
2. Other people added to the list
3. He completed the items added by his boss.
4. He completed some, but not all, of the items added by others.
So he does say where the tasks came from, and unless he's outright lying, he completed everything he was supposed to on the list by COB Friday.
SilentChris wrote:
Contrast that with this guy: a game programmer. Paid to sit by himself and code all day for entertainment purposes. His boss hands him a long list of assignments, some of which come last minute. A network administrator would say "fine" and finish the job, regardless of the fact that it ate up some of us weekend.
You missed the part where these assignments didn't come from his boss. They came from other people. As he stated in his entry, which you obviously didn't read or retained little of, he was supposed to and did prioritize and complete items given him by his boss. Other items were, according to his understanding as given to him in a previous meeting, subject to his own prioritization:
Well the week cruised by with me not hearing a peep from my supervisor except in reply to almost daily status reports I was sending him (on my own perogative, to forestall any suprises). I worked my butt off and completed the list. I had several "great job" emails from my supervisor during this time.... Now we had discussed this in the previous meetings and I wasn't supposed to prioritize stuff from anyone except from my supervisor, and he also said we'd talk if something new was supposed to replace anything on my must do list.
Then he came in on Monday and started work on the (as he understood it, non-required) items he didn't get to the previous week, and was still reamed for not meeting expectations which were never communicated to him.
SilentChris wrote:
I knew going headfirst into system administration that I'd work some crappy hours. Things break, people mess up, it happens. But I don't sit around like a pussy programmer and complain that my 6-digit salary isn't enough, or I have "special needs" when the company moves. He wasn't part of upper-management, he doesn't have the right to make those decisions.
First of all, get off the completely immature "pussy programmers vs. manly sysadmins" trip. I'm a sysadmin too, and from your comments you wouldn't last two days in the shops most of the admins I know run. They have no tolerance (nor do I) for that kind of artificial ego-inflating crap.
Second, he and I and you all have every right to decide what we consider acceptable. And if the company decides to meet your or my or his demands, they better make good on their promise. They had the choice at the beginning to say, for example, "No, we just can't do that kind of relocation package, here's what we can do" or just "See ya later, you greedy bastard." But they decided to hire him. To my mind that's not being a pussy, it's smart negotiating to extract whatever you can out of an employer who most people here know can more than afford it.
Don't imagine that being a grunt employee in the computer gaming industry is a bed of wine and roses with a hot blonde secretary who gives you blowjobs every day after you knock off at 2 in the afternoon (except Fridays, which you take off and she comes over to clean your house, wash your BMW, and then spend the rest of the day in bed with you in full bondage gear). If you really think that, you obviously haven't ever worked in the industry and probably don't know anyone worth anything who has.
I worked for a game developer (Kesmai) that was bought by EA in early 2000 (the buy was announced in late 1999).
A couple of links from around then will tell the tale:
EA From the Inside I/II (LtM - I is a couple of entries below II. Sadly the links to the actual scanned memo are no longer extant, it was a stunner.)
EA harassment lawsuit (Fatbabies)
EA has been about maximizing profit and minimizing expenses first, and customer satisfaction second, and the health and well-being of its employees almost dead last, for a long time now.
I'm not holding out much hope of a truly fair and secure election here.
We support re-establishing United States control over the Canal in order to retain our military bases in Panama, to preserve our right to transit through the Canal, and to prevent the establishment of Chinese missile bases in Panama.
[my additional emphasis on last phrase]
Am I out of the loop on this one, or did the Chinese missile bases come in out of way left field? Have the ChiComs been getting up to dickens with the current Panamanian leadership?
Although I can't actually remember what the truck was called, or if it even had a name of its own.
That was the episode that confirmed Kubrick was right -- damaged AIs speak in very slow, simple sentences about three octaves below their normal range.
30 bits ~= 1 billion
Current world population ~= 6 billion or so
128 bits ~= 2^98 billion ~= 10^30 billion
Even when there are 256 billion people running around this planet (and, one assumes, others as well), there will be 90 bits of address space for each of us. Not that anybody is going to get 90 bits of address space even now, but if I read this right that's 26 SLA's, or a little less than 5 bits of SLA address space.
Yeah, yeah, firewall, toolkit CD, spare hard drive, blah blah blah. How far do you want to take that? "What kind of half-assed tech doesn't carry around the kit to build a complete multi-tier corporate network from scratch?"
The bottom line is no one should ever have to reinstall the OS just to get rid of malware. Right, wish in one hand, etc.
When I went home for my sister's graduation last June, my parents were in a similar situation to this reporter. They had Windows XP and had never downloaded a Windows Update. Ever. There was too much stuff on the computer (financial records, etc.) to just blow it away and format from scratch.
After about 6-7 hours of actual work and about 36 hours of downloading (yes, dialup, in a rural area to boot), I had the system back to what appeared to be normal. They haven't reported difficulties since then, so I assume it's more or less stayed that way. Ad-Aware, Spybot, Norton Antivirus, mostly judicious and occasional heavy-handed use of regedit, and several boots into Safe Mode were the key. It's tedious, but it can be done, and sometimes should be done.
A lot of times reinstalling from scratch is somewhere between a false economy and a disaster waiting to happen.
When you go into, say, a Kinko's, odds are every single machine in that store, right down to the 11-inch laminator in the customer area, is leased, with a maintenance contract (if it's not leased, then it probably was leased for so long that it went off-lease and became owned by the store.) Look on the side or top of the stuff in there and you'll see a label with the lessor info: who to call, what the number is, the equipment serial number, etc.
When equipment breaks a lease saves simple hassle in the business too -- instead of having to trust some employee to monkey around in there (which you may or may not be able to spare man-hours for), you just take it out of service, have another store produce orders if need be, and call the lease company. And trust me, when you're talking about a half-million-dollar copier, you do not want to have to eat major repair costs because your screwdriver slipped and you skewered the main vacuum tube or dented the motherboard on the controller.
One trade, I got hold of a case (20 bottles, IIRC) of Paulaner Oktoberfest for $30. Man, was I popular at the next party.
And of course any number of other customers offered me a free beer after finishing the work. That was usually the start of the Q&A session, which always boiled down to "what did you do, why did you need to do it, and is there anything I can do about it so it won't cost me too much from now on?"
Sometime around the end of June, when my first performance review was due, a memo went out. The bonus plan was becoming an annual payout at the fiscal year-end, instead of quarterly, and it was going to be half cash, half stock options. Much grumbling, but in the economy of late 2001, having a job was better than not having one.
Then right after September 11 (October 2, in fact), a bunch of us got laid off. The bonus-payout issue was raised. We were told (this is priceless) that a memo had gone out the day before, but our team hadn't gotten it because our project manager had forgotten to distribute it to us. The alleged memo said that effective with the last quarter (the first one where the deferred-bonus plan was in effect), all bonus payout was to be annual, at the end of the fiscal year, but now it would be all stock options.
Essentially what they did was, in stages and retroactive to the previous two quarters, convert a quarterly cash bonus retroactively to an annual stock-option award. That didn't sit well with me, and with the "keeping my job" incentive removed, I decided to see what my options were.
To make a long story short, the Virginia Department of Labor & Industry agreed with my interpretation, that since no employee signed any paperwork acknowledging the change in the bonus plan, the original offer letter's terms should stand. That I know of I'm the only person who fought them on this, but they didn't make me sign a confidentiality agreement so I made sure my co-workers knew. By the last day of December 2001 I had in my hand a check for 10% of my salary (6 months' worth of bonus) minus my relocation expenses. I probably could have quibbled over the meaning of "leave" versus "involuntarily terminated without cause", but by then I needed the money rather badly.
Get all the terms of your employment up front, in writing, and keep that paperwork safe!