The problem is, you can't pay for what you want really. I've still got old HP DeskJet's(no numbers, the very first model) that are in nice working condition. We're talking ten years of office use for an inkjet printer. Not very fast, but they last.
I would like to pay a bit more for a model which is built to last, but if I put more money, they just get faster and cheaper prices per printed page, more cpu etc.
I suppose the idea "pay more for longer lasting quality" isn't a good ad, as it makes the cheaper models look like they're supposed to break five days after the warranty period. But that's exactly what they do, whether they're expensive network lasers or cheap home inkjets.
Sure, most of us IT people have a lot of training and skills. In fact - with 12+ hour days 6-7 days a week and the very little bonus times going on reading more about it, there isn't much of a chance to have learned anything more.
Data security. That's what pushes over the limit for me.
Every day of every week, you just have to check on every server, check every security measure, just check through everything over and over so you can sleep. I worked for a larger company, and had holidays - even though every time they pulled me away after a few days, but at least it was a few days. Few days when I knew someone else covered for me. Now it's my own company and holiday means a maximum of an extended weekend twice a year. I can't go on a holiday, because the workload and pressure means returning is just too much work.
When I started this area of work, I didn't know about the Internet and neither did pretty much anyone else. I slept well, had hobbies and knew how to smile. First the Internet was interesting, the first half a dozen years just fun, possibilities for personal and professional interest.
Maybe I'll drop out of IRC... but then what would I do while a couple of servers are verifying MD5 checksums of binaries in the background?
And besides - where would I go? At this rate, every human being has to use a computer somewhere, sometime. Even 70 year olds who don't use computers are considered strange and 'they should learn for their own good'. I don't want to retire to that kind of a rest of my life.
Actually, when the final Debian Woody came out I've started using floppies for installation a lot more than before. It's just simple and functional and I always have spare floppy drives. Also, since ext3+md-raid-1 has become more stable, I find myself having more and more systems with two cheap ide drives as RAID-1, booting from a floppy.
I had a time when the floppies were almost never used but nowadays, I'm actually using floppies more every month. Just a matter of what stuff you have around - functional cd-rom-drives seem to have 'better use', but floppy drives I never run out of. So I use them.
An earlier case was with an IBM workstation, only 386 in architecture, a very small hdd, ie. very cool, nothing very hot in there. A number of these were used as cash register machines until one day.
Basically, pc's gather dust, like noted. If you place it into a tight enough place, they can gather a lot of dust. The end result was a sudden KABOOM type sound, scaring off a lot of customers, obviously. It was just luck that the fire could be put out quickly enough.
Now, you figure out what happens when you have a high end AMD CPU there. Similar cases have been seen and witnessed by yours truly on several P2 and P3 systems from IBM and HP. And only few companies want to buy the service of having their workstations air pressure cleaned regularly.
So yes, this threat is very real and companies should put the amount of five minutes into checking what's under the hood of workstations, especially in tough/tight places, such as cash registers often are in. Even once every three years is enough often, though once or twice a year isn't certainly a bad habit.
Some switches, especially some 3COM Superstack models seem to like dust as well, and have the same risk. If there's something that can get hot, this is just a matter of time.
A low class compressed air pump doesn't cost that much from a local hardware store. My opinion: worthy investment.
nVidia has clearly a place with gamers but as we've seen from the lousier than lousy attempts such as Quadro2, they're really not for the high end workstation. I don't play that much anymore, perhaps they're great gaming cards, but in 2D use, dtp, desktop and stuff, you just end up with a lot of little bugs with nVidia drivers.
Perhaps the cards are okay but the end result matters most. And when I have to spend half an hour poking settings so my dvi panel gives a proper picture only to lose those setups every time(read: often) I have to upgrade the drivers to fix a little but annoying bug, it's not fun. For a lot of 2D users, the good old Matrox Millennium II and G200 cards are often perfect.
I never expected Matrox to do an all out card. I want to know Matrox provides a steady multiuse desktop card with reliable drivers. nVidia can continue providing high end fast-but-buggy setups for gamers and ATI seems to find their way somewhere in between. And there just might be other players around too.
Isn't that the main thing - when the amount of choices is higher than one, it can't be all bad.
Here in Finland, a smaller town of Nokia(yes, it's also a town name) has done this for a while. It's not arranged by a single school, but the town youth welfare workers. And I think they got the right point - let the kids spend a weekend now and then gaming instead of getting drunk on the streets.
This is imo the main point - okay, only violent computer games is bad. But isn't the main thing that they're competing in a safe, moderated environment and dealing with other people.
As for games, I've found that letting some of the students themselves take part in arranging this is a good idea. Part of arranging it is to arrange short demonstrations of games. Get their interests to rise. Strategy based games, especially those letting you do teamwork and cooperation can get them interested quickly, if you show them what it's about. They think it's boring when they hear the name, but when someone talks a bit, shows a bit of it in a short demo, it just might get more interesting.
And no, I'm not kidding when I suggest some net version of Civilization or Master of Orion II(for shorter games). Especially when you see teamwork there, it gets fun for everyone.
I suppose there are as many opinions as there are writers, scenarios and locations, but over here I could write a book on customers that have been majorly unhappy with Compaq support. It may change with the number of installed systems of course, but from HP it's been good for 5 and 500 computers alike.
Then again, for me, it's not about software and support but about the fact that Compaq workstations have been a pain. Since the original HP Vectra (286), I've known to trust them. Compaq's done it's few good things but basically, they've either been too unstable with an okay price or too high priced.
With a large amount of various opinions all over the customer area I'm sure, how many people will have to do like me and just make the unwanted decision of stopping to buy HP stuff from now? I wonder if they've properly calculated this at HP.
I think there's something to be learned elsewhere as well. So far, if I want to get rid of for example monitors that I don't have time or skill to fix, I have to either pay 5 euros a piece to get them into some place that strips them into pieces and dumps them away - or hope that someone will take them for free and make use of them.
The thing is - I figure any country with at least some history in computers and nerds(wait, isn't that almost every country) needs some place that manages this. The reasons are obvious and it seems to me that it wouldn't be a huge waste of money and it might be a nice step to enviromentalism.
I'd like to see the people working in these kinds of places to include a few with some hardware knowledge...
"Wanted: geek to play around with second hand hardware. Benefits: all the old skool junk you can carry"
The end result would be larger towns having a large hall somewhere at the edge of town where rents are cheap, with a lot of hardware stuff in some sorts of categories. Maybe a few trucks to drive around the country across smaller places, gathering stuff now and then. Some of it will be reused by people wanting to play with stuff. Perhaps the staff might work to fix some things that could be sold for cheap or donated to some place that needs them, like poor countries, schools, clubs etc. Of course some would go to waste, but properly recycled.
The key thing is - don't just gather the materials, gather the potential uses as well. For example, a 486 or even an old pentium might be useless for most places, but consider the geeky uses for such things, consider places that don't have any computers. Value in dollars or euros? Little. Value in practical use? Large to very large.
I wrote about this in a licensing matter here a month or two ago as well, but it seems to apply here too.
Shorter version of story: BSA scares people, they don't want people to buy software, they want people to pay fines. M$ and other software companies talk with people, they want people to buy their software. BSA wants people scared, M$ and co. want people happy. It's been seen over here (.fi) enough many times - talk with BSA and everybody's a sinner. Talk with M$ etc. and their polite - they're not stupid, they want business.
So my suggestion is, stomp over BSA's head. Talk directly with the software vendors whos software your using. Get them to visit you - and they will - and talk about your licenses now and maybe the future. It'll probably be a smooth conversation and if you've put some money in their software, the discussion should leave both sides happy. Then, it's pretty easy to slap it into BSA's face that you've already discussed the matter with the involved parties directly and they're happy.
In any case, you're a customer, software vendors are sales people who want happy and paying customers who will buy again. BSA is a wild card that really doesn't have anything to gain unless it finds pirated software. When BSA comes over and sees that everything's fine, they've failed. They'll do pretty nasty reading-that-fine-print-a-bit-too-much kinda stuff just to prevent that. It's been seen.
First of all, speaking strictly as someone living in Finland and listening to online gamers daily as a part of my job, I can easily see the reasons why bnetd came to be.
Lag is a global enemy. For people here, playing on battle.net means connecting to Sweden, which means foreign bandwitdh, which means it's much more easily lagged than local connections. Local unofficial servers can be seen here and there, just because gaming is much more comfortable on them. Actually, bnetd can pretty clearly increase game sales from what I've asked around - as it allows people to make gameplay more enjoyable in places where the Blizzard doesn't want to support the gamers. A bnetd user is NOT a synonym for a software pirate.
So the idea mentioned here, of a closed source solution. From my point of view, it would be a good idea. I can smell some potential things that need be verified and looked into, I at least don't personally want to support game servers where one can play with pirated games, but I do like to see local people having local servers. There's a lot of places like this on our big earth, where there are players, but the place just isn't interesting enough for Blizzard to arrange a server deal.
In tiny short words: let the gamers play
...in the end, has Blizzard really looked at the HUGE variety of different players, different locations and different viewpoints? There's a lot of non-US players too. I can't run a bnetd server because of the uncertainties, but I would love to see Blizzard playing along here so I could, without worries, play along with the local gamers. Bnetd is what came to be because it was just needed. I don't neccessarily view it as a solution, but as a sign that Blizzard/Vivendi needs to play along.
I dunno how many deals with the guy down below are the reason but Macs are really using some hard-to-explain (devilish?) ways in luring us longtime x86 people to their (dark?) side.
Seriously, it's weird. It seems like in the past year or two, they're using some kind of alien influence to eat off the creativity of pc manufacturers and meanwhile quietly putting a few new nice new functions to their products every now and then.
If one were to love conspiracy theories, they might note that for example PC notebooks are "boring" nowadays, so very little new things, more new problems than new things. Then I ended up (work of aliens/the devil/something, but I love to blame) browsing apple's web pages. Or maybe pc notebooks are not boring, but we're only forced to see them like that... maybe we have tiny G4's screwed in our heads... maybe they got to us through a new kind of virus on irc... maybe...
so finally someone unconvered their true methods. Let these people be our new gods!
Actually I have to disagree. Human like names are easier to remember. Even when they have a bit less logic, it's a LOT easier for me to remember that I have to upgrade the kernel on Amiboshi than to upgrade the kernel on a-04-02-1(the other naming standard seen here). It's just very, very hard for people to remember numbers and strings.
Yes, remembering names will take more time to learn for new people especially, but generally, it's just something a psychologist person is better in explaining - a real word/name is easier to remember than a bunch of identifying codes.
My idea of a compromise might be human "segment name" followed by an id of some sort, so I'd connect to, for example, box Youzen 21. But just numbers and letters and id's - it was a good idea for us to try that here but nobody, and I mean nobody can really remember them, we get mixed up all the time.
The worst thing about "cute" names is that there's always someone objecting them. Sure, it's impossible to find a theme that everyone would like but it's even worse when you just can't remember.
Oh don't smile yet. They've been selling broadband wireless here(Finland) for two years or so now, in various styles. So far, there aren't too many nice words for it. In some places, it works, but often, the ISP's are greedy and their tech knowledge is zip.
Sometimes they just lack customer service, sometimes they don't how far that certain antenna actually reaches, sometimes they forget that some people aren't experts in installing pcmcia wireless cards on their first workstation they just bought a month ago. Sometimes they're overpriced. Sometimes they got too many people in the same access point. And almost always they lie about actual performance.
The list is endless, however no matter how the ISP provides the internet connection, some basic things are just the same. WLAN's can save initial setup costs but they still need tech people behind it, they need customer service and they need proper pricing. I really do hope that somewhere else around the world, companies will actually do this PROPERLY. From all I've studied here, it wouldn't be impossible at all.
The technology is good. We got a lot of employees home networks connected to the office with WLAN and we're looking at extremely long link uptimes even during snowstorms and even with long distances. Why does every ISP claim that WLAN, by definition isn't reliable...
I read the text and it looks like someone's actually put a bit of thought into it. However, this is a point, not right this way thoug, imo.
Spyware? Spyware++? Those are just common guy words but I'm thinking about laws around. Making this work isn't really just about making the technology safe and hard (the word impossible doesn't exist) to hack. What if one of the companies buying your cpu time is working on a medical project deemed illegal in half of the world? As this is supposed to be global, there is a _LOAD_ of laws, regulations to consider, not forgetting that these laws aren't constant, but always changing.
Simply put, laws will have to grow just as much as technology. I'm saying good luck but I don't feel this will have any easy road ahead.
I've got some first hand experience and comparisons from around here. Especially a few years back, Microsoft over here in Finland made it their policy to talk about licensing instead of letting BSA do the work. They'd ask people from your company to come over, they offer a meal, demonstrate some programs and do some usual advertisement tricks. Then they talk about licenses, licensing methods and they've usually done some background work on your company, helping to find a licensing solution. After a little talk, they'll get back to you and you'll usually find some good way to arrange licenses. "But I don't have all licenses in order now" you might tell them, and they'll respond kindly and suggest that maybe you should check them out now.
In comes BSA - everyone's doomed, everyone goes to hell and nobody passes go, but BSA certainly collects more than $200. You show them licenses, they'll claim you're hiding something. You show them invoices, they ask you are they forged. In the end, they're never saying it's okay, they're never wanting to solve things - they're just SO certain that every company is an evil pirate, or perhaps at least a place to turn into an incident.
I don't like a LOT of things about microsoft, including their customer service most of the time, their programs and their 72 million IIS bugs, but I won't lie to myself here - they want to make solutions, BSA wants to make war. BSA uses aggression, fear and often, VERY rude and offensive language. Of course they have nice people there too but it seems they're a minority. I -really- hope this is all just me seeing a number of bad days for them.
I don't have any info on what the laws say about this in Canada, but it's been a subject here in Finland too. Obviously ISP's try to alter the rules - 90% of their customers is good enough for them, as those 90% only access their yahoo/hotmail/etc account and check the weather report once a week.
The subject on the table here is trying to define a matter very hard to put into proper wording. How do you define "useless" bandwidth usage in fine print? You don't have to leech off warez to get a lot of bandwitdh used. You might just watch news on your registered realplayer or download a lot of game demos and patches.
The other thing is what you can sell and with what text. If you're selling a connection with words such as unlimited usage, constant monthly fee or certain amount of available bandwidth, you can't just suddenly say that the text is only meant for net-lazy people.
The ISP's can blame themselves - they have pushed prices way too down in many places and now they're regretting it. It's not rare to see big price jumps nowadays, the isp here suddenly doubled our monthly bills in a "routine price checking", and a lot of other people are also seeing small effects from this.
ISP's have acted hastily, and quite often they seem to plan only the next week ahead. Key fact: that's not users' fault.
HP, among other manufacturers has said that they can't support Debian because it's not commercial. People from HP have agreed that Debian is a good distro, but they can't make proper agreements unless there's a company in both ends, and without such agreements, they can't add a cute "works with add_distro_name_here" ad on the spec sheet of their servers.
Libranet is letting Debian do even more than it does now(I didn't know that was possible;). Nothing's perfect, but I honestly can't feel like complaining in any way.
Tell him you are, but that it doesn't affect your day job;)
I'm looking forward to this as well, I nowadays take extreme pleasure from deleting red hat installations in favor of more functional ones. Good work Libranet!
At least old AWARD bioses allowed you to flash a small logo of your own. I think AMI allowed that too. You needed to find the program to do that but it wasn't too difficult. I'm somehow thinking IBM wouldn't provide such programs - shame, would've made this A30p just perfect.
Of course, computers that you could order to self destruct with for example an SMS message would be cool. "That thief's not getting his stuff... and what's that smoke coming from the garage?"
Actually, I never thought of that until now. Now that I think of it, it would be very useful. You can get a load of dumb terminals for free, and they're quiet and small enough to fit into little spots.
I'd imagine it wouldn't require a huge amount of work to do this. Debian being my alltime favorite, it's not a bad idea to hope... I hope;)
I've been in a larger company, I've been in a smaller company. Definately now in my current workplace, a smaller company, this happens more often. But - I do remember a few headache creating evenings at my previous workplace too, where I didn't even know all the people that were gathered there. But it was fun.
It depends on the company a bit too - if the workplace creates a mood where getting to know others is easy, this happens more often. Unfortunately though, there's places that make sure that people don't cooperate, but compete together. And that's a very sure way of avoiding any communication outside work hours.
While much of this is true, as living in Finland, as part of the EU, I know that the EU doesn't do much good in this area. I'm not saying that any organization of that size could with the amount of personal interests the politics have. This is 100% clearly just fishing for votes.
Much of the EU member countries, at least Finland, DO already clearly criminalize certain kinds of behaviour on the net. I've seen it - nazi material, child porn, etc. doesn't live long on local servers. No - this isn't any kind of "we're best, you're not" talk, just one thing that imo, at least currently, is somewhat under control. Probably it's because we're a relatively small country. The problem has been real here though, newspaper articles come up now and then speaking of removed content this and that, person jailed for spreading something unwanted.
But of course, we've gone over the edge. A big ISP had a nice service of providing a lot of extra temporary space for compiling large programs, temporary location for downloads etc... of course, many abused it, and because one or two abused it badly, the police had the whole service shut down. The ISP was threatened in every possible way. If in such a small country, and such a small environment, it gets so badly out of hand, I can imagine the problems it will do to hundreds of thousands of innocents on a large scale.
I mentioned local servers above, so what about non-local servers? Yep, it's a problem, but in my view, everyone has to look under their own nose. It's not realistic in today's world, but responsibility is a key word in "political evolution".
So, what is realistic now? Common sense. In us - many of us know what to avoid on the net, and can spread our knowledge onwards. Help others know that the net isn't always friendly. The less popularity any extremists receive, the less they'll live on. And common sense in law enforcement - there'll always be problems on the net, and they will always be found. Make effective ways to deal with REAL problems. Don't harm the masses. Free internet has made many young people into very smart young people, who have learned a lot and moved our world ahead.
And common sense at homes and schools. There's a lot you can learn when you're young, but there's a lot of things parents or even teacher just don't know to teach. Like in real life, there's a lot of things on the net that can be "fun", but the risks are just as big. I've seen parents surprised when they suddenly get a call hearing their son has been helping illegal operations on the net - and because they didn't have a good idea how stupid it was, they may have done extreme things, like serve nazi material on their homepage - only thinking it was fun.
But don't take away people's right to disagree. People must have the right to have personal opinions, even direct ones. Of course there's a limit - you can't post death threats, but you can dislike a politician, a law, or even a country. You can have an opinion, IRL and on the net. Sensible people know how to express these, and others will hopefully learn from these. More directly - it's not a nice thing usually, but you have the right to hate. Just do it with your words.
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The problem is, you can't pay for what you want really. I've still got old HP DeskJet's(no numbers, the very first model) that are in nice working condition. We're talking ten years of office use for an inkjet printer. Not very fast, but they last.
I would like to pay a bit more for a model which is built to last, but if I put more money, they just get faster and cheaper prices per printed page, more cpu etc.
I suppose the idea "pay more for longer lasting quality" isn't a good ad, as it makes the cheaper models look like they're supposed to break five days after the warranty period. But that's exactly what they do, whether they're expensive network lasers or cheap home inkjets.
Sure, most of us IT people have a lot of training and skills. In fact - with 12+ hour days 6-7 days a week and the very little bonus times going on reading more about it, there isn't much of a chance to have learned anything more.
Data security. That's what pushes over the limit for me.
Every day of every week, you just have to check on every server, check every security measure, just check through everything over and over so you can sleep. I worked for a larger company, and had holidays - even though every time they pulled me away after a few days, but at least it was a few days. Few days when I knew someone else covered for me. Now it's my own company and holiday means a maximum of an extended weekend twice a year. I can't go on a holiday, because the workload and pressure means returning is just too much work.
When I started this area of work, I didn't know about the Internet and neither did pretty much anyone else. I slept well, had hobbies and knew how to smile. First the Internet was interesting, the first half a dozen years just fun, possibilities for personal and professional interest.
Maybe I'll drop out of IRC... but then what would I do while a couple of servers are verifying MD5 checksums of binaries in the background?
And besides - where would I go? At this rate, every human being has to use a computer somewhere, sometime. Even 70 year olds who don't use computers are considered strange and 'they should learn for their own good'. I don't want to retire to that kind of a rest of my life.
Actually, when the final Debian Woody came out I've started using floppies for installation a lot more than before. It's just simple and functional and I always have spare floppy drives. Also, since ext3+md-raid-1 has become more stable, I find myself having more and more systems with two cheap ide drives as RAID-1, booting from a floppy.
I had a time when the floppies were almost never used but nowadays, I'm actually using floppies more every month. Just a matter of what stuff you have around - functional cd-rom-drives seem to have 'better use', but floppy drives I never run out of. So I use them.
An earlier case was with an IBM workstation, only 386 in architecture, a very small hdd, ie. very cool, nothing very hot in there. A number of these were used as cash register machines until one day.
Basically, pc's gather dust, like noted. If you place it into a tight enough place, they can gather a lot of dust. The end result was a sudden KABOOM type sound, scaring off a lot of customers, obviously. It was just luck that the fire could be put out quickly enough.
Now, you figure out what happens when you have a high end AMD CPU there. Similar cases have been seen and witnessed by yours truly on several P2 and P3 systems from IBM and HP. And only few companies want to buy the service of having their workstations air pressure cleaned regularly.
So yes, this threat is very real and companies should put the amount of five minutes into checking what's under the hood of workstations, especially in tough/tight places, such as cash registers often are in. Even once every three years is enough often, though once or twice a year isn't certainly a bad habit.
Some switches, especially some 3COM Superstack models seem to like dust as well, and have the same risk. If there's something that can get hot, this is just a matter of time.
A low class compressed air pump doesn't cost that much from a local hardware store. My opinion: worthy investment.
nVidia has clearly a place with gamers but as we've seen from the lousier than lousy attempts such as Quadro2, they're really not for the high end workstation. I don't play that much anymore, perhaps they're great gaming cards, but in 2D use, dtp, desktop and stuff, you just end up with a lot of little bugs with nVidia drivers.
Perhaps the cards are okay but the end result matters most. And when I have to spend half an hour poking settings so my dvi panel gives a proper picture only to lose those setups every time(read: often) I have to upgrade the drivers to fix a little but annoying bug, it's not fun. For a lot of 2D users, the good old Matrox Millennium II and G200 cards are often perfect.
I never expected Matrox to do an all out card. I want to know Matrox provides a steady multiuse desktop card with reliable drivers. nVidia can continue providing high end fast-but-buggy setups for gamers and ATI seems to find their way somewhere in between. And there just might be other players around too.
Isn't that the main thing - when the amount of choices is higher than one, it can't be all bad.
Here in Finland, a smaller town of Nokia(yes, it's also a town name) has done this for a while. It's not arranged by a single school, but the town youth welfare workers. And I think they got the right point - let the kids spend a weekend now and then gaming instead of getting drunk on the streets.
This is imo the main point - okay, only violent computer games is bad. But isn't the main thing that they're competing in a safe, moderated environment and dealing with other people.
As for games, I've found that letting some of the students themselves take part in arranging this is a good idea. Part of arranging it is to arrange short demonstrations of games. Get their interests to rise. Strategy based games, especially those letting you do teamwork and cooperation can get them interested quickly, if you show them what it's about. They think it's boring when they hear the name, but when someone talks a bit, shows a bit of it in a short demo, it just might get more interesting.
And no, I'm not kidding when I suggest some net version of Civilization or Master of Orion II(for shorter games). Especially when you see teamwork there, it gets fun for everyone.
I suppose there are as many opinions as there are writers, scenarios and locations, but over here I could write a book on customers that have been majorly unhappy with Compaq support. It may change with the number of installed systems of course, but from HP it's been good for 5 and 500 computers alike.
Then again, for me, it's not about software and support but about the fact that Compaq workstations have been a pain. Since the original HP Vectra (286), I've known to trust them. Compaq's done it's few good things but basically, they've either been too unstable with an okay price or too high priced.
With a large amount of various opinions all over the customer area I'm sure, how many people will have to do like me and just make the unwanted decision of stopping to buy HP stuff from now? I wonder if they've properly calculated this at HP.
Meanwhile, in Finland..
I think there's something to be learned elsewhere as well. So far, if I want to get rid of for example monitors that I don't have time or skill to fix, I have to either pay 5 euros a piece to get them into some place that strips them into pieces and dumps them away - or hope that someone will take them for free and make use of them.
The thing is - I figure any country with at least some history in computers and nerds(wait, isn't that almost every country) needs some place that manages this. The reasons are obvious and it seems to me that it wouldn't be a huge waste of money and it might be a nice step to enviromentalism.
I'd like to see the people working in these kinds of places to include a few with some hardware knowledge...
"Wanted: geek to play around with second hand hardware. Benefits: all the old skool junk you can carry"
The end result would be larger towns having a large hall somewhere at the edge of town where rents are cheap, with a lot of hardware stuff in some sorts of categories. Maybe a few trucks to drive around the country across smaller places, gathering stuff now and then. Some of it will be reused by people wanting to play with stuff. Perhaps the staff might work to fix some things that could be sold for cheap or donated to some place that needs them, like poor countries, schools, clubs etc. Of course some would go to waste, but properly recycled.
The key thing is - don't just gather the materials, gather the potential uses as well. For example, a 486 or even an old pentium might be useless for most places, but consider the geeky uses for such things, consider places that don't have any computers. Value in dollars or euros? Little. Value in practical use? Large to very large.
I wrote about this in a licensing matter here a month or two ago as well, but it seems to apply here too.
Shorter version of story: BSA scares people, they don't want people to buy software, they want people to pay fines. M$ and other software companies talk with people, they want people to buy their software. BSA wants people scared, M$ and co. want people happy. It's been seen over here (.fi) enough many times - talk with BSA and everybody's a sinner. Talk with M$ etc. and their polite - they're not stupid, they want business.
So my suggestion is, stomp over BSA's head. Talk directly with the software vendors whos software your using. Get them to visit you - and they will - and talk about your licenses now and maybe the future. It'll probably be a smooth conversation and if you've put some money in their software, the discussion should leave both sides happy. Then, it's pretty easy to slap it into BSA's face that you've already discussed the matter with the involved parties directly and they're happy.
In any case, you're a customer, software vendors are sales people who want happy and paying customers who will buy again. BSA is a wild card that really doesn't have anything to gain unless it finds pirated software. When BSA comes over and sees that everything's fine, they've failed. They'll do pretty nasty reading-that-fine-print-a-bit-too-much kinda stuff just to prevent that. It's been seen.
First of all, speaking strictly as someone living in Finland and listening to online gamers daily as a part of my job, I can easily see the reasons why bnetd came to be.
Lag is a global enemy. For people here, playing on battle.net means connecting to Sweden, which means foreign bandwitdh, which means it's much more easily lagged than local connections. Local unofficial servers can be seen here and there, just because gaming is much more comfortable on them. Actually, bnetd can pretty clearly increase game sales from what I've asked around - as it allows people to make gameplay more enjoyable in places where the Blizzard doesn't want to support the gamers. A bnetd user is NOT a synonym for a software pirate.
So the idea mentioned here, of a closed source solution. From my point of view, it would be a good idea. I can smell some potential things that need be verified and looked into, I at least don't personally want to support game servers where one can play with pirated games, but I do like to see local people having local servers. There's a lot of places like this on our big earth, where there are players, but the place just isn't interesting enough for Blizzard to arrange a server deal.
In tiny short words: let the gamers play
...in the end, has Blizzard really looked at the HUGE variety of different players, different locations and different viewpoints? There's a lot of non-US players too. I can't run a bnetd server because of the uncertainties, but I would love to see Blizzard playing along here so I could, without worries, play along with the local gamers. Bnetd is what came to be because it was just needed. I don't neccessarily view it as a solution, but as a sign that Blizzard/Vivendi needs to play along.
I dunno how many deals with the guy down below are the reason but Macs are really using some hard-to-explain (devilish?) ways in luring us longtime x86 people to their (dark?) side.
Seriously, it's weird. It seems like in the past year or two, they're using some kind of alien influence to eat off the creativity of pc manufacturers and meanwhile quietly putting a few new nice new functions to their products every now and then.
If one were to love conspiracy theories, they might note that for example PC notebooks are "boring" nowadays, so very little new things, more new problems than new things. Then I ended up (work of aliens/the devil/something, but I love to blame) browsing apple's web pages. Or maybe pc notebooks are not boring, but we're only forced to see them like that... maybe we have tiny G4's screwed in our heads... maybe they got to us through a new kind of virus on irc... maybe...
so finally someone unconvered their true methods. Let these people be our new gods!
Actually I have to disagree. Human like names are easier to remember. Even when they have a bit less logic, it's a LOT easier for me to remember that I have to upgrade the kernel on Amiboshi than to upgrade the kernel on a-04-02-1(the other naming standard seen here). It's just very, very hard for people to remember numbers and strings.
Yes, remembering names will take more time to learn for new people especially, but generally, it's just something a psychologist person is better in explaining - a real word/name is easier to remember than a bunch of identifying codes.
My idea of a compromise might be human "segment name" followed by an id of some sort, so I'd connect to, for example, box Youzen 21. But just numbers and letters and id's - it was a good idea for us to try that here but nobody, and I mean nobody can really remember them, we get mixed up all the time.
The worst thing about "cute" names is that there's always someone objecting them. Sure, it's impossible to find a theme that everyone would like but it's even worse when you just can't remember.
Oh don't smile yet. They've been selling broadband wireless here(Finland) for two years or so now, in various styles. So far, there aren't too many nice words for it. In some places, it works, but often, the ISP's are greedy and their tech knowledge is zip.
Sometimes they just lack customer service, sometimes they don't how far that certain antenna actually reaches, sometimes they forget that some people aren't experts in installing pcmcia wireless cards on their first workstation they just bought a month ago. Sometimes they're overpriced. Sometimes they got too many people in the same access point. And almost always they lie about actual performance.
The list is endless, however no matter how the ISP provides the internet connection, some basic things are just the same. WLAN's can save initial setup costs but they still need tech people behind it, they need customer service and they need proper pricing. I really do hope that somewhere else around the world, companies will actually do this PROPERLY. From all I've studied here, it wouldn't be impossible at all.
The technology is good. We got a lot of employees home networks connected to the office with WLAN and we're looking at extremely long link uptimes even during snowstorms and even with long distances. Why does every ISP claim that WLAN, by definition isn't reliable...
I read the text and it looks like someone's actually put a bit of thought into it. However, this is a point, not right this way thoug, imo.
Spyware? Spyware++? Those are just common guy words but I'm thinking about laws around. Making this work isn't really just about making the technology safe and hard (the word impossible doesn't exist) to hack. What if one of the companies buying your cpu time is working on a medical project deemed illegal in half of the world? As this is supposed to be global, there is a _LOAD_ of laws, regulations to consider, not forgetting that these laws aren't constant, but always changing.
Simply put, laws will have to grow just as much as technology. I'm saying good luck but I don't feel this will have any easy road ahead.
I've got some first hand experience and comparisons from around here. Especially a few years back, Microsoft over here in Finland made it their policy to talk about licensing instead of letting BSA do the work. They'd ask people from your company to come over, they offer a meal, demonstrate some programs and do some usual advertisement tricks. Then they talk about licenses, licensing methods and they've usually done some background work on your company, helping to find a licensing solution. After a little talk, they'll get back to you and you'll usually find some good way to arrange licenses. "But I don't have all licenses in order now" you might tell them, and they'll respond kindly and suggest that maybe you should check them out now.
In comes BSA - everyone's doomed, everyone goes to hell and nobody passes go, but BSA certainly collects more than $200. You show them licenses, they'll claim you're hiding something. You show them invoices, they ask you are they forged. In the end, they're never saying it's okay, they're never wanting to solve things - they're just SO certain that every company is an evil pirate, or perhaps at least a place to turn into an incident.
I don't like a LOT of things about microsoft, including their customer service most of the time, their programs and their 72 million IIS bugs, but I won't lie to myself here - they want to make solutions, BSA wants to make war. BSA uses aggression, fear and often, VERY rude and offensive language. Of course they have nice people there too but it seems they're a minority. I -really- hope this is all just me seeing a number of bad days for them.
So, who do you want talk to about licenses today?
I don't have any info on what the laws say about this in Canada, but it's been a subject here in Finland too. Obviously ISP's try to alter the rules - 90% of their customers is good enough for them, as those 90% only access their yahoo/hotmail/etc account and check the weather report once a week.
The subject on the table here is trying to define a matter very hard to put into proper wording. How do you define "useless" bandwidth usage in fine print? You don't have to leech off warez to get a lot of bandwitdh used. You might just watch news on your registered realplayer or download a lot of game demos and patches.
The other thing is what you can sell and with what text. If you're selling a connection with words such as unlimited usage, constant monthly fee or certain amount of available bandwidth, you can't just suddenly say that the text is only meant for net-lazy people.
The ISP's can blame themselves - they have pushed prices way too down in many places and now they're regretting it. It's not rare to see big price jumps nowadays, the isp here suddenly doubled our monthly bills in a "routine price checking", and a lot of other people are also seeing small effects from this.
ISP's have acted hastily, and quite often they seem to plan only the next week ahead. Key fact: that's not users' fault.
HP, among other manufacturers has said that they can't support Debian because it's not commercial. People from HP have agreed that Debian is a good distro, but they can't make proper agreements unless there's a company in both ends, and without such agreements, they can't add a cute "works with add_distro_name_here" ad on the spec sheet of their servers.
;). Nothing's perfect, but I honestly can't feel like complaining in any way.
Libranet is letting Debian do even more than it does now(I didn't know that was possible
Tell him you are, but that it doesn't affect your day job ;)
I'm looking forward to this as well, I nowadays take extreme pleasure from deleting red hat installations in favor of more functional ones. Good work Libranet!
At least old AWARD bioses allowed you to flash a small logo of your own. I think AMI allowed that too. You needed to find the program to do that but it wasn't too difficult. I'm somehow thinking IBM wouldn't provide such programs - shame, would've made this A30p just perfect.
Of course, computers that you could order to self destruct with for example an SMS message would be cool. "That thief's not getting his stuff... and what's that smoke coming from the garage?"
Actually, I never thought of that until now. Now that I think of it, it would be very useful. You can get a load of dumb terminals for free, and they're quiet and small enough to fit into little spots.
;)
I'd imagine it wouldn't require a huge amount of work to do this. Debian being my alltime favorite, it's not a bad idea to hope... I hope
I've been in a larger company, I've been in a smaller company. Definately now in my current workplace, a smaller company, this happens more often. But - I do remember a few headache creating evenings at my previous workplace too, where I didn't even know all the people that were gathered there. But it was fun.
It depends on the company a bit too - if the workplace creates a mood where getting to know others is easy, this happens more often. Unfortunately though, there's places that make sure that people don't cooperate, but compete together. And that's a very sure way of avoiding any communication outside work hours.
While much of this is true, as living in Finland, as part of the EU, I know that the EU doesn't do much good in this area. I'm not saying that any organization of that size could with the amount of personal interests the politics have. This is 100% clearly just fishing for votes.
Much of the EU member countries, at least Finland, DO already clearly criminalize certain kinds of behaviour on the net. I've seen it - nazi material, child porn, etc. doesn't live long on local servers. No - this isn't any kind of "we're best, you're not" talk, just one thing that imo, at least currently, is somewhat under control. Probably it's because we're a relatively small country. The problem has been real here though, newspaper articles come up now and then speaking of removed content this and that, person jailed for spreading something unwanted.
But of course, we've gone over the edge. A big ISP had a nice service of providing a lot of extra temporary space for compiling large programs, temporary location for downloads etc... of course, many abused it, and because one or two abused it badly, the police had the whole service shut down. The ISP was threatened in every possible way. If in such a small country, and such a small environment, it gets so badly out of hand, I can imagine the problems it will do to hundreds of thousands of innocents on a large scale.
I mentioned local servers above, so what about non-local servers? Yep, it's a problem, but in my view, everyone has to look under their own nose. It's not realistic in today's world, but responsibility is a key word in "political evolution".
So, what is realistic now? Common sense. In us - many of us know what to avoid on the net, and can spread our knowledge onwards. Help others know that the net isn't always friendly. The less popularity any extremists receive, the less they'll live on. And common sense in law enforcement - there'll always be problems on the net, and they will always be found. Make effective ways to deal with REAL problems. Don't harm the masses. Free internet has made many young people into very smart young people, who have learned a lot and moved our world ahead.
And common sense at homes and schools. There's a lot you can learn when you're young, but there's a lot of things parents or even teacher just don't know to teach. Like in real life, there's a lot of things on the net that can be "fun", but the risks are just as big. I've seen parents surprised when they suddenly get a call hearing their son has been helping illegal operations on the net - and because they didn't have a good idea how stupid it was, they may have done extreme things, like serve nazi material on their homepage - only thinking it was fun.
But don't take away people's right to disagree. People must have the right to have personal opinions, even direct ones. Of course there's a limit - you can't post death threats, but you can dislike a politician, a law, or even a country. You can have an opinion, IRL and on the net. Sensible people know how to express these, and others will hopefully learn from these. More directly - it's not a nice thing usually, but you have the right to hate. Just do it with your words.