But you are assuming that one instance of failure destroys your credit history and that just is not true. Believe it or not you can actualy work with most of these companies to arrange payments, especialy if you've fallen on financial hardships. The trick is though, that it takes work (and paperwork) and it takes a bit of foresight. The longer you wait before you seek help or reprives the harder it will be to get them. Speaking as someone who's been there and had to make decisions like which bill to pay this month, it's not easy and it doesn't mean you'll preserve your pristine credit rating but it's better than not paying and hoping it goes away.
Very alarmist but hardly accurate. Let's take them 1 by 1.
If you're in a bad situation medicaly and you didnt' ask the hospital about help or financial programs then that's your own fault. I've been there and done that and seen entire debts erased because of "financial circumstances". Medical places are the most understanding and helpful when it comes to massive bills, and not talking to them and looking to work something out is a failure on your part.
As far as one months missed payment killing you, no that won't happen. And infact your story doesn't fit with that either. You said Mr. X was out of the country for months which means not one missed payment, but multiple missed payments, on multiple accounts, and all in a row. The fact that his friend was a jackass is sad to be true, but the debts were still his responsibility in the end and he should have been checking to ensure they were being paid. At the very least he could have gotten in touch with the companies he owed money to before leaving the country and looked into setting up an automatic draft or even better paying up front.
As far as senario 3 goes again, your fault for forgetting about the card. But further more, one joint account it not going to make an employer not hire you (and if it does did you really want to work for them anyway). I don't know if you've ever seen a real credit report (not a credit score) but they are extremely detailed and this account would be an oddity in a sea of other accounts.
Ok, he maxed out his cards, so what? What is he doing about it is what matters. I don't know if you've ever seen a full credit report but they're pretty detailed including number of on time payments, number of late payments and number of over the limit charges. If he maxed his cards but has been making steady regular payments, his history will still be good. It may not be great but as an employer I'm concerned with how you're handling your obligations, not how many you have.
Possibly, but I doubt it. To consumers DRM is just another format, like CD, VHS, Beta or what have you. In the end you have to convert. They've done it before (8track to audio to CD) and they're doing it again (VHS to DVD) and they will do it again (iTunes to format du jour). It's also worth noting that just because you're in an un DRMed format doesn't mean you'll be able to keep it forever without converting. When the next big thing rolls around for portable music players, MP3 can just as easily be left unsupported.
AFAIK the signing statements do not have the wieght of law and would not hold in court. That isn't to say that they won't be enacted for a short period of time (as the executive branch is the enforcement branch) but a lawsuit would end that real quick.
I hate that damn buzzword. Security through obscurity is a valid part of any security model. At some point every model relies on some information being unknown to outside people. Furthermore, not all security decisions and systems can be broken down like a computer system can. Blind spots are certainly not the best things in the world to have in your camera system, but sometimes (whether for economic reasons or simple space restrictions) you may need them. Not advertising to the world where your blind spots are is a valid way of helping to ensure your security.
It's not and should not be the only method used to secure something but obscurity is a useful part of a security tool kit.
If businesses paid a bit more attention to the machines they had, they might find they don't need as many new machines as often. I worked for a school system for a while that had a policy of using every machine until it died for good. If it could be repaired, and the cost of repair wasn't much more than a new unit, then it was repaired. While the central servers for the school were running off of brand spanking new systems, the monitor computer which did traffic reporting and system health monitoring was an old Mac Classic. Not every machine is useless just because it's not new.
It's better called a "refurbishing fee" or "rental fee". Any time a company does that, it's because they have to do some work to make the product sellable again and because they take a hit on it. And the reason companies charge such fees are all the morons who go out and buy new expensive electronics to use for 3 days and then return them for full refund. People do it all the time and it costs the company money, so they just pass those costs back on to everyone else. Unfortunately it's another case of a few people ruining it for everyone.
I see, so you're arguing that if customers know more about the product, even though they haven't signed an NDA it won't make the sales guys jobs harder? Like when you're in the store and some moron who downloaded the beta contradicts a sales guy talking to a different customer and the sales guy has no knowledge with which to counter those claims. "DTrace in OS X is incompatible with the output files of Solaris Dtrace. I tried and there was no way to get the standard files output. Buy a Lenovo." Is that a true statement or is the guy saying it just incompetent and did not bother using the CLI option? Is it optimal that an Apple sales employee doesn't even have a way to find out even though the average Joe on the street can with bittorrent and a little messing around?
Again, if the information is supposed to be public the sales person will have access to that information. You assume our retail sales joe average is even going to use DTrace. Furthermore, so what if the random customer who downloaded a pirated version says that, as you already pointed out, the software is beta, going from your assumption that the customer knows what that means, then all the sales person has to say is the software is not finalized and there's no way to say for sure. The customer could say that leapord killed his mother by causing the computer to emit brain eating cancer waves and it would be irellevant. The software is not finished and the features are not finalized and therefore what it can and can't do yet is irellevant to a sale's persons job.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is no legitimate reason the sales person in question would need access to the unfinished OS in the course of their job duties that would not be covered under the information that they would already have at their disposal.
Correction: Some manager took it upon himself to investigate a conversation Apple employees were having about Apple employees infringing on Apple's copyright and violating company property. These kids weren't talking about cracking a $20 shareware app, they were doing this with company property, if that isn't down right stupid I don't know what is. (And yes, they could have been fired for cracking the $20 app too, companies employing people they know to be actively breaking laws is a good way to get sued.)
Any NDA that i've seen from companies has always included a part (or at the least it's been a sperate company policy) on copyright infringement, especialy as it pertains to the companies own products. Furthermore, NDAs often cover unauthorized distribution AND acquisition of items covered under the NDA.
I reject your argument that customers are idiots and salespeople need to be forced by their own ignorance not to tell them anything not stupid simple.
Which is why I assert that you have never worked in retail sales.
Can you move all the Windows in a virtual desktop to another at once? Sure you just hit a key combination (shift-space) and it works. Would I remember that from reading through 10 pages of PR stuff? No. Would I remember it if I did it a few times to try it out? Yup. Are salespeople the same way? Probably. Can you have different windows of the same application on different desktops? What if you are on a third desktop and click the application icon in the dock, does it take you to one of those desktops? Which one? Having used the feature an employee can answer these questions and I don't think it is giving away anything to competitors or anyone else. Having just read the marketing stuff, an employee has no idea.
And if that is supposed to be public information why do you assume the sales person does not have access to that information? Do you know what information Apple provides it's sales people on the products? If not then why are you assuming that the information is not availible to them? The fact that they are unable to remember these facts without having an illicit copy of the OS is irellevant, they would still have access to the information through their approved channels. Again, if it's supposed to be public, they would have access to it.
Unless the employee happens to be a developer or happens to have downloaded a copy of the beta from one of the many Websites that are now hosting it. Then the customer has more info than the salesperson, which is not particularly good for business.
Right, the only way the customer would have more information than the sales person is if they've either signed an NDA and have the OS already (thus would not be asking the retail sales person about it) or if they have not signed the NDA and have the OS in which case the retail employee should not be discussing the information with the customer and the customer should again not be asking.
No, store employees should not have it because they shouldn't be answering ANY questions. The beta is released to developers under NDA, that means no one should be talking about what is and isn't in it, and for a very good reason, features are subject to change. Compare the current views on Vista's ever shrinking feature list to the views of Leppords only half announced feature list. The fact that priates and competitors have it is irellevant, no part of the retail employee's job REQUIRES them to have or use the software.
And how do we know that these employee's remorse was any more or less sincere than a politician's? Going off track a hair here, politicians come from the public, not from some void, their ability to be incincere in their remorse is not a unique trait to them.
No, store employees should not have it because they shouldn't be answering ANY questions. The beta is released to developers under NDA, that means no one should be talking about what is and isn't in it, and for a very good reason, features are subject to change. Compare the current views on Vista's ever shrinking feature list to the views of Leppords only half announced feature list. The fact that priates and competitors have it is irellevant, no part of the retail employee's job REQUIRES them to have or use the software.
None of the people in question need to nor are currently supporting the non public beta of a non shipping product. Hell Apple doesn't even support public betas (see BootCamp). They did not need the software to do their jobs.
The trade secret is enough of an edge in the current market to potentialy move themselves into the lead of their competition.
The value of the trade secret doesn't have to extend indefinately, just long enough to take market position.
Consider if ATI came up with some code that could get spectacular performance out of their graphics cards using half as much in terms of components as NVIDIA.
Eventualy NVIDIA will figure something out, either the same thing or just reverse engineer and develop their own version, either way is irellevant because at that point the trade secret is worht little to ATI, but for that 2, 3, 6 or 12 month period that it take NVIDIA to catch up, ATI has the edge, and has the chance to take market position.
By contrast, say ATI releases the source for their drivers and such with their new wonder card. It takes all of 5 minutes for NVIDIA to have someone take a drive to compUSA, buy a card and look at the source figure out how to do it and make their own.
And so on and so forth untill the worker becomes the manager, and because the manager when he was a worker did not believe in taking pride in his work and was shown that a company will therefore not take pride in him, he now believes that he should not take pride in his employees presuming them to be lazy slobs who will do the minimum neccesary for a pay check. And the cycle continues. I said nothing about the moral fiber of the company or those running the company. It should have been clear from my post that I was criticising the lack of pride people take in the work they do, and that it would extand not just to the janitors but to the CEO's as well. CEOs who don't take pride in their product and in their company (their work) will turn the company into little more than a sweat shop paying barely enough to keep employees. It's because the CEO's don't take pride in their work, and are again only concerned with material goods. A business owner who takes pride in his company will pay his employees as much as he can reasonably do so to generate a feeling of pride in the employees. He will then promote and keep the employees that take pride in their work because they are the ones who will make their salaries worth the expense.
And yes, I've seen both sides of the equation in action, and yes it does work. The net result is that theres a little less profit to go around, but the company is much better off than the competitors.
If your work is not a point of pride for you, then you need another job. If workers and employers took pride in their work, we would all be better off, but this is america, and we don't.
You can be interoperable without compromising the ultimate ideal. You have to do it the same way that everyone else does, by making the ideal the default, but easily allowing the alternative. Look at the way that both microsoft and apple operate to bring people into "their way of things" the default setting is "their way" (i.e. WMP defaults to WMA as an import format, and iTunes defaults to AAC) but with a simple change, both allow you use alternative formats (MP3, AIFF, WAV, what have you). Linux needs to work the same way to bring people into the fold. The default of course should be open and free, but it should not be a song and dance to operate with proprietary devices, just a switch. You could even do it transparently, much like iTunes for windows handles WMA (by converting it in the background). In the end, your goal should be making the free and open so much a part of normal everyday behaviors that when they run into something that isn't, they think twice. The goal should not be to make the change as jarring as possible, because change is bad, and therefore, linux or free and open protocols will be viewed as bad.
Make it easy for them to be free and open, and make it easy for what is already proprietary to be used in the free and open system and you will find that free and open will gain strength and acceptance.
I don't think you understand the essential question to people. The question is, will X work with what I already have? People already have an iPod, they already have WoW, they already have photoshop, they already have Office, furthermore, they have hundreds of thousands of bytes of data in those apps. They may be willing to move and they may be willing to port, but it's not going to happen all at once, so whatever they get that's new, has to work with what they have that's old. ESR's point is that Vista is propting some huge hardware upgrades and the move to new processors will do the same. When confronted with Windows, Mac or Linux to put on their new machine (or when confronted with a new machine that includes W,M or L) the question will not be "why does my current product not work with L" it will always be (and rightfuly so) "Why doesn't L work with my current product." It is the battle Apple fought for years and is now seeing the bennefits of being compatible with existing installs. The method linux needs to take is one of sneaking in and becoming casualy a part of life. People don't like change and if you can make linux the smallest change possible, then you'll get more people.
Slashdot Mirror
But you are assuming that one instance of failure destroys your credit history and that just is not true. Believe it or not you can actualy work with most of these companies to arrange payments, especialy if you've fallen on financial hardships. The trick is though, that it takes work (and paperwork) and it takes a bit of foresight. The longer you wait before you seek help or reprives the harder it will be to get them. Speaking as someone who's been there and had to make decisions like which bill to pay this month, it's not easy and it doesn't mean you'll preserve your pristine credit rating but it's better than not paying and hoping it goes away.
Very alarmist but hardly accurate. Let's take them 1 by 1.
If you're in a bad situation medicaly and you didnt' ask the hospital about help or financial programs then that's your own fault. I've been there and done that and seen entire debts erased because of "financial circumstances". Medical places are the most understanding and helpful when it comes to massive bills, and not talking to them and looking to work something out is a failure on your part.
As far as one months missed payment killing you, no that won't happen. And infact your story doesn't fit with that either. You said Mr. X was out of the country for months which means not one missed payment, but multiple missed payments, on multiple accounts, and all in a row. The fact that his friend was a jackass is sad to be true, but the debts were still his responsibility in the end and he should have been checking to ensure they were being paid. At the very least he could have gotten in touch with the companies he owed money to before leaving the country and looked into setting up an automatic draft or even better paying up front.
As far as senario 3 goes again, your fault for forgetting about the card. But further more, one joint account it not going to make an employer not hire you (and if it does did you really want to work for them anyway). I don't know if you've ever seen a real credit report (not a credit score) but they are extremely detailed and this account would be an oddity in a sea of other accounts.
Ok, he maxed out his cards, so what? What is he doing about it is what matters. I don't know if you've ever seen a full credit report but they're pretty detailed including number of on time payments, number of late payments and number of over the limit charges. If he maxed his cards but has been making steady regular payments, his history will still be good. It may not be great but as an employer I'm concerned with how you're handling your obligations, not how many you have.
Possibly, but I doubt it. To consumers DRM is just another format, like CD, VHS, Beta or what have you. In the end you have to convert. They've done it before (8track to audio to CD) and they're doing it again (VHS to DVD) and they will do it again (iTunes to format du jour). It's also worth noting that just because you're in an un DRMed format doesn't mean you'll be able to keep it forever without converting. When the next big thing rolls around for portable music players, MP3 can just as easily be left unsupported.
OTOH, in iTunes, you can just copy the file to an external/removeable disk and take it with you.
Go look around a college campus and see how few college students know what those are. It's actualy mildly frightening.
AFAIK the signing statements do not have the wieght of law and would not hold in court. That isn't to say that they won't be enacted for a short period of time (as the executive branch is the enforcement branch) but a lawsuit would end that real quick.
Why not just release the code into the public domain?
2/3 beats veto.
I hate that damn buzzword. Security through obscurity is a valid part of any security model. At some point every model relies on some information being unknown to outside people. Furthermore, not all security decisions and systems can be broken down like a computer system can. Blind spots are certainly not the best things in the world to have in your camera system, but sometimes (whether for economic reasons or simple space restrictions) you may need them. Not advertising to the world where your blind spots are is a valid way of helping to ensure your security.
It's not and should not be the only method used to secure something but obscurity is a useful part of a security tool kit.
If businesses paid a bit more attention to the machines they had, they might find they don't need as many new machines as often. I worked for a school system for a while that had a policy of using every machine until it died for good. If it could be repaired, and the cost of repair wasn't much more than a new unit, then it was repaired. While the central servers for the school were running off of brand spanking new systems, the monitor computer which did traffic reporting and system health monitoring was an old Mac Classic. Not every machine is useless just because it's not new.
It's better called a "refurbishing fee" or "rental fee". Any time a company does that, it's because they have to do some work to make the product sellable again and because they take a hit on it. And the reason companies charge such fees are all the morons who go out and buy new expensive electronics to use for 3 days and then return them for full refund. People do it all the time and it costs the company money, so they just pass those costs back on to everyone else. Unfortunately it's another case of a few people ruining it for everyone.
I see, so you're arguing that if customers know more about the product, even though they haven't signed an NDA it won't make the sales guys jobs harder? Like when you're in the store and some moron who downloaded the beta contradicts a sales guy talking to a different customer and the sales guy has no knowledge with which to counter those claims. "DTrace in OS X is incompatible with the output files of Solaris Dtrace. I tried and there was no way to get the standard files output. Buy a Lenovo." Is that a true statement or is the guy saying it just incompetent and did not bother using the CLI option? Is it optimal that an Apple sales employee doesn't even have a way to find out even though the average Joe on the street can with bittorrent and a little messing around?
Again, if the information is supposed to be public the sales person will have access to that information. You assume our retail sales joe average is even going to use DTrace. Furthermore, so what if the random customer who downloaded a pirated version says that, as you already pointed out, the software is beta, going from your assumption that the customer knows what that means, then all the sales person has to say is the software is not finalized and there's no way to say for sure. The customer could say that leapord killed his mother by causing the computer to emit brain eating cancer waves and it would be irellevant. The software is not finished and the features are not finalized and therefore what it can and can't do yet is irellevant to a sale's persons job.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, there is no legitimate reason the sales person in question would need access to the unfinished OS in the course of their job duties that would not be covered under the information that they would already have at their disposal.
Correction: Some manager took it upon himself to investigate a conversation Apple employees were having about Apple employees infringing on Apple's copyright and violating company property. These kids weren't talking about cracking a $20 shareware app, they were doing this with company property, if that isn't down right stupid I don't know what is. (And yes, they could have been fired for cracking the $20 app too, companies employing people they know to be actively breaking laws is a good way to get sued.)
Any NDA that i've seen from companies has always included a part (or at the least it's been a sperate company policy) on copyright infringement, especialy as it pertains to the companies own products. Furthermore, NDAs often cover unauthorized distribution AND acquisition of items covered under the NDA.
I reject your argument that customers are idiots and salespeople need to be forced by their own ignorance not to tell them anything not stupid simple.
Which is why I assert that you have never worked in retail sales.
Can you move all the Windows in a virtual desktop to another at once? Sure you just hit a key combination (shift-space) and it works. Would I remember that from reading through 10 pages of PR stuff? No. Would I remember it if I did it a few times to try it out? Yup. Are salespeople the same way? Probably. Can you have different windows of the same application on different desktops? What if you are on a third desktop and click the application icon in the dock, does it take you to one of those desktops? Which one? Having used the feature an employee can answer these questions and I don't think it is giving away anything to competitors or anyone else. Having just read the marketing stuff, an employee has no idea.
And if that is supposed to be public information why do you assume the sales person does not have access to that information? Do you know what information Apple provides it's sales people on the products? If not then why are you assuming that the information is not availible to them? The fact that they are unable to remember these facts without having an illicit copy of the OS is irellevant, they would still have access to the information through their approved channels. Again, if it's supposed to be public, they would have access to it.
Unless the employee happens to be a developer or happens to have downloaded a copy of the beta from one of the many Websites that are now hosting it. Then the customer has more info than the salesperson, which is not particularly good for business.
Right, the only way the customer would have more information than the sales person is if they've either signed an NDA and have the OS already (thus would not be asking the retail sales person about it) or if they have not signed the NDA and have the OS in which case the retail employee should not be discussing the information with the customer and the customer should again not be asking.
To quote myself:
No, store employees should not have it because they shouldn't be answering ANY questions. The beta is released to developers under NDA, that means no one should be talking about what is and isn't in it, and for a very good reason, features are subject to change. Compare the current views on Vista's ever shrinking feature list to the views of Leppords only half announced feature list. The fact that priates and competitors have it is irellevant, no part of the retail employee's job REQUIRES them to have or use the software.
And how do we know that these employee's remorse was any more or less sincere than a politician's? Going off track a hair here, politicians come from the public, not from some void, their ability to be incincere in their remorse is not a unique trait to them.
No, store employees should not have it because they shouldn't be answering ANY questions. The beta is released to developers under NDA, that means no one should be talking about what is and isn't in it, and for a very good reason, features are subject to change. Compare the current views on Vista's ever shrinking feature list to the views of Leppords only half announced feature list. The fact that priates and competitors have it is irellevant, no part of the retail employee's job REQUIRES them to have or use the software.
None of the people in question need to nor are currently supporting the non public beta of a non shipping product. Hell Apple doesn't even support public betas (see BootCamp). They did not need the software to do their jobs.
Wrong, none of these guys were supporting or developing the software they downloaded given that the software has not even been released yet.
You entirely missed reason 5:
The trade secret is enough of an edge in the current market to potentialy move themselves into the lead of their competition.
The value of the trade secret doesn't have to extend indefinately, just long enough to take market position.
Consider if ATI came up with some code that could get spectacular performance out of their graphics cards using half as much in terms of components as NVIDIA.
Eventualy NVIDIA will figure something out, either the same thing or just reverse engineer and develop their own version, either way is irellevant because at that point the trade secret is worht little to ATI, but for that 2, 3, 6 or 12 month period that it take NVIDIA to catch up, ATI has the edge, and has the chance to take market position.
By contrast, say ATI releases the source for their drivers and such with their new wonder card. It takes all of 5 minutes for NVIDIA to have someone take a drive to compUSA, buy a card and look at the source figure out how to do it and make their own.
And so on and so forth untill the worker becomes the manager, and because the manager when he was a worker did not believe in taking pride in his work and was shown that a company will therefore not take pride in him, he now believes that he should not take pride in his employees presuming them to be lazy slobs who will do the minimum neccesary for a pay check. And the cycle continues. I said nothing about the moral fiber of the company or those running the company. It should have been clear from my post that I was criticising the lack of pride people take in the work they do, and that it would extand not just to the janitors but to the CEO's as well. CEOs who don't take pride in their product and in their company (their work) will turn the company into little more than a sweat shop paying barely enough to keep employees. It's because the CEO's don't take pride in their work, and are again only concerned with material goods. A business owner who takes pride in his company will pay his employees as much as he can reasonably do so to generate a feeling of pride in the employees. He will then promote and keep the employees that take pride in their work because they are the ones who will make their salaries worth the expense.
And yes, I've seen both sides of the equation in action, and yes it does work. The net result is that theres a little less profit to go around, but the company is much better off than the competitors.
If your work is not a point of pride for you, then you need another job. If workers and employers took pride in their work, we would all be better off, but this is america, and we don't.
You can be interoperable without compromising the ultimate ideal. You have to do it the same way that everyone else does, by making the ideal the default, but easily allowing the alternative. Look at the way that both microsoft and apple operate to bring people into "their way of things" the default setting is "their way" (i.e. WMP defaults to WMA as an import format, and iTunes defaults to AAC) but with a simple change, both allow you use alternative formats (MP3, AIFF, WAV, what have you). Linux needs to work the same way to bring people into the fold. The default of course should be open and free, but it should not be a song and dance to operate with proprietary devices, just a switch. You could even do it transparently, much like iTunes for windows handles WMA (by converting it in the background). In the end, your goal should be making the free and open so much a part of normal everyday behaviors that when they run into something that isn't, they think twice. The goal should not be to make the change as jarring as possible, because change is bad, and therefore, linux or free and open protocols will be viewed as bad.
Make it easy for them to be free and open, and make it easy for what is already proprietary to be used in the free and open system and you will find that free and open will gain strength and acceptance.
I don't think you understand the essential question to people. The question is, will X work with what I already have? People already have an iPod, they already have WoW, they already have photoshop, they already have Office, furthermore, they have hundreds of thousands of bytes of data in those apps. They may be willing to move and they may be willing to port, but it's not going to happen all at once, so whatever they get that's new, has to work with what they have that's old. ESR's point is that Vista is propting some huge hardware upgrades and the move to new processors will do the same. When confronted with Windows, Mac or Linux to put on their new machine (or when confronted with a new machine that includes W,M or L) the question will not be "why does my current product not work with L" it will always be (and rightfuly so) "Why doesn't L work with my current product." It is the battle Apple fought for years and is now seeing the bennefits of being compatible with existing installs. The method linux needs to take is one of sneaking in and becoming casualy a part of life. People don't like change and if you can make linux the smallest change possible, then you'll get more people.