Aw, c'mon, spare the strawman. That's a no-brainer. You don't keep their "My Documents" in the VM but link it to someplace in the Linux file system where it's regularly backed up. (You DO know that all Windows system directories can be easily symlinked or moved, yes?) Add in Subversion and you can even have something similar to the Time Machine feature the upcoming OSX 10.5 will have, even if it won't be as accessible for the lusers. (But as they always refer to me first when they lose something instead of even searching for it locally... you get the point.)
No, I'm not a Linux priest at all. I'm just being pragmatic and going the way of the highest maintainability. Plus, I'm fed up with repairing stuff that broke because people keep downloading warez to perform basic stuff every other fricking OS has legally available for free.
And I think you're not considering my target audience enough. We're talking about people who have no clue whatsoever and just want to surf the web, write e-mail, rip their music CDs to MP3s and listen to them, and maybe some misc stuff like converting their vinyl to CDs or burning DVDs of the family holiday videos. They don't know how to do it at all, and I'll rather keep them warez-free and get a maintainable system as a bonus. For them it doesn't make a difference what they use, as they couldn't tell Windows from Linux anyways.
Probably not, no idea, but I couldn't care less. All DX gamers I know are teens, and I don't help those beyond some pointers on what to google. They're young enough to either learn how to run a Windows machine or go dual-boot. I've helped some with the latter, but won't support it. I've got enough already with the older folks.
No idea, probably not, but really I couldn't care less. All DX gamers I know are teens, and I'd *never* help one of those. They're young enough to either learn how to run a Windows machine or go dual-boot. I've explained the latter to some, but won't support it. I've got enough with the old folk already.
Um, you know, that is basically what virtualization is meant for, and it's common practice in *every* company with more than 5-10 servers. I'm a bit surprised this makes for a "+4, Informative" on a technical site like the dot.
I wonder why all the Linux priests here on the dot don't get that Virtualization is the magic key to drive Linux adoption among the typical Windows luser crowd. Since VMware Server was free, I've converted almost *everybody* I help with computers to kubuntu with VMware running a XP VM for the few things that people "need to keep" like say Quicken or their exotic label printers' proprietary software or whatnot. I notice that people don't panic because Windows is "still around", but when I give them a short introduction to their new system, I use Linux software all the time, and present Windows at the end with the comment "oh and if you need your label printer, just fire up this windows button (VMware link on desktop) and off you go.
Just snapshot their Windows VM after configuring it, and when it unavoidably fubars, you just login remotely via ssh with X forwarding, launch the VMware console and revert the VM to the snapshot.
This takes around half an hour longer than giving them Windows-only, but it will save you a *ton* of grief even short-term. I have relatives who fuck up their Windows installations at least biweekly. I've shown them the 'revert' button and put the snapshot on "protected", so they can never fuck up beyond all repair anymore. None of them has managed to do *any* harm to the k|ubuntu I gave them, and there are real boneheads among them.
You know, Spiderman isn't about realism, as the stories arise from the Marvel comic character... Spiderman. I *expect* the slightly-off physics in such a movie.
I'm with you and agree to your point if you look at movies which are set in a realistic environment and the modified physics aren't part of the visual concept. But Spiderman (or Matrix or LOTR or...) is a bad example for your point.
In some applications, I take a hybrid approach. For example, when using Inkscape or Corel Draw (which have similar interfaces and shortcuts), I might click on an object, and then say, press Ctrl+D to duplicate. Or I might click on text and then hit Ctrl+T to bring up the text editing dialog.
You're spot on. Watch any professional Photoshopper. I work in advertising and *all* Photoshoppers work like that. They will always have one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, using the mouse to do their magic and switch tools and enter parameters with the other hand. I once had a coworker who was *incredible* in Photoshop, and watching him was an enlightening experience. If he'd need to draw a path, he'd use the Alt, Ctrl and Apple keys to change bezier dot types on the fly and be done with the most complicated paths in seconds even good people would need several minutes for.
Then again, people marvel at me when they see me debugging code on the fly, switching between several applications on several screens, and I don't use the mouse at all for that. So what's most efficient differs a huge deal from task to task. That's why designing a UI is so damn hard. It must be usable for all types of crowds from the "what is this foot pedal for?" camp to the shortcut-fu types. IMO, Linux and OSX are best here, stressing different aspects, though.
I have only had ONE on any Mac running Mac OS X. That was because I had the buggy version of the WiFi driver (fixed now) and I hit a WiFi access point that was malfunctioning.
Oh, there was a time (must have been in the 10.2/10.3 days, don't remember exactly) when I had those on a regular basis. I'm the CTO of an advertising agency, and we had about 60 OSX Macs in a homogenous network with a multi-NIC FreeBSD 4 router which spoke AppleTalk for the Macs (lots of OS9-Macs) and TCP/IP for the civilized world. Due to reasons unknown, the AppleTalk daemon (atalkd) tended to slow down to a crawl sometimes, rendering the network almost unusable for the AppleTalk machines. (TCP/IP was unaffected.) Someone would then simply SIGHUP atalkd, which would remove the problems for the OS9 machines, but would panic a good portion of the OSX machines. We eventually threw out atalkd when we bought an XServe, which would run flawlessly.
Funny about that was that all machines were setup from the same image and shared the same configuration, so a software bug should be out, and the problems would occur to different machines each time it happened (around twice a week near the end), be it G3s, G4s, G5s... Interesting heisenbug.
A bit OT, but can you give me a hint on what to google for to find more information about that garbage-as-large-as-Texas-stuff? I haven't heard of that and would love to know more.
Re:A question for large print graphics designers..
on
The History of Photoshop
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know, I'm the CTO of a pre-press shop with 30 employees, and we often deal with way larger amounts of money you talk about. At the moment I'm working on a web-to-print project for a major car manufacturer which will be used to have around 1600 dealerships customize, order and distribute brochures that will be distributed by TNT Germany-wide. We're talking about 35,000,000 copies here. That's business as usual for us, and we're a small shop. Forget those $57,500. The cost of a failure can easily propel into the millions. I'm sure the majority of players in the advertising chain deal with much larger numbers than those you quoted on a regular basis.
That said, you're *so* spot on. A wrong logo color or even the "haptic sensation" of the paper can drive clients *really* mad. So you just don't fiddle around with something like the GIMP, you just buy the CS Suite licenses you need and have them paid off the same month you purchased them. Because, you know, there's always someone like me between agency and the printer, and you can bet I make sure that I deliver the data with the correct colors (actually, it's even a profession of it's own here). Usually that means PDF X/3, too, so if the colors come out wrong, I can just pull out the PDF I sent and show that the logo color indeed is set to the correct Pantone 12345, and therefore demonstrate that it's clearly the printer who fucked it up. Things like that happen regularly, and decide whether you keep getting those projects in the future.
To sum it up for all those morons who think because the GIMP is good enough for them, it should be good enough for everyone:
You don't put people's jobs, and therefore the income of themselves and their *families*, at risk for those ridiculous few thousand bucks the CS suite costs (updates are quite cheap BTW). Period. This is the Real Business World(TM), and if there's a relatively cheap, proven toolset that does everything you need and much more, I'll use it. And that's what everyone does and why Adobe have sold so many copies.
And spare me the "But it's Free Software!" You go ahead and tell that to the people who lose their jobs. I'm sure their children will cheer in joy because at least, they support Free Software.
Excuse the rant but seriously, I'm getting tired with all those know-it-alls who don't know shit about actual professional work, or business decisions. I'm sick and tired of those perpetual, unchanged discussions everytime the topic Photoshop comes up. It remembers me why I don't read the dot much any more.
From a web application testing VM at work? No.:) Said VM is always restored from a standard snapshot, so I'm sure there's nothing like that installed.
But, having a closer look, I know what it might be - you were talking about http://user:pw@domain.tld/ but I was using ftp://user:pw@domain.tld (FTP instead of HTTP). Maybe they've disabled it for HTTP only? I can't test as I don't have a site available that would use HTTP auth in such a way that it could be accessed using said format... but FTP definitely works. We send links with one-time logins in emails every day and people can access them without problems.
Coincidentally I connected to something using that format five minutes ago, with IE7 and not having touched *any* settings. Maybe they MEANT to deactivate it and somehow... forgot?;)
No really, it works perfectly, from both IE and the regular Explorer address bar, under XP Professional SP2, with all patches (auto-update activated). Am I missing something?
Your post is a good example why geeks usually make for lousy businesspeople. Making the salespeople look dumb might be a satisfying prospect from the poor schmocks' perspective who has to code up the features, but for business it's among the worst things that can happen. And you know why?
Because the client will go "this product didn't do what I need and the salesperson even lied to me to get my money", and never do business with you again. And yes, he'll talk about it when meeting other businesspeople in his field, who are your prospective clients. You'd be amazed how quickly things like that get propagated throughout a field. I could go on for hours with war stories.
Coding up the features, OTOH, will just be billed by including the cost in the price of the product, so it generates revenue for you, and you (usually) gain a happy client who will come back to you when he needs more. If you can keep avoiding those who are never happy without getting the above multiplication effect, do so.
Of course the key account managers must be trained not to accept every crazy deadline or feature request. Feature requests and deadlines always are discussed with key account manager *and* IT, resulting in better (and workable) specifications and quotes on the cost. Everybody wins. Unfortunately, not many businesses realize this yet. Of course, you also need people who both are deeply involved in development of the product *and* have the personality and social skills to have direct contact with the client, which seems to be the biggest problem as those people are rare. Being a former code monkey myself, I must admit that among ourselves there aren't many who will feel good and perform well in direct contact with high-level execs or representatives of global corporations.
(I know above effects from personal experience. We had some serious nuts in sales for a painfully long period of time, so I feel your pain.)
linux has the issue that windows programs don't work on it, even with WINE there are issues sometimes
It used to when WINE was the only way apart from dual-boot, because WINE is impossible to understand for a layman. Now that VMware Server is available for free, I simply run self-made Windows VMs. I only have a 800MHz PIII with 512 MB RAM, but it runs one VM at a time impressively quick, which is all I need. The second VM running will of course get it swapping , resulting in a severe performance drop, but you can pause all VMs you have and switch between them with two clicks of a mouse, with no noticeable delay.
Oh, and through ssh/X11 forwarding I can use my VMs from the Powerbook also, for which VMware is not (and won't be) available. With good performance even, though the ssh encryption + VMware will increase the CPU load to 60-70% when I access the machine through a gigabit connection (as opposed to accessing it through the Internet at work with 300kB/s max).
Windows on Linux is not rocket science anymore. I dunno what this virtualization stuff is which is included in the new Mandriva, but I have it already running in a VM and get to test it in the next days. I'd rather use open source than a commercial product, but for now I'm happy with my VMware.
I figure you don't have children. The FBI (and legal entities all over the world except for Thailand et al.) is cracking down on it because it's among the worst crimes there are, in the same league as torture and rape. Screw those idiots who send money to people without having the goods first.
Notice that I don't think new or stricter laws are necessary, I rather consider them counter-productive. All those thinkofthechildrenisms are a joke. When I was a kid, there weren't all those crazy laws we have today, and we got it much better than today's kids who are all treated as if they were potential amokers or terrorists, and barely capable of getting *anything* right for themselves. If I had been treated like this, I'd probably have rebeled *much* more, and the same is true for today's kids for sure. I make sure my kids feel valued and value other people, and know what they want and what they don't, and the rest will follow. If it's hard, oh well, so was it for my parents, it's only fair.;)
I dunno. Bockmist is pretty uncommon here (Ruhrpott), used mainly by old people or children. A sharply pronounced Blödsinn has a lot of impact in my experience, so it's what I used in the OP.
Quatsch or Humbug are also pretty regional, I think, as your suggestion of Bockmist, so we can well attest the German language the lack of a good equivalent for 'bullshit'. Maybe this is why you hear 'bullshit' more and more often these days...
I have no idea why you're getting modded down, you have some valid points.
So, to answer your question, you cannot accumulate so much vacation here in Germany neither - you have to take any vacation that's left in the first quarter of the following year. It's just that I worked so much, and current projects don't allow for vacation until April or May, that I let them give me in writing that the vacation can be transferred to my 2007 vacation time. So it's not the norm, but you see I'm the CTO and told them that there's no way I let the vacation expire, so they could choose whether they let me transfer the free days or be stuck without a CTO during February and March. We're a small shop, and an open discussion goes a long way. Also, I'm here for ten years, so they know I'm not trying to extort them, but am actually offering a fair deal.
As for the overtime, unions are very strong here in Germany, and so we all got paid overtime here. I'm in advertising, so this isn't just unusual, but shockingly so - at least for the other poor guys in the shops who don't have it.
You see, I know I'm quite lucky with some things where I work. But it doesn't keep me from finding a new job, as working here has become *so* shitty, with me not having had a single day of vacation for more than a year at pretty mediocre pay and the whole company going downhill with the PHB who replaced the Chaos Troopers who were CEO's before, so go figure.
Abandoning the job sounds pretty nice (and pretty Polish *g*, I had lots of Polish friends and it fits their sense of humor), but I wonder - why would any company put a shorter notice period in the contract if you're free to ignore it anyway?
It's the same here - it can be anything up to six months (so usually it *is* six months), and you can get instantly fired without reason. Many employers use this to temporarily hire people and get rid of them the week (or even day) before the period is up.
In Germany, the standard is four weeks to the end of the month or the 15th of the month, unless your contract states something else. If I were offered a contract telling me I had to wait three months until I can walk away, I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Also, companies want to get rid of people *quicker*, that's why there is so much discussion in Germany about changing the work laws to allow companies to fire people with no delay whatsoever.
Notice there's a difference in whether you're quitting or you're fired. You can always quit with four weeks notice, but if they want to fire you, it depends on how long you work at the place. A coworker has been fired after 11 years at the company and they had to give her four months notice.
There go my mod points, but this was SO wrong I had to jump in.
As a side note - I've got so much overtime and vacation left that when I find a new job, I can leave the same minute and they still have to pay me for eight weeks. (Of course I will offer to freelance at a fair rate to not endanger my projects, but that's only because I don't want to leave my coworkers stuck in the shit.) So there are your "three months notice".
You don't have to be that quick - it takes only a fraction of a second to identify credentials in the data stream and send them to fucked.bank.com to wire yourself a nice amount. The user gets 'service unavailable', of course. If you're lucky, the user retries. Several times.
Remember, if you're on the machine, you can simply MITM *everything* and do with it as you please.
There are enough vulnerable Windows machines on the net. If you behave well enough for some time (not provoking a reinstallation of your host), I imagine you could build quite a nice botnet. While you're waiting for your botnet to grow, you can take your time taking some proxy and teach it how to deal with as many different banks as you want. After all, you only need to identify the credentials, intercept them, show the 503, and fire off a script which wires the correct amount of money (different banks have different defaults for the highest allowed wired amount, and you want to avoid wiring too little (=less money for you, bad) or too much (no transaction, credentials are wasted, you're making noise)).
Really, someone with the skill to do something like this (actually, well documented on the net and learnable in, say, a few days to weeks depending on what you already know) and enough of a criminal attitude could get amazingly rich, and probably even get applause from the hacker crowd for teaching the public about the importance of computer security, and the obscene security holes in large parts of the Internet-connected machines. The political effects and collateral damage would prove really interesting.
Maybe the hacker community even needs something like this to understand that they have legit cases, and lots of them. I'm not seing serious political lobbying from hackers, and I think it's a grave mistake. We need to put an end to a legislation by people who completely clueless about *everything*, including the chances and dangers of a global network, um, I mean, series of tubes. (Not trucks. Mind you.) We need hacker politicians to solve the political aspects of the net, and technology in general. Any other group of experts do this, only we hackers don't. I wonder why. I wonder if we really only are a bunch of obscure wizards who can't agree on anything because of HEY NOBODY SPEAKS FOR ME I AM AN INDIVIDUAL!
OK, that's the feds at the door, I s'pose. I better go open before they kick in the door. Was nice talking to you guys. Bye.
Jokes aside, and back on-topic, I lack the criminal energy and skills to really implement something like this, but I'm sure there are enough socially-inept-type hackers who could easily do it. Maybe it's happening while I write this. Probably it is. After all, times are obviously still good for worm writers, if I look at all the security advisories in my work inbox.
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Aw, c'mon, spare the strawman. That's a no-brainer. You don't keep their "My Documents" in the VM but link it to someplace in the Linux file system where it's regularly backed up. (You DO know that all Windows system directories can be easily symlinked or moved, yes?) Add in Subversion and you can even have something similar to the Time Machine feature the upcoming OSX 10.5 will have, even if it won't be as accessible for the lusers. (But as they always refer to me first when they lose something instead of even searching for it locally... you get the point.)
No, I'm not a Linux priest at all. I'm just being pragmatic and going the way of the highest maintainability. Plus, I'm fed up with repairing stuff that broke because people keep downloading warez to perform basic stuff every other fricking OS has legally available for free.
And I think you're not considering my target audience enough. We're talking about people who have no clue whatsoever and just want to surf the web, write e-mail, rip their music CDs to MP3s and listen to them, and maybe some misc stuff like converting their vinyl to CDs or burning DVDs of the family holiday videos. They don't know how to do it at all, and I'll rather keep them warez-free and get a maintainable system as a bonus. For them it doesn't make a difference what they use, as they couldn't tell Windows from Linux anyways.
Probably not, no idea, but I couldn't care less. All DX gamers I know are teens, and I don't help those beyond some pointers on what to google. They're young enough to either learn how to run a Windows machine or go dual-boot. I've helped some with the latter, but won't support it. I've got enough already with the older folks.
No idea, probably not, but really I couldn't care less. All DX gamers I know are teens, and I'd *never* help one of those. They're young enough to either learn how to run a Windows machine or go dual-boot. I've explained the latter to some, but won't support it. I've got enough with the old folk already.
Um, you know, that is basically what virtualization is meant for, and it's common practice in *every* company with more than 5-10 servers. I'm a bit surprised this makes for a "+4, Informative" on a technical site like the dot.
I wonder why all the Linux priests here on the dot don't get that Virtualization is the magic key to drive Linux adoption among the typical Windows luser crowd. Since VMware Server was free, I've converted almost *everybody* I help with computers to kubuntu with VMware running a XP VM for the few things that people "need to keep" like say Quicken or their exotic label printers' proprietary software or whatnot. I notice that people don't panic because Windows is "still around", but when I give them a short introduction to their new system, I use Linux software all the time, and present Windows at the end with the comment "oh and if you need your label printer, just fire up this windows button (VMware link on desktop) and off you go.
Just snapshot their Windows VM after configuring it, and when it unavoidably fubars, you just login remotely via ssh with X forwarding, launch the VMware console and revert the VM to the snapshot.
This takes around half an hour longer than giving them Windows-only, but it will save you a *ton* of grief even short-term. I have relatives who fuck up their Windows installations at least biweekly. I've shown them the 'revert' button and put the snapshot on "protected", so they can never fuck up beyond all repair anymore. None of them has managed to do *any* harm to the k|ubuntu I gave them, and there are real boneheads among them.
Yeah, as it was in South Africa not too long ago.
This must be the best summary I've ever seen for any FA. That's all I wanted to know.
NEXT!
You know, Spiderman isn't about realism, as the stories arise from the Marvel comic character... Spiderman. I *expect* the slightly-off physics in such a movie.
I'm with you and agree to your point if you look at movies which are set in a realistic environment and the modified physics aren't part of the visual concept. But Spiderman (or Matrix or LOTR or...) is a bad example for your point.
You're spot on. Watch any professional Photoshopper. I work in advertising and *all* Photoshoppers work like that. They will always have one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, using the mouse to do their magic and switch tools and enter parameters with the other hand. I once had a coworker who was *incredible* in Photoshop, and watching him was an enlightening experience. If he'd need to draw a path, he'd use the Alt, Ctrl and Apple keys to change bezier dot types on the fly and be done with the most complicated paths in seconds even good people would need several minutes for.
Then again, people marvel at me when they see me debugging code on the fly, switching between several applications on several screens, and I don't use the mouse at all for that. So what's most efficient differs a huge deal from task to task. That's why designing a UI is so damn hard. It must be usable for all types of crowds from the "what is this foot pedal for?" camp to the shortcut-fu types. IMO, Linux and OSX are best here, stressing different aspects, though.
Oh, there was a time (must have been in the 10.2/10.3 days, don't remember exactly) when I had those on a regular basis. I'm the CTO of an advertising agency, and we had about 60 OSX Macs in a homogenous network with a multi-NIC FreeBSD 4 router which spoke AppleTalk for the Macs (lots of OS9-Macs) and TCP/IP for the civilized world. Due to reasons unknown, the AppleTalk daemon (atalkd) tended to slow down to a crawl sometimes, rendering the network almost unusable for the AppleTalk machines. (TCP/IP was unaffected.) Someone would then simply SIGHUP atalkd, which would remove the problems for the OS9 machines, but would panic a good portion of the OSX machines. We eventually threw out atalkd when we bought an XServe, which would run flawlessly.
Funny about that was that all machines were setup from the same image and shared the same configuration, so a software bug should be out, and the problems would occur to different machines each time it happened (around twice a week near the end), be it G3s, G4s, G5s... Interesting heisenbug.
A bit OT, but can you give me a hint on what to google for to find more information about that garbage-as-large-as-Texas-stuff? I haven't heard of that and would love to know more.
*LOL* - mind if I sig you?
You know, I'm the CTO of a pre-press shop with 30 employees, and we often deal with way larger amounts of money you talk about. At the moment I'm working on a web-to-print project for a major car manufacturer which will be used to have around 1600 dealerships customize, order and distribute brochures that will be distributed by TNT Germany-wide. We're talking about 35,000,000 copies here. That's business as usual for us, and we're a small shop. Forget those $57,500. The cost of a failure can easily propel into the millions. I'm sure the majority of players in the advertising chain deal with much larger numbers than those you quoted on a regular basis.
That said, you're *so* spot on. A wrong logo color or even the "haptic sensation" of the paper can drive clients *really* mad. So you just don't fiddle around with something like the GIMP, you just buy the CS Suite licenses you need and have them paid off the same month you purchased them. Because, you know, there's always someone like me between agency and the printer, and you can bet I make sure that I deliver the data with the correct colors (actually, it's even a profession of it's own here). Usually that means PDF X/3, too, so if the colors come out wrong, I can just pull out the PDF I sent and show that the logo color indeed is set to the correct Pantone 12345, and therefore demonstrate that it's clearly the printer who fucked it up. Things like that happen regularly, and decide whether you keep getting those projects in the future.
To sum it up for all those morons who think because the GIMP is good enough for them, it should be good enough for everyone:
You don't put people's jobs, and therefore the income of themselves and their *families*, at risk for those ridiculous few thousand bucks the CS suite costs (updates are quite cheap BTW). Period. This is the Real Business World(TM), and if there's a relatively cheap, proven toolset that does everything you need and much more, I'll use it. And that's what everyone does and why Adobe have sold so many copies.
And spare me the "But it's Free Software!" You go ahead and tell that to the people who lose their jobs. I'm sure their children will cheer in joy because at least, they support Free Software.
Excuse the rant but seriously, I'm getting tired with all those know-it-alls who don't know shit about actual professional work, or business decisions. I'm sick and tired of those perpetual, unchanged discussions everytime the topic Photoshop comes up. It remembers me why I don't read the dot much any more.
From a web application testing VM at work? No.
But, having a closer look, I know what it might be - you were talking about http://user:pw@domain.tld/ but I was using ftp://user:pw@domain.tld (FTP instead of HTTP). Maybe they've disabled it for HTTP only? I can't test as I don't have a site available that would use HTTP auth in such a way that it could be accessed using said format... but FTP definitely works. We send links with one-time logins in emails every day and people can access them without problems.
Coincidentally I connected to something using that format five minutes ago, with IE7 and not having touched *any* settings. Maybe they MEANT to deactivate it and somehow... forgot? ;)
No really, it works perfectly, from both IE and the regular Explorer address bar, under XP Professional SP2, with all patches (auto-update activated). Am I missing something?
Your post is a good example why geeks usually make for lousy businesspeople. Making the salespeople look dumb might be a satisfying prospect from the poor schmocks' perspective who has to code up the features, but for business it's among the worst things that can happen. And you know why?
Because the client will go "this product didn't do what I need and the salesperson even lied to me to get my money", and never do business with you again. And yes, he'll talk about it when meeting other businesspeople in his field, who are your prospective clients. You'd be amazed how quickly things like that get propagated throughout a field. I could go on for hours with war stories.
Coding up the features, OTOH, will just be billed by including the cost in the price of the product, so it generates revenue for you, and you (usually) gain a happy client who will come back to you when he needs more. If you can keep avoiding those who are never happy without getting the above multiplication effect, do so.
Of course the key account managers must be trained not to accept every crazy deadline or feature request. Feature requests and deadlines always are discussed with key account manager *and* IT, resulting in better (and workable) specifications and quotes on the cost. Everybody wins. Unfortunately, not many businesses realize this yet. Of course, you also need people who both are deeply involved in development of the product *and* have the personality and social skills to have direct contact with the client, which seems to be the biggest problem as those people are rare. Being a former code monkey myself, I must admit that among ourselves there aren't many who will feel good and perform well in direct contact with high-level execs or representatives of global corporations.
(I know above effects from personal experience. We had some serious nuts in sales for a painfully long period of time, so I feel your pain.)
It used to when WINE was the only way apart from dual-boot, because WINE is impossible to understand for a layman. Now that VMware Server is available for free, I simply run self-made Windows VMs. I only have a 800MHz PIII with 512 MB RAM, but it runs one VM at a time impressively quick, which is all I need. The second VM running will of course get it swapping , resulting in a severe performance drop, but you can pause all VMs you have and switch between them with two clicks of a mouse, with no noticeable delay.
Oh, and through ssh/X11 forwarding I can use my VMs from the Powerbook also, for which VMware is not (and won't be) available. With good performance even, though the ssh encryption + VMware will increase the CPU load to 60-70% when I access the machine through a gigabit connection (as opposed to accessing it through the Internet at work with 300kB/s max).
Windows on Linux is not rocket science anymore. I dunno what this virtualization stuff is which is included in the new Mandriva, but I have it already running in a VM and get to test it in the next days. I'd rather use open source than a commercial product, but for now I'm happy with my VMware.
I figure you don't have children. The FBI (and legal entities all over the world except for Thailand et al.) is cracking down on it because it's among the worst crimes there are, in the same league as torture and rape. Screw those idiots who send money to people without having the goods first.
;)
Notice that I don't think new or stricter laws are necessary, I rather consider them counter-productive. All those thinkofthechildrenisms are a joke. When I was a kid, there weren't all those crazy laws we have today, and we got it much better than today's kids who are all treated as if they were potential amokers or terrorists, and barely capable of getting *anything* right for themselves. If I had been treated like this, I'd probably have rebeled *much* more, and the same is true for today's kids for sure. I make sure my kids feel valued and value other people, and know what they want and what they don't, and the rest will follow. If it's hard, oh well, so was it for my parents, it's only fair.
(Modded OT in 3...2...1...)
The interesting question here is: How do you know that we *aren't* the remainder of such a colonization?
I dunno. Bockmist is pretty uncommon here (Ruhrpott), used mainly by old people or children. A sharply pronounced Blödsinn has a lot of impact in my experience, so it's what I used in the OP.
Quatsch or Humbug are also pretty regional, I think, as your suggestion of Bockmist, so we can well attest the German language the lack of a good equivalent for 'bullshit'. Maybe this is why you hear 'bullshit' more and more often these days...
I have no idea why you're getting modded down, you have some valid points.
So, to answer your question, you cannot accumulate so much vacation here in Germany neither - you have to take any vacation that's left in the first quarter of the following year. It's just that I worked so much, and current projects don't allow for vacation until April or May, that I let them give me in writing that the vacation can be transferred to my 2007 vacation time. So it's not the norm, but you see I'm the CTO and told them that there's no way I let the vacation expire, so they could choose whether they let me transfer the free days or be stuck without a CTO during February and March. We're a small shop, and an open discussion goes a long way. Also, I'm here for ten years, so they know I'm not trying to extort them, but am actually offering a fair deal.
As for the overtime, unions are very strong here in Germany, and so we all got paid overtime here. I'm in advertising, so this isn't just unusual, but shockingly so - at least for the other poor guys in the shops who don't have it.
You see, I know I'm quite lucky with some things where I work. But it doesn't keep me from finding a new job, as working here has become *so* shitty, with me not having had a single day of vacation for more than a year at pretty mediocre pay and the whole company going downhill with the PHB who replaced the Chaos Troopers who were CEO's before, so go figure.
Abandoning the job sounds pretty nice (and pretty Polish *g*, I had lots of Polish friends and it fits their sense of humor), but I wonder - why would any company put a shorter notice period in the contract if you're free to ignore it anyway?
It's the same here - it can be anything up to six months (so usually it *is* six months), and you can get instantly fired without reason. Many employers use this to temporarily hire people and get rid of them the week (or even day) before the period is up.
Blödsinn. (Bullshit, for our English readers.)
In Germany, the standard is four weeks to the end of the month or the 15th of the month, unless your contract states something else. If I were offered a contract telling me I had to wait three months until I can walk away, I'd ask them to have their heads examined. Also, companies want to get rid of people *quicker*, that's why there is so much discussion in Germany about changing the work laws to allow companies to fire people with no delay whatsoever.
Notice there's a difference in whether you're quitting or you're fired. You can always quit with four weeks notice, but if they want to fire you, it depends on how long you work at the place. A coworker has been fired after 11 years at the company and they had to give her four months notice.
There go my mod points, but this was SO wrong I had to jump in.
As a side note - I've got so much overtime and vacation left that when I find a new job, I can leave the same minute and they still have to pay me for eight weeks. (Of course I will offer to freelance at a fair rate to not endanger my projects, but that's only because I don't want to leave my coworkers stuck in the shit.) So there are your "three months notice".
You don't have to be that quick - it takes only a fraction of a second to identify credentials in the data stream and send them to fucked.bank.com to wire yourself a nice amount. The user gets 'service unavailable', of course. If you're lucky, the user retries. Several times.
Remember, if you're on the machine, you can simply MITM *everything* and do with it as you please.
There are enough vulnerable Windows machines on the net. If you behave well enough for some time (not provoking a reinstallation of your host), I imagine you could build quite a nice botnet. While you're waiting for your botnet to grow, you can take your time taking some proxy and teach it how to deal with as many different banks as you want. After all, you only need to identify the credentials, intercept them, show the 503, and fire off a script which wires the correct amount of money (different banks have different defaults for the highest allowed wired amount, and you want to avoid wiring too little (=less money for you, bad) or too much (no transaction, credentials are wasted, you're making noise)).
Really, someone with the skill to do something like this (actually, well documented on the net and learnable in, say, a few days to weeks depending on what you already know) and enough of a criminal attitude could get amazingly rich, and probably even get applause from the hacker crowd for teaching the public about the importance of computer security, and the obscene security holes in large parts of the Internet-connected machines. The political effects and collateral damage would prove really interesting.
Maybe the hacker community even needs something like this to understand that they have legit cases, and lots of them. I'm not seing serious political lobbying from hackers, and I think it's a grave mistake. We need to put an end to a legislation by people who completely clueless about *everything*, including the chances and dangers of a global network, um, I mean, series of tubes. (Not trucks. Mind you.) We need hacker politicians to solve the political aspects of the net, and technology in general. Any other group of experts do this, only we hackers don't. I wonder why. I wonder if we really only are a bunch of obscure wizards who can't agree on anything because of HEY NOBODY SPEAKS FOR ME I AM AN INDIVIDUAL!
OK, that's the feds at the door, I s'pose. I better go open before they kick in the door. Was nice talking to you guys. Bye.
Jokes aside, and back on-topic, I lack the criminal energy and skills to really implement something like this, but I'm sure there are enough socially-inept-type hackers who could easily do it. Maybe it's happening while I write this. Probably it is. After all, times are obviously still good for worm writers, if I look at all the security advisories in my work inbox.