Yes, but ADC is what we WANT! It's unique in that it uses standard DVI spec for analog and digital video + it has powered usb connections...allowing you to control the monitor directly from the computer, or to plug in keyboards, monitors, without ANOTHER plug running to your desk....
It's quick and simple to convert VGA or DVI to ADC...[the other way around is tough though due to apple using USB to control the monitors] There's no reason for everybody not to use the best and sell a $10 retail doggle to "dumb" it down...it's a chicken-egg-omlet problem.
I always thought it was actually an accident of the original electrical layout of the keyboard that allowed those keys [+ their internal contacts] to pull up the reset line....but this guy was the first to realize that and codify it?
there isn't any precedent for this yet. this guy's not actually setting up the cameras, or physically tresspassing on the property to "modify" them...he's just picking up the over the air broadcast. This was a similar issue with cordless phones in the beginning too. In those cases courts ruled that the early FM cordless phones were legal to "listen" to. Of course the phone makers went to 900MhZ for digital [one step harder] and 2.4 & 5GHz to add spread spectrum and ditigal encoding...so they can DMCA anybody who taps them now.
Best bet would be for wireless cams to push out some heavy duty encryption into the cameras...then at least you'd have hacking charges to bring against the guy....moral of the story: use wires whenever possible!!!
Honestly, why should another employer care? After all, it's not like anybody give proper notice of layoffs anymore! If you've got another job, just go. Drop a note and leave...that saves you from embarassing yourself, and from any reprecussions the company may do...I have worked for at least 3 places where the bosses fired people for giving notice!
Also, it helps to be up front with future employers that you left on bad terms with a past one. It would help to make sure you left a resignation letter, and take a copy with you if you think there'll be trouble. But seriously, if any company would reject you because of one critical [perhaps lying] past boss without your side of the story, they really aren't worth working for anyway...
To the poster above who's former boss tore them up, they can successfuly hire a lawyer against BOTH COMPANIES!!! Many companies simply will not give out employement info anymore...heck, even McDonald's has been successfully sued for actions of their mouthy managers...that dude screwed up big time...
For starts %0 hours a week is +1.5 extra FULL DAYS of work per week! 60 hours is +3 extra Full days per week....that is the problem. Most IT workers are still paid
The point is that most people weren't hired to work 60 hours a week. And when you confront employers with a %20 to %50 pay increase to compensate they get all mean and rude...and still don't back down from the OT.
You seem to work for a company that follows the "spirit" of the rules and not just the letter...I feel happy for you!
I agree with you that using "tradmarked" characters like Mickey Mouse without Disney permission should be prevented, but copyright protects individual works from reproduction, not derivive works... that's a key point.
In the music and book industry copyright is pretty clearcut. they print a CD or book and you buy it. After so many years you still have the book in your posession and my copy it at will...if anybody still cares. Corporations are abusing that part of the deal. That once the "cat is out of the bag", it's out for good, take the money and move on. The problem is that with media like movies or performances or software, the publishers are playing both sides against the middle. The ORIGINAL work is often never released...they aren't publishing a printed play, movie reel, or source code to their work...Those materials are never published into the wild, but are held by the publishers under licenses and returned to the publishers after running and often destroyed!...so they are not "publishing" anything...it's their trade secret. Much of the current copyright rule changes have hinged on that fact...Disney and other companies have held their sole internal copies hostage to get the rules changed...because they never released copies of much of the early works of Disney to the masses [i.e. publishing!!] they used their singular deteriorating copy as leverage to get the laws changed so they could charge again for more viewings. This is further complicated by pushes for DRM...where the copy is not real or persistant at all!!!! therefore in 20 years you will not have access to that information at all thru legal measures...or without taking extreme methods to archive media. That shouldn't count as a copyrightable material if it doesn't persist...because the point is to release the ideas into the wild...Which is actively being fought against.
You've got a great point...perhaps we should start locking up more people...entire factories if we have too. Perhaps the suits would follow the laws if they KNEW they were going to jail. That's the biggest problem...certian offences need to land the suits in JAIL irreguardless of money. It sounds cruel, but time in the slammer is the only real deterrant to corperate crimes nowdays...fines are a joke to a multi-billion dollar corporation...but tossing a few execs and board memembers in the clink with common thugs should get the point loud and clear!
More punishment needs to be meeted to stockholders too...perhaps the govt should start demanding investors or execs surrender stocks instead of fines! Of course closing companies would work too...it would make people think twice about passively allowign illegal activities to go on...and deny unemployment for those workers too...
If you want to get corps back in line treat them like you would the mob! That's what we want to do to SCO right...just like in the war on drugs and terror, lean on the little guys so they won't work for companies accused of illegal actions. Companies don't do business with each other or employees without background checks...it's time that employees had motivation to demand the same intrusive inqueries of their bosses!! The problem is that the "welfare" that the pundits decry allows them to make irresponsible choices and let the govt fix it. After all, if there weren't unemployement, FDIA, and such corps would have to be a lot more responsible for their actions and the damage they cause to employees and financial institutions.
With George at the helm the parent was spot on! Sure you can make and sell stuff in third world countries...but if it's shipping to USA...or sold to a US compan... or used to process stuff going to the USA [or europe]...you've gotta have a US patent or be in compliance with them. The long arm of US corps will see to that. Disagree and they'll lobby congress to label you "terrorist" and bomb you.
You don't gotta have a patent for things used outside the US, but the largest source of money is the US and Europe...you gotta play by the corperate rules to sell anything here...although with things like medicine many countries refuse to honor US patents. Other things like crops, we'll let our corps take food from starving african children [farm crop patents] to enforce our patent US "rights"... It's also why we won't see the chinese dragon processor based stuff here...
ASCAP is who you have to fear! They are FAR MORE STRONGARMED than the *IAAs!!
Having been in band in school, sheet music licenses are actually worse that the EULAs written by demon MS lawyers...You can't actually BUY sheet music of arranged pieces...you have to RENT it PER PERFORMANCE! OUCH!
sounds cool!
Particularly because Recipes are part data/ingredient manifest and part process order, mixing steps and settings. Solving a seemingly simple problem like this would have huge industrial applications as well!
Setting up such a system would require a most basic representation of the steps...because you can't try to assume every ingredient or tool necessary in the DTD, you'd have to have a way to represent the recipes without actually knowing [as the format creator] what was was actually in them. Wether it be flour, sugar, and eggs...or snips,snails and puppydog tails!
The poster has a point, that it's neat to use standard templates to convert XML formats. You are correct that it wouldn't be easy to do such conversions...of course it's not entirely necessary to do them either. The point the poster was making is that it's possible...look how many problems we still have simply displaying a MS Word format simply because it's binary!
I think you miss what XML formats were designed for. They designed XML to be flexible enough to represent high level concepts [like music notation!] in a standardized way. It doesn't mean it would be easy to make conversions, just to have a standardized way of doing so.
The creator's assumed using XML that you will have to have custom binary programs to implement the DTD's in some manner useful to the user of the data. That's what makes it so useful! They didn't put artificial binary constraints on creating formats. XSTL is again designed to make things possible not pretty. [the perl gurus here should understand that concept!] XML is met to be handled by machines. The point is to have self-documenting formats...so that 20 years from now when we all code with our brainwaves we can go back and understand [reverse engineer if we have to] the formats to retreive the data from them. Once you have to use data or databases from programmers 10 years ago, you'll understand that documention is a fickle thing...XML was designed to mitigate some of the mess that was Y2K when tons of data was lost to undocumented bianary formats and just sent to the landfill because nobody could figure it out!!!
Actually it addresses the need to have music represented...rather than just sounds. It's the difference between a movie and a screenplay. The movie is the finished product...that's nice. But the screen play tells What actors are doing, why the camera is there, etc...
It will do for music what CSS & XHTML with metatags do for printed text...Right now sheet music is still the standard for music notation...it's not couducive to archiving or sharing [sans simply scanning the paper copy] Imagine having the musical equivelant of Google where you can find a song by just a few notes...MusicXML allows you to develop that!
Once those tools are set we can take on plays, speech, and eventually source code too! This is one of the first really original uses of XML...what it was created to do!
no, I was reading at yahoo about the opening day of trial. She's accused of getting a tip to sell stock from an assistant of a broker that also delt with ImClone stock and somehow noted a sell off comming...They said she concocted a lie about placing a market order and that she also lied to her own investors to keep her companies stock from plunging [due to the news of her personal indescression?] How does claiming you're innocent of charges a crime? That's scary.
I mean if they're hauling her into court over NOT loosing $40,000 [? That's the value of what she sold, not even the amout of profit/loss?] what will they do when the SEC gets wind of the game SCO has been playing??? The fireworks should be fun! But I doubt the Utah branch will be that hard on SCO...or they'd have already acted publicly to take their stocks down!
On a side note, personally I think Martha's maybe guilty of acting on tip she shouldn't have gotten...but it's not her fault she got the tip...and you can't really expect somebody to be very financially responsible by loosing more money than they might have if they could have prevented it? if anything it's the broker's butt in a sling...the only reason I can see them going after Martha is that she's openly a good neighbor of Bill & Hillary in upstate New York...and the Feds have to LOOK like they're cracking down on sombody post-Enron for playing the stock market...of course looking at the VP for Iraq contracts to his former cronies isn't really an option...or HIS involvement with the Enron groupies? Go after the Democrat nevau-riche! yeah! The only explaination I can think of is that certian feds were trying to use the news of Martha's personal life to shake up her company and make her loose more money/position by "rumor"...there's no other explaination for the manor they've made every step extremely public...and tried to take her other invetors down with her. It's almost cliche Hollywood good cop/bad cop.
Read up on Martha Stewart's trial lately! The feds are raking her over for FAR less that SCO is doing right now. Let's hope they sic this same prosecutor on McBride & Co!!
Well you have to start a business in something you DO!
Remember, most software is written in-house by people for the company...or is bought by companies to "scratch and itch" in their specific industry. MS with all its money is only the tip of the iceberg! Think of all those things in your old business that should have been fixed...FIX THEM, then go back and show them how it's done!!! Because the company laid you off [set you free!], you can even go to their competitors and sell to them too.
If you're only after enough work to feed yourself, it doesn't take that much...especially when you consider that the company was willing to pay more than twice your wage for your work for them due to taxes, overhead, etc. If you can find about a dozen companies to need your services on a regular basis you can just about recover your salary from before...
The battery situation is already dealt with...most of the eInk solutions don't require power to keep the display...just to change it. The advantage then would be the ability to hold A LOT of maps in your pocket and switch them without digging around pockets! After all, how many pages of greyscale maps could a simple 64MB SD card hold... Of course being able to pull up maps from GPS or military planner data wouldn't hurt either.
Remember too that the eInk soulutions will reduce power requirements accross the board...PDAs will use less batteries...and they are sunlite [flashlight?] readable...no battery-sucking backlights. Also, larger sizes will be soon available...far cheaper than LCDs...so you could have 36" x 36" rollable maps INSTEAD of a standard laptop or PDA screen! Remember too, an old-school palm can go almost a month on a pair of AAAs. And soon We'll have chemicaly, replentishable fuel-cells for electronics too...hopefully shipping later this year!
That and it's about bragging rights....Duhh! Of course now they have the bragging rights, but suits say the meter is spinning a bit to fast for their wallets...so they'll have to upgrade to reduce costs...wonder if they'll add a few boxen to the farm...gotta keep up bragging rights!
I mean really, for a community that mothballs GFX 5900's because the 5950s came out...do we have to ask?
The problem is that the monopoly laws are only reactive not proactive... MS moves to fast and keeps the lawyers working OT to slow down the courts till it doesn't matter business wise anymore.
MS lawyers always argue "property rights", "rights to do business", "trade secrets", etc... The courts are really hesitant to step on any of those fundamental rights of businesses. Add to that the fact that judges can only rule on the case in front of them without reguard to other cases/laws/judgements and you have the MS shell game! MS can have a dozen cases at once...maybe even for the same thing...but the courts [and plaitifs] can't see them as a whole... In short, even the anti-trust judge can't hand down "guidlines" to other judges on how to handle MS cases because of the anti-trust jusgement... The problem is that MS can pick & choose it's lawsuits & how to respond, and let ITS lawyers use those cases as precedent...
You're right, it's not fair!!! That's why the Chief Execuitive is there to guide the govts' hand and catch this stuff...unfortunately this one doesn't think MS is a problem...
yes, but the key is that you can send OO.org files to other people now and have they can open them with FREE viewers! While oo.org, or abiword, or others are still new, they are free to run...so there's no excuse for many companies not to get a hold of a copy...especially if smaller businesses start using it! The bigger key is that EVERYONE ELSE is starting to use open formats...Old Word and WordPerfect is taken care of pretty well, and now the OS groups are starting to realize they need to share too. The break point will be when you can use OO.org, AbiWork, Koffice, etc. to create documents and share them with any of the other OSS programs without hassle...
Actually the corporations are what have ruined the "protestant" work ethic...not the masses... After all, when they can export your job after 15 years of hard work to overseas, that's a breach of the "social contract" Look what happened to pentioners in the 80's...when the Govt took a "so what" attitude to corperate pilfering of thoses people's hard work.
The OSS community realizes that not all inventions need to go thru corporations anymore...Lots of other inventions and hobbies don't require big business to keep them going....that's the difference...Imagine the outcry if one company tried to get a monopoly on yarn for knitting! you'd see old ladies break out the spinning wheels overnight...computers are still bleeding-edge new...look how long it took for Carnige's steel or Rockafeller's oil to get out of the spotlight even after being broken up. Even in the history of computing there have been more years of "free" software than not free...MS is still an anomoly..
yes, but the key is that the DRM particulars are hidden in the BIOS of the machine...after all a DVD player doesn't really need that many KB to run...if the hardware is setup properly. It neatly avoids many of the industry fears of using linux...too bad more mobos can't come with built in 64MB SDcards then the MOBO makers could install all this stuff by default...
Sounds like the poor guy had culture shock...welcome to the world of RPG and COBOL, the seedy underbelly of the IT world! But hey, most foundations are down with the worms anyway. AS400 on terminals is truly a culture shock..even more so for you Linux gurus. The keyboard mapping on terminals is wacked to a "normal" pc user...worse because there's nothing actually marked to tell you what to do.
You're right though, they didn't train the poor guy at all. That's a real problem on the old systems. Schools teach stuff way beyond those old systems, but student's don't get a clue about how they work...they do grow on you. Also, most of the systems are in the hands of 50-somethings that were hot in their day, but are stuck on doing things the same old way...they're too busy to want to take time to learn the newer easier ways of doing things...it's not uncommon to find 10+ year old programs these guys wrote still in use every day that these guys tweak from time to time... But it's a tough world because most of these guys learned that stuff from scratch and hacked their own way of doing things to get stuff done with minimal interaction with any "collegues" in the industry...they're also not the best at training new people to help them out.
Actually, nintendo's parent is a chip fab!...they gotta sell those chips...that's how they keep making a profit year after year [their box, their carts, their chips!] while the other guys sell beefy systems below cost then try to sock licensees.
It's a smart business model to sell more often for less cost but still make profit from Every sale. Not like the "wall street" goons that are baseing their whole model on "cornering" the market and jacking up prices. The mini-DVD format is a scary change for them because it doesn't feed the parent company by using chips and the GC chips are built by IBM. But don't the disks read backwards or something also?
In Gimp's defense it's meant to run under X. So a busy person like you could use virtual desktops, each with it's own resoultion and window lists, to switch between apps/app families with a single keystroke!!! learning to use Linux virtual desktops takes some getting used to from being a Windows drone, but it's quite cool...
I'd venture in large companies IT is it's own monster, but in smaller companies, IT's only 1-2 guys, half dozen at most...and the problems are directly with management. Management wants to be in control...but they don't want to understand WHY or PLAN AHEAD.
Stuff like Linux is all about corperate forsight! in reality, OSS meets most goal and attitudes of many small companies...but understanding the 'gottchas' aren't light reading...many execs want their internal departments to 'market' to them like external people do...That's not what good IT people do...most IT people are not in the biz to be 'diplomatic', but they tend to have a getter grasp of what the problems in a company REALLY ARE. Many execs don't want to be told that they have to have a 2,3,5 year plan for IT...and that breaking it costs real time and real money! It's a bit of a mutual problem though...IT guys like the big checks for 60+ hour weeks...and execs feel that it's OK to write big checks because IT works so long...no body wants to step up and say their's a better way!!!
Unfortunately it means that execs have to get their hands dirty and make decisions they can live with long term...because the small decisions [like covers on TPS reports that have to be written by hand!] are the ones that kill IT productivity! But it's getting management to surrender a degree of power that's the problem...and small, meaningless changes are absolute power! IT in it's truest form is like QC/ISO and best practices in IT are similar to those of a wrist-slapping school teacher! Unfortunately, execs live in a world where they flout how undiciplined they can be...as a good thing.
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It's quick and simple to convert VGA or DVI to ADC...[the other way around is tough though due to apple using USB to control the monitors] There's no reason for everybody not to use the best and sell a $10 retail doggle to "dumb" it down...it's a chicken-egg-omlet problem.
I always thought it was actually an accident of the original electrical layout of the keyboard that allowed those keys [+ their internal contacts] to pull up the reset line....but this guy was the first to realize that and codify it?
Best bet would be for wireless cams to push out some heavy duty encryption into the cameras...then at least you'd have hacking charges to bring against the guy....moral of the story: use wires whenever possible!!!
Also, it helps to be up front with future employers that you left on bad terms with a past one. It would help to make sure you left a resignation letter, and take a copy with you if you think there'll be trouble. But seriously, if any company would reject you because of one critical [perhaps lying] past boss without your side of the story, they really aren't worth working for anyway...
To the poster above who's former boss tore them up, they can successfuly hire a lawyer against BOTH COMPANIES!!! Many companies simply will not give out employement info anymore...heck, even McDonald's has been successfully sued for actions of their mouthy managers...that dude screwed up big time...
You seem to work for a company that follows the "spirit" of the rules and not just the letter...I feel happy for you!
In the music and book industry copyright is pretty clearcut. they print a CD or book and you buy it. After so many years you still have the book in your posession and my copy it at will...if anybody still cares. Corporations are abusing that part of the deal. That once the "cat is out of the bag", it's out for good, take the money and move on. The problem is that with media like movies or performances or software, the publishers are playing both sides against the middle. The ORIGINAL work is often never released...they aren't publishing a printed play, movie reel, or source code to their work...Those materials are never published into the wild, but are held by the publishers under licenses and returned to the publishers after running and often destroyed! ...so they are not "publishing" anything...it's their trade secret. Much of the current copyright rule changes have hinged on that fact...Disney and other companies have held their sole internal copies hostage to get the rules changed...because they never released copies of much of the early works of Disney to the masses [i.e. publishing!!] they used their singular deteriorating copy as leverage to get the laws changed so they could charge again for more viewings. This is further complicated by pushes for DRM...where the copy is not real or persistant at all!!!! therefore in 20 years you will not have access to that information at all thru legal measures...or without taking extreme methods to archive media. That shouldn't count as a copyrightable material if it doesn't persist...because the point is to release the ideas into the wild...Which is actively being fought against.
More punishment needs to be meeted to stockholders too...perhaps the govt should start demanding investors or execs surrender stocks instead of fines! Of course closing companies would work too...it would make people think twice about passively allowign illegal activities to go on...and deny unemployment for those workers too...
If you want to get corps back in line treat them like you would the mob! That's what we want to do to SCO right...just like in the war on drugs and terror, lean on the little guys so they won't work for companies accused of illegal actions. Companies don't do business with each other or employees without background checks...it's time that employees had motivation to demand the same intrusive inqueries of their bosses!! The problem is that the "welfare" that the pundits decry allows them to make irresponsible choices and let the govt fix it. After all, if there weren't unemployement, FDIA, and such corps would have to be a lot more responsible for their actions and the damage they cause to employees and financial institutions.
Sure you can make and sell stuff in third world countries...but if it's shipping to USA...or sold to a US compan... or used to process stuff going to the USA [or europe]...you've gotta have a US patent or be in compliance with them. The long arm of US corps will see to that. Disagree and they'll lobby congress to label you "terrorist" and bomb you.
You don't gotta have a patent for things used outside the US, but the largest source of money is the US and Europe...you gotta play by the corperate rules to sell anything here...although with things like medicine many countries refuse to honor US patents. Other things like crops, we'll let our corps take food from starving african children [farm crop patents] to enforce our patent US "rights"... It's also why we won't see the chinese dragon processor based stuff here...
Having been in band in school, sheet music licenses are actually worse that the EULAs written by demon MS lawyers...You can't actually BUY sheet music of arranged pieces...you have to RENT it PER PERFORMANCE! OUCH!
Particularly because Recipes are part data/ingredient manifest and part process order, mixing steps and settings. Solving a seemingly simple problem like this would have huge industrial applications as well!
Setting up such a system would require a most basic representation of the steps...because you can't try to assume every ingredient or tool necessary in the DTD, you'd have to have a way to represent the recipes without actually knowing [as the format creator] what was was actually in them. Wether it be flour, sugar, and eggs...or snips,snails and puppydog tails!
I think you miss what XML formats were designed for. They designed XML to be flexible enough to represent high level concepts [like music notation!] in a standardized way. It doesn't mean it would be easy to make conversions, just to have a standardized way of doing so.
The creator's assumed using XML that you will have to have custom binary programs to implement the DTD's in some manner useful to the user of the data. That's what makes it so useful! They didn't put artificial binary constraints on creating formats. XSTL is again designed to make things possible not pretty. [the perl gurus here should understand that concept!] XML is met to be handled by machines. The point is to have self-documenting formats...so that 20 years from now when we all code with our brainwaves we can go back and understand [reverse engineer if we have to] the formats to retreive the data from them. Once you have to use data or databases from programmers 10 years ago, you'll understand that documention is a fickle thing...XML was designed to mitigate some of the mess that was Y2K when tons of data was lost to undocumented bianary formats and just sent to the landfill because nobody could figure it out!!!
It will do for music what CSS & XHTML with metatags do for printed text...Right now sheet music is still the standard for music notation...it's not couducive to archiving or sharing [sans simply scanning the paper copy] Imagine having the musical equivelant of Google where you can find a song by just a few notes...MusicXML allows you to develop that!
Once those tools are set we can take on plays, speech, and eventually source code too! This is one of the first really original uses of XML...what it was created to do!
I mean if they're hauling her into court over NOT loosing $40,000 [? That's the value of what she sold, not even the amout of profit/loss?] what will they do when the SEC gets wind of the game SCO has been playing??? The fireworks should be fun! But I doubt the Utah branch will be that hard on SCO...or they'd have already acted publicly to take their stocks down!
On a side note, personally I think Martha's maybe guilty of acting on tip she shouldn't have gotten...but it's not her fault she got the tip...and you can't really expect somebody to be very financially responsible by loosing more money than they might have if they could have prevented it? if anything it's the broker's butt in a sling...the only reason I can see them going after Martha is that she's openly a good neighbor of Bill & Hillary in upstate New York...and the Feds have to LOOK like they're cracking down on sombody post-Enron for playing the stock market...of course looking at the VP for Iraq contracts to his former cronies isn't really an option...or HIS involvement with the Enron groupies? Go after the Democrat nevau-riche! yeah! The only explaination I can think of is that certian feds were trying to use the news of Martha's personal life to shake up her company and make her loose more money/position by "rumor"...there's no other explaination for the manor they've made every step extremely public...and tried to take her other invetors down with her. It's almost cliche Hollywood good cop/bad cop.
Read up on Martha Stewart's trial lately! The feds are raking her over for FAR less that SCO is doing right now. Let's hope they sic this same prosecutor on McBride & Co!!
Remember, most software is written in-house by people for the company...or is bought by companies to "scratch and itch" in their specific industry. MS with all its money is only the tip of the iceberg! Think of all those things in your old business that should have been fixed...FIX THEM, then go back and show them how it's done!!! Because the company laid you off [set you free!], you can even go to their competitors and sell to them too.
If you're only after enough work to feed yourself, it doesn't take that much...especially when you consider that the company was willing to pay more than twice your wage for your work for them due to taxes, overhead, etc. If you can find about a dozen companies to need your services on a regular basis you can just about recover your salary from before...
Remember too that the eInk soulutions will reduce power requirements accross the board...PDAs will use less batteries...and they are sunlite [flashlight?] readable...no battery-sucking backlights. Also, larger sizes will be soon available...far cheaper than LCDs...so you could have 36" x 36" rollable maps INSTEAD of a standard laptop or PDA screen! Remember too, an old-school palm can go almost a month on a pair of AAAs. And soon We'll have chemicaly, replentishable fuel-cells for electronics too...hopefully shipping later this year!
I mean really, for a community that mothballs GFX 5900's because the 5950s came out...do we have to ask?
MS lawyers always argue "property rights", "rights to do business", "trade secrets", etc... The courts are really hesitant to step on any of those fundamental rights of businesses. Add to that the fact that judges can only rule on the case in front of them without reguard to other cases/laws/judgements and you have the MS shell game! MS can have a dozen cases at once...maybe even for the same thing...but the courts [and plaitifs] can't see them as a whole... In short, even the anti-trust judge can't hand down "guidlines" to other judges on how to handle MS cases because of the anti-trust jusgement... The problem is that MS can pick & choose it's lawsuits & how to respond, and let ITS lawyers use those cases as precedent...
You're right, it's not fair!!! That's why the Chief Execuitive is there to guide the govts' hand and catch this stuff...unfortunately this one doesn't think MS is a problem...
yes, but the key is that you can send OO.org files to other people now and have they can open them with FREE viewers! While oo.org, or abiword, or others are still new, they are free to run...so there's no excuse for many companies not to get a hold of a copy...especially if smaller businesses start using it! The bigger key is that EVERYONE ELSE is starting to use open formats...Old Word and WordPerfect is taken care of pretty well, and now the OS groups are starting to realize they need to share too. The break point will be when you can use OO.org, AbiWork, Koffice, etc. to create documents and share them with any of the other OSS programs without hassle...
The OSS community realizes that not all inventions need to go thru corporations anymore...Lots of other inventions and hobbies don't require big business to keep them going....that's the difference...Imagine the outcry if one company tried to get a monopoly on yarn for knitting! you'd see old ladies break out the spinning wheels overnight...computers are still bleeding-edge new...look how long it took for Carnige's steel or Rockafeller's oil to get out of the spotlight even after being broken up. Even in the history of computing there have been more years of "free" software than not free...MS is still an anomoly..
yes, but the key is that the DRM particulars are hidden in the BIOS of the machine...after all a DVD player doesn't really need that many KB to run...if the hardware is setup properly. It neatly avoids many of the industry fears of using linux...too bad more mobos can't come with built in 64MB SDcards then the MOBO makers could install all this stuff by default...
You're right though, they didn't train the poor guy at all. That's a real problem on the old systems. Schools teach stuff way beyond those old systems, but student's don't get a clue about how they work...they do grow on you. Also, most of the systems are in the hands of 50-somethings that were hot in their day, but are stuck on doing things the same old way...they're too busy to want to take time to learn the newer easier ways of doing things...it's not uncommon to find 10+ year old programs these guys wrote still in use every day that these guys tweak from time to time... But it's a tough world because most of these guys learned that stuff from scratch and hacked their own way of doing things to get stuff done with minimal interaction with any "collegues" in the industry...they're also not the best at training new people to help them out.
It's a smart business model to sell more often for less cost but still make profit from Every sale. Not like the "wall street" goons that are baseing their whole model on "cornering" the market and jacking up prices. The mini-DVD format is a scary change for them because it doesn't feed the parent company by using chips and the GC chips are built by IBM. But don't the disks read backwards or something also?
In Gimp's defense it's meant to run under X. So a busy person like you could use virtual desktops, each with it's own resoultion and window lists, to switch between apps/app families with a single keystroke!!! learning to use Linux virtual desktops takes some getting used to from being a Windows drone, but it's quite cool...
I'd venture in large companies IT is it's own monster, but in smaller companies, IT's only 1-2 guys, half dozen at most...and the problems are directly with management. Management wants to be in control...but they don't want to understand WHY or PLAN AHEAD.
Stuff like Linux is all about corperate forsight! in reality, OSS meets most goal and attitudes of many small companies...but understanding the 'gottchas' aren't light reading...many execs want their internal departments to 'market' to them like external people do...That's not what good IT people do...most IT people are not in the biz to be 'diplomatic', but they tend to have a getter grasp of what the problems in a company REALLY ARE. Many execs don't want to be told that they have to have a 2,3,5 year plan for IT...and that breaking it costs real time and real money! It's a bit of a mutual problem though...IT guys like the big checks for 60+ hour weeks...and execs feel that it's OK to write big checks because IT works so long...no body wants to step up and say their's a better way!!!
Unfortunately it means that execs have to get their hands dirty and make decisions they can live with long term...because the small decisions [like covers on TPS reports that have to be written by hand!] are the ones that kill IT productivity! But it's getting management to surrender a degree of power that's the problem...and small, meaningless changes are absolute power! IT in it's truest form is like QC/ISO and best practices in IT are similar to those of a wrist-slapping school teacher! Unfortunately, execs live in a world where they flout how undiciplined they can be...as a good thing.