There seems to be a whole lot of senators lined up behind this--it's possible that passage of SOME bill is inevitable. Perhaps the tech industry opponents could offer up some compromise that would appease Hatch and friends?
I think you're correct on this point. It is virtually assured, in my opinion, that there will be some sort of legislation passed with these goals in mind. How specific it is and how far-reaching it is are really the only two variables here. I don't know whether or not there are (and this is just me being honest and speaking from a political background, not a technology background) people who actively oppose legislation like this for reasons other than the typical political rhetoric such as expansion of the federal government, excess federal spending, unnecessary federal regulation, infringment on states' rights, et cetera in order to actually make a difference and affect change. I don't even think they'd be able to get a compromise. This is no fault of these particular people and organizations, they just don't have professional lobbyists for the most part.
The main problem with the INDUCE act is that it's too vague--it doesn't specify exactly what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do. What exactly is going to be criminalized by this? We know they want to get rid of Kazaa. Is Bittorrent also suspect, even though linux distributions and the mozilla project among many others have used it as a legitimate means of relieving bandwidth? Is the freenet projectfreenet now going to have to move underground? Are programs released for free with no profit incentive equally doomed? Are CD burners, MP3 players, and VCRs also doomed? No one is offering evidence of what would and would not be prohibited by this.
Good luck getting the United States Congress to be specific in regards to legislation that affects things that virtually none of them genuinely care about. The fact of the matter is that the folks who represent us in Congress really don't take most of these issues seriously at all until a corporate lobbyist from the RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization calls his or her office, schedules an appointment, and effectively both bribes and scares our elected officials into opposing certain behaviors which they hardly understand.
Basically, in order to understand how these folks operate, you have to acknowledge a couple pretty humbling facts:
* First, they don't care at all about whether or not there are masses of people downloading mozilla, linux distributions, or anything else legitimate over BitTorrent or any other network. The legislation may use specific examples, but the enforcement will take place on a broad scale, and the enforcement clause(s) of the legislation will be written on a broad scale. It will be up to the appropriate law enforcement agencies who to shut down. If you want to start preparing some letters, think about starting a petition to send to the Department of Justice for after this legislation is passed. They're the folks who you're going to have to persuade not to shut down BitTorrent or similar networks which provide genuine and legal services. You can basically kiss KaZaA and the rest of those networks goodbye.
* Secondly, you can't fault them for not knowing what's going on in a world that they do not participate in. For all intents and purposes, the Internet is an international sub-culture that reaches up from time to time and gets involved in the regular day-to-day affairs of those who are involved in politics. Take the Dean campaign for example. It's not that politicians don't know what the Internet is, because they certainly do. They know that it can be used to raise donations, spread their messages through e-mail, and to post issues and platform information. What they didn't realize, it seems, is the depth of the Internet. I don't think people in politics realized, prior to the Dean campaign, that you could theoretically win an election simply by firing up "grassroots" support over the Interne
I can't tell what's worse: the fact that, from the title of your post, I thought you were going to suggest that soldiers eat their own shit, or the fact that an idea of that nature would come into my own head.
If I were Ron Popeil, I'd make millions off of that theory. Get your basic latrine, add a rotisserie, advertise (repeat this step until blood erupts from ears and eyes -- both, not one or the other), profit.
It's important to realize that the government and government workers have more important things to do and to be working on than dealing with computer problems. Now, Linux doesn't have all that many problems if set up correctly and everything else. The unfortunate part is that most folks who work in government aren't going to want to have to learn Linux. That's just my guess, after all. I could be wrong.
With Windows, if something goes wrong, a "shrug and reboot" will take place. If something's still wrong, a work order or whatever else will be put in, and the problem will be fixed. Now, here's the kicker: when things have to get fixed, does the government want to have to pay for a bunch of people who are like the character Nick Burns from SNL?
Perhaps government offices feel like Microsoft and associated tech support teams are more friendly and cooperative. I think it would be nice if the government switched over to Linux. It would avoid some security issues like when Republican staffers "broke into" Democratic bulletin boards and published internal memoranda.
Oh well, what do I know? I'm more about government than technology anyway, but I don't have a problem with switching over to Linux. Maybe the powers that be do.
Most video game companies still don't engage in this kind of behavior. I'm really big on sports games; in fact, that's basically all I play. I play them on my XBox, regrettably because I should've gotten a PS2 with an expansion HDD (my laser is a piece of garbage, my XBox told me that my discs were damaged the first time I put them in on the past two games I've purchased), and I enjoy them. I don't buy that NFL Street garbage or any of that.
I've recently made the switch back from a Madden gamer (2002-2004 games) to an ESPN gamer (2K-2K3, 2K5-). One thing that bothers me about the ESPN game is the "Crib" feature. As best as I can tell, this thing is designed to allow you to buy material possessions in order to make your "Crib" exciting. There's posters of girls you can put up on the walls, and while it's not as bad as the NBA Street games where you buy beautiful women and fast cars, it's unnecessary. I don't need that. I want a football game, not some excessive garbage about "pimpin' tha crib." It's absurd.
There sure is a lot of money to be made by these games as there is an entire culture of adolescents, as mfh outlined. We're talking about individuals who need to make up for some sort of inadequacy by acting tough. This is nothing new. People do this on a regular basis. I was walking down the street last night minding my own business, and a speeding little Hyundai piece of trash goes by and some drunkard yells out the window. I have no idea what was said, it was more of an "AUUHGHHH!!" I know where these people come from, too, and it says a lot. These are folks who just got back from their first year at college and away from their safety blankets. In order to make up for how inadequate they felt, they came back home and harass people drunkenly. They speed, they break laws, and they think they're tough, cool, and popular.
The same thing is occuring with these video games on a less personal scale. Immature people identify with the "thug" culture because it is wholly material. Beautiful women treated like objects and possessions. Fast cars, big houses, bling-bling. The video game industry is just buying into this cultural problem. They're out to make money, and they're doing it.
I will say, however, that the punk in question from Midway ought to realize that a large part of the video game market is not interested in this kind of crap. Calling legitimate complaints "bitching" and then accusing a mass of people whose demographics he obviously does not have the first clue about of pushing the age of 35 is just bad for business and it's a bad attitude. It's not like Midway is the shining beacon of video game producers anymore either.
At the.edu level, it's more disadvantageous to find security holes and report them. The main reasons for this are simple:
A) the tech department is unlikely to do anything of substance in fixing whatever security hole has been exposed;
B) if the tech department is really adamant about people not exploring for holes in the first place, an individual who discovers a security hole can get in more trouble for reporting it than letting it go.
I imagine if I thought I was going to have my job outsourced to Mumbai, India, at any moment, I'd be pretty unhappy too. Hell, I'm pretty unhappy about the issue myself, and I'm not even an IT professional.
Maybe I'm out of my mind (I probably am), but I actually think, by and large, this might be a good idea. Restrict e-mail only to.mail and probably.edu too. There don't seem to be many spam creations coming from.edu, at least not ending up in my junk mail directory that is.
You are correct about this. The problem with my particular situation is that I will be spending probably four years in undergraduate studies to get a meaningless degree, then probably end up having to spend anothet three years in law school, and then I might be able to get my feet on the ground with a career, and that's still not even on the direct path to where I want to go.
This kind of problem isn't something that needs to be addressed by everyone. This is why I envy engineering majors, for example.
I'm a political science major, for the time being, and I can vouch for the fact that liberal arts majors are completely worthless. What am I going to do with this degree? Become a political scientist? No such thing exists.
Half the degrees in college these days are nothing but bullshit to get you out in 4 years and have some piece of paper to tell an employer about the fact that you're easily duped into giving up a lot for a little.
Pardon me for not trying to be funny, but George W. Bush doesn't use a computer unless he absolutely has to. He's said this before. He also doesn't watch television unless it's sports, he doesn't like to use the telephone, he doesn't use cell-phones, and so on.
All of this should be no surprise for someone who doesn't even read the news himself, and has his advisors act as a "news filter" for him so he only hears and learns about what he wants to hear and learn about, or what his advisors want him to hear or learn about.
You can be pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but that's hardcore ignorance, especially for a president. I don't think there's much of anything funny about it.
The open source movement simply doesn't appear as a potential source of campaign cash to congressmen, so the likelihood of these dolts being convinced to side with SCO and go against open source software is high.
I spent far, far too long studying politics before I realized how much it absolutely drove me insane, and it's these sorts of things -- complete ineptitude on behalf of this nation's leaders -- that drove me back to compsci. The fact of the matter is that SCO looks like dollar-bills to politicians, and open source looks like some strange threat to democracy (the same way they view 3rd parties).
I fully expect, and will be very pissed off when/if it happens, Congress to side with SCO's lobbying and proposals.
It's Voice-over-IP software. Like the "Talk" function in AOL Instant Messenger, just long before that was added in to the popular IM programs. I remember using it years and years ago with a friend of mine in Nebraska (I was in Indiana at the time). We both played guitar, so we would play back and forth & exchange ideas and suggestions. I still have a copy of the program, if not on this machine, then on my old Windows 98 desktop. I haven't used it in a long time, but I do remember it well, and I'll be a little sad to see it go.
I don't even know what my comcast.net e-mail address password is. I guess this is a good thing. I have no reason to read that garbage anyway, though I guess it would be nice to have a proper e-mail address, POP3 style, instead of that piece of trash Hotmail. Certainly less spam, I'd guess.
Maybe I should call and get my password reset or something, not like the Comcast people (in India? perhaps) would do it or know what I was talking about. I called them before to find out whether or not there was a router out in my area, and they told me that, not only did they not provide service in my area, but that I'm not a Comcast customer. Some real sharp tacks working for that company, let me tell you.
I really don't understand how American techies are supposed to compete with Indians that are willing to work for much, much less, and the companies don't even care that the work that's being done is shoddy at best.
If they cared, don't you think they would find people who could speak proper English to run help desk lines? Don't you think that makes sense? It's difficult enough to understand some Americans when they are talking, thanks to accents. Now these companies are going to outsource to India, and Americans are talking to Indians about something that's broken on their computer. Sorry, but some woman being paid pennies on the dollar in Mumbai is simply not going to be providing quality service to somebody trying to set up another crappy HP product in Amherst, Massachusetts.
I guess, in a way, this doesn't surprise me coming from HP. Their products are complete garbage in my opinion. They sell USB PSC combos... without USB cables. Just precisely how f-ing cheap do you have to be to sell a USB device without a cable to connect it to the computer? What's next, are they going to start selling printers without cartridges or power plugs either? They'll do anything to cut cost. Believe me, people are paying HP enough money for their garbage products to get a damn USB cable with it so they can use the things.
It's penny-pinching, and the consumers are the ones who suffer. Carly here is getting triple her already-insane yearly salary in a bonus, and she's going to talk to us like we have to just make do with the fact that her company is raping and pillaging consumers with overpriced crappy products, *then* outsource jobs to underqualified people overseas just to save even more money?
STFU, Carly, and anybody else who wants to act like "competition" is all about talent or skills. It's about the ability to be paid nothing and do the absolute minimum on the job.
I think this is a really good idea. It puts a bit of competition in there against OpenOffice, a suite which I like but I find to be... a bit too slow for my tastes (is it the Java? I don't know), and I think it would be nice to see those two suites duel for control over, basically, the office/publishing market on Linux desktops.
I think this is a fantastic idea by IBM. I will be buying one of the IBM Linux desktops, I bet, if they're priced reasonably (that's a big if, especially for IBM). Then again, if it was priced reasonably, I'd buy an AIX desktop from them.:P
I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. As far as I can tell, there's really no need for Microsoft to go around advertising against Linux. What part of the market is Linux, the kind of Linux that can really compete with Windows on the *desktop* market (the market that I happen to think is most important considering businesses are still blowing $8,000 on AIX servers from IBM) is left completely unaddressed.
Let me put it this way: if you're on Microsoft.com reading this website, chances are that it's not going to convince you to switch from Linux to Microsoft. Businesses that are already running Linux aren't going to have CEOs seeing a Microsoft.com website that says they'll save some mysterious percentage of money if they switch over to something new.
The average citizen is easily duped, but businesses are not. Most businesses that use Linux, UNIX, and variants realize that it's the better choice *already*. This Microsoft ad is basically designed to prevent CURRENT Microsoft customers from switching over to Linux, basically. Even so, that would be pretty silly. Businesses would be better off switching to BSD if we're talking about servers, security, and reliability, but that's a completely new can of worms.
This truly is, as many others have said, a measure that Microsoft clearly felt it had to take before it lost MORE of the market share to Linux, UNIX, and variants rather than actually convincing anyone who's already spent the money to change.
That's surprisingly funny considering some things I've seen from "that crowd" before.
For example, an advertisement on NewsMax.com, a banner ad, said "SADDAM'S WEST NILE VIRUS," and I just thought to myself, "This can't be for real. They're not REALLY claiming that the mosquitos are in it with Saddam Hussein, are they?" But they were, and it was sad.
So, I suppose if they claimed that Iraq had moved all its WMDs to Mars, the average American would flip out and start cursing about "them damn little green bastards" being terrorists and the like.
I don't like it one bit, no sir.
It could be said that, if the Beagle mission is successful, maybe it doesn't take the absolute best in technology, the most money, and the most powerful country/countries on Earth to send missions into space as some sort of play for military superiority. After all, this is the real reason that the "space race" happened in the first place.
Perhaps we're finally moving out of the Cold War mentality.
Once again, why does it matter if we find one person when we've created hundreds, maybe thousands more terrorists from our own reckless behavior in the post-9/11 world?
Osama bin Laden is, more or less, irrelevant now, much the same way as Saddam Hussein is irrelevant and was irrelevant. Terrorists don't require a top man to operate. Capturing the head means you have a body that's even more angry.;)
Ho Chi Minh died during the Vietnam War, and that didn't stop the DRV and the Vietcong from attacking Americans and South Vietnamese. Don't think, even for a second, that Saddam being in U.S. custody means the violence and terrorism in Iraq will slow down or come to an end. Bush has a long, tough road ahead, one that he paved himself through over-spending and war-mongering.
I went from using the traditional Uniball Vision, fine point, for quite some time to the Vision Elite just this year. Either one will do for me. I find they are both extraordinary pens. I wouldn't ever spend a lot of money on a pen, rechargeable or otherwise. Besides, I can't write that well with fountian pens.
These pens are fantastic though. The only problem is when you write on stickers or other glossy surfaces. I had to wait something like 10 hours just to get the Vision Elite ink to dry on a glossy label for a big ol' envelope. Even 15-16 hours later, it was still smearing a little bit.
Maybe that's more of the paper's fault, so I digress.
Actually, if you think about it, nature may be able to tolerate all that is being done to the environment by people in the sense that it has experienced both far higher and far lower temperatures before. Perhaps humans are not directly responsible for global warming, but I do believe that it's fair to say that if nature begins to become severely damaged by the actions of humans, that nature will eliminate humans to preserve itself. Wouldn't that be cute?
Crackpots? All of the sudden, when you question things that are commonly presumed to be true but never actually proven, you're a crackpot?
Well, that sure doesn't sound like the hacker mindset (hacker as in the real hacker, not those 14 year old punks who WinNuke yahoo.com) to me.
Sure, NASA should have to prove that they really landed on the moon when they said they did. Why shouldn't they have to prove it? I mean, if they can't prove it, then why should we believe it happened?
There's no reason why we should be going around taking the word of a government agency in this government, that's for sure.
-TS
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There seems to be a whole lot of senators lined up behind this--it's possible that passage of SOME bill is inevitable. Perhaps the tech industry opponents could offer up some compromise that would appease Hatch and friends?
I think you're correct on this point. It is virtually assured, in my opinion, that there will be some sort of legislation passed with these goals in mind. How specific it is and how far-reaching it is are really the only two variables here. I don't know whether or not there are (and this is just me being honest and speaking from a political background, not a technology background) people who actively oppose legislation like this for reasons other than the typical political rhetoric such as expansion of the federal government, excess federal spending, unnecessary federal regulation, infringment on states' rights, et cetera in order to actually make a difference and affect change. I don't even think they'd be able to get a compromise. This is no fault of these particular people and organizations, they just don't have professional lobbyists for the most part.
The main problem with the INDUCE act is that it's too vague--it doesn't specify exactly what I'm allowed to do and not allowed to do. What exactly is going to be criminalized by this? We know they want to get rid of Kazaa. Is Bittorrent also suspect, even though linux distributions and the mozilla project among many others have used it as a legitimate means of relieving bandwidth? Is the freenet projectfreenet now going to have to move underground? Are programs released for free with no profit incentive equally doomed? Are CD burners, MP3 players, and VCRs also doomed? No one is offering evidence of what would and would not be prohibited by this.
Good luck getting the United States Congress to be specific in regards to legislation that affects things that virtually none of them genuinely care about. The fact of the matter is that the folks who represent us in Congress really don't take most of these issues seriously at all until a corporate lobbyist from the RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization calls his or her office, schedules an appointment, and effectively both bribes and scares our elected officials into opposing certain behaviors which they hardly understand.
Basically, in order to understand how these folks operate, you have to acknowledge a couple pretty humbling facts:
* First, they don't care at all about whether or not there are masses of people downloading mozilla, linux distributions, or anything else legitimate over BitTorrent or any other network. The legislation may use specific examples, but the enforcement will take place on a broad scale, and the enforcement clause(s) of the legislation will be written on a broad scale. It will be up to the appropriate law enforcement agencies who to shut down. If you want to start preparing some letters, think about starting a petition to send to the Department of Justice for after this legislation is passed. They're the folks who you're going to have to persuade not to shut down BitTorrent or similar networks which provide genuine and legal services. You can basically kiss KaZaA and the rest of those networks goodbye.
* Secondly, you can't fault them for not knowing what's going on in a world that they do not participate in. For all intents and purposes, the Internet is an international sub-culture that reaches up from time to time and gets involved in the regular day-to-day affairs of those who are involved in politics. Take the Dean campaign for example. It's not that politicians don't know what the Internet is, because they certainly do. They know that it can be used to raise donations, spread their messages through e-mail, and to post issues and platform information. What they didn't realize, it seems, is the depth of the Internet. I don't think people in politics realized, prior to the Dean campaign, that you could theoretically win an election simply by firing up "grassroots" support over the Interne
I can't tell what's worse: the fact that, from the title of your post, I thought you were going to suggest that soldiers eat their own shit, or the fact that an idea of that nature would come into my own head.
If I were Ron Popeil, I'd make millions off of that theory. Get your basic latrine, add a rotisserie, advertise (repeat this step until blood erupts from ears and eyes -- both, not one or the other), profit.
It's important to realize that the government and government workers have more important things to do and to be working on than dealing with computer problems. Now, Linux doesn't have all that many problems if set up correctly and everything else. The unfortunate part is that most folks who work in government aren't going to want to have to learn Linux. That's just my guess, after all. I could be wrong.
With Windows, if something goes wrong, a "shrug and reboot" will take place. If something's still wrong, a work order or whatever else will be put in, and the problem will be fixed. Now, here's the kicker: when things have to get fixed, does the government want to have to pay for a bunch of people who are like the character Nick Burns from SNL?
Perhaps government offices feel like Microsoft and associated tech support teams are more friendly and cooperative. I think it would be nice if the government switched over to Linux. It would avoid some security issues like when Republican staffers "broke into" Democratic bulletin boards and published internal memoranda.
Oh well, what do I know? I'm more about government than technology anyway, but I don't have a problem with switching over to Linux. Maybe the powers that be do.
Most video game companies still don't engage in this kind of behavior. I'm really big on sports games; in fact, that's basically all I play. I play them on my XBox, regrettably because I should've gotten a PS2 with an expansion HDD (my laser is a piece of garbage, my XBox told me that my discs were damaged the first time I put them in on the past two games I've purchased), and I enjoy them. I don't buy that NFL Street garbage or any of that.
I've recently made the switch back from a Madden gamer (2002-2004 games) to an ESPN gamer (2K-2K3, 2K5-). One thing that bothers me about the ESPN game is the "Crib" feature. As best as I can tell, this thing is designed to allow you to buy material possessions in order to make your "Crib" exciting. There's posters of girls you can put up on the walls, and while it's not as bad as the NBA Street games where you buy beautiful women and fast cars, it's unnecessary. I don't need that. I want a football game, not some excessive garbage about "pimpin' tha crib." It's absurd.
There sure is a lot of money to be made by these games as there is an entire culture of adolescents, as mfh outlined. We're talking about individuals who need to make up for some sort of inadequacy by acting tough. This is nothing new. People do this on a regular basis. I was walking down the street last night minding my own business, and a speeding little Hyundai piece of trash goes by and some drunkard yells out the window. I have no idea what was said, it was more of an "AUUHGHHH!!" I know where these people come from, too, and it says a lot. These are folks who just got back from their first year at college and away from their safety blankets. In order to make up for how inadequate they felt, they came back home and harass people drunkenly. They speed, they break laws, and they think they're tough, cool, and popular.
The same thing is occuring with these video games on a less personal scale. Immature people identify with the "thug" culture because it is wholly material. Beautiful women treated like objects and possessions. Fast cars, big houses, bling-bling. The video game industry is just buying into this cultural problem. They're out to make money, and they're doing it.
I will say, however, that the punk in question from Midway ought to realize that a large part of the video game market is not interested in this kind of crap. Calling legitimate complaints "bitching" and then accusing a mass of people whose demographics he obviously does not have the first clue about of pushing the age of 35 is just bad for business and it's a bad attitude. It's not like Midway is the shining beacon of video game producers anymore either.
At the .edu level, it's more disadvantageous to find security holes and report them. The main reasons for this are simple:
A) the tech department is unlikely to do anything of substance in fixing whatever security hole has been exposed;
B) if the tech department is really adamant about people not exploring for holes in the first place, an individual who discovers a security hole can get in more trouble for reporting it than letting it go.
I imagine if I thought I was going to have my job outsourced to Mumbai, India, at any moment, I'd be pretty unhappy too. Hell, I'm pretty unhappy about the issue myself, and I'm not even an IT professional.
Maybe I'm out of my mind (I probably am), but I actually think, by and large, this might be a good idea. Restrict e-mail only to .mail and probably .edu too. There don't seem to be many spam creations coming from .edu, at least not ending up in my junk mail directory that is.
You are correct about this. The problem with my particular situation is that I will be spending probably four years in undergraduate studies to get a meaningless degree, then probably end up having to spend anothet three years in law school, and then I might be able to get my feet on the ground with a career, and that's still not even on the direct path to where I want to go.
This kind of problem isn't something that needs to be addressed by everyone. This is why I envy engineering majors, for example.
I'm a political science major, for the time being, and I can vouch for the fact that liberal arts majors are completely worthless. What am I going to do with this degree? Become a political scientist? No such thing exists.
Half the degrees in college these days are nothing but bullshit to get you out in 4 years and have some piece of paper to tell an employer about the fact that you're easily duped into giving up a lot for a little.
Pardon me for not trying to be funny, but George W. Bush doesn't use a computer unless he absolutely has to. He's said this before. He also doesn't watch television unless it's sports, he doesn't like to use the telephone, he doesn't use cell-phones, and so on.
All of this should be no surprise for someone who doesn't even read the news himself, and has his advisors act as a "news filter" for him so he only hears and learns about what he wants to hear and learn about, or what his advisors want him to hear or learn about.
You can be pro-Bush or anti-Bush, but that's hardcore ignorance, especially for a president. I don't think there's much of anything funny about it.
The open source movement simply doesn't appear as a potential source of campaign cash to congressmen, so the likelihood of these dolts being convinced to side with SCO and go against open source software is high.
I spent far, far too long studying politics before I realized how much it absolutely drove me insane, and it's these sorts of things -- complete ineptitude on behalf of this nation's leaders -- that drove me back to compsci. The fact of the matter is that SCO looks like dollar-bills to politicians, and open source looks like some strange threat to democracy (the same way they view 3rd parties).
I fully expect, and will be very pissed off when/if it happens, Congress to side with SCO's lobbying and proposals.
It's Voice-over-IP software. Like the "Talk" function in AOL Instant Messenger, just long before that was added in to the popular IM programs. I remember using it years and years ago with a friend of mine in Nebraska (I was in Indiana at the time). We both played guitar, so we would play back and forth & exchange ideas and suggestions. I still have a copy of the program, if not on this machine, then on my old Windows 98 desktop. I haven't used it in a long time, but I do remember it well, and I'll be a little sad to see it go.
I don't even know what my comcast.net e-mail address password is. I guess this is a good thing. I have no reason to read that garbage anyway, though I guess it would be nice to have a proper e-mail address, POP3 style, instead of that piece of trash Hotmail. Certainly less spam, I'd guess.
Maybe I should call and get my password reset or something, not like the Comcast people (in India? perhaps) would do it or know what I was talking about. I called them before to find out whether or not there was a router out in my area, and they told me that, not only did they not provide service in my area, but that I'm not a Comcast customer. Some real sharp tacks working for that company, let me tell you.
I really don't understand how American techies are supposed to compete with Indians that are willing to work for much, much less, and the companies don't even care that the work that's being done is shoddy at best.
If they cared, don't you think they would find people who could speak proper English to run help desk lines? Don't you think that makes sense? It's difficult enough to understand some Americans when they are talking, thanks to accents. Now these companies are going to outsource to India, and Americans are talking to Indians about something that's broken on their computer. Sorry, but some woman being paid pennies on the dollar in Mumbai is simply not going to be providing quality service to somebody trying to set up another crappy HP product in Amherst, Massachusetts.
I guess, in a way, this doesn't surprise me coming from HP. Their products are complete garbage in my opinion. They sell USB PSC combos... without USB cables. Just precisely how f-ing cheap do you have to be to sell a USB device without a cable to connect it to the computer? What's next, are they going to start selling printers without cartridges or power plugs either? They'll do anything to cut cost. Believe me, people are paying HP enough money for their garbage products to get a damn USB cable with it so they can use the things.
It's penny-pinching, and the consumers are the ones who suffer. Carly here is getting triple her already-insane yearly salary in a bonus, and she's going to talk to us like we have to just make do with the fact that her company is raping and pillaging consumers with overpriced crappy products, *then* outsource jobs to underqualified people overseas just to save even more money?
STFU, Carly, and anybody else who wants to act like "competition" is all about talent or skills. It's about the ability to be paid nothing and do the absolute minimum on the job.
I think this is a really good idea. It puts a bit of competition in there against OpenOffice, a suite which I like but I find to be... a bit too slow for my tastes (is it the Java? I don't know), and I think it would be nice to see those two suites duel for control over, basically, the office/publishing market on Linux desktops.
:P
I think this is a fantastic idea by IBM. I will be buying one of the IBM Linux desktops, I bet, if they're priced reasonably (that's a big if, especially for IBM). Then again, if it was priced reasonably, I'd buy an AIX desktop from them.
Wow. You completely and totally misunderstood my post. Nice rant though.
I don't know, maybe I'm crazy. As far as I can tell, there's really no need for Microsoft to go around advertising against Linux. What part of the market is Linux, the kind of Linux that can really compete with Windows on the *desktop* market (the market that I happen to think is most important considering businesses are still blowing $8,000 on AIX servers from IBM) is left completely unaddressed.
Let me put it this way: if you're on Microsoft.com reading this website, chances are that it's not going to convince you to switch from Linux to Microsoft. Businesses that are already running Linux aren't going to have CEOs seeing a Microsoft.com website that says they'll save some mysterious percentage of money if they switch over to something new.
The average citizen is easily duped, but businesses are not. Most businesses that use Linux, UNIX, and variants realize that it's the better choice *already*. This Microsoft ad is basically designed to prevent CURRENT Microsoft customers from switching over to Linux, basically. Even so, that would be pretty silly. Businesses would be better off switching to BSD if we're talking about servers, security, and reliability, but that's a completely new can of worms.
This truly is, as many others have said, a measure that Microsoft clearly felt it had to take before it lost MORE of the market share to Linux, UNIX, and variants rather than actually convincing anyone who's already spent the money to change.
Sorry if that's a little long and drawn out.
That's surprisingly funny considering some things I've seen from "that crowd" before. For example, an advertisement on NewsMax.com, a banner ad, said "SADDAM'S WEST NILE VIRUS," and I just thought to myself, "This can't be for real. They're not REALLY claiming that the mosquitos are in it with Saddam Hussein, are they?" But they were, and it was sad. So, I suppose if they claimed that Iraq had moved all its WMDs to Mars, the average American would flip out and start cursing about "them damn little green bastards" being terrorists and the like. I don't like it one bit, no sir.
It could be said that, if the Beagle mission is successful, maybe it doesn't take the absolute best in technology, the most money, and the most powerful country/countries on Earth to send missions into space as some sort of play for military superiority. After all, this is the real reason that the "space race" happened in the first place. Perhaps we're finally moving out of the Cold War mentality.
[zaschitnik] # perl 2038.pl Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038 Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901 Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901 Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Once again, why does it matter if we find one person when we've created hundreds, maybe thousands more terrorists from our own reckless behavior in the post-9/11 world? Osama bin Laden is, more or less, irrelevant now, much the same way as Saddam Hussein is irrelevant and was irrelevant. Terrorists don't require a top man to operate. Capturing the head means you have a body that's even more angry. ;)
Ho Chi Minh died during the Vietnam War, and that didn't stop the DRV and the Vietcong from attacking Americans and South Vietnamese. Don't think, even for a second, that Saddam being in U.S. custody means the violence and terrorism in Iraq will slow down or come to an end. Bush has a long, tough road ahead, one that he paved himself through over-spending and war-mongering.
I went from using the traditional Uniball Vision, fine point, for quite some time to the Vision Elite just this year. Either one will do for me. I find they are both extraordinary pens. I wouldn't ever spend a lot of money on a pen, rechargeable or otherwise. Besides, I can't write that well with fountian pens. These pens are fantastic though. The only problem is when you write on stickers or other glossy surfaces. I had to wait something like 10 hours just to get the Vision Elite ink to dry on a glossy label for a big ol' envelope. Even 15-16 hours later, it was still smearing a little bit. Maybe that's more of the paper's fault, so I digress.
Actually, if you think about it, nature may be able to tolerate all that is being done to the environment by people in the sense that it has experienced both far higher and far lower temperatures before. Perhaps humans are not directly responsible for global warming, but I do believe that it's fair to say that if nature begins to become severely damaged by the actions of humans, that nature will eliminate humans to preserve itself. Wouldn't that be cute?
Crackpots? All of the sudden, when you question things that are commonly presumed to be true but never actually proven, you're a crackpot? Well, that sure doesn't sound like the hacker mindset (hacker as in the real hacker, not those 14 year old punks who WinNuke yahoo.com) to me. Sure, NASA should have to prove that they really landed on the moon when they said they did. Why shouldn't they have to prove it? I mean, if they can't prove it, then why should we believe it happened? There's no reason why we should be going around taking the word of a government agency in this government, that's for sure. -TS