I was not directly involved with the debacle, but was closely connected with Commodore personnel who were in a position to know. Paramount originally wanted to use an Amiga in that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. To that end, they contacted Commodore to obtain an Amiga 1000 for use.
The dweezil at the other end informed them that Commodore had no procedures in place for distribution of promotional machines (marketing? What's that?). However, they would be willing to sell them a machine at cut-rate developer pricing. Surprisingly, Paramount agreed, cut a check, and sent it off.
Fast forward a couple weeks: No machine. Another call to Commodore. It turns out that the amount of the check failed to include some trivial fee (shipping, tax, whatever), and the machine wasn't going to be shipped. Paramount was invited to send another check for the corrected amount.
Paramount understandably got fed up and made it's next call to Cupertino, CA. Apple not only gave Paramount a machine, they assigned them a programmer to do whatever they needed to make the machine dance for the camera.
Just another page in the ponderous tome of Commodore's incompetent management.
There's one thing I don't get. We are tax payers, the people we elect are law-makers, they are paid to find solutions to common problems. They love passing laws. But WHY do they always have to go against the population and not work with them?
Because elected officials are no longer representing you, but their campaign funding sources. The right to be heard is now only available to those who have paid for it.
Want to know the fastest way to get spam outlawed? Use it for political advocacy for the upcoming election. Hey, it's extremely cheap, and spammers claim it's effective, so why not use it to shake up the status quo? If you're successful, you'll vote the bastards out. If not, you'll get spam outlawed (after all, we can't have the proles thinking they have any say in government (note: sarcasm)).
Find a theater showing Spider-man and an Indie flick at about the same time. Buy a ticket for the Indie and sit down in the Spider-man theater "by mistake." [... ]
Um, how many theaters who managed to book a film like Spider-Man would also be booking indie flicks?
I mean, what kind of theater that screens Spider-Man would also screen something like Orlando?
Consider: A US Federal Court -- not some backwater municipal or state court -- has just ordered a wholesale invasion of citizens' privacy and personal information without a search warrant.
Consider further: This action was ordered, not in the name of "National Security" or "Anti-Terrorist Investigation", not on behalf of the government at all, but on behalf of a monsterously wealthy corporation bleating about "theft" and illusory "lost profits".
It has begun. The last bulwark against tyranny has been swept aside by a sitting Federal Magistrate without the slightest qualm.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I offer the following admittedly foolish, idealisic counsel:
Close your wallets.
Buy nothing.
See no movies. Rent no videos. Buy no music CDs. Purchase no computer software that isn't Open Source/Free Software (remember, the BSA members are in on this, too).
"But what do I do for entertainment?" Easy. Fire up your Web browser and/or go to your local government building and start digging for incriminating dirt on every elected official you can find. Once you find it, publish it. Read the dirt other people have dug up. Learn as much as you can. Discovering incriminating secrets about other people is endlessly entertaining, especially with that whole "betrayal of the public trust" angle going for it.
And once you've learned everything you possibly can about the people ostensibly representing you... VOTE!
Too many Attorneys General simply refuse to bring malfeasance charges, so relying on criminal prosecution to delete these people won't be very effective. Get out there this upcoming November and vote the bastards out. They are your employees. They are betraying you and selling you out. They are embezzling your earnings and selling your personal secrets to the highest bidder. Fire them. Hurl them out the door so fast that you can see a redshift on their ass.
Apathy about our government is a luxury we can no longer afford. We will only have one or two more shots at this before the courts decide that EULAs really are binding, that your property isn't really yours, that the monopoly of copyright trumps Freedom of Speech (q.v. Keith Henson) and Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure (this case). At that point, we all become serfs, and, "Your papers, please," will become a phrase heard all too often in our places of work and our homes.
I've been a SCSI bigot since my Amiga days. Just 15 short years ago, all that was really available for consumer-level computers was SCSI, ESDI, and ST-506.
ST-506 was hardly an interface at all. You had to tell the BIOS the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors the drive had (sound familiar?), so that it could do the multiplication and convert logical block addresses into positioning information for the drive. You also had to enter the bad block list by hand, printed on a sticker affixed to the drive. An ST-506 interface was available for the Amiga-2000, and setting it up was predictably a bear.
SCSI saw its first consumer deployment on the Mac, and Amiga got it not too long after. No more CHS crap. No more typing in lists of bad blocks. All that intelligence was on the drive itself. Just plug the drive into the chain, tell the OS what SCSI address it had, and you were ready to start partitioning and using the drive.
So when it comes time for PCs to get intelligent drives, SCSI was the obvious choice. But no, they invent this new thing called IDE. What was different about it? As far as anyone could tell, the cable. You still had to feed CHS addresses at it; SCSI used LBA from the start. IDE drives from different manufacturers wouldn't work together; SCSI mandated interoperability. IDE now let you have two drives in your machine; SCSI already allowed up to seven.
IDE was touted as much cheaper, but it wasn't. SCSI and IDE drive prices were at near parity for years. Manufacturers were offering drives in both IDE and SCSI flavors (all other characteristics identical), with the SCSI flavor costing only ten dollars more (for a $600.00 drive, a typical price in those days, this was epsilon). It's only in the last few years or so that SCSI drive prices have skyrocketed for no readily discernable reason.
Add to that the fact that, even on a modern SCSI controller, all your old drives will still work. I have an old 600M 5-1/4-inch full-height Hewlett/Packard drive with a SCSI-I (asynchronous) interface. I plug it into the Adaptec AHA2940-U2W controller in my main rig, and Linux sees and mounts it just fine. Same with all my other old SCSI drives; I don't have to leave any of my data behind. It Just Works.
I also have an HP Omnibook 800CT laptop, which has SCSI built-in. All my drives work on that, too.
Apart from the artificially inflated costs, SCSI's only real headache is bus termination. But aside from that, the increased speed, flexibility, expandability, and reliability, for me, make SCSI an obvious choice.
The recent context menu revisions and personal toolbar recommendations by Netscape have caused a bit of controversy.
Could someone summarize what the story is here? About the only thing that annoys me about the current crop of fresh Mozilla installs is that it keeps changing my default search engine away from Google and back to Netscape.
Isn't that a bit like holding Napster responsible for all theft of music that happens on its systems, or the manufacturers of CD-RW drives for all software piracy done on their machines?
No, it's not.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
-- Henry Spencer
Computer science and computer security experts have been saying for years that Micros~1 hasn't got the first fscking clue when it comes to writing solid, reliable, secure code. This despite the fact that there have been several examples of, if not ideal solutions, good first approaches to the problem. Indeed, to create WinNT, Microsoft snarfed the VMS team from DEC, a bunch of guys who understood those principles.
And yet, despite the mountains of examples both within and without the company, despite the millions of computers blue-screening every damned day, Microsoft willfully persists in making the same stupid mistakes.
As is well-known, Word macro viruses were a big problem in years past. This was because Microsoft made a series of impossibly moronic decisions:
To incorporate a macro facility into Word directly (rather than as an external engine driven by IPC protocols, where access controls can be applied in a uniform manner),
To embed the macros into the Word documents directly, rather than as separate macro files (thus making it impossible for the user to distinguish between a normal document and an "active" one),
To set the default condition to run the macros automatically upon document loading, without informing the user,
To, by default, not inform the user that any of this idiocy was going on.
Okay, fine, so Microsoft got bitten by their would-be cleverness, but they cleaned up their act, right? They learned their lesson, right?
No. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge that they had fscked up royally, they went and deliberately committed the same errors again and again:
Not only does IE uncritically implement JavaScript, it also throws in Visual Basic scripting and ActiveX, all of which are turned on by default. This condition is identical to that which propogated the Word macro virus fiasco. Even their "secure" execution environments hasn't prevented hostile Web sites from hijacking the browser.
Outlook likewise, without user intervention, will extract and launch embedded content while simultaneously hiding it from the user. The damn thing doesn't even check to make sure the MIME type and the filename extension are consistent.
There's a term for this kind of behavior: Willful negligence. Oh, you can point out that there are security update downloads. But you can't ignore the fact that, if Microsoft had followed basic security principles, if they had learned from their own history -- hell, if they'd even extended common courtesy to their users -- this sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the first place.
This isn't an honest mistake. This is a pattern with over twenty years of history behind it.
Any responsibility born by Microsoft is equalled by the responsibility born by those users who don't apply security updates and don't run up-to-date firewall and virus checking software.
I agree that uneducated users are a big problem. But, especially with the advent of broadband connectivity, what Microsoft has effectively done is to give a loaded Uzi with the safety off to eight-year-olds, and then fail to train them in its use or even tell them where the safety lock is.
Microsoft touts its products as turnkey, ready-to-go, fire-and-forget, no setup, no configuration, no need to learn computer-ese, just sit down and become productive immediately. This is misleading in the extreme. Training is required; proper configuration is required (because Microsoft keeps setting the defaults wrong). As such, I feel Microsoft bears a significant burden of responsibility for the havoc their software has wreaked on the Internet.
it's not the *physical* harm... it's the freaking man-years of time that is wasted. [... ]
Oh, well, then if IT departments working to clean up the mess left by viruses can be counted as a dollar cost, I'd like to see a comparative study done of the dollar cost due to unprovoked Windows crashes.
It is also probably worth pointing out that these viruses wouldn't be nearly as plentiful had it not been for the 25-years-and-counting history of bloody-minded engineering incompetence freely practiced up in Redmond.
Schwab
Re:On the enforcability of EULAs
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Everyone seems to agree that EULAs are legal in as far as they are enforcable (just like any other contract). [...]
Wrong, right out of the gate.
Shrinkwrap "licenses" are a legal fiction with extremely shaky basis in law, and no basis in ethics, much less common courtesy. It is a fiction with a twenty year history, but a fiction nonetheless. See my long-ish editorial on this subject for a more detailed analysis.
Moreover, a California court recently ruled that, no matter how persistently and shrilly you refer to the transaction as a "license", if the behavior you engaged in has all the characteristics of a retail sale, then the transaction is a sale. Whether the "license" effectively alters the terms of the sale after the fact is a question unanswered by the courts. However, any person with even a smidgen of common courtesy toward their fellow man will agree that no such "contract" should be held as valid.
So, no, the EULA doesn't save RadLight's legal posterior.
Anyone have this guy's full name? I want to add him to our company's hiring blacklist. I encourage others to do likewise. Banishment/ostracization is the only effective tool we have right now for ethically reprehensible hominids such as this; might as well use it.
Schwab
The Guy's Name is **WHAT!?**
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 2
"Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future."
-- Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space
Heh, I still have my $400+ USR HST (not DS!) 14.4kb modem lurking in my storage room. It's the size of a notebook computer.
Pfah! That's nothing. I have a Hayes 300 baud StupidModem for my SOL-20. It's twice the size of your average PCI card (being a full S-100 card), uses an external "brick" for the phone line interface, has no DTMF generator (pulse dialing only), no internal speaker, and no internal software for dialing or connection establishment. You have to write a short program to fiddle the hook relay to count out dialing pulses, then wait and pray the connection works out.
Ah, those were the days...
BTW, who else learned to read NetNews off the screen at 2400 bps?:-)
I'm with you, pal. Everyone who bought one of USR's proprietary high-speed modems ended up having to spend extra money to replace it, because the standard that was ultimately adopted was superior to -- and incompatible with -- USR's.
HST was obsoleted and replaced with V.32bis. X2 was obsoleted and replaced with V.90. I don't plan on wasting my money; I'll wait for 802.11a to get cheaper.
Not so long ago, I would have agreed with you. However, having been in the computer industry for over 20 years -- primarily computer games -- has taught me there's still a huge gap between what one guy can bash out in his garage, and "studio quality" stuff.
Put simply, creating a computer game these days is unbelievably expensive. The sheer amount of work required to build maps, draw textures, create FMV cutscenes, score and record music, and write the software occupies the full time of a couple dozen people for upwards of two years. Occasionally you get a Tetris out of nowhere, but that's sadly very rare.
By extension, creating a "studio-quality" movie will continue to require a lot of production staff and infrastructure. So Hollywood does not yet need to worry about the next Spielberg creating a blockbuster in his garage (and if one does, they can simply buy him/her out).
One thing the Internet might do is break the current logjam of banality and lack of imagination shown by most screenplays these days. But until every home has 3Mb/sec, effective distribution will remain in the hands of big players.
Try reading - you will find out there are a lot of companies with much worse business ethics and practices than Microsoft.
And so that excuses Micros~1's ethical bankruptcy?
"I suppose, if everyone else jumped off the Empire State Building, you would have to jump off the Empire State Building."
As we move into a future where interconnected computers and ephemeral digital bits will become critical to everyday life, it is absolutely crucial that the architects of this future are people of good character and integrity. Micros~1 is the very antithesis of this. Because they are at the beginning of this future, and because of their size and "success", their ethical lapses are magnified by a couple of orders of magnitude. Even if Micros~1 were to vanish tomorrow, undoing the damage they've done to date would take decades.
Regardless of the magnitude of their "success" and the "shareholder value" they've created, it does not change or excuse the fact Bill Gates displays all the character and integrity of a spoiled brat. He needs to be put over someone's knee posthaste.
IBM's drive packing instructions are pretty darned explicit. And they tell you right up front that improper packing is grounds for voiding the warranty.
I recently shipped a flaky DDYS-T18350N back to them for RMA replacement. I followed their packing instructions. The drive was replaced without incident.
They're not trying to invent reasons to screw you out of the warranty; they're trying to eliminate damage during shipping. Without careful shipping, how can they know the failure they're seeing was due to faulty manufacturing, or due to static buildup during shipping?
Form a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that owns and operates the database. Draw up the corporate charter such that the database must be maintained for the sole benefit of the community, that users' activity will never be tracked, etc.
My (limited) understanding is that the law makes 501(c)(3) charters very hard to change. As such, new management can't just waltz in and "sell out" the company and its resources.
The only remaining danger is that the organization becomes politically influential and either leverages that influence to the detriment of the community, or itself comes under the influence of corrupt organizations.
The root of the problem is the concept of a salary range for a given job. People can't get a raise because they are max'd out for their job.
That's absurd. If the company thinks an employee is valuable doing what they're doing, and they want to keep them, then just give them a raise.
First off, the idea of a set range for a given job role is arbitrary to begin with. But who's the "audience" here? By that I mean, who's watching their salary range, and who notices when it's been exceeded? Do they get their knickers in a twist when it happens? And why should it matter to them?
Hell, if the company feels constrained by an arbitrary salary range, then why not just create a new position (Grand Digital Poo-Bah) with no established range. If it's the semantics that's standing in your way, then hack around them.
We're talking about advertising here. Advertising is all about being in your face without your consent. They want to turn your PC into a television, where you have to watch their "message" they way they want you to see it, without any opportunity for meaningful feedback.
Firstly, the ad campaign is about data centers and "big iron", not web servers [... ]
In which case, Microsoft's PR campaign is even sillier than a first glance would suggest. Windows is barely adequate as an HTTP server. As a hosting platform for a massive corporate data center, it's quite out of the question.
For terabyte data warehousing and five-9's reliability (both in uptime and in accuracy), Microsoft's 25-year-long history of provably shoddy products absolutely precludes its use in company-wide "mission-critical" applications. Any "professional" who would host a massive corporate data center on Windows would be guilty of negligence verging on the criminal.
Your business runs on proven, rock-solid software; not four-color glossy fliers.
Theft is you writing a song, me taking the song and telling the world that indeed I wrote the song not you, and I should be given the credit. Theft is me downloading a copy of the song without paying you.
Nice rhetorical attempt at conflating two completely unrelated activities, namely reputation fraud (claiming another's work as your own) and unsanctioned copying.
Unsanctioned copying is going to happen whether you want it to or not. The nature of digital media offers you no choice.
* At least some of the phones were purchased from Cingular -- not Nokia.
Yeah, and...? Cingular doesn't make phones, they sell cellular service. The phones they offer are co-branded Motorolas, Ericssons, and Nokias.
* There was no mention in the article that *any* phones were purchased straight from Nokia
Yeah, and...? Is their attempt at deception somehow nullified simply because they obtained the Nokias through a third party?
* The phones in question were distributed to media-types only to demonstrate the supposed proprietary technology. They were not purchased by end users.
The phones were represented to the media as their actual product. When the reporters learned the truth and called them on it, Hop-On backpedaled and said it's only a mock-up.
Slashdot Mirror
That Mac was supposed to be an Amiga.
I was not directly involved with the debacle, but was closely connected with Commodore personnel who were in a position to know. Paramount originally wanted to use an Amiga in that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. To that end, they contacted Commodore to obtain an Amiga 1000 for use.
The dweezil at the other end informed them that Commodore had no procedures in place for distribution of promotional machines (marketing? What's that?). However, they would be willing to sell them a machine at cut-rate developer pricing. Surprisingly, Paramount agreed, cut a check, and sent it off.
Fast forward a couple weeks: No machine. Another call to Commodore. It turns out that the amount of the check failed to include some trivial fee (shipping, tax, whatever), and the machine wasn't going to be shipped. Paramount was invited to send another check for the corrected amount.
Paramount understandably got fed up and made it's next call to Cupertino, CA. Apple not only gave Paramount a machine, they assigned them a programmer to do whatever they needed to make the machine dance for the camera.
Just another page in the ponderous tome of Commodore's incompetent management.
Schwab
Because elected officials are no longer representing you, but their campaign funding sources. The right to be heard is now only available to those who have paid for it.
Want to know the fastest way to get spam outlawed? Use it for political advocacy for the upcoming election. Hey, it's extremely cheap, and spammers claim it's effective, so why not use it to shake up the status quo? If you're successful, you'll vote the bastards out. If not, you'll get spam outlawed (after all, we can't have the proles thinking they have any say in government (note: sarcasm)).
Schwab
Um, how many theaters who managed to book a film like Spider-Man would also be booking indie flicks?
I mean, what kind of theater that screens Spider-Man would also screen something like Orlando ?
Schwab
It's a civil case. The right to refuse to self-incriminate is only available during criminal proceedings.
Schwab
Consider: A US Federal Court -- not some backwater municipal or state court -- has just ordered a wholesale invasion of citizens' privacy and personal information without a search warrant.
Consider further: This action was ordered, not in the name of "National Security" or "Anti-Terrorist Investigation", not on behalf of the government at all, but on behalf of a monsterously wealthy corporation bleating about "theft" and illusory "lost profits".
It has begun. The last bulwark against tyranny has been swept aside by a sitting Federal Magistrate without the slightest qualm.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I offer the following admittedly foolish, idealisic counsel:
Close your wallets.
Buy nothing.
See no movies. Rent no videos. Buy no music CDs. Purchase no computer software that isn't Open Source/Free Software (remember, the BSA members are in on this, too).
"But what do I do for entertainment?" Easy. Fire up your Web browser and/or go to your local government building and start digging for incriminating dirt on every elected official you can find. Once you find it, publish it. Read the dirt other people have dug up. Learn as much as you can. Discovering incriminating secrets about other people is endlessly entertaining, especially with that whole "betrayal of the public trust" angle going for it.
And once you've learned everything you possibly can about the people ostensibly representing you... VOTE!
Too many Attorneys General simply refuse to bring malfeasance charges, so relying on criminal prosecution to delete these people won't be very effective. Get out there this upcoming November and vote the bastards out. They are your employees. They are betraying you and selling you out. They are embezzling your earnings and selling your personal secrets to the highest bidder. Fire them. Hurl them out the door so fast that you can see a redshift on their ass.
Apathy about our government is a luxury we can no longer afford. We will only have one or two more shots at this before the courts decide that EULAs really are binding, that your property isn't really yours, that the monopoly of copyright trumps Freedom of Speech (q.v. Keith Henson) and Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure (this case). At that point, we all become serfs, and, "Your papers, please," will become a phrase heard all too often in our places of work and our homes.
Schwab
Fravia's Pages of Reverse Engineering aren't too shabby an introduction. However, their focus is on DOS-based systems, not UNIX.
Schwab
I've been a SCSI bigot since my Amiga days. Just 15 short years ago, all that was really available for consumer-level computers was SCSI, ESDI, and ST-506.
ST-506 was hardly an interface at all. You had to tell the BIOS the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors the drive had (sound familiar?), so that it could do the multiplication and convert logical block addresses into positioning information for the drive. You also had to enter the bad block list by hand, printed on a sticker affixed to the drive. An ST-506 interface was available for the Amiga-2000, and setting it up was predictably a bear.
SCSI saw its first consumer deployment on the Mac, and Amiga got it not too long after. No more CHS crap. No more typing in lists of bad blocks. All that intelligence was on the drive itself. Just plug the drive into the chain, tell the OS what SCSI address it had, and you were ready to start partitioning and using the drive.
So when it comes time for PCs to get intelligent drives, SCSI was the obvious choice. But no, they invent this new thing called IDE. What was different about it? As far as anyone could tell, the cable. You still had to feed CHS addresses at it; SCSI used LBA from the start. IDE drives from different manufacturers wouldn't work together; SCSI mandated interoperability. IDE now let you have two drives in your machine; SCSI already allowed up to seven.
IDE was touted as much cheaper, but it wasn't. SCSI and IDE drive prices were at near parity for years. Manufacturers were offering drives in both IDE and SCSI flavors (all other characteristics identical), with the SCSI flavor costing only ten dollars more (for a $600.00 drive, a typical price in those days, this was epsilon). It's only in the last few years or so that SCSI drive prices have skyrocketed for no readily discernable reason.
Add to that the fact that, even on a modern SCSI controller, all your old drives will still work. I have an old 600M 5-1/4-inch full-height Hewlett/Packard drive with a SCSI-I (asynchronous) interface. I plug it into the Adaptec AHA2940-U2W controller in my main rig, and Linux sees and mounts it just fine. Same with all my other old SCSI drives; I don't have to leave any of my data behind. It Just Works.
I also have an HP Omnibook 800CT laptop, which has SCSI built-in. All my drives work on that, too.
Apart from the artificially inflated costs, SCSI's only real headache is bus termination. But aside from that, the increased speed, flexibility, expandability, and reliability, for me, make SCSI an obvious choice.
Schwab
Could someone summarize what the story is here? About the only thing that annoys me about the current crop of fresh Mozilla installs is that it keeps changing my default search engine away from Google and back to Netscape.
Schwab
No, it's not.
Computer science and computer security experts have been saying for years that Micros~1 hasn't got the first fscking clue when it comes to writing solid, reliable, secure code. This despite the fact that there have been several examples of, if not ideal solutions, good first approaches to the problem. Indeed, to create WinNT, Microsoft snarfed the VMS team from DEC, a bunch of guys who understood those principles.
And yet, despite the mountains of examples both within and without the company, despite the millions of computers blue-screening every damned day, Microsoft willfully persists in making the same stupid mistakes.
As is well-known, Word macro viruses were a big problem in years past. This was because Microsoft made a series of impossibly moronic decisions:
Okay, fine, so Microsoft got bitten by their would-be cleverness, but they cleaned up their act, right? They learned their lesson, right?
No. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge that they had fscked up royally, they went and deliberately committed the same errors again and again:
There's a term for this kind of behavior: Willful negligence. Oh, you can point out that there are security update downloads. But you can't ignore the fact that, if Microsoft had followed basic security principles, if they had learned from their own history -- hell, if they'd even extended common courtesy to their users -- this sort of thing wouldn't have happened in the first place.
This isn't an honest mistake. This is a pattern with over twenty years of history behind it.
I agree that uneducated users are a big problem. But, especially with the advent of broadband connectivity, what Microsoft has effectively done is to give a loaded Uzi with the safety off to eight-year-olds, and then fail to train them in its use or even tell them where the safety lock is.
Microsoft touts its products as turnkey, ready-to-go, fire-and-forget, no setup, no configuration, no need to learn computer-ese, just sit down and become productive immediately. This is misleading in the extreme. Training is required; proper configuration is required (because Microsoft keeps setting the defaults wrong). As such, I feel Microsoft bears a significant burden of responsibility for the havoc their software has wreaked on the Internet.
Schwab
Oh, well, then if IT departments working to clean up the mess left by viruses can be counted as a dollar cost, I'd like to see a comparative study done of the dollar cost due to unprovoked Windows crashes.
It is also probably worth pointing out that these viruses wouldn't be nearly as plentiful had it not been for the 25-years-and-counting history of bloody-minded engineering incompetence freely practiced up in Redmond.
Schwab
Wrong, right out of the gate.
Shrinkwrap "licenses" are a legal fiction with extremely shaky basis in law, and no basis in ethics, much less common courtesy. It is a fiction with a twenty year history, but a fiction nonetheless. See my long-ish editorial on this subject for a more detailed analysis.
Moreover, a California court recently ruled that, no matter how persistently and shrilly you refer to the transaction as a "license", if the behavior you engaged in has all the characteristics of a retail sale, then the transaction is a sale. Whether the "license" effectively alters the terms of the sale after the fact is a question unanswered by the courts. However, any person with even a smidgen of common courtesy toward their fellow man will agree that no such "contract" should be held as valid.
So, no, the EULA doesn't save RadLight's legal posterior.
Schwab
Anyone have this guy's full name? I want to add him to our company's hiring blacklist. I encourage others to do likewise. Banishment/ostracization is the only effective tool we have right now for ethically reprehensible hominids such as this; might as well use it.
Schwab
Schwab
Pfah! That's nothing. I have a Hayes 300 baud StupidModem for my SOL-20. It's twice the size of your average PCI card (being a full S-100 card), uses an external "brick" for the phone line interface, has no DTMF generator (pulse dialing only), no internal speaker, and no internal software for dialing or connection establishment. You have to write a short program to fiddle the hook relay to count out dialing pulses, then wait and pray the connection works out.
Ah, those were the days...
BTW, who else learned to read NetNews off the screen at 2400 bps? :-)
Schwab
I'm with you, pal. Everyone who bought one of USR's proprietary high-speed modems ended up having to spend extra money to replace it, because the standard that was ultimately adopted was superior to -- and incompatible with -- USR's.
HST was obsoleted and replaced with V.32bis. X2 was obsoleted and replaced with V.90. I don't plan on wasting my money; I'll wait for 802.11a to get cheaper.
Schwab
Not so long ago, I would have agreed with you. However, having been in the computer industry for over 20 years -- primarily computer games -- has taught me there's still a huge gap between what one guy can bash out in his garage, and "studio quality" stuff.
Put simply, creating a computer game these days is unbelievably expensive. The sheer amount of work required to build maps, draw textures, create FMV cutscenes, score and record music, and write the software occupies the full time of a couple dozen people for upwards of two years. Occasionally you get a Tetris out of nowhere, but that's sadly very rare.
By extension, creating a "studio-quality" movie will continue to require a lot of production staff and infrastructure. So Hollywood does not yet need to worry about the next Spielberg creating a blockbuster in his garage (and if one does, they can simply buy him/her out).
One thing the Internet might do is break the current logjam of banality and lack of imagination shown by most screenplays these days. But until every home has 3Mb/sec, effective distribution will remain in the hands of big players.
Schwab
And so that excuses Micros~1's ethical bankruptcy?
"I suppose, if everyone else jumped off the Empire State Building, you would have to jump off the Empire State Building."
As we move into a future where interconnected computers and ephemeral digital bits will become critical to everyday life, it is absolutely crucial that the architects of this future are people of good character and integrity. Micros~1 is the very antithesis of this. Because they are at the beginning of this future, and because of their size and "success", their ethical lapses are magnified by a couple of orders of magnitude. Even if Micros~1 were to vanish tomorrow, undoing the damage they've done to date would take decades.
Regardless of the magnitude of their "success" and the "shareholder value" they've created, it does not change or excuse the fact Bill Gates displays all the character and integrity of a spoiled brat. He needs to be put over someone's knee posthaste.
Schwab
IBM's drive packing instructions are pretty darned explicit. And they tell you right up front that improper packing is grounds for voiding the warranty.
I recently shipped a flaky DDYS-T18350N back to them for RMA replacement. I followed their packing instructions. The drive was replaced without incident.
They're not trying to invent reasons to screw you out of the warranty; they're trying to eliminate damage during shipping. Without careful shipping, how can they know the failure they're seeing was due to faulty manufacturing, or due to static buildup during shipping?
Schwab
You work for Salon, don'cha?
Schwab
Form a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that owns and operates the database. Draw up the corporate charter such that the database must be maintained for the sole benefit of the community, that users' activity will never be tracked, etc.
My (limited) understanding is that the law makes 501(c)(3) charters very hard to change. As such, new management can't just waltz in and "sell out" the company and its resources.
The only remaining danger is that the organization becomes politically influential and either leverages that influence to the detriment of the community, or itself comes under the influence of corrupt organizations.
Schwab
That's absurd. If the company thinks an employee is valuable doing what they're doing, and they want to keep them, then just give them a raise.
First off, the idea of a set range for a given job role is arbitrary to begin with. But who's the "audience" here? By that I mean, who's watching their salary range, and who notices when it's been exceeded? Do they get their knickers in a twist when it happens? And why should it matter to them?
Hell, if the company feels constrained by an arbitrary salary range, then why not just create a new position (Grand Digital Poo-Bah) with no established range. If it's the semantics that's standing in your way, then hack around them.
Schwab
We're talking about advertising here. Advertising is all about being in your face without your consent. They want to turn your PC into a television, where you have to watch their "message" they way they want you to see it, without any opportunity for meaningful feedback.
Schwab
In which case, Microsoft's PR campaign is even sillier than a first glance would suggest. Windows is barely adequate as an HTTP server. As a hosting platform for a massive corporate data center, it's quite out of the question.
For terabyte data warehousing and five-9's reliability (both in uptime and in accuracy), Microsoft's 25-year-long history of provably shoddy products absolutely precludes its use in company-wide "mission-critical" applications. Any "professional" who would host a massive corporate data center on Windows would be guilty of negligence verging on the criminal.
Your business runs on proven, rock-solid software; not four-color glossy fliers.
Schwab
Nice rhetorical attempt at conflating two completely unrelated activities, namely reputation fraud (claiming another's work as your own) and unsanctioned copying.
Unsanctioned copying is going to happen whether you want it to or not. The nature of digital media offers you no choice.
Schwab
Er, yeah, I did. That's why I submitted it.
Yeah, and...? Cingular doesn't make phones, they sell cellular service. The phones they offer are co-branded Motorolas, Ericssons, and Nokias.
Yeah, and...? Is their attempt at deception somehow nullified simply because they obtained the Nokias through a third party?
The phones were represented to the media as their actual product. When the reporters learned the truth and called them on it, Hop-On backpedaled and said it's only a mock-up.
Sorry, Hop-On loses.
Schwab