"If it's an employee's own computer, with its own wireless card, you can't legally take it"
This depends on the company policy. The company I currently work for has a policy of no computers, PDA's, etc except those provided by the company. They have temporarily taken an employee's computer, made sure no company IP was on the computer and escorted the employee/contractor out the door.
"So it proves that most people who are pro barbarism (i.e. capital punishment) are only pro capital punishment when they've not thought through all the consequences"
Most people I know that are pro capitol punishment have thought it through completely, and still come to the same conclusion, capitol punishment is correct. Are innocent people executed? Sure Is it a large percentage? NO!
People who believe in captiol punishment feel that people that have committed heinous crimes against society should be permanantly removed from society, just as their victim(s) were.
Any time new evidence is uncovered, regardless if the convicted is still alive, it should be investigated to the fullest to determine where the system failed and make adjustments to avoid such failings in the future. Does the system work like this today? sometimes, mostly not though.
The system isn't perfect, but it's right much more than it's wrong.
If you think life in prison is such a great alternative, then why is the suicide rate so high among "lifers"?
"The death of one wrong person alone removes the justification for the death penalty"
The death of one innocent person by the hands of a guilty person justifies the death penalty.
If you choose to kill an innocent person, then your right to life is forfeit!
Prison is always punishment. If someone is put away for 8 to 20 years that is still punishment, that is 8 to 20 years of their life spent behind bars, that they will never get back. You can dream that it is somehow different and that it is "rehabilitation", but when that cell door gets slammed, the punishment begins.
If gun companies actually promoted their products to do "bodily harm" than they should be held liable, when someone gets harmed/killed with their product. I have never seen a gun company promote their product in such a way, and find it highly unlikely they ever would.
Believe it or not guns actually do have legitimate uses, and most gun owners actually do use them for perfectly legal activity.
I couldn't have said it better, I really dispise the "Jack of trades..." crap.
My teams are always made up mostly of generalists, and cross-skilling is expected of them. Someone that only knows one or two skills and doesn't have a desire to learn a new skill is not very useful to me, and doesn't last long on my team.
In today's complex IT environments you can't have single points of failure anywhere, and this most definately includes staff. Your lucky if a specialist quits, because if you run into a problem you may be able to bring him back as a consultant, but if he gets hit by a bus, good luck.
"3. people who had a PPC Mac hate this, actually they might switch to a Linux now as their old machine is going to phase out "
I use a Mac because of OS X, not because of the CPU in the machine. It doesn't bother me that Apple switched to Intel, maybe the price will come down for the HW, somehow I doubt it though, since maximum profit is still king at Apple.
Nice bit of FUD on the "phase out". Sure, PPC based machines will be phased out, and replaced with Intel based machines, but OS X will continue to support PPC based machine for quite a while, and as I said OS X is the reason I use Macs.
Before I made the switch, two years ago, I used Linux as my desktop for 5 years. While Linux is more stable than Windows, and offers a better development environment, IMO, it isn't even close to OS X from an ease of use standpoint. With OS X I get Unix like stability and development environment bundled in an easy to use and maintain OS.
So true, I would be more afraid of the porn industry though, since I don't believe they would use the legal system to quash your patent, more likely large men in suits and blunt objects...
"C) Use a loop hole to take their work and use it as your own for free."
It's not a loop hole, it is a requirement of the GPL that RH releases the code. It is the risky business model (charging for packaging and support of OSS software) that RH has chosen to undertake, that could cause them to go backrupt.
I would agree for production, mission critical systems I almost always run RHEL, but on developement and test systems the cost benefit isn't there, and I run CentOS.
In my experience, any problem I have found on RHEL, has been exactly the same on CentOS, and any patch the RH develops for RHEL, is pretty quickly picked up by the CentOS folks. My only concern is that CentOS doesn't loose momentum, and start to lag behind RH in producing patches and builds.
I haven't upgraded yet, purchased yes, upgraded no. Now I won't be upgrading for a while, since I won't be able to do development on it, until Java 5 is available. So for now it's Terminal.app and X11 to a Linux server.
I didn't make the choice to go Java 5, my management did. My choice is to develop on OS X, but on this project that has become impossible, for reasons outside of my control.
Well I'm ready now, actually the project I work on moved to Java 5 a month ago, and has started using Java 5 features.
I originally figured no big deal since Tiger is out in a month and Java 5 was in the later previews of Tiger, so surely it will be in the final, but no. Worse there doesn't seem to be a date for release, just soon...
"After all, how would you like it if it came out that you had a confidential illness because a medical transcriptionist hit 'Send' after Word crashed while mail-merging your test results?"
Have you ever been involved in contract negotiations like the GP is describing? Lawyers could send these documents back and forth 10 or 20 times (or more), with minute changes each time. You can't expect lawyers to deal with converting it to text and then using some other tool to compare it, that's why they are using a word processor, so they don't have to do that.
PDF? How does sending a read-only version of a document, that needs to have changes done to it, solve anything?
"And what does this have to do with K-12 education again?"
The point is that OOo has compatibility issues with Word. This is a problem regardless of who uses it. You can't expect every student to install OOo on their home machines, so compatibility issues are going to come up.
Are these issues any worse then the ones that come up now with different version of Word?
Does it change the amount work the OP's support staff has to do?
In my experience the nature of the compatibility issues between Word and OOo are harder to solve, than the issues between different versions of Word. So my answer to the above two questions are "yes" and "yes, initially". Once certain "classes" of issues are seen a couple of times, those are easier to solve, and potentially teaching staff can be trained to solve them on their own.
OOo is a needed and great product, but hitting a constantly moving target is a hard thing to do. Its doubtful that OOo will ever be a 100% compatiable, since as soon as they get close, MS will change the formats (which is completely within their rights. Your right as a consumer, if you don't like vendor lockin, is to use something else).
I don't see how my arguement is wrong. It may be wrong for your company, but your company is an exception, the vast majority of companies that buy PC's run Windows on that machine. Engineering companies, like yours, make up a very small segment of the PC market.
I also agree completely with your second argument, Linux does take more market share from Unix than it does from MS, becuase again where Linux is making the biggest in roads is in the data center and large processing "farms" (engineering, video production, etc), where MS has historically had the weakest market share, and Unix is historically strong.
IMO your view is a little too optimistic. I am by far NOT a MS supporter and would like nothing more than to see their stranglehold on the corporate world broken, but I can't say that I have seen any numbers to support this.
Sure Longhorn is delayed, but I don't see that affecting MS's bottom line. There are thousands (millions?) of new PC's leaving Dell/HP/IBM everyday that have a MS OS installed on them. The majority of those PC's retain that OS as well, because the vast majority of those are destined for a corporate environment, where like it or not Linux has made almost no impact.
There is no arguement that, in many aspects, Linux is a far better choice, but better doesn't always win (Beta vs. VHS).
The key to MS's defeat lies in winning over the corporate world, and taking away that steady stream of "yes men" to anything MS. This is certainly happening in the data center, but on the desktop/enterprise side...
Patents are great and I certainly agree that MS would be foolish to try another swipe at Linux from the aspect you presented, but IMO, if MS were smart (LONG from a given), they could lay low, lay off the rhetoric of Linux and continue to do what they do best, market, and they would continue to dominate for the forseeable future.
It's not about who has the best product, it's about who can market it best, and MS has ALWAYS been a better marketing company than a product company.
Redundant systems are nice, if you can afford that. I assume you mean having redundant ISP/Co-Lo's as well, since ISP/Co-Lo's have a tendancy to go out of business suddenly and you no longer have "access" to the IP addresses that were on those machines. There are more companies that can't afford having multiple ISP/Co-Lo's, then can, and for those companies that can't, having TTL's that won't propagate their new DNS entries is a BIG problem.
Fortunately you don't have to worry about me working for you, since that would NEVER happen, one conversation with you would be all I needed to make up my mind...
This works for MX records, but what about any other type of "service", where TTL's are the only way to propagate new information?
I have unfortunately had to take a similar stance as the original poster, and let users know that they can either complain to their ISP, change ISP's or I MAY let them use my DNS server (not likely).
Seen it for myself, I was at a mall watching a couple of the workers goofing off, setting the anti-theft device off, they were tossing a FOB to one another through the doorway of the store.
It may very well have to do with the "cheapness" of the FOB, because my Audi key doesn't set it off, and I suspect that retail store workers aren't driving expensive cars.
Do you have a FOB for your car? For whatever reason certain key FOB's set these things off. I wonder if it's your keys and not the OTC medicine that is setting it off.
Slashdot Mirror
"If it's an employee's own computer, with its own wireless card, you can't legally take it"
This depends on the company policy. The company I currently work for has a policy of no computers, PDA's, etc except those provided by the company. They have temporarily taken an employee's computer, made sure no company IP was on the computer and escorted the employee/contractor out the door.
"So it proves that most people who are pro barbarism (i.e. capital punishment) are only pro capital punishment when they've not thought through all the consequences"
Most people I know that are pro capitol punishment have thought it through completely, and still come to the same conclusion, capitol punishment is correct. Are innocent people executed? Sure Is it a large percentage? NO!
People who believe in captiol punishment feel that people that have committed heinous crimes against society should be permanantly removed from society, just as their victim(s) were.
Any time new evidence is uncovered, regardless if the convicted is still alive, it should be investigated to the fullest to determine where the system failed and make adjustments to avoid such failings in the future. Does the system work like this today? sometimes, mostly not though.
The system isn't perfect, but it's right much more than it's wrong.
If you think life in prison is such a great alternative, then why is the suicide rate so high among "lifers"?
"The death of one wrong person alone removes the justification for the death penalty"
The death of one innocent person by the hands of a guilty person justifies the death penalty.
If you choose to kill an innocent person, then your right to life is forfeit!
Prison is always punishment. If someone is put away for 8 to 20 years that is still punishment, that is 8 to 20 years of their life spent behind bars, that they will never get back. You can dream that it is somehow different and that it is "rehabilitation", but when that cell door gets slammed, the punishment begins.
If gun companies actually promoted their products to do "bodily harm" than they should be held liable, when someone gets harmed/killed with their product. I have never seen a gun company promote their product in such a way, and find it highly unlikely they ever would.
Believe it or not guns actually do have legitimate uses, and most gun owners actually do use them for perfectly legal activity.
I couldn't have said it better, I really dispise the "Jack of trades..." crap.
My teams are always made up mostly of generalists, and cross-skilling is expected of them. Someone that only knows one or two skills and doesn't have a desire to learn a new skill is not very useful to me, and doesn't last long on my team.
In today's complex IT environments you can't have single points of failure anywhere, and this most definately includes staff. Your lucky if a specialist quits, because if you run into a problem you may be able to bring him back as a consultant, but if he gets hit by a bus, good luck.
"3. people who had a PPC Mac hate this, actually they might switch to a Linux now as their old machine is going to phase out "
I use a Mac because of OS X, not because of the CPU in the machine. It doesn't bother me that Apple switched to Intel, maybe the price will come down for the HW, somehow I doubt it though, since maximum profit is still king at Apple.
Nice bit of FUD on the "phase out". Sure, PPC based machines will be phased out, and replaced with Intel based machines, but OS X will continue to support PPC based machine for quite a while, and as I said OS X is the reason I use Macs.
Before I made the switch, two years ago, I used Linux as my desktop for 5 years. While Linux is more stable than Windows, and offers a better development environment, IMO, it isn't even close to OS X from an ease of use standpoint. With OS X I get Unix like stability and development environment bundled in an easy to use and maintain OS.
So true, I would be more afraid of the porn industry though, since I don't believe they would use the legal system to quash your patent, more likely large men in suits and blunt objects...
I think the porn industry can trump your patent with prior art...
"C) Use a loop hole to take their work and use it as your own for free."
It's not a loop hole, it is a requirement of the GPL that RH releases the code. It is the risky business model (charging for packaging and support of OSS software) that RH has chosen to undertake, that could cause them to go backrupt.
I would agree for production, mission critical systems I almost always run RHEL, but on developement and test systems the cost benefit isn't there, and I run CentOS.
In my experience, any problem I have found on RHEL, has been exactly the same on CentOS, and any patch the RH develops for RHEL, is pretty quickly picked up by the CentOS folks. My only concern is that CentOS doesn't loose momentum, and start to lag behind RH in producing patches and builds.
Thanks
I haven't upgraded yet, purchased yes, upgraded no. Now I won't be upgrading for a while, since I won't be able to do development on it, until Java 5 is available. So for now it's Terminal.app and X11 to a Linux server.
I didn't make the choice to go Java 5, my management did. My choice is to develop on OS X, but on this project that has become impossible, for reasons outside of my control.
So I pay ~$100 for Tiger, which is required to run Java 5. Then I pay ~$500 for a beta version of Java 5!
Apple should be allowing free access to beta versions of Java. If I want to run beta sw, that should be my choice.
I really wish Sun would step to the plate and start offering Java for OS X, because Apple has proven that Java is not a priority for them.
Agreed. I like my Mac, but now, until Apple releases Java 5, I will have to move to a Linux machine for development.
You haven't been around Sun's "name games" very long, have you? Try figuring out Solaris versions some time...
Well I'm ready now, actually the project I work on moved to Java 5 a month ago, and has started using Java 5 features.
I originally figured no big deal since Tiger is out in a month and Java 5 was in the later previews of Tiger, so surely it will be in the final, but no. Worse there doesn't seem to be a date for release, just soon...
Is Java 5 in the final version of Tiger?
If not when will Apple be releasing it?
"After all, how would you like it if it came out that you had a confidential illness because a medical transcriptionist hit 'Send' after Word crashed while mail-merging your test results?"
Which brings up HIPPA concerns, here in the US.
Have you ever been involved in contract negotiations like the GP is describing? Lawyers could send these documents back and forth 10 or 20 times (or more), with minute changes each time. You can't expect lawyers to deal with converting it to text and then using some other tool to compare it, that's why they are using a word processor, so they don't have to do that.
PDF? How does sending a read-only version of a document, that needs to have changes done to it, solve anything?
"And what does this have to do with K-12 education again?"
The point is that OOo has compatibility issues with Word. This is a problem regardless of who uses it. You can't expect every student to install OOo on their home machines, so compatibility issues are going to come up.
Are these issues any worse then the ones that come up now with different version of Word?
Does it change the amount work the OP's support staff has to do?
In my experience the nature of the compatibility issues between Word and OOo are harder to solve, than the issues between different versions of Word. So my answer to the above two questions are "yes" and "yes, initially". Once certain "classes" of issues are seen a couple of times, those are easier to solve, and potentially teaching staff can be trained to solve them on their own.
OOo is a needed and great product, but hitting a constantly moving target is a hard thing to do. Its doubtful that OOo will ever be a 100% compatiable, since as soon as they get close, MS will change the formats (which is completely within their rights. Your right as a consumer, if you don't like vendor lockin, is to use something else).
I don't see how my arguement is wrong. It may be wrong for your company, but your company is an exception, the vast majority of companies that buy PC's run Windows on that machine. Engineering companies, like yours, make up a very small segment of the PC market.
I also agree completely with your second argument, Linux does take more market share from Unix than it does from MS, becuase again where Linux is making the biggest in roads is in the data center and large processing "farms" (engineering, video production, etc), where MS has historically had the weakest market share, and Unix is historically strong.
IMO your view is a little too optimistic. I am by far NOT a MS supporter and would like nothing more than to see their stranglehold on the corporate world broken, but I can't say that I have seen any numbers to support this.
Sure Longhorn is delayed, but I don't see that affecting MS's bottom line. There are thousands (millions?) of new PC's leaving Dell/HP/IBM everyday that have a MS OS installed on them. The majority of those PC's retain that OS as well, because the vast majority of those are destined for a corporate environment, where like it or not Linux has made almost no impact.
There is no arguement that, in many aspects, Linux is a far better choice, but better doesn't always win (Beta vs. VHS).
The key to MS's defeat lies in winning over the corporate world, and taking away that steady stream of "yes men" to anything MS. This is certainly happening in the data center, but on the desktop/enterprise side...
Patents are great and I certainly agree that MS would be foolish to try another swipe at Linux from the aspect you presented, but IMO, if MS were smart (LONG from a given), they could lay low, lay off the rhetoric of Linux and continue to do what they do best, market, and they would continue to dominate for the forseeable future.
It's not about who has the best product, it's about who can market it best, and MS has ALWAYS been a better marketing company than a product company.
Must be nice to have all the answers...
Redundant systems are nice, if you can afford that. I assume you mean having redundant ISP/Co-Lo's as well, since ISP/Co-Lo's have a tendancy to go out of business suddenly and you no longer have "access" to the IP addresses that were on those machines. There are more companies that can't afford having multiple ISP/Co-Lo's, then can, and for those companies that can't, having TTL's that won't propagate their new DNS entries is a BIG problem.
Fortunately you don't have to worry about me working for you, since that would NEVER happen, one conversation with you would be all I needed to make up my mind...
This works for MX records, but what about any other type of "service", where TTL's are the only way to propagate new information?
I have unfortunately had to take a similar stance as the original poster, and let users know that they can either complain to their ISP, change ISP's or I MAY let them use my DNS server (not likely).
Seen it for myself, I was at a mall watching a couple of the workers goofing off, setting the anti-theft device off, they were tossing a FOB to one another through the doorway of the store.
It may very well have to do with the "cheapness" of the FOB, because my Audi key doesn't set it off, and I suspect that retail store workers aren't driving expensive cars.
Do you have a FOB for your car? For whatever reason certain key FOB's set these things off. I wonder if it's your keys and not the OTC medicine that is setting it off.