Read the article:
San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based company that turned up a few dozen unlicensed copies of programs.
If he's using a few dozens copies of high-end business software, it could EASILY amount to the price he had to pay.
It's nice to see a business move to open source, but it's not like this guy didn't deserve what he got.
From the Article:
How did that happen?
We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation. Even if they can tell a piece of software isn't being used, it's still a violation if it's on that hard drive. What I really thought is that you ought to treat people the way you want to be treated.
Organisations like the BSA are allowed to raid people and companies?
I thought only the police could do that - if they have a warrant.
RTFA: And one day I got a call that there were armed marshals at my door talking about software license compliance i.e. it was the police (or some other law enforcement agency).
The point isn't to surpass it. The point is to do it because you want to, to see if you can, and for fun. Think of it as some guy writing yet another editor - what's the point in a world with with emacs, vi etc?.
Actually, not quite right, it's never 1/2. You have a 1/3 chance of picking the right door if you stay with your first choice, and a 2/3 chance if you switch. No need for simulation, just look at the possibility matrix:
\ 1 2 3
A y n n
B n y n
C n n y
The top row is the door number, the letters are the three cases, y means 'yes' (location of prize), n means 'no'. Suppose you chose door #1. In case A he'll show you door 2 or 3, in case B he'll show you #3, in case C he'll show #2. Only in Case A will you win by sticking with it. Case B and C you'll win by switching. That's 2/3 chance of winning by switching. Same thing regardless of what choice of door you made first.
There are two cases where you win by sticking.
Where you are shown #2, and where you are shown #3.
\ 1 2 3 - pick - shown
S y n n -- 1 -- 2
T y n n -- 1 -- 3
U n y n -- 1 -- 3
V n n y -- 1 -- 2
There are two cases where you win by changing.This makes it 1/2, if I am wrong, why?
Apologies for the ugly formatting, but I don't know how to get/. to accept some whitespace:-(
Don't forget We Can Remember It For You Wholesale which ended up as Total Recall.
I'm waiting for the Hollywood blockbuster versions of Radio Free Albemuth, A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. That would be fun:-) Actually Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would make a good movie.(Yes I did like Blade Runner but...)
That wouldn't enable me to imply MS may not be 'eating their own dog food' and possibly need to run a unix/linux/bsd to handle the volume of data sent by thirty billion XP crashes a year, would it?
John Dvorak developed some interesting stats on XP crashes based on information given in a speech by Bill Gates. He works out that there are 25 millions blue screen crashes of XP per day. Interesting read. Also raises the question of exactly what happens to all those "crash reports".
Well if it was linux/unix I'd say '>/dev/null'. Of course they may be running a linux/unix box to handle the volume of data they're getting...
I don't use it any more, for which I am sincerely grateful, but the memories are like an old wound. Jakob Nielsen had a nice hatchet job on Notes on his Usability pages, but it seems to have gone. I used to use TeamLinks too:-(
I may be going senile but PROFS doesn't look so bad in hindsight.
At home I'm on Kmail (which does most things right) and at work it's OutLook - which is not so good. The filters in Kmail are so much better than rules in Outlook that it's surprising that more people don't switch OS just to get a decent mail client. (I am exagerating for effect of course).
I think for the most part, "useability"
(sic) is 90% familiarity. If you make a person use any system for 6 months, they will get used to it and it will, at least to an extent, "make sense".
You've never used VMS have you?
If we were talking software rather than OS I would have said NOTES. That pos has never and will never make sense to anybody who thinks logically.
It's funny but my compiler cares a lot more about spelling than I do. So does my Perl interpreter, which is truly amazing considering what it will accept in the way of code:-D
That's unfair to IBM. They're behaving impeccably. It reminds of an adult and a whiny child - the child is screaming and swinging wildly and missing, whilst the adult holds off the tantrum-throwing tot with a hand on the childs head and a puzzled expression - and the other hand reaching for the rolled up newspaper.
Or AD&D analogy: SCO==kobold with a feather duster, IBM==Ancient Gold Dragon with a puzzled expression thinking "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Thanks. It's long standing - I fell onto my back on concrete when I was 13 doing sports. Carrying an electric double oven into the house by myself fifteen years ago probably didn't help either. It had been doing OK until three weeks ago, right now I can't walk upright without pain:-( I suspect I may need surgery eventually and I don't like the idea of scalpels near my spinal cord.
PC gear can be a problem - 17"+ monitors aren't light, which is why I now have an LCD (and it take up less space). Seriously though, an aluminium case makes a huge difference to the weight of a PC, when the case arrived I thought the box was empty, really. You develop many strategies for coping - including heated car seats in summer - heat does help relieve the problem.
I did something similar - I built an Athlon 2800+ in a Lian-Li case. I didn't bother with a baybus, I got a pyramid sensor which adjusts all the case fans as the temp changes. The CPU fan is a Volcano 7 also with thermistor controlled (big) fan. And an Enemrax 400W PSU - with a little fan speed knob at the back. I am very pleased - it's almost silent with a weight of some sort on the case - the top fan causes a little resonance when first switched on. I have to check the lights to see if it's on sometimes - if I have another machine one I can't hear it. I'm gradually working towards quieting all my boxes now I know it works. BTW with a bad back the Aluminium cases are wonderful - I'm not sure about the so-called heat-sink effect but they are a dream to move, and I'm sure the thicker panels help to keep vibrational noise down - the resonance I mentioned is only when first booting. I was worried when I built this as the mobo started beeping on power-up that the CPU fan had died, which could be nasty with an Athlon, but it was just the sensor not bothering to up the fan speed until it got hotter, a tweak of the alarm setting and all was well.
It's a nice box, cool and quiet, whatever I run on it.
I still have desktop icons in linux but not in windows:-/ I'm still geting fully up to speed on KDE so It's a temporary thing - in Windows I use WinKey and most of the programs or network shares I use frequently have windows key combinations bound to them. I also make liberal use of the ability to add a shortcut key to an item on the start menu. e.g. WinKey+Esc starts Emacs, WinKey+Ctrl+E brings up the Emacs reference card, Ctrl+NumPadPlus starts CygWin... I don't like using the mouse. I will do similar in KDE but I don't use linux at work, and there are lot's more ways to do things and I'm deciding which way I prefer:-)
what "NEEDS" to be installed in most cases is rather simple: X, gnome, evolution, mozilla, gaim, vim, ssh. thats it, if they need openoffice then stick that on there.
vim No, surely you mean emacs??? Perhaps you'd be better installing both? There is perpetual flamewar over this so it might be wise to sit on the fence.
A lot of places let you use the 'net while waiting for stuff to compile/reun etc. If the company is prepared to have more contented staff that's not a problem.
Or just when you're on your lunchbreak. The computer's are still on and the bandwidth is still paid for so why should the company care? IF it's against company policy then you shouldn't do, but a lot of places are more sensible about this.
Not to start a flamewar but does anybody else get irritated that smokers are allowed to work less than non-smaokers?
Err, it's not Apache, but I do have a webserver on my P800:-) It's called Prosit - if you want to know why I have a webserver on a cellphone... um, er, ah well, I know - just because I can!
I also have myBuddies (ICQ) PuTTY and VNCviewer. And 2 browsers - a built in one for WAP and Opera for GPRS (It really is good too).
It plays video (avi) and will sent photos from the built in camera by email. There are some utilies (sman and control panel), games, Java note util (standard one has proprietary format) and some crypto. I also use Mobipocket to browse offline and read books.
Downside is it 'only' has 12Mb onboard and 16Mb Memory Stick Duo and I really need to get rid of some stuff or buy a 64Mb card.
Screen is quite good too for 4096 colour. If it had some sort of spreadsheet/DB util I wouldn't bother with a 'normal' PDA, I still might get one eventually. But I downloaded the SDK to see if I can whip up something in Java.
I get strange looks as my ring tone is a good quality.wav of an old-fashioned phone ringing (bells).
it's much easier to open up your email client and fire out an email to tech support in 15 seconds that says "OMG HELP ME I CANT GET TO ANY WEBSITES AND MY EMAIL ISENT WORKING!!!!!!1111one" than it is to open up your web browser, navigate to the user login page, log in with SSL, find the support link, then fill in your "issue" and send.
And if you can't get to websites and your email isn't working neither route will get you very far.....
Now that Alan Yentob is no longer its controller we may even get a sci-fi series on BBC1 again. IIRC he was the reason Dr Who was axed and why there has been no more SF except films - he doesn't like it so we don't get to see it.
Go Paul Darrow - Avon certainly the coolest character in B7, followed by Vila and then all the others a long way behind.
Hey, let's take this to the logical conclusion! Let's have hardlink between modification time metadata files. And the modification time for the modification time file could be a file as well! I must admit I wondered about that too. Where are the read/write/execute permissions for foo/..rwx stored? In foo/..rwx/..rwx?
Err, the modification time for the modification time file is store in the modification time file itself, think about it. And I can't think why the permissions for the permissions 'metadata' file (and all other 'metadata' files as well as the 'real' file)wouldn't be stored in that file too - I know the OS has to read that file to decide if the user has permission to read it, but surely that's what we have now - I don't see a larger security risk than the current situation.
But if the purchasers can't buy the goods any other way and are happy to pay the high shipping and insurance costs, why not sell to them - your profit margin is about the same if you offload those costs. You should also be able to charge a handling fee for the extra paperwork.
It doesn't matter what the costs are if the customers are prepared (read desperate enough) to pay them. Just tell them in advance what and why they will have to pay - if it's itemised as shiiping costs etc (i.e. not bumping up the actual cost of the item) they may be happy and you have another sale, otherwise, well you didn't want to sell to them in the first place, did you?.
I suppose you need to factor in the cost of 'quoted but lost sales' into the handling charge too.
Normally when buying stuff from the US I get charged VAT (sales tax) at my end, and IIRC customs duty too.
I may be wrong but I thought that taxes/duties were paid by the recipient in these cases.
I know the US sites are supposed to collect vat now, but I haven't bought anything internationally lately.
Good luck getting stuff sent to the UK. You get the feeling that US companies don't want our money, even if it does magically get changes into gold old greenbacks on the way:-( It's probably better than Hungary but it's still silly - we don't have that many language problems even if our statutory warranties are better then the US there not as far-reaching as Germany etc.
Slashdot Mirror
How did that happen?
We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation. Even if they can tell a piece of software isn't being used, it's still a violation if it's on that hard drive. What I really thought is that you ought to treat people the way you want to be treated.
Perhaps you should read all the article?
i.e. it was the police (or some other law enforcement agency).
Err, except for power line broadband?
The point isn't to surpass it. The point is to do it because you want to, to see if you can, and for fun.
Think of it as some guy writing yet another editor - what's the point in a world with with emacs, vi etc?.
\ 1 2 3 - pick - shown
S y n n -- 1 -- 2
T y n n -- 1 -- 3
U n y n -- 1 -- 3
V n n y -- 1 -- 2
There are two cases where you win by changing.This makes it 1/2, if I am wrong, why?
Apologies for the ugly formatting, but I don't know how to get /. to accept some whitespace :-(
I'm waiting for the Hollywood blockbuster versions of Radio Free Albemuth, A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. That would be fun :-) Actually Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would make a good movie.(Yes I did like Blade Runner but...)
That wouldn't enable me to imply MS may not be 'eating their own dog food' and possibly need to run a unix/linux/bsd to handle the volume of data sent by thirty billion XP crashes a year, would it?
I used to use TeamLinks too
I may be going senile but PROFS doesn't look so bad in hindsight.
At home I'm on Kmail (which does most things right) and at work it's OutLook - which is not so good. The filters in Kmail are so much better than rules in Outlook that it's surprising that more people don't switch OS just to get a decent mail client. (I am exagerating for effect of course).
If we were talking software rather than OS I would have said NOTES. That pos has never and will never make sense to anybody who thinks logically.
It's funny but my compiler cares a lot more about spelling than I do. :-D
So does my Perl interpreter, which is truly amazing considering what it will accept in the way of code
Can you do better when limited to five characters for your identifier?
It reminds of an adult and a whiny child - the child is screaming and swinging wildly and missing, whilst the adult holds off the tantrum-throwing tot with a hand on the childs head and a puzzled expression - and the other hand reaching for the rolled up newspaper.
Or AD&D analogy:
SCO==kobold with a feather duster,
IBM==Ancient Gold Dragon with a puzzled expression thinking "Are you sure you want to do this?"
I suspect I may need surgery eventually and I don't like the idea of scalpels near my spinal cord.
PC gear can be a problem - 17"+ monitors aren't light, which is why I now have an LCD (and it take up less space). Seriously though, an aluminium case makes a huge difference to the weight of a PC, when the case arrived I thought the box was empty, really. You develop many strategies for coping - including heated car seats in summer - heat does help relieve the problem.
I am very pleased - it's almost silent with a weight of some sort on the case - the top fan causes a little resonance when first switched on. I have to check the lights to see if it's on sometimes - if I have another machine one I can't hear it. I'm gradually working towards quieting all my boxes now I know it works. BTW with a bad back the Aluminium cases are wonderful - I'm not sure about the so-called heat-sink effect but they are a dream to move, and I'm sure the thicker panels help to keep vibrational noise down - the resonance I mentioned is only when first booting.
I was worried when I built this as the mobo started beeping on power-up that the CPU fan had died, which could be nasty with an Athlon, but it was just the sensor not bothering to up the fan speed until it got hotter, a tweak of the alarm setting and all was well.
It's a nice box, cool and quiet, whatever I run on it.
I still have desktop icons in linux but not in windows :-/ :-)
I'm still geting fully up to speed on KDE so It's a temporary thing - in Windows I use WinKey and most of the programs or network shares I use frequently have windows key combinations bound to them. I also make liberal use of the ability to add a shortcut key to an item on the start menu.
e.g. WinKey+Esc starts Emacs, WinKey+Ctrl+E brings up the Emacs reference card, Ctrl+NumPadPlus starts CygWin... I don't like using the mouse. I will do similar in KDE but I don't use linux at work, and there are lot's more ways to do things and I'm deciding which way I prefer
Perhaps you'd be better installing both? There is perpetual flamewar over this so it might be wise to sit on the fence.
Or just when you're on your lunchbreak. The computer's are still on and the bandwidth is still paid for so why should the company care? IF it's against company policy then you shouldn't do, but a lot of places are more sensible about this.
Not to start a flamewar but does anybody else get irritated that smokers are allowed to work less than non-smaokers?
I also have myBuddies (ICQ) PuTTY and VNCviewer. And 2 browsers - a built in one for WAP and Opera for GPRS (It really is good too). It plays video (avi) and will sent photos from the built in camera by email. There are some utilies (sman and control panel), games, Java note util (standard one has proprietary format) and some crypto. I also use Mobipocket to browse offline and read books.
Downside is it 'only' has 12Mb onboard and 16Mb Memory Stick Duo and I really need to get rid of some stuff or buy a 64Mb card. Screen is quite good too for 4096 colour. If it had some sort of spreadsheet/DB util I wouldn't bother with a 'normal' PDA, I still might get one eventually. But I downloaded the SDK to see if I can whip up something in Java. .wav of an old-fashioned phone ringing (bells).
I get strange looks as my ring tone is a good quality
Go Paul Darrow - Avon certainly the coolest character in B7, followed by Vila and then all the others a long way behind.
And I can't think why the permissions for the permissions 'metadata' file (and all other 'metadata' files as well as the 'real' file)wouldn't be stored in that file too - I know the OS has to read that file to decide if the user has permission to read it, but surely that's what we have now - I don't see a larger security risk than the current situation.
It doesn't matter what the costs are if the customers are prepared (read desperate enough) to pay them. Just tell them in advance what and why they will have to pay - if it's itemised as shiiping costs etc (i.e. not bumping up the actual cost of the item) they may be happy and you have another sale, otherwise, well you didn't want to sell to them in the first place, did you?.
I suppose you need to factor in the cost of 'quoted but lost sales' into the handling charge too.
I know the US sites are supposed to collect vat now, but I haven't bought anything internationally lately.
Good luck getting stuff sent to the UK. :-(
You get the feeling that US companies don't want our money, even if it does magically get changes into gold old greenbacks on the way
It's probably better than Hungary but it's still silly - we don't have that many language problems even if our statutory warranties are better then the US there not as far-reaching as Germany etc.