No, it was an idea with a specific type of social merit that was propagated to the masses through religion.
The chicken or egg question of "was this particular idea chosen for this religion based on this social merit" or "did this religion survive where others failed based on their co-incidental adoptation of this social value" is something for historians to answer.
All the religions are full of this type of stuff, looks like mumbo-jibberish that you accept as part of a religion and rationalize away as metaphors for underlying truths like we're taught to do, when it point of fact it was simply literal-minded good advice that is only good advice when you consider it in the context of how the world was when it was written.
That's the problem with leading the stupid to wisdom with religion, they didn't know why it was wisdom when they started listening, so they don't know when it stops being wise to listen....
It was an idea put forth during the time of waring families, and it was intended to see to it that if you tore out the eye of the son of your enemy, your own son would have his eye torn out, not to punish your son, but to make sure there was no advantage to be had by violating the social order.
HP engaged in covert espionage. Who knows what they found out?
There shouldn't be any money paid to the government here.
HP should have their entire communications structure made public knowledge, with the exercise conducted by a third party, appointed by a panel of their competitors, with the whole thing funded by HP as punishment.
This would be fitting, and exposing the inner workings of the company to public scrutiny would be conductive to the public good, and you can bet your last dollar no other company would want to be caught dead engaging in this sort of excercise in the future.
Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy.
Is this a joke? America has replaced more democratic leaders with puppet dictators than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia put together, and their own democracy looks more and more like a trick of the light with each passing day.
Let me phrase that another way; My experience has led me to consider Wikipedia a perfectly valid way to look up details about an obscure reference to something Isaac Asimov wrote for conversation purposes, but when I happen to click on a google link to wikipedia while I'm looking up something technical, I often (usually?) find it to be in part or whole inaccurate, misleading or wrong.
I find wikipedia is full of the kind of advice you get about database normalization from an old school self-taught MySQL/PHP coder who thinks they know everything because they built a forum that gets a lot of hits, so to speak.
What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write?
Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
Back when we didn't have an Internet and people actually turned routinely to books and encyclopedias for information, the point of an encyclopedia was its breadth and accuracy. You couldn't afford to keep an entire library in your house, but you could have an encyclopedia, and you would hope that your search could end there ideally. If it didn't, you had to go digging.
You had to deal with the limitations of the medium, so you don't just want to fill it with every bit of trivia in the world and still have breadth, but the foremost criteria was that it was accurate, that you could look it up and go forth with the assurance that you might not have exhaustive information about the subject, but what you did know was solid.
Bound by those limitations, there were pocket encyclopedias you could carry, still as fat as was practical, and there were large hardcover encyclopedias you could keep at your desk, and there were affordable sets of 8 books for your home, and there were nicer sets of 24 books for the library, or if you had more cash or got on a payment plan, and there were sets of books that tried to increase their breadth even more by focusing on one subject or another allowing for more depth, and there were a multitude of those about sports and music and what have you.
The encyclopedia was supposed to be accurate and hold as much broad knowledge as it was possible for the books to hold.
The significant difference between an encyclopedia of any sort and the web at large is most definately not supposed to be that the encyclopedia only has the "notable" stuff in it. It's supposed to be that you know the encyclopedia is factual.
If they were to focus on a method of a) achieving as much breadth as possible while b) never sacrificing their accuracy in the name of breadth, they might be a different beast, and I might not think they suck. But they neither claim nor appear to focus on these things, and I personally agree with the Post article.
Wikipedia might be a novel human achievement, it might be the best they could do, but at the end of the day, it's a boat that almost floats; not good enough to be put to practical use.
..and the workplace is really Windows' main market. I'm willing to guess that at least half their profits come from corporations. The question is, why do they seem to be switching targets?
Their market isn't the workplace, it's PCs everywhere. That market is saturated with Windows, and their product will continue to go onto newly built PCs until and unless something that makes a suitable replacement comes along.
That means they don't need to build new stuff for the user. They will get their money anyways. They're going to keep getting paid for Windows licenses as long as Windows remains the dominant platform with no more functionality than they have now.
What they ARE doing is selling their users out to media companies. They are getting paid by those companies to put support for powerful DRM on every computer around the planet so there will exist a market for DRM media. They are getting paid for this as added revenue on top of the "Windows and Office" tax.
They believe that they can get paid by third parties to design Windows so it will intentionally fuck over the people who use it and we will still buy it same as always.
Good reusable code is empowering. Make them aware of it by giving that power to them. Example:
Just last week I got asked to put some quick hacks in one of my clients sites to allow for some more discrete rights management for their client-facing site because they had one large client ask for it.
I could have written an extra page that those clients get redirected to, some dangling crud in the database to support it and maintain it in an ever growing parallel with the rest of the system, or some other ugly hack that leads to unmaintainable code. That was specifically what they asked me to do.
Instead I proposed that I extend the internal rights management used for employees to handle the client side of things, which was quite a bit more work, and a fair bit more expensive, but "Oh by the way, if we do it this way, I can trivially exploit this change to allow you to also discretely control rights for all this other functionality your clients are exposed to, and allow you to do it on a client by client basis in the future without needing to pay me to change the code."
Don't just tell people that in some abstract fashion your "good coding techniques" are superior to the crufty crud that seems to work fine. Think of all the things that become trivial for you to deliver because of those good coding techniques, and make them part of the package.
In other words, don't tell them you can take 5 days to deliver a "good" implementation that delivers the same functionality as working 2 days to deliver a "cruddy" implementation.
Instead, tell them you can take 7 days to deliver a "good" implementation, and it will include all this extra functionality that they weren't asking for but what the hell, it's good value and it's the right way to do things too, so why not.
If you can't find some way or another to make doing it the "right" way pay extra dividends that users can appreciate, maybe it's not really the right way...
They may not be dead, but none of the individuals who created C# own it; they transferred ownership of that language to a large tribe called Microsoft.
Now, according to Microsoft's director of intellectual property Michele Herman, Microsoft requires that you enter into what some have called "A reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license agreement with Microsoft" if you wish to implement anything using that language.
So, if it is reasonable for Microsoft to dictate terms under which the C# language should be used, why is it unreasonable that the tribe that has hereditary rights to the Mapuzugun language should be able to dictate terms to Microsoft?
Either the fundimental principle of "owning" such intellectual constructs as languages has merit, or it doesn't, and Microsoft has become the most powerful company in the world solely based on our systematic presupposition that this principle does indeed have merit.
I don't think it has merit. I think this is a great example of the idiocy of the very idea. But if the Mapuche have good lawyers, it could be very interesting to see Microsofts lawyers sqirm about trying to defeat this case without making Microsoft looking stupid, hypocritical and antisocial.
What people are really complaining about (even if they don't really understand it) is that OSS leaders often are comfortable with their financial circumstances and NOT motivated by money at all, and therefore you cannot make them do the work for you at ANY price. You can't even negotiate with them.
Self appointed dictators, if that's all they are, can be removed from the FOSS scene with something as simple as a name switch.
A lot of people who are given the label "self-appointed dictator" in this realm are really just people leading by doing, but leading in a direction different than those doing the labeling would prefer.
The "I'll donate some of my time to some project" developers like the "cool" features, yes, and the real leaders will take what help they can get. As they do most of the work.
Most successful FOSS projects seem to be based around a core group of people whose prime driver is their interest in fulfilling their vision of what the result should be, assisted in small ways by a large group of vaguely interested people.
This is leadership. You can tell the difference between a leader and a director with a simple comparison: If the person would eventually/theoretically get the project done even if everyone else left, they're leading, and if they wouldn't get anything done when everyone left, they're not leading.
Of course, there's no reasoning with people like that... they don't give a fuck about what you want, they're blazing trail.
As to "winning", which do you think most people care about, their desktop, or the Internet it connects to? How many people do you know these days who can't just sit down in front of any computer whatsoever, log onto whatever services they need, finish up and walk away? There are a lot of them. The services they're logging onto are the "Network is the Machine" effect Microsoft has been fearing and fighting all this time, and that network is pretty much owned by FOSS.
Linux might not be on the desktop, but the desktop is becoming more and more "That virus infested annoyance you're forced to deal with to get on the Internet", and the Internet is FOSS.
The difference between the FOSS and commerical software is that both have a lack of leadership.
No... wait...
The difference between the FOSS and commercial software worlds is that in commercial enterprises, in the absense of leadership, someone will be unilaterally appointed, not to lead, but to dictate.
In the FOSS world, if there's no leader, there's no leader. People will choose their own direction until they find someone they want to follow or find others wanting to follow them.
I think that's a major reason why FOSS is winning. The smarter you are, the less you like having your actions dictated to you by a moron in a suit, and for all its faults, participation in FOSS projects doesn't generally ask you to put up with that sort of shit.
I would hazard to guess that MySQL AB would rebuild their entire company for you based around a contract 1/10th the amount that say Oracle would charge a large client to participate in their existing generic support infrastructure.
With the kind of dollars big DB companies charge, if you're a big fish and able to solve your business problems with Open Source instead, you could pretty much steer the course of the industry for a fraction of the cost to buy from a big vendor.
With the kind of money being tossed around, you have to wonder why some of these big IT spenders don't just start a subsidary company based around an open source project. It wouldn't have to have making money as it's primary mandate, but rather supporting its owners IT needs first and trying to generate return on investment as an incidental second.
Heh, Postgres is ripe for something like this. Instead of paying a bunch of money to an existing player, if a major corporate IT spender like a bank were to throw down a bunch of money and create a corporate and licensing structure similar to what MySQL AB has done using Postgres' code base, they could probably own their DB vendor for less than it costs to negotiating with the one they have now. The "Who cares if it makes money as long as it saves money" approach.
Maybe they just understand that there was a purpose to that law, to prevent prejudicial business practices, and its being dodged.
This is a GOOD law, and Cragslist is a haven for fraudsters. They SHOULD be compelled to comply with this law. Hell, if they can't clean up their act, they should be shut down.
If any of you had watched the article, you'd know that they need to have a person lower them, they don't lower automatically. So unless there's some dickhead being malicious like the aforementioned jackass university student, that's not going to happen.
However, they apparently raise automatically, so depending on how much upward pressure they exert before they realize there's an obstacle and abort (assuming that they do, which you'd reasonably expect) it could be ugly if you parked over one.
In my defense, at that time, I had negligible real-world experience to speak of and was attempting to single-handedly reverse engineer, repair and extend a huge mess that looked like it had been written by a secretary. I think they migrated the db from Access with a wizard and then poked around looking for ways to make it worse.
The idea of not using "live data" in that particular case was a bit of a joke.
I left a job once when I first started working in IT, and one of the projects I'd done was for a web hosting company. I wanted the project to finish before I quit so I could use it on my resume, so I sent myself home the files I needed to work on to finish it so I could quit.
One of the databases I was working on had hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers in it. I deleted it, of course, but it was trivial to bring it home... at that time, to me, it wasn't a collection of credit card numbers, it was just "the database I needed to have present to finish my work".
It's SOO easy to be trivial about these types of things when you're an overworked IT pro. Security procedures exist BECAUSE it's so easy to forget that the stuff that you deal with in such a routine fashion is sensitive. It's just like reality tv stars forgetting about the cameras.
We need software that works out of the box, no questions asked. There's little room for error, either as far as time or money goes. Any time spent twiddling with software is money lost. It's that simple.
Tough shit. You can't buy software like that. I'd suggest you try a pencil.
Certainly, their client software is their cash cow, but see how little attention it is getting compared to servers and tools? Consider this: most windows liscences are sold at a steep discount when bundled with a PC... which does make MS profit, but a steadily decreasing one. I think MS is shifting their business model (which they are very good at). I won't say I know what they are up to, but it is clear that they have a long term plan.
Yeah, right.
Looks like the same business they've been in for years... make money off the two products they've got a monopoly with (Windows and Office), guard that monopoly religiously, then waste time failing to successfully compete in other markets.
Where do you see them EVER successfully shifting their business model?
The difference between a Computer Scientist and a Software Engineer is that the first doesn't do any Science, while the second doesn't do any Engineering. On the other hand, neither does the other one.
Slashdot Mirror
They have something like that. It's called a webserver. You need to check your own grammar though.
Texan lawmakers are encouraging blind people to hunt, and Americans are afraid of foreigners?
Give em all rocket launchers and let God sort em out...
It might not be free, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Trolltech charges.
No, it was an idea with a specific type of social merit that was propagated to the masses through religion.
The chicken or egg question of "was this particular idea chosen for this religion based on this social merit" or "did this religion survive where others failed based on their co-incidental adoptation of this social value" is something for historians to answer.
All the religions are full of this type of stuff, looks like mumbo-jibberish that you accept as part of a religion and rationalize away as metaphors for underlying truths like we're taught to do, when it point of fact it was simply literal-minded good advice that is only good advice when you consider it in the context of how the world was when it was written.
That's the problem with leading the stupid to wisdom with religion, they didn't know why it was wisdom when they started listening, so they don't know when it stops being wise to listen....
Ever heard of the old saying "An Eye for an Eye"?
It was an idea put forth during the time of waring families, and it was intended to see to it that if you tore out the eye of the son of your enemy, your own son would have his eye torn out, not to punish your son, but to make sure there was no advantage to be had by violating the social order.
HP engaged in covert espionage. Who knows what they found out?
There shouldn't be any money paid to the government here.
HP should have their entire communications structure made public knowledge, with the exercise conducted by a third party, appointed by a panel of their competitors, with the whole thing funded by HP as punishment.
This would be fitting, and exposing the inner workings of the company to public scrutiny would be conductive to the public good, and you can bet your last dollar no other company would want to be caught dead engaging in this sort of excercise in the future.
Committee member Brit Williams, who opposed the measure, said, 'You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.'
You know, if each American who reads slashdot went out and smashed just ONE voting machine each with a sledgehammer, this entire argument would be a moot point.
I do think we need better accountability in elections, because it's terrible that we can't be certain in the country that's supposed to be the leader in democracy.
Is this a joke? America has replaced more democratic leaders with puppet dictators than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia put together, and their own democracy looks more and more like a trick of the light with each passing day.
Ballmer, I must say, this is brilliant work!
.NET!
With OLE, we can take all these little programs and have them run without the user having to do anything!
Yep, ActiveX is an absolutely amazing and novel innovation, and is sure to pull the company out of the fire...
I mean, it's even easy to say!
Say it with me: COM!
Isn't it cool?
I bet you can't say it three times fast!
Oh yes I can!
DCOM COM+
In your FACE!
Yep, Click Once and Run is absolutely BRILLIANT innovation! MS does it again!
*monkey dance*
Let me phrase that another way; My experience has led me to consider Wikipedia a perfectly valid way to look up details about an obscure reference to something Isaac Asimov wrote for conversation purposes, but when I happen to click on a google link to wikipedia while I'm looking up something technical, I often (usually?) find it to be in part or whole inaccurate, misleading or wrong.
I find wikipedia is full of the kind of advice you get about database normalization from an old school self-taught MySQL/PHP coder who thinks they know everything because they built a forum that gets a lot of hits, so to speak.
What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write?
Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
Back when we didn't have an Internet and people actually turned routinely to books and encyclopedias for information, the point of an encyclopedia was its breadth and accuracy. You couldn't afford to keep an entire library in your house, but you could have an encyclopedia, and you would hope that your search could end there ideally. If it didn't, you had to go digging.
You had to deal with the limitations of the medium, so you don't just want to fill it with every bit of trivia in the world and still have breadth, but the foremost criteria was that it was accurate, that you could look it up and go forth with the assurance that you might not have exhaustive information about the subject, but what you did know was solid.
Bound by those limitations, there were pocket encyclopedias you could carry, still as fat as was practical, and there were large hardcover encyclopedias you could keep at your desk, and there were affordable sets of 8 books for your home, and there were nicer sets of 24 books for the library, or if you had more cash or got on a payment plan, and there were sets of books that tried to increase their breadth even more by focusing on one subject or another allowing for more depth, and there were a multitude of those about sports and music and what have you.
The encyclopedia was supposed to be accurate and hold as much broad knowledge as it was possible for the books to hold.
The significant difference between an encyclopedia of any sort and the web at large is most definately not supposed to be that the encyclopedia only has the "notable" stuff in it. It's supposed to be that you know the encyclopedia is factual.
If they were to focus on a method of a) achieving as much breadth as possible while b) never sacrificing their accuracy in the name of breadth, they might be a different beast, and I might not think they suck. But they neither claim nor appear to focus on these things, and I personally agree with the Post article.
Wikipedia might be a novel human achievement, it might be the best they could do, but at the end of the day, it's a boat that almost floats; not good enough to be put to practical use.
..and the workplace is really Windows' main market. I'm willing to guess that at least half their profits come from corporations. The question is, why do they seem to be switching targets?
Their market isn't the workplace, it's PCs everywhere. That market is saturated with Windows, and their product will continue to go onto newly built PCs until and unless something that makes a suitable replacement comes along.
That means they don't need to build new stuff for the user. They will get their money anyways. They're going to keep getting paid for Windows licenses as long as Windows remains the dominant platform with no more functionality than they have now.
What they ARE doing is selling their users out to media companies. They are getting paid by those companies to put support for powerful DRM on every computer around the planet so there will exist a market for DRM media. They are getting paid for this as added revenue on top of the "Windows and Office" tax.
They believe that they can get paid by third parties to design Windows so it will intentionally fuck over the people who use it and we will still buy it same as always.
Chances are, they are right.
Good reusable code is empowering. Make them aware of it by giving that power to them. Example:
Just last week I got asked to put some quick hacks in one of my clients sites to allow for some more discrete rights management for their client-facing site because they had one large client ask for it.
I could have written an extra page that those clients get redirected to, some dangling crud in the database to support it and maintain it in an ever growing parallel with the rest of the system, or some other ugly hack that leads to unmaintainable code. That was specifically what they asked me to do.
Instead I proposed that I extend the internal rights management used for employees to handle the client side of things, which was quite a bit more work, and a fair bit more expensive, but "Oh by the way, if we do it this way, I can trivially exploit this change to allow you to also discretely control rights for all this other functionality your clients are exposed to, and allow you to do it on a client by client basis in the future without needing to pay me to change the code."
Don't just tell people that in some abstract fashion your "good coding techniques" are superior to the crufty crud that seems to work fine. Think of all the things that become trivial for you to deliver because of those good coding techniques, and make them part of the package.
In other words, don't tell them you can take 5 days to deliver a "good" implementation that delivers the same functionality as working 2 days to deliver a "cruddy" implementation.
Instead, tell them you can take 7 days to deliver a "good" implementation, and it will include all this extra functionality that they weren't asking for but what the hell, it's good value and it's the right way to do things too, so why not.
If you can't find some way or another to make doing it the "right" way pay extra dividends that users can appreciate, maybe it's not really the right way...
Your link does not prove your point.
But this one proves mine.
Smile! You've learned something new today!
They may not be dead, but none of the individuals who created C# own it; they transferred ownership of that language to a large tribe called Microsoft.
Now, according to Microsoft's director of intellectual property Michele Herman, Microsoft requires that you enter into what some have called "A reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license agreement with Microsoft" if you wish to implement anything using that language.
So, if it is reasonable for Microsoft to dictate terms under which the C# language should be used, why is it unreasonable that the tribe that has hereditary rights to the Mapuzugun language should be able to dictate terms to Microsoft?
Either the fundimental principle of "owning" such intellectual constructs as languages has merit, or it doesn't, and Microsoft has become the most powerful company in the world solely based on our systematic presupposition that this principle does indeed have merit.
I don't think it has merit. I think this is a great example of the idiocy of the very idea. But if the Mapuche have good lawyers, it could be very interesting to see Microsofts lawyers sqirm about trying to defeat this case without making Microsoft looking stupid, hypocritical and antisocial.
Of course, that's NOT how it is.
What people are really complaining about (even if they don't really understand it) is that OSS leaders often are comfortable with their financial circumstances and NOT motivated by money at all, and therefore you cannot make them do the work for you at ANY price. You can't even negotiate with them.
Self appointed dictators, if that's all they are, can be removed from the FOSS scene with something as simple as a name switch.
A lot of people who are given the label "self-appointed dictator" in this realm are really just people leading by doing, but leading in a direction different than those doing the labeling would prefer.
The "I'll donate some of my time to some project" developers like the "cool" features, yes, and the real leaders will take what help they can get. As they do most of the work.
Most successful FOSS projects seem to be based around a core group of people whose prime driver is their interest in fulfilling their vision of what the result should be, assisted in small ways by a large group of vaguely interested people.
This is leadership. You can tell the difference between a leader and a director with a simple comparison: If the person would eventually/theoretically get the project done even if everyone else left, they're leading, and if they wouldn't get anything done when everyone left, they're not leading.
Of course, there's no reasoning with people like that... they don't give a fuck about what you want, they're blazing trail.
As to "winning", which do you think most people care about, their desktop, or the Internet it connects to? How many people do you know these days who can't just sit down in front of any computer whatsoever, log onto whatever services they need, finish up and walk away? There are a lot of them. The services they're logging onto are the "Network is the Machine" effect Microsoft has been fearing and fighting all this time, and that network is pretty much owned by FOSS.
Linux might not be on the desktop, but the desktop is becoming more and more "That virus infested annoyance you're forced to deal with to get on the Internet", and the Internet is FOSS.
The difference between the FOSS and commerical software is that both have a lack of leadership.
No... wait...
The difference between the FOSS and commercial software worlds is that in commercial enterprises, in the absense of leadership, someone will be unilaterally appointed, not to lead, but to dictate.
In the FOSS world, if there's no leader, there's no leader. People will choose their own direction until they find someone they want to follow or find others wanting to follow them.
I think that's a major reason why FOSS is winning. The smarter you are, the less you like having your actions dictated to you by a moron in a suit, and for all its faults, participation in FOSS projects doesn't generally ask you to put up with that sort of shit.
I would hazard to guess that MySQL AB would rebuild their entire company for you based around a contract 1/10th the amount that say Oracle would charge a large client to participate in their existing generic support infrastructure.
With the kind of dollars big DB companies charge, if you're a big fish and able to solve your business problems with Open Source instead, you could pretty much steer the course of the industry for a fraction of the cost to buy from a big vendor.
With the kind of money being tossed around, you have to wonder why some of these big IT spenders don't just start a subsidary company based around an open source project. It wouldn't have to have making money as it's primary mandate, but rather supporting its owners IT needs first and trying to generate return on investment as an incidental second.
Heh, Postgres is ripe for something like this. Instead of paying a bunch of money to an existing player, if a major corporate IT spender like a bank were to throw down a bunch of money and create a corporate and licensing structure similar to what MySQL AB has done using Postgres' code base, they could probably own their DB vendor for less than it costs to negotiating with the one they have now. The "Who cares if it makes money as long as it saves money" approach.
Maybe they just understand that there was a purpose to that law, to prevent prejudicial business practices, and its being dodged.
This is a GOOD law, and Cragslist is a haven for fraudsters. They SHOULD be compelled to comply with this law. Hell, if they can't clean up their act, they should be shut down.
If any of you had watched the article, you'd know that they need to have a person lower them, they don't lower automatically. So unless there's some dickhead being malicious like the aforementioned jackass university student, that's not going to happen.
However, they apparently raise automatically, so depending on how much upward pressure they exert before they realize there's an obstacle and abort (assuming that they do, which you'd reasonably expect) it could be ugly if you parked over one.
In my defense, at that time, I had negligible real-world experience to speak of and was attempting to single-handedly reverse engineer, repair and extend a huge mess that looked like it had been written by a secretary. I think they migrated the db from Access with a wizard and then poked around looking for ways to make it worse.
The idea of not using "live data" in that particular case was a bit of a joke.
I left a job once when I first started working in IT, and one of the projects I'd done was for a web hosting company. I wanted the project to finish before I quit so I could use it on my resume, so I sent myself home the files I needed to work on to finish it so I could quit.
One of the databases I was working on had hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers in it. I deleted it, of course, but it was trivial to bring it home... at that time, to me, it wasn't a collection of credit card numbers, it was just "the database I needed to have present to finish my work".
It's SOO easy to be trivial about these types of things when you're an overworked IT pro. Security procedures exist BECAUSE it's so easy to forget that the stuff that you deal with in such a routine fashion is sensitive. It's just like reality tv stars forgetting about the cameras.
Take it from me, me bys, dere's no better place fer a vacation den up e're on de rock where de liquors hard and de sluts are everywhere!
We need software that works out of the box, no questions asked. There's little room for error, either as far as time or money goes. Any time spent twiddling with software is money lost. It's that simple.
Tough shit. You can't buy software like that. I'd suggest you try a pencil.
Certainly, their client software is their cash cow, but see how little attention it is getting compared to servers and tools? Consider this: most windows liscences are sold at a steep discount when bundled with a PC... which does make MS profit, but a steadily decreasing one. I think MS is shifting their business model (which they are very good at). I won't say I know what they are up to, but it is clear that they have a long term plan.
Yeah, right.
Looks like the same business they've been in for years... make money off the two products they've got a monopoly with (Windows and Office), guard that monopoly religiously, then waste time failing to successfully compete in other markets.
Where do you see them EVER successfully shifting their business model?
The difference between a Computer Scientist and a Software Engineer is that the first doesn't do any Science, while the second doesn't do any Engineering. On the other hand, neither does the other one.