Try this over the telephone with someone who does not know the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the command line - and is deathly afraid of the typo that will bring his system down - permanently. Try it again with a line of more than ten to fifteen characters. Try it with a hunt-and-peck typist - who uses a symbol like the tilde only once every six months.
The same clients considering Google Apps are 99.999% likely to have a non-existent or ineffective backup/archiving system, lack the expertise/cash for sysadmining Microsoft enterprise apps and would probably benefit from being able to log in on multiple machines to access their data
Then when you need to do is form an IT co-op or partnership with a larger, stronger, organization that has the experience and resources to it right. Which is something the HMOs and government agencies are probably going to force on you anyway.
This is insane. This kid is looking at 10 years for modifying hardware while another story linked right at the bottom of the same article describes a cop getting a one day suspension (with pay) for running down a child with his car
It would be a modest accomplishment, I think, if the geek began to grasp the essentials of a federal system - federal, state and local jurisdiction.
ICE is the enforcement arm of US Customs and Immigration. That's a big gun and not a cap pistol.
To make it into their sights you really have to work for it.
This is a common logical fallacy I see all the time -- that just a comparison differs in degree that the comparison is invalid.
A difference in degree can be a difference in kind.
There is no fallacy.
To get more to the heart of the issue, you do have a right to a hacked and modded PS3, it is absurd that the government can get away with passing a law telling me what I can and cannot do with a piece of hardware that I own, never mind mandating a decade of jail time for it
There are many things you can own or possess but cannot touch - without consequences.
You can't boost the power of a VHF or shortwave radio beyond its legal limits. You must follow the correct procedures "on air."
You can't drive "your car" on a public road without a license, registration, inspection and insurance. If you draw on your bag of tricks to rake in a little more - more likely a lot more - on the sale of your clapped-out Hyundai, you have committed a fraud.
This "kid" is 27 years old.
He was in the business of customizing hardware or modding it for resale --- not his own personal use.
The real-world function of the mod is to run the pirated game - or perhaps get a steroid boost-up in competitive on-line play.
One of the most interesting things about the American federal Constitution is that a general "right to property" is nowhere to be found.
The federal government is, however, granted broad powers over interstate commerce. It can force individuals into compliance. The federal government has the explicit right to grant patents and copyrights - and the implied right to meaningfully enforce them.
No one accepted these arguments of "just doing my job" in the Nuremberg trials -- why should we now? (Sorry, Godwin.)
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
It functions as it was built to function.
In the American federal system, violent crimes are traditionally prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government has no general criminal jurisdiction outside of Washington D.C., its island territories, military bases, Indian reservations, and similiar enclaves.
The Secret Service was orginally organized to fight counterfeiting - a purely economic crime with an interstate dimension. ICE is the criminal enforcement division of the customs and immigration service - and these are not guys you want to fool around with.
Violent offenders who do enter the federal system get hammered. There is little willingness to plea bargain. When the judge says twenty-five years to life, you serve twenty-five years to life.
Well, pay in the U.S. has gone all haywire. My grandfather's best friend was a professional baseball player in his youth (quite a long time ago) -- and he was a plumber most of the time because pro ball didn't pay enough to live on. Imagine that.
In his time, there would have at least three - likely four - levels of professional play.
You could be a consistent, entertaining, player and never make it into major league ball.
You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them
WordPerfect was the perfect word processor - but the word processor was no longer enough.
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process.Almost Perfect
they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another...
You did notice that not one of your examples was an end-user application?
"Linux is the kernel..."
Knowing how to code in C is not the same as understanding office work well enough to design and execute a competitive office suite - and MS Office is itself only one component of the MS Office system.
Microsoft has - quite literally - billions to spend on studies of office work and the office worker. It has had the guts to trust in what it has learned and make a commitment to The Ribbon UI across the board.
OpenOffice.org through almost the whole of its existence has been - for all practical purposes - a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun.
Firefox - the Moz Foundation - began with an hefty infusion of cash and IP from AOL and still receives tens of millions of dollars in subsidies each year from Google alone.
That buys organization - planning - discipline.
It buys talent and resources beyond those of the programmer himself.
Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.
There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.
It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.
Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.
Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.
This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
Usually I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but what if he was bribed to essentially throw his own case in order to set some kind of legal precedent? I mean, it takes a special, special brand of stupid to plead guilty in circumstances like these.
The judge came damn close to ruling that - as a matter of law - Tenenbaum's defense was dead on arrival. Leaving the conspiracy theorist no choice but to throw his attorneys into the pot.
Then there is the small - but risky business - of admitting to lying under oath in the pre-trial proceedings.
The sad fact is that since shortly after (during?) World War II, popular culture (Elvis, John Wayne, the Beatles, etc.) has been the prevailing form of culturing we've received as a society.
In the 1850s Barnum's PR machine could drive the price of a concert ticket to $150 in gold when he had right material to work with, a star like Jenny Lind. Both understood perfectly well the ancillary profits to be made from product endorsements, sheet music sales and so on.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers organized in 1871 introduced negro spirtual and work songs - one of the great foundation stones of American music - to a northern white audience. But their entire repertory - an authentic folk tradition spanning two hundred years - was only about 200 songs.
American culture has been commercial and "pop" from its beginnings.
Why does it seem that everybody involved in these cases is an idiot? The RIAA lawyers, the defendants and their representation, the judges, the juries...they all sound like total stooges.
The RIAA lawyers won their case. Taking no prisoners.
Nesson barely managed to scratch and claw his way to a jury verdict on damages. He came within an inch of being cited for professional misconduct.
Tenenbaum admitted that the screenshots captured by MediaSentry in August 2004, showing over 800 song files in his KaZaA shared folder, were accurate representations of the contents of that folder.Tenenbaum takes the stand: I used P2P and lied about it
Slashdot Mirror
to claim make a claim that the ribbon is "the single most reviled "feature"" requires some actual evidence beyond what a few tech sites say.
Is the "tech site" the right place to look?
What you really need to know is what the office manager and the 9 to 5 office worker thinks of the new UI.
This is where even modest gains in productivity translate into significant and immediate returns on your investment.
It's disallowed by MS specifically for Office-like applications. (nothing else)
The license is royalty-free.
It's a simple click-through agreement.
The program does not involve code or technical specifications and there are no protocols or file formats.
The license is platform-independent.
The license is available for {any application] except [those] that compete directly with the five MS Office applications that have the new UI.
Office UI Licensing Developer Center
One of the main reasons I use OO now is the ribbon on Orifice 2007.
This is where I get off.
Saying "Open the terminal and type..."
Try this over the telephone with someone who does not know the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the command line - and is deathly afraid of the typo that will bring his system down - permanently. Try it again with a line of more than ten to fifteen characters. Try it with a hunt-and-peck typist - who uses a symbol like the tilde only once every six months.
Henry David Thoreau addressed this issue better than I can:
Socrates accepted his death sentence.
Thoreau made no attempt to avoid going to jail. Neither demanded that anyone else pay the price for their own civil disobedience.
When a geek pleads guilty to breaking the law - then we can continue this discussion with a little less hypocrisy.
The same clients considering Google Apps are 99.999% likely to have a non-existent or ineffective backup/archiving system, lack the expertise/cash for sysadmining Microsoft enterprise apps and would probably benefit from being able to log in on multiple machines to access their data
Then when you need to do is form an IT co-op or partnership with a larger, stronger, organization that has the experience and resources to it right. Which is something the HMOs and government agencies are probably going to force on you anyway.
This is insane. This kid is looking at 10 years for modifying hardware while another story linked right at the bottom of the same article describes a cop getting a one day suspension (with pay) for running down a child with his car
It would be a modest accomplishment, I think, if the geek began to grasp the essentials of a federal system - federal, state and local jurisdiction.
ICE is the enforcement arm of US Customs and Immigration. That's a big gun and not a cap pistol.
To make it into their sights you really have to work for it.
This is a common logical fallacy I see all the time -- that just a comparison differs in degree that the comparison is invalid.
A difference in degree can be a difference in kind.
There is no fallacy.
To get more to the heart of the issue, you do have a right to a hacked and modded PS3, it is absurd that the government can get away with passing a law telling me what I can and cannot do with a piece of hardware that I own, never mind mandating a decade of jail time for it
There are many things you can own or possess but cannot touch - without consequences.
You can't boost the power of a VHF or shortwave radio beyond its legal limits. You must follow the correct procedures "on air."
You can't drive "your car" on a public road without a license, registration, inspection and insurance. If you draw on your bag of tricks to rake in a little more - more likely a lot more - on the sale of your clapped-out Hyundai, you have committed a fraud.
This "kid" is 27 years old.
He was in the business of customizing hardware or modding it for resale --- not his own personal use.
The real-world function of the mod is to run the pirated game - or perhaps get a steroid boost-up in competitive on-line play.
One of the most interesting things about the American federal Constitution is that a general "right to property" is nowhere to be found.
The federal government is, however, granted broad powers over interstate commerce. It can force individuals into compliance. The federal government has the explicit right to grant patents and copyrights - and the implied right to meaningfully enforce them.
And "yelling at a bus driver"? Sorry. That probably doesn't count as interfering with the operation of a mass transit system, either.
Of course it does.
It distracts the driver.
He can't respond quickly enough to the kid taking his bike out into street - the car that ran the stop sign.
Someone dies.
At the very least, you've done your bit to make the mass transit experience singularly unpleasant for everyone.
That doesn't help boost ridership and revenues, it sure as heck doesn't make it any easier to recruit and retain drivers.
It interests me when a geek equates the enforcement arm of US customs and immigration to the SS. That his right to a hacked and modded PS3 seems to count for as much as what a prisoner lost in the Nazi death camps.
The Nuremberg defendants were charged with crimes against humanity - and, and among the specific changes, the crime of institutionalized murder on an industrial scale. That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.
Your apologies to Godwin are fraudulent.
And hundreds, if not thousands, of violent crime offenders go without jail time every week. I love a functining legal system.
It functions as it was built to function.
In the American federal system, violent crimes are traditionally prosecuted at the state and local level.
The federal government has no general criminal jurisdiction outside of Washington D.C., its island territories, military bases, Indian reservations, and similiar enclaves.
The Secret Service was orginally organized to fight counterfeiting - a purely economic crime with an interstate dimension. ICE is the criminal enforcement division of the customs and immigration service - and these are not guys you want to fool around with.
Violent offenders who do enter the federal system get hammered. There is little willingness to plea bargain. When the judge says twenty-five years to life, you serve twenty-five years to life.
Well, pay in the U.S. has gone all haywire. My grandfather's best friend was a professional baseball player in his youth (quite a long time ago) -- and he was a plumber most of the time because pro ball didn't pay enough to live on. Imagine that.
In his time, there would have at least three - likely four - levels of professional play.
You could be a consistent, entertaining, player and never make it into major league ball.
Huh??? Most knowledgeable IT directors that I've worked with have sneered at certifications
He can sneer all he wants - but if there is a slot he needs to fill - today - the cert gives you an edge.
In this economy, there will be many - likely far too many - applicants who have the degree he wants to see and the experience and the cert.
He can't interview them all. He may have the time to look at the best two out of three.
PHB. Minesweeper and Consultant and Solitaire Expert
"Doesn't work or play well with others." Leave your Dilbert comics and attitude at home.
Your buddy's degree in marketing implies at least some basic social skills and instincts.
You buddy is ready for the management track if he wants it. That's what makes him worth $20K more than you.
The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame
I remember reading about these glasses in National Geographic.
They were designed for [mostly rural] third world markets where dispensing opticians are almost non-existent - and complex lenses priced out of reach.
The village elder would be quick to admit that they look over-weight and dorky even on him.
Yep. I'd estimate in my experience for every 20 or so people who say "Screw them, I'm not buying that", 1 will actually follow through.
I'd say it is much worse than that.
How many gamers will even bother to - pretend - that they are going to boycott a game or a publisher?
You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them
WordPerfect was the perfect word processor - but the word processor was no longer enough.
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process. Almost Perfect
they said that writing a free C compiler and libraries just wasn't feasible. Afterwards, they said using the C compiler and associated libraries to write a free Unix clone wasn't feasible. Its been one thing after another, after another, after another...
You did notice that not one of your examples was an end-user application?
"Linux is the kernel..."
Knowing how to code in C is not the same as understanding office work well enough to design and execute a competitive office suite - and MS Office is itself only one component of the MS Office system.
Microsoft has - quite literally - billions to spend on studies of office work and the office worker. It has had the guts to trust in what it has learned and make a commitment to The Ribbon UI across the board.
OpenOffice.org through almost the whole of its existence has been - for all practical purposes - a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun.
Firefox - the Moz Foundation - began with an hefty infusion of cash and IP from AOL and still receives tens of millions of dollars in subsidies each year from Google alone.
That buys organization - planning - discipline.
It buys talent and resources beyond those of the programmer himself.
Oracle could stop caring about OpenOffice tomorrow, and the community would simply pick up and continue development on it, business as usual. Nice try, though.
There is nothing "simple" about taking up a project on this scale.
It is this attitude that can make it a little hard to take the geek seriously.
Microsoft sees Word as one component of an integrated office system that scales "almost effortlessly" from the home user to enterprise solutions on the grandest of scales.
Client - Server - The Web - each has its place.
This solves so many problems for the office manager that I don't think the geek really understands what he competing against.
Usually I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but what if he was bribed to essentially throw his own case in order to set some kind of legal precedent? I mean, it takes a special, special brand of stupid to plead guilty in circumstances like these.
The judge came damn close to ruling that - as a matter of law - Tenenbaum's defense was dead on arrival. Leaving the conspiracy theorist no choice but to throw his attorneys into the pot.
Then there is the small - but risky business - of admitting to lying under oath in the pre-trial proceedings.
The sad fact is that since shortly after (during?) World War II, popular culture (Elvis, John Wayne, the Beatles, etc.) has been the prevailing form of culturing we've received as a society.
In the 1850s Barnum's PR machine could drive the price of a concert ticket to $150 in gold when he had right material to work with, a star like Jenny Lind. Both understood perfectly well the ancillary profits to be made from product endorsements, sheet music sales and so on.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers organized in 1871 introduced negro spirtual and work songs - one of the great foundation stones of American music - to a northern white audience. But their entire repertory - an authentic folk tradition spanning two hundred years - was only about 200 songs.
American culture has been commercial and "pop" from its beginnings.
Oh please, this has nothing to do with lobbyists having more power that the people. The voters clearly do not care about this issue
How many of those voters are based in cities where "big media" is politically and economically significant?
The P2P community is dispersed. The lobbyist can focus on the power brokers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Nashville, Orlando...
I'm surprised they allowed the defendant on the stand. Maybe the rules for civil procedure are different than criminal.
The defendant can always choose to take the stand in his own defense in a criminal trial - even when his lawyer advises against it.
The defendant has no absolute right to refuse to testify in a civil trial. The right against self-incrimination in civil litigation
The guy made offers twice to give everything he had to the RIAA. He even mailed them over $5000. They returned his check.
Of course they returned his check.
You won't find a lawyer anywhere who would have accepted it.
The formalities matter. You want everything in writing. You want - and need - the judge's stamp of approval.
Why does it seem that everybody involved in these cases is an idiot? The RIAA lawyers, the defendants and their representation, the judges, the juries...they all sound like total stooges.
The RIAA lawyers won their case. Taking no prisoners.
Nesson barely managed to scratch and claw his way to a jury verdict on damages. He came within an inch of being cited for professional misconduct.
30 songs. The rest is conjectural and not proven
This sure as heck looks like proof to my eyes:
Tenenbaum admitted that the screenshots captured by MediaSentry in August 2004, showing over 800 song files in his KaZaA shared folder, were accurate representations of the contents of that folder. Tenenbaum takes the stand: I used P2P and lied about it