Let's see, the USA tortures prisoners, executes probably innocent prisoners and prisoners who are mentally retarded or who were children at the time of the crime, police brutality is rampant especially against racial minorities, children are often thrown into jail cells with brutal hardened criminals, children held in isolation for months at a time, widespread rape of female prisoners by male prison guards, regularly denies foreign prisoners the right to contact their consulate for legal representation,...
Of course many other countries are much worse. While we do beat our protesters and frame them for murder, there are no widespread "Disappearances" of critics of the government. Indeed, a brief search of the Internet will find you hundreds of thousands of people criticising the government. In many countries, criticisms such as these that we are making here would be sufficient to have you "disappeared".
If I had a million dollars, it was stolen in a fraud scheme, and I called the FBI flat broke and in bankruptcy, do you *really* think they would bother calling in any of their agents from where they're standing duty in the world's donut shops to track down the perp?
Hint: Here in Arizona, an outfit called "The Baptist Foundation" scammed *MILLIONS* of dollars from unwitting retirees across the country who thought they were supporting a religious-related investment fund, people who are now broke and living on Social Security. Guess what: Not *ONE* of the criminals responsible is currently serving time.
I once had the displeasure of working with an arrogant jerk. We (the two senior-most programmers in the company) asked him to write a class for accessing our database. We told him the API we wanted, and gave him sample code that accessed the database. He argued that we didn't need that class, and that his way (sprinkle database code all throughout the program) was better. We agreed that our class was overkill, but noted that it would improve future maintainability of the code and we wanted this code to have legs. He refused to listen.
Finally we had to pull rank on him to get him to do his job. First and last time I have ever had to do that. After the VP of Engineering pulled him into a meeting and gave him a lecture about teamwork, compromise, and cooperation, he drove to the central office and turned in his resignation because we "didn't respect him".
Fact: It doesn't matter whether the reason work isn't done is because he's incompetent, or because he's a prima donna. Either way, the work ain't done.
Note that I am *NOT* talking about confident programmers who are simply not shy about sharing their knowledge. I've been accused of that myself in the past:-). Rather, I'm talking about "legends in their own mind" who, in reality, are legendary only in their ability to make excuses as to why he isn't going to implement the solution that the rest of the team has agreed upon.
FreeBSD doesn't do bleeding edge hardware very well, and while it runs *most* commercial Linux software programs, it by no means runs *all* commercial Linux software programs.
I'll be evaluating Slackware 8.0 shortly. My current employer does a Linux-based product and right now we're based on Red Hat 6.2. RH62, though, is getting rather long of tooth. We need the stable 2.2 kernel (let the morons shoot themselves in the foot with 2.4, it'll still be a few months before 2.4 is stable enough for commercial use), so upgrading to Red Hat 7.1 is not an option.
This is an example of a niche Linux vendor, the kind where I said their business might support a dozen employees. If you bought a hundred machines from them they may be able to support a couple dozen employees (grin), but Dell definitely is not shuddering in their boots.
Unfortunately, the custom Linux server niche won't support any company with more than a dozen or so employees. Custom Linux server hardware is always more expensive than mass-produced hardware. But there will always be a market for it, because there will always be tasks that can't be accomplished with off-the-shelf hardware. Unfortunately, as VA found out, it isn't that big a market.
Frankly, this announcement was
inevitable. There is a limited market for custom servers, and VA Linux was never interested in building enough volume to be the Dell of Linux
(i.e., provide lots of cost-effective hardware for low prices), they wanted to be the Sun of Linux (i.e, sell high end server products
for high prices). The problem is that Linux does not lend itself to a Sun approach. People who want to buy Sun buy Sun, not VA
Linux Systems. People paid the premium for VA Linux servers when the dot.com money was flowing, but now that it's not, they buy Dell. Or, if it's a higher end server, IBM. VA Linux just did not have the volume to sell at a competitive price, and this move is a recognition of that fact. Unless you are buying parts in lots of 10,000 nowdays, you just can't make money in the hardware business -- and even at those volumes, Dell, HP, and IBM are all having to tighten their belt buckles to make any money selling PC's.
The wonder is that it has taken this long. I predicted this would happen back in March of 1999 (the ill-will from that prediction,
which was sent to several high-level VA executives expressing concern over their business model and where I thought it would
lead in the future, is one reason why I did not go to work for VA after they bought "selected assets" of Linux Hardware Solutions).
I guess it took that long to burn through all the VC capital plus the IPO capital.
The interesting thing is that this basically leaves Sam Ockman's Penguin Computing as the "last man standing" of the Linux
hardware business as of September 1998. I remember meeting Sam at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in September 1998, the last
show before the Linux Movement died and the Linux Business was born. At that time he had started his business only a few
months earlier, barely had enough money to meet payroll, and was wandering around poking his nose into our boxes and into VA's
boxes to see what parts we were using so that he could think about what he could do to compete against us. He'd already been
evicted from one apartment for running an assembly line in the back bedroom (or was it the living room?). He had nifty ads in all of the Linux magazines, but was out of cash for any further ads. I remember Kit Cosper of Linux Hardware Solutions
saying that Penguin Computing was not long for this world. Sam certainly has the last laugh here!
VA's quality problems are not new. For example, for years they sold a RAID card that did not work well with Linux because one of their employees had written the driver for it. But the basic problem was one of business model. The quality problems would have been fixed by a business model fix.
Several years ago I argued strongly that they should adopt a business model similar to that of Dell, of putting out large quantities of mostly-identical machines in an assembly line fashion. I also suggested that they needed to broaden their sales and distribution efforts to target new markets for Linux rather than sell to the same old server market. Their response was that their customers didn't want that. But the problem is that VA could never build enough volume with custom computers to get the kind of parts deals needed to be competitive in the business. You just can't survive that way, unless you're content to be a fringe provider of custom computers for people who just absolutely can't accept generic hardware. VA's business model just can't sustain more than a dozen or so employees. I know that for a fact, having been in the hardware business (for a competitor that was bought up by them several years back) and having seen the pressures and limitations first-hand.
First of all, unless you are an international corporation, you can't sue just anywhere for libel. You have to have reputation in that country and prove publication in that country (i.e., that at least one person in that country read the message). I got that info from Lawrence Godfrey of Demon Internet libel suit fame, if anybody knows about international libel law, he does:-).
Secondly, there is still the issue of expense. If a particular virulent group of spammers
in Britain are publishing defamatory nonsense about me, sure, I can sue them here in a Phoenix AZ court of law or there in Britain (I have correspondents in both country who would testify to publication in both places). But if I sued them here in Phoenix I'd end up having to sue them in a British court to enforce the judgement, and if I sued them there in Britain, I'd have to spend a bunch of time in London. Sorry, I don't like the dreary isles that much.
Saying that a web site can only be sued in the country where it is published gives free rein for liars in one country to defame people in other countries all they want, knowing that the people in those other countries aren't going to have the resources to travel to some dreary little island in the North Atlantic just to sue some moronic spammers. The current situation is not ideal -- it basically means that if I sue under my own laws, I end up having to sue twice to enforce a judgement -- but the alternative is no better.
In case you haven't heard, scholarly works (which are full of the things) *ARE* speech. Under the First Amendment, the government can no more censor the equations describing the physics of nuclear explosions than they can censor somebody's political speech.
A description of the program and what it does (i.e. source code), is just as much speech as a paper describing how to build an atomic bomb -- which, BTW, was a test case a few years back. See:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/nuc.bo mb.html
If a user makes a few small changes in a file and submits those changes to you, he has created a derivative work. Derivative works still belong to the original copyright holder.
What complicates things is when he submits an entire file for you to add to your program. This entire file is itself copyrightable by that user, since it is not derived from your own source code, and you must abide by whatever license that user set forth or else exclude that file from your program. This is the case with the Linux kernel, where many files are copyrighted individually by their individual authors.
It all depends upon how long you want to keep your car. If you are going to keep your car for 10 years, it doesn't matter how much it depreciates once you drive it off the dealer's lot -- what matters is how well it holds up for that 10 years. The best way to have that happen is to buy it new and properly care for it for that entire time. That's what my family typically does. My Mom's 1988 Honda Civic station wagon was only recently retired, with 288,000 miles. Her 1995 Honda Civic 4 door (she sold the station wagon to my brother at that time) has over 120,000 miles on it right now, and she plans to hold on to it for another 5 years. She can do that because it was taken care of, and she doesn't have to worry about whether the previous owner ran it for 60,000 miles without an oil change, and....
The problem is that we here in America rarely take the long view. It's always "Buy something, hope it lasts a few years, buy something else to replace it." I grew up in a part of the country where keeping old cars running for a long time was a part of the way of life. For some reason we've lost that part of our culture in our "buy buy buy" consumer feeding frenzy.
I was actually present at an event that, according to the media, didn't exist. Note that I was not a participant in the event, did not agree with the position of the people holding the event (in fact, I wanted to go to the local Wal-mart and grab some posterboard and start a counter-protest, but decided I wasn't feeling that energetic that day), but it was an unmistakable event that pretty much reduced the main drag of Wilmington NC to an unnavigable state for four hours. In other words, you'd have to be a moron not to have noticed it. But no mention on the nightly news (I checked every local TV station, both the 6pm and 11pm news), no mention in the daily newspaper... as far as the corporate media was concerned, it did not exist.
That was when I started to think about how a few large corporations such as Disney and Gannet control almost all news media in the United States.
Anyhow, read my writeup of the experience, and judge for yourself. Are you being told the real news?
My employer provides a month's free technical support with every purchase. You get on the phone with techical support you get an answer within a few minutes. You send in a technical support request via e-mail and you get an answer within a few hours. If it's a particularly hard question, or one which indicates there may be a bug in the product, you may even get some mail from one of the developers.
One of our competitors has support that you basically can't get on the phone. Their programmers are in France and don't even speak English, so you're certainly not going to get any response back. Their price is higher than ours for most configurations. Their ad budget is fifty times what ours is.
Guess who sells more?
Hint: It ain't the guys with the good support or the best price. It's the guys with the big ad budget.
Technical support is crappy because Americans only give lip service to support. What it all boils down to is that most Americans are sheeple. They buy a product because they've seen the most ads for a product or because it's "popular". Support never enters the equation. How else to explain the popularity of Microsoft?
Wood is cheap in the U.S., due to huge pine plantations covering much of the Southeast United States. So American houses are generally highly flammable. Gypsum drywall is required in order to keep the houses from going up in seconds when they catch on fire. Gypsum has this odd quality that when you heat it up, it loses hold on the water clutched in its crystal structure. That water evaporates, providing a cooling effect. It doesn't last for long, but the theory is that it lasts long enough to keep the house from instantly going "Whoosh!" and hopefully gives people inside time enough to get out.
However, drywall is typically used even inside U.S. homes built of "breezeblock" or other non-standard (for the U.S.) technologies, in order to provide a false wall to run wires and such through. Most Americans don't like seeing bare conduit running across their walls -- clashes with the decor -- and besides, in most places that's against local building codes for new homes (but okay for new businesses -- go figure). And interior walls are always a couple of slabs of drywall slapped onto wood or metal studs (most new U.S. homes use manufactured trusses to span the exterior walls, and thus interior walls are non-load-bearing "curtain" walls -- and built as flimsily and cheaply as local building codes will allow).
The whole point of most U.S. building practices is to build homes as cheaply as possible, while being able to sell them as expensively as possible. Most homes are viewed as disposable temporary commodities, to be discarded and replaced with another one as the family grows or shrinks. This contrasts with some countries where homes are viewed as family legacies, to be retained and maintained over hundreds of years. The U.S. isn't that old, and the U.S. is a very mobile nation, where most of the best and brightest end up moving all over the country in pursuit of the best jobs. So the U.S. has very little recent tradition of home as quality construction. Probably the last time quality housing was built in the U.S. was back at the turn of the 20th century, when all those exquisite Victorian homes and craftsman-era cottages were built. Even new mansions today are slapped together in a way that would have infuriated the European craftsmen who built those Victorian-era homes. Around here in Phoenix, they're nick-named "McMansions" because of their cookie-cutter appearance and slapped-together construction.
I know that my own employer's job would be a lot easier if the same OS ran on every platform. There are tons of stupid differences in non-standard areas such as tape drivers that make porting any software that deals with tape drives a pain in the %$@!@. One way we got around that on some platforms was to write our own tape driver, but that adds its own compatibility problems. E.g., on Solaris, we must compile it for: Solaris 8 64 bit SPARC, Solaris 8 32 bit SPARC, Solaris 7 64 bit SPARC, Solaris 7 32 bit SPARC, Solaris 2.6 64 bit SPARC,.....
It would also help if there was a such operating system as "Linux", but that's another issue (grumble grumble).
The problem is that they're disabling the anonymous pull method (done by up2date). It's unclear why they're doing this. Even Microsoft allows you to update your system from their web site without hassles. A pull-type updater is necessary if you are going to be taken seriously as a consumer OS. Obviously, Red Hat is not interested in that market. That's okay, other distros will take up the slack.
Personally, if up2date quits working, it's that much more motivation to go with Mandrake or Debian or some other distribution. The notion that I should be contented downloading patches and manually applying them is one that would have been fine in 1995, but this is not 1995. I am currently beta-testing Red Hat 7.0.91, but I can easily use any Linux distribution without any big hassles (my systems are set up so that I can change Linux distributions at will).
The issue is not RHN. RHN is irrelevant to the vast majority of Slashdot readers, who don't need the services provided by RHN. The issue is up2date no longer working anonymously. Even Microsoft gives you free updates via their update agent.
So let's see: Red Hat is going to make themselves harder to install security patches on than Windows. Duh. Like that's smart. (Insert sound of Red Hat putting pistol to head, pulling trigger).
Apparently Red Hat believes that, since they have so much marketshare, they can make their Linux harder to use than competing Linux distributions while retaining market share. That doesn't make sense to anybody with half a brain, but (duh) nobody ever accused Red Hat of anything except a lot of luck.
Basically, if you are talking lawyers, it is time to resign. You do not trust these people. By hiring a lawyer to remind them of your agreement, you are showing them that you do not trust them. At that point, since neither side trusts the other, the best thing to do is go elsewhere.
Being young and with a family might make that painful, but you have to face facts -- your job at this company is finished. All you're doing right now is dancing on the grave.
My company attempted to get me to sign one of those IP agreements. There was a clause that said they owned anything "related in any way to work duties". My reply to them was that virtually anything I did with a computer could conceivably be related somehow to my work duties through enough mush-mouthed rationalizing, and I was not going to sign a contract with that clause. So I didn't. Now, if the company came back and said "You know, that program of yours that you did in your spare time on your own computer is ours," I'd politely inform them no, it's not. If they insist, well, it's time to go.
Where the military works is for people who have no game plan, no skills, no motivation, and no way to get any. I've never been in the military myself, but I'm from North Louisiana, meaning that most of my (male) relatives have been. For a redneck kid who'd otherwise be working in a sawmill, the chance to roam the world for four to six years at government expense is pretty hard to turn down, and the chance of getting shot in the military is probably less than the chance of getting shot in a North Louisiana honky-tonk on a rowdy night. And the pay isn't all that bad -- compared to working in a sawmill for minimum wage.
Now, the question is, would somebody with 2 years of technical school be happier going to college, or going into the military? I would personally say "Go to college". The military is not going to make use of those 2 years of technical school. The military is accustomed to hiring the redneck kid of my first paragraph, kids who have native intelligence but are bone stock ignorant. So you're likely to be bored stiff in training courses going over material that you already know before you get a chance to do anything with the "neat equipment" that's probably 5 to 10 years old.
The military isn't too bad a place for nascent techies, those who like computers but have no education or training. But the real learning comes afterwards, when you go to college and get your BS degree (bull**** degree, agreed, but lots of people like to see that you have one, for a variety of reasons that I won't expound upon here). For those who already DO have training, the military can be a very dreary place indeed unless you're an officer -- and even there, there's no guarantees (and the "up or out" policies really suck, a friend's brother got kicked out at 18 years because he did not rise in grade fast enough, and he has *NO* retirement benefits for his 18 years of service).
The Reserves or National Guard have been mentioned as an alternative. All I have to say about that is: what happens the next time we have another Persian Gulf skirmish? You could lose everything if you're called up for active duty for six months because some tinpot dictator decided to take over one of our favorite oil producing states. Think about it -- you're in the Silicon Valley, you have a house that you paid $350,000 for, a car that you paid $40,000 for, and you really expect to be able to keep the mortgage and car payments up when you're ripped from your job and forced into active duty at a whopping $750/month?! I know people who lost everything when they got called up into active duty for the Persian Gulf skirmish. Yeah, the "free" money for college is great, but the obligation is real, and can cost you much, MUCH more than the "free" money for college.
The vice principal probably learned about the parody from a teacher who learned it from some other student. I know that I learned the darndest things about the things happening in my students' lives. For example, there was one kid who was very disruptive. I learned from the other students that he had a drinking problem, that he acted stupid because he thought it made him look cool, and that everybody pretty much despised him and thought he was pathetic. That was a heck of a lot more than I wanted to know, but was representative of the kinds of things the kids would tell me. Sometimes they were even true:-).
Anyhow, probably a kid told a teacher about how so-and-so was saying he had a web site that slammed Mr. VP, and the teacher told Mr. VP, and Mr. Vice Principal blew a fuse.
There are kids who specialize in figuring out what will make teachers and administrators blow fuses. The trick to dealing with those kids is to go "by the book" -- dispassionately, documenting everything, making sure all the boxes are checked and all the A's covered in the CYA's. Blowing a fuse gets you sued. As happened here.
And oh, by the way, there is no such thing as a "challenge to authority", the moment you get into that zero-sum game, you (as a teacher or administrator) have lost. The only thing of interest is disruptions to the learning environment. "authority" is of use only insofar as it relates to handling disruptions of the learning environments. Teachers (and administrators) can no longer stand at the schoolhouse door and beat the sh*t out of any kid whose looks they don't like. There has to be an actual disruption first.
The problem is that the school did not say the kid was spreading the URL around campus and causing a disruption. Rather, the school said the web page itself was a disruption.
Schools have no business regulating off-campus speech, because off-campus speech by definition cannot disrupt. Only on-campus behavior can disrupt. So if the kid was spreading the URL around campus, yeah, you can suspend him -- for that on-campus behavior. But that's not what they did to him.
If the kid was spreading the pamphlet around school and causing a disruption, yes, he could be suspended. For that matter, if he were spreading the URL around school and causing a disruption, yes, he could be suspended. But that's not what the school district argued. The school district argued that the web site itself was disruptive -- NOT that the student was spreading the URL around the school during school hours and thus causing a disruption.
There is a clear difference between off-campus behavior and on-campus behavior. The school wronged the student by punishing him for off-campus behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, click here anyhow.
Let's see, the USA tortures prisoners, executes probably innocent prisoners and prisoners who are mentally retarded or who were children at the time of the crime, police brutality is rampant especially against racial minorities, children are often thrown into jail cells with brutal hardened criminals, children held in isolation for months at a time, widespread rape of female prisoners by male prison guards, regularly denies foreign prisoners the right to contact their consulate for legal representation, ...
Of course many other countries are much worse. While we do beat our protesters and frame them for murder, there are no widespread "Disappearances" of critics of the government. Indeed, a brief search of the Internet will find you hundreds of thousands of people criticising the government. In many countries, criticisms such as these that we are making here would be sufficient to have you "disappeared".
-E
Hint: Here in Arizona, an outfit called "The Baptist Foundation" scammed *MILLIONS* of dollars from unwitting retirees across the country who thought they were supporting a religious-related investment fund, people who are now broke and living on Social Security. Guess what: Not *ONE* of the criminals responsible is currently serving time.
-E
-E
Fact: It doesn't matter whether the reason work isn't done is because he's incompetent, or because he's a prima donna. Either way, the work ain't done.
Note that I am *NOT* talking about confident programmers who are simply not shy about sharing their knowledge. I've been accused of that myself in the past :-). Rather, I'm talking about "legends in their own mind" who, in reality, are legendary only in their ability to make excuses as to why he isn't going to implement the solution that the rest of the team has agreed upon.
-E
I'll be evaluating Slackware 8.0 shortly. My current employer does a Linux-based product and right now we're based on Red Hat 6.2. RH62, though, is getting rather long of tooth. We need the stable 2.2 kernel (let the morons shoot themselves in the foot with 2.4, it'll still be a few months before 2.4 is stable enough for commercial use), so upgrading to Red Hat 7.1 is not an option.
-E
-E
-E
Frankly, this announcement was inevitable. There is a limited market for custom servers, and VA Linux was never interested in building enough volume to be the Dell of Linux (i.e., provide lots of cost-effective hardware for low prices), they wanted to be the Sun of Linux (i.e, sell high end server products for high prices). The problem is that Linux does not lend itself to a Sun approach. People who want to buy Sun buy Sun, not VA Linux Systems. People paid the premium for VA Linux servers when the dot.com money was flowing, but now that it's not, they buy Dell. Or, if it's a higher end server, IBM. VA Linux just did not have the volume to sell at a competitive price, and this move is a recognition of that fact. Unless you are buying parts in lots of 10,000 nowdays, you just can't make money in the hardware business -- and even at those volumes, Dell, HP, and IBM are all having to tighten their belt buckles to make any money selling PC's.
The wonder is that it has taken this long. I predicted this would happen back in March of 1999 (the ill-will from that prediction, which was sent to several high-level VA executives expressing concern over their business model and where I thought it would lead in the future, is one reason why I did not go to work for VA after they bought "selected assets" of Linux Hardware Solutions). I guess it took that long to burn through all the VC capital plus the IPO capital.
The interesting thing is that this basically leaves Sam Ockman's Penguin Computing as the "last man standing" of the Linux hardware business as of September 1998. I remember meeting Sam at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in September 1998, the last show before the Linux Movement died and the Linux Business was born. At that time he had started his business only a few months earlier, barely had enough money to meet payroll, and was wandering around poking his nose into our boxes and into VA's boxes to see what parts we were using so that he could think about what he could do to compete against us. He'd already been evicted from one apartment for running an assembly line in the back bedroom (or was it the living room?). He had nifty ads in all of the Linux magazines, but was out of cash for any further ads. I remember Kit Cosper of Linux Hardware Solutions saying that Penguin Computing was not long for this world. Sam certainly has the last laugh here!
-E
Several years ago I argued strongly that they should adopt a business model similar to that of Dell, of putting out large quantities of mostly-identical machines in an assembly line fashion. I also suggested that they needed to broaden their sales and distribution efforts to target new markets for Linux rather than sell to the same old server market. Their response was that their customers didn't want that. But the problem is that VA could never build enough volume with custom computers to get the kind of parts deals needed to be competitive in the business. You just can't survive that way, unless you're content to be a fringe provider of custom computers for people who just absolutely can't accept generic hardware. VA's business model just can't sustain more than a dozen or so employees. I know that for a fact, having been in the hardware business (for a competitor that was bought up by them several years back) and having seen the pressures and limitations first-hand.
-E
Secondly, there is still the issue of expense. If a particular virulent group of spammers in Britain are publishing defamatory nonsense about me, sure, I can sue them here in a Phoenix AZ court of law or there in Britain (I have correspondents in both country who would testify to publication in both places). But if I sued them here in Phoenix I'd end up having to sue them in a British court to enforce the judgement, and if I sued them there in Britain, I'd have to spend a bunch of time in London. Sorry, I don't like the dreary isles that much.
Saying that a web site can only be sued in the country where it is published gives free rein for liars in one country to defame people in other countries all they want, knowing that the people in those other countries aren't going to have the resources to travel to some dreary little island in the North Atlantic just to sue some moronic spammers. The current situation is not ideal -- it basically means that if I sue under my own laws, I end up having to sue twice to enforce a judgement -- but the alternative is no better.
-E
A description of the program and what it does (i.e. source code), is just as much speech as a paper describing how to build an atomic bomb -- which, BTW, was a test case a few years back. See: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/nuc.bo mb.html
-E
What complicates things is when he submits an entire file for you to add to your program. This entire file is itself copyrightable by that user, since it is not derived from your own source code, and you must abide by whatever license that user set forth or else exclude that file from your program. This is the case with the Linux kernel, where many files are copyrighted individually by their individual authors.
-E
The problem is that we here in America rarely take the long view. It's always "Buy something, hope it lasts a few years, buy something else to replace it." I grew up in a part of the country where keeping old cars running for a long time was a part of the way of life. For some reason we've lost that part of our culture in our "buy buy buy" consumer feeding frenzy.
-E
That was when I started to think about how a few large corporations such as Disney and Gannet control almost all news media in the United States.
Anyhow, read my writeup of the experience, and judge for yourself. Are you being told the real news?
-E
One of our competitors has support that you basically can't get on the phone. Their programmers are in France and don't even speak English, so you're certainly not going to get any response back. Their price is higher than ours for most configurations. Their ad budget is fifty times what ours is.
Guess who sells more?
Hint: It ain't the guys with the good support or the best price. It's the guys with the big ad budget.
Technical support is crappy because Americans only give lip service to support. What it all boils down to is that most Americans are sheeple. They buy a product because they've seen the most ads for a product or because it's "popular". Support never enters the equation. How else to explain the popularity of Microsoft?
-E
However, drywall is typically used even inside U.S. homes built of "breezeblock" or other non-standard (for the U.S.) technologies, in order to provide a false wall to run wires and such through. Most Americans don't like seeing bare conduit running across their walls -- clashes with the decor -- and besides, in most places that's against local building codes for new homes (but okay for new businesses -- go figure). And interior walls are always a couple of slabs of drywall slapped onto wood or metal studs (most new U.S. homes use manufactured trusses to span the exterior walls, and thus interior walls are non-load-bearing "curtain" walls -- and built as flimsily and cheaply as local building codes will allow).
The whole point of most U.S. building practices is to build homes as cheaply as possible, while being able to sell them as expensively as possible. Most homes are viewed as disposable temporary commodities, to be discarded and replaced with another one as the family grows or shrinks. This contrasts with some countries where homes are viewed as family legacies, to be retained and maintained over hundreds of years. The U.S. isn't that old, and the U.S. is a very mobile nation, where most of the best and brightest end up moving all over the country in pursuit of the best jobs. So the U.S. has very little recent tradition of home as quality construction. Probably the last time quality housing was built in the U.S. was back at the turn of the 20th century, when all those exquisite Victorian homes and craftsman-era cottages were built. Even new mansions today are slapped together in a way that would have infuriated the European craftsmen who built those Victorian-era homes. Around here in Phoenix, they're nick-named "McMansions" because of their cookie-cutter appearance and slapped-together construction.
-E
It would also help if there was a such operating system as "Linux", but that's another issue (grumble grumble).
-E
Personally, if up2date quits working, it's that much more motivation to go with Mandrake or Debian or some other distribution. The notion that I should be contented downloading patches and manually applying them is one that would have been fine in 1995, but this is not 1995. I am currently beta-testing Red Hat 7.0.91, but I can easily use any Linux distribution without any big hassles (my systems are set up so that I can change Linux distributions at will).
-E
So let's see: Red Hat is going to make themselves harder to install security patches on than Windows. Duh. Like that's smart. (Insert sound of Red Hat putting pistol to head, pulling trigger).
Apparently Red Hat believes that, since they have so much marketshare, they can make their Linux harder to use than competing Linux distributions while retaining market share. That doesn't make sense to anybody with half a brain, but (duh) nobody ever accused Red Hat of anything except a lot of luck.
-E
Being young and with a family might make that painful, but you have to face facts -- your job at this company is finished. All you're doing right now is dancing on the grave.
My company attempted to get me to sign one of those IP agreements. There was a clause that said they owned anything "related in any way to work duties". My reply to them was that virtually anything I did with a computer could conceivably be related somehow to my work duties through enough mush-mouthed rationalizing, and I was not going to sign a contract with that clause. So I didn't. Now, if the company came back and said "You know, that program of yours that you did in your spare time on your own computer is ours," I'd politely inform them no, it's not. If they insist, well, it's time to go.
-E
Now, the question is, would somebody with 2 years of technical school be happier going to college, or going into the military? I would personally say "Go to college". The military is not going to make use of those 2 years of technical school. The military is accustomed to hiring the redneck kid of my first paragraph, kids who have native intelligence but are bone stock ignorant. So you're likely to be bored stiff in training courses going over material that you already know before you get a chance to do anything with the "neat equipment" that's probably 5 to 10 years old.
The military isn't too bad a place for nascent techies, those who like computers but have no education or training. But the real learning comes afterwards, when you go to college and get your BS degree (bull**** degree, agreed, but lots of people like to see that you have one, for a variety of reasons that I won't expound upon here). For those who already DO have training, the military can be a very dreary place indeed unless you're an officer -- and even there, there's no guarantees (and the "up or out" policies really suck, a friend's brother got kicked out at 18 years because he did not rise in grade fast enough, and he has *NO* retirement benefits for his 18 years of service).
The Reserves or National Guard have been mentioned as an alternative. All I have to say about that is: what happens the next time we have another Persian Gulf skirmish? You could lose everything if you're called up for active duty for six months because some tinpot dictator decided to take over one of our favorite oil producing states. Think about it -- you're in the Silicon Valley, you have a house that you paid $350,000 for, a car that you paid $40,000 for, and you really expect to be able to keep the mortgage and car payments up when you're ripped from your job and forced into active duty at a whopping $750/month?! I know people who lost everything when they got called up into active duty for the Persian Gulf skirmish. Yeah, the "free" money for college is great, but the obligation is real, and can cost you much, MUCH more than the "free" money for college.
-E
-E
Anyhow, probably a kid told a teacher about how so-and-so was saying he had a web site that slammed Mr. VP, and the teacher told Mr. VP, and Mr. Vice Principal blew a fuse.
There are kids who specialize in figuring out what will make teachers and administrators blow fuses. The trick to dealing with those kids is to go "by the book" -- dispassionately, documenting everything, making sure all the boxes are checked and all the A's covered in the CYA's. Blowing a fuse gets you sued. As happened here.
And oh, by the way, there is no such thing as a "challenge to authority", the moment you get into that zero-sum game, you (as a teacher or administrator) have lost. The only thing of interest is disruptions to the learning environment. "authority" is of use only insofar as it relates to handling disruptions of the learning environments. Teachers (and administrators) can no longer stand at the schoolhouse door and beat the sh*t out of any kid whose looks they don't like. There has to be an actual disruption first.
-E
Schools have no business regulating off-campus speech, because off-campus speech by definition cannot disrupt. Only on-campus behavior can disrupt. So if the kid was spreading the URL around campus, yeah, you can suspend him -- for that on-campus behavior. But that's not what they did to him.
-E
There is a clear difference between off-campus behavior and on-campus behavior. The school wronged the student by punishing him for off-campus behavior.
-E