Sorry, this is one area where M$ doesn't have a monopoly. I've worked in pre-sales for a number of VARs over the past 4 years -- pretty much ever since my career prospects as a pure techy got shipped to Asia. A pre-sales consultant is expected to keep his mouth shut in front of the customer when he knows the salesperson is lying, then correct the salesperson later. It's up to the salesperson whether or not he wants to then recant his claims with the customer, but you must *never* indicate to the customer that what's being presented is anything but the gospel truth, straight from the gods.
No, it's not arrogant at all, considering he did not solicit the interview. If a company said to me out of the blue, "We're really impressed with your skill set and would like to speak with you about a job opportunity", then ambushed me with a pop quiz when I got there, you can bet I'd be offended.
With an opener like that, my expectation would be that they already had a good handle on my skill set through a referral, my published work, or some other means. Here's a dating analogy: You see an attractive woman at a bar, and offer to buy her a drink, complementing her good looks. Then you ask if she has any photos of her relatives, because you want to be sure that if you eventually breed, your offspring won't be ugly. Wouldn't you expect a slap in the face?
Are you using Windows every day? Did you set up a Windows computer for your parents, grandparents, or other friends because FreeBSD/Linux/NetBSD/MacOS is "too complicated"?
I have not used Windows daily for several years now. My desktop and my laptop both run Linux. I don't even use Windows to play video games anymore.
I switched my mother to Linux over a year ago because I was tired of fielding "Help, Windows crashed and won't come out of Safe Mode" calls every other day. Now I get calls less than once a month from her, and they are because she wants to do something new or forgot how to do something -- not because of crashes and malware.
I've basically told the rest of my family that if they want computer support from me, then they'll have to switch to Linux too.
To me, "using the right tool for the job" means not funding the mob while I'm at it (I see no difference between Microsoft's business practices and those of organized crime), choosing something that isn't broken, and choosing something that will create as few trouble calls as possible.
This very issue was running through my head yesterday, when my old HP Officejet breathed its last breath. It had a good run, about 8 years of nearly daily use, and I was pretty satisfied with it. The Epson RX620 I picked up to replace it has me a little worried though. The parts in it seem flimsier, and I question whether it will last even half as long.
Anyway, my hope is that if the manafucturers have to pay a disposal fee when their devices are retired, they might put more effort into making them last longer than the 1 year warranty. "They just don't make 'em like they used to" constantly comes to mind when I look at today's consumer electronics. Each generation seems to have less metal, thinner plastic, weaker moving parts, and less overall thought to durability.
This is why competition is a Very Good Thing. Without VMWare to keep them honest, Microsoft would be doing exactly what the grandparent poster fears. I only wish that Microsoft's court conviction for anticompetitive behavior had carried with it much stiffer penalties and enforcement.
I'm more concerned about the potential for abuse by outsiders than by the law enforcement authorities. You can't tell my predisposition to an illness or disorder from my fingerprints, but you certainly can from my DNA. How long will it be before health/life insurers and employers bribe the right politicians and get access to this stuff -- probably under the guise of "background checks" or some similar nonsense?
I've been wondering about this a lot myself, but I've come to realize that there's more to it than just the pain of being a Microsoft bit^H^H^Huser. In a world where everyone else uses Microsoft, interoperability and compatibilty are key. I've been using OSS (various flavors of Red Hat, mainly) as my sole desktop OS for 5 years now, and it's the little things that kill you. Yes, OpenOffice will read and write MS Office files, but try dealing with format translations between Word and Writer documents, for instance.
One time I sent my resume, written in OpenOffice Writer and exported to Word format, to a potential employer. By chance, I sent the same document to a friend asking for constructive criticism. One of his comments was to not use daggers for bullets -- the default round bullet symbol in OpenOffice had been interpreted as daggers in Word! Needless to say, I never got a call from that employer.
I believe that this particular problem was not deliberately caused by the programmers of either application. But that was then, and this is now. Make no mistake: Microsoft is very aware of the threat that OSS poses, and they will go to any length to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Stories like this one are just the tip of the iceberg, and I fully expect things to get worse in the near future.
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Of the many different applications I've tried to run in Wine, only viruses seem to work (mostly) as intended. On the bright side, at least they're truthful about their development status -- every release email has the standard disclaimer: "This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly."
Well, my thinking was that his grandmother couldn't figure out how to print on this hypothetical Linux system because printing had not yet been configured. If, on the other hand, printing had been configured and his grandmother could not figure out that File->Print the or button with the printer icon on it in a desktop app did the same thing that it did in Windows, well then I'm amazed that she's able to print (or do much of anything else) in Windows.
Well, I recently converted my mother's badly ailing Windows box to Fedora, and she hasn't looked back. Sure, I tended to all the nuts-and-bolts details of the installation, and very occasionally I still field a tech support call, but for the most part it all finally Just Works. For her needs it's perfect: email, web browsing, and word processing. And no more random boots into safe mode, no more virus and spyware infections, no more random lockups.
Your grandmother may not be able to figure out how to configure printing in Linux, but once it's been set up, the same print button and File menu option to print exists in Linux apps as it does in Windows, and it works the same way. For a truly fair comparison, I challenge your grandmother to install and configure Windows on a bare metal machine.
There's no need to look to the heavens for a possible cause of our demise. The fact is, a terrible amount of destructive capability is within the reach of an increasing number of people -- not all with good intentions. We worry about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon proliferation among nations today, but as the technology advances and becomes more affordable, tomorrow we'll have to worry about their proliferation among individuals.
Sadly, for many of these scenarios there is no defense but to be far, far away when it happens. In some cases, the only defense will be to live in a different biosphere entirely. So even though I think the odds of a cosmic disaster quoted here are FUD, I do believe that there is plenty of reason to start preparing. Space colonization is an idea whose time has come, and one way or another I do believe our survival as species depends on it.
I don't know about other distros, but when I tried to use CIFS to mount in Fedora Core 2 instead of SMBFS, I got a bunch of kernel errors. AFAIK, it's still an open bug: bugzilla.redhat.com.
As your knowledge workers become more expensive, expect to see those jobs migrate to still cheaper labor markets in other developing countries. Sure, the net effect on the global economy is positive, but I can tell you it really sucks to be on the losing end of the outsourcing movement.
Your magstripe simply has the same info as is on the license.
So that would be name, address, license number, and date of birth. Combined with facts about how often and what type of poison (alcohol, nicotine, etc.) I buy, this information has great value to the insurance industry. I'll keep wearing my tin foil hat, thanks.
Just the other day I went to Beverages and More to buy some booze. The cashier asked me for ID, so I showed him my license inside the clear plastic flap of my wallet. He asked me to take it out, so I did so and handed it to him, not realizing what he was about to do... He swiped it through a mag strip reader! I have no idea what's on the strip, but now BevMo's computers have that information. If my street address is in there, it's probably going to be used to spam me with junk mail. But who knows how slimy they are? They might sell that information to life and health insurance underwriters, or worse. The possibilities are endless.
Anyway, I promptly ran my license through a degausser after that incident. If they start embedding RFID tags, I guess I'll have to take similar measures.
I have a lot of Libertarian views, but there are cases where government regulation is actually a Good Thing (or at least better than the alternative). Reason being, letting the market forces regulate corporate behavior just isn't good enough when planes (or rockets) fall out of the sky, food is contaminated, or drugs are defective, and people die as a result.
Corporations are soulless entities that will do anything and everything for profit. When human life and limb is at stake, safety guidelines must be established and enforced before an incident ever happens.
I feel your pain. I went out and got an Epia M6000 and Hauppage 250 with the idea of building a small, quiet (the M6000 is fanless) MythTV-based PVR that I would be happy to have in my living room. What a royal PITA that turned out to be! I don't doubt that it can be done on the M10000 using software decoding, but I was not able to get much more than a segfault out of the binary drivers Via had released for a distro I didn't want to run anyway.
I persevered though, and spent another WEEK compiling Gentoo packages before I finally decided that the extra $150 for a Shuttle SN41G2 and the noise that came with it was a reasonable sacrifice to make for something that would Just Work.
A day later, I had a fully functional PVR. I'm sorry, but I won't consider Via for anything running Linux again until they start providing proper driver support for their products.
Someone did sue Microsoft and moreover, they won. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Of course, the court-ordered breakup was nullified, and nothing's happened to control their business practices since. It's both sad and frightening how much "justice" money can buy.
(yes, I read the blurb posted this to the site; I'm repeating it here)
The H1-B program has destroyed the careers of thousands of U.S. citizens while simultaneously making indentured servants out of the foreign workers it brings to this country. Will you take a stand and shut this program down, or at least revise it so that foreign workers cannot be virtually enslaved by the companies that sponsor them?
If you are not familiar with the issue, there is some excellent testimony about it here:
I'm sure this has been brought up before, but why not bring a suit against M$ for selling a defective product? What makes bugs in their product any different than a car whose wheels fall off because of faulty lug nuts?
I went to HP's online store and I clicked every link I could find pertaining to the nx5000. I saw only one page that mentioned SUSE as an option, and zero places where I could actually CHOOSE that option when configuring. On the other hand, every single page I saw had in bold letters "HP recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional" right at the top. So is this even for real?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, this is one area where M$ doesn't have a monopoly. I've worked in pre-sales for a number of VARs over the past 4 years -- pretty much ever since my career prospects as a pure techy got shipped to Asia. A pre-sales consultant is expected to keep his mouth shut in front of the customer when he knows the salesperson is lying, then correct the salesperson later. It's up to the salesperson whether or not he wants to then recant his claims with the customer, but you must *never* indicate to the customer that what's being presented is anything but the gospel truth, straight from the gods.
No, it's not arrogant at all, considering he did not solicit the interview. If a company said to me out of the blue, "We're really impressed with your skill set and would like to speak with you about a job opportunity", then ambushed me with a pop quiz when I got there, you can bet I'd be offended.
With an opener like that, my expectation would be that they already had a good handle on my skill set through a referral, my published work, or some other means. Here's a dating analogy: You see an attractive woman at a bar, and offer to buy her a drink, complementing her good looks. Then you ask if she has any photos of her relatives, because you want to be sure that if you eventually breed, your offspring won't be ugly. Wouldn't you expect a slap in the face?
I have not used Windows daily for several years now. My desktop and my laptop both run Linux. I don't even use Windows to play video games anymore.
I switched my mother to Linux over a year ago because I was tired of fielding "Help, Windows crashed and won't come out of Safe Mode" calls every other day. Now I get calls less than once a month from her, and they are because she wants to do something new or forgot how to do something -- not because of crashes and malware.
I've basically told the rest of my family that if they want computer support from me, then they'll have to switch to Linux too.
To me, "using the right tool for the job" means not funding the mob while I'm at it (I see no difference between Microsoft's business practices and those of organized crime), choosing something that isn't broken, and choosing something that will create as few trouble calls as possible.
Count me in. Seriously.
This very issue was running through my head yesterday, when my old HP Officejet breathed its last breath. It had a good run, about 8 years of nearly daily use, and I was pretty satisfied with it. The Epson RX620 I picked up to replace it has me a little worried though. The parts in it seem flimsier, and I question whether it will last even half as long.
Anyway, my hope is that if the manafucturers have to pay a disposal fee when their devices are retired, they might put more effort into making them last longer than the 1 year warranty. "They just don't make 'em like they used to" constantly comes to mind when I look at today's consumer electronics. Each generation seems to have less metal, thinner plastic, weaker moving parts, and less overall thought to durability.
This is why competition is a Very Good Thing. Without VMWare to keep them honest, Microsoft would be doing exactly what the grandparent poster fears. I only wish that Microsoft's court conviction for anticompetitive behavior had carried with it much stiffer penalties and enforcement.
Aww, who made this a troll? I thought it was hilarious!!! Silly moderators...
I'm more concerned about the potential for abuse by outsiders than by the law enforcement authorities. You can't tell my predisposition to an illness or disorder from my fingerprints, but you certainly can from my DNA. How long will it be before health/life insurers and employers bribe the right politicians and get access to this stuff -- probably under the guise of "background checks" or some similar nonsense?
I've been wondering about this a lot myself, but I've come to realize that there's more to it than just the pain of being a Microsoft bit^H^H^Huser. In a world where everyone else uses Microsoft, interoperability and compatibilty are key. I've been using OSS (various flavors of Red Hat, mainly) as my sole desktop OS for 5 years now, and it's the little things that kill you. Yes, OpenOffice will read and write MS Office files, but try dealing with format translations between Word and Writer documents, for instance.
One time I sent my resume, written in OpenOffice Writer and exported to Word format, to a potential employer. By chance, I sent the same document to a friend asking for constructive criticism. One of his comments was to not use daggers for bullets -- the default round bullet symbol in OpenOffice had been interpreted as daggers in Word! Needless to say, I never got a call from that employer.
I believe that this particular problem was not deliberately caused by the programmers of either application. But that was then, and this is now. Make no mistake: Microsoft is very aware of the threat that OSS poses, and they will go to any length to maintain their stranglehold on the market. Stories like this one are just the tip of the iceberg, and I fully expect things to get worse in the near future.
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Of the many different applications I've tried to run in Wine, only viruses seem to work (mostly) as intended. On the bright side, at least they're truthful about their development status -- every release email has the standard disclaimer: "This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly."
Well, my thinking was that his grandmother couldn't figure out how to print on this hypothetical Linux system because printing had not yet been configured. If, on the other hand, printing had been configured and his grandmother could not figure out that File->Print the or button with the printer icon on it in a desktop app did the same thing that it did in Windows, well then I'm amazed that she's able to print (or do much of anything else) in Windows.
Well, I recently converted my mother's badly ailing Windows box to Fedora, and she hasn't looked back. Sure, I tended to all the nuts-and-bolts details of the installation, and very occasionally I still field a tech support call, but for the most part it all finally Just Works. For her needs it's perfect: email, web browsing, and word processing. And no more random boots into safe mode, no more virus and spyware infections, no more random lockups.
Your grandmother may not be able to figure out how to configure printing in Linux, but once it's been set up, the same print button and File menu option to print exists in Linux apps as it does in Windows, and it works the same way. For a truly fair comparison, I challenge your grandmother to install and configure Windows on a bare metal machine.
There's no need to look to the heavens for a possible cause of our demise. The fact is, a terrible amount of destructive capability is within the reach of an increasing number of people -- not all with good intentions. We worry about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon proliferation among nations today, but as the technology advances and becomes more affordable, tomorrow we'll have to worry about their proliferation among individuals.
Sadly, for many of these scenarios there is no defense but to be far, far away when it happens. In some cases, the only defense will be to live in a different biosphere entirely. So even though I think the odds of a cosmic disaster quoted here are FUD, I do believe that there is plenty of reason to start preparing. Space colonization is an idea whose time has come, and one way or another I do believe our survival as species depends on it.
I don't know about other distros, but when I tried to use CIFS to mount in Fedora Core 2 instead of SMBFS, I got a bunch of kernel errors. AFAIK, it's still an open bug: bugzilla.redhat.com.
As your knowledge workers become more expensive, expect to see those jobs migrate to still cheaper labor markets in other developing countries. Sure, the net effect on the global economy is positive, but I can tell you it really sucks to be on the losing end of the outsourcing movement.
So that would be name, address, license number, and date of birth. Combined with facts about how often and what type of poison (alcohol, nicotine, etc.) I buy, this information has great value to the insurance industry. I'll keep wearing my tin foil hat, thanks.
Just the other day I went to Beverages and More to buy some booze. The cashier asked me for ID, so I showed him my license inside the clear plastic flap of my wallet. He asked me to take it out, so I did so and handed it to him, not realizing what he was about to do... He swiped it through a mag strip reader! I have no idea what's on the strip, but now BevMo's computers have that information. If my street address is in there, it's probably going to be used to spam me with junk mail. But who knows how slimy they are? They might sell that information to life and health insurance underwriters, or worse. The possibilities are endless.
Anyway, I promptly ran my license through a degausser after that incident. If they start embedding RFID tags, I guess I'll have to take similar measures.
I have a lot of Libertarian views, but there are cases where government regulation is actually a Good Thing (or at least better than the alternative). Reason being, letting the market forces regulate corporate behavior just isn't good enough when planes (or rockets) fall out of the sky, food is contaminated, or drugs are defective, and people die as a result.
Corporations are soulless entities that will do anything and everything for profit. When human life and limb is at stake, safety guidelines must be established and enforced before an incident ever happens.
I feel your pain. I went out and got an Epia M6000 and Hauppage 250 with the idea of building a small, quiet (the M6000 is fanless) MythTV-based PVR that I would be happy to have in my living room. What a royal PITA that turned out to be! I don't doubt that it can be done on the M10000 using software decoding, but I was not able to get much more than a segfault out of the binary drivers Via had released for a distro I didn't want to run anyway.
I persevered though, and spent another WEEK compiling Gentoo packages before I finally decided that the extra $150 for a Shuttle SN41G2 and the noise that came with it was a reasonable sacrifice to make for something that would Just Work.
A day later, I had a fully functional PVR. I'm sorry, but I won't consider Via for anything running Linux again until they start providing proper driver support for their products.
Someone did sue Microsoft and moreover, they won. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. Of course, the court-ordered breakup was nullified, and nothing's happened to control their business practices since. It's both sad and frightening how much "justice" money can buy.
(yes, I read the blurb posted this to the site; I'm repeating it here)
The H1-B program has destroyed the careers of thousands of U.S. citizens while simultaneously making indentured servants out of the foreign workers it brings to this country. Will you take a stand and shut this program down, or at least revise it so that foreign workers cannot be virtually enslaved by the companies that sponsor them?
If you are not familiar with the issue, there is some excellent testimony about it here:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
I'm sure this has been brought up before, but why not bring a suit against M$ for selling a defective product? What makes bugs in their product any different than a car whose wheels fall off because of faulty lug nuts?
I went to HP's online store and I clicked every link I could find pertaining to the nx5000. I saw only one page that mentioned SUSE as an option, and zero places where I could actually CHOOSE that option when configuring. On the other hand, every single page I saw had in bold letters "HP recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional" right at the top. So is this even for real?
...but I'd love to walk their aisles with something like this in my pocket and do my own price rollbacks!