The editors have done their jobs -- note all these Google-related articles appear in the Google section of Slashdot's article system. Go hit up your profile page (select "Preferences," I believe) and turn off the Google section if you're sick of seeing that news on the front page, then go visit the Google section manually when you decide you want a Google news fix.
I'm keen to know who would honestly behave like this as well; if they're a big company, they wouldn't normally be this uptight about it (even Microsoft will replace missing/damaged product keys), and if they're small, they wouldn't want to risk losing business like that.
Odd, then, that this company is behaving like this.
Read the EULA for the app if it's handy (or available), just to make sure, but I believe in most cases using a keygen (if one is available) to get the application installed and running isn't actually against the EULA (which just wants you not to run the app on more than one computer without multiple licenses or copy it for your friends).
You can show you've paid for the application. You can show you've tried to resolve the situation in good faith with the vendor, and presumably you can show they were uncooperative. Obviously, you don't tell them you're using the keygen, and you keep complaining to their support group and even their ownership until you get your key back, but you've got your application up and running at least.
If they do somehow figure out you're using a keygen and get huffy/legal with you, you've got plenty to show a court that you are entitled to use the application because you paid for it and that you tried to clear it up with them.
It goes without saying you shouldn't (if you have any choice) do any business with a company like this again. Also, though you already know this, keep better track of keys next time as well.
The only other helpful suggestion I've seen here so far is to keep pestering the company's support team until they cave in, or get the BBB or AG involved (or both). Trying to contact the company's owners or upper management might be a good idea, too.
One final tip: if you've been dealing with the support minions by phone or e-mail, stop. Do it in writing, to leave a paper trail and give them a better sense of urgency about the problem. Make it clear that you will not stop until they make this right; letters are far more powerful and effective in this than persistent phone calls or e-mails.
Why do you get that impression? "Child pornography" is just the red herring people always trot out when they want to censor speech.
You've heard the expression "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," yes? Your idea of "offensive content" may differ wildly from someone else's; the question becomes "who is right?" Sure, you can refuse to run a FreeNet node because you're scared some evil recipe for "instant terror version 3.4" might get stored there or a nasty evil child pornographer might post some horrid icky pictures you don't like onto FreeNet and your node happens to harbor some of the data, but in that case you really are censoring in your own way.
The FAQ's response to this concern is dead-on right. Even with child pornography, you're trying to treat the symptoms instead of the disease when you reason like this -- "oh I'm not running that because it doesn't actively stop child pornographers!" Bad news, buddy, the internet itself doesn't "actively stop" any pornographers. Are you just going to unplug so your browser cache doesn't accidentally store a thumbnail with content that offends you?
If you want to censor what you participate in on a free speech-centric network, you don't belong there. If you believe that, ultimately, full-fledged freedom of speech is more vital to our society than taking a sad, impotent stab at a group you don't like, then run a damned node and deal with the fact that you may not like what lives on it. Remember, there's a far better chance that text a government doesn't like (but that you do like) will be stored on your node than pics of little Suzie.
Claiming FreeNet was just "designed" for child porn is like saying Slashdot was designed to attract trolls. Sure, it happened, but that wasn't the original intent; back when it started, I think they honestly wanted to encourage and support open, public debate on important topics. Heh. Whoops.:)
I couldn't agree more. It was a great idea until it got renamed from "journaling" to "blogging" (that term still makes me cringe), and until the angst-ridden teens got hold of the idea. I still write one, but at least I spell-check the damned thing and try to keep the "angst" to a minimum. But I don't spam it all over the place or plaster it full of ads (Google text ads are as far as it'll ever go) either.
There are some well-written ones buried amongst the mountains of drivel (I'd like to hope mine is one of the better ones), but finding them is a true bitch. You generally don't want to read about someone's personal life unless they can make it sound more interesting with good writing. "I shampooed my dog today" is boring. "My dog made sure I took a bath too as I washed his filthy carcass today" is better. The boring minutes of a person's day aren't worth it unless there's some good humor or "educational" value mixed in. "I wrote neat code today" versus "look how much faster and smaller this Python snippet is than the equivalent in PHP" will start flamewars and keep people interested.
Wish they'd make up their minds. A guy who (misguided or not) seems to run a legitimate Windows fan site (ye gods, that's insane:) gushes about their product and the company slams him down for it. What happens when some blogger with no love for Windows (I fit in this category, though I won't bother pirating/running the beta because I don't give a rat's arse about Windows releases nor will I review it for them) jumps on this "team" and decides some new "feature" sucks or finds a critical, egg-smeared-on-face kind of bug and writes about it?
Free speech sure ain't looking too healthy these days...
True, but images range between a few hundred bytes to a few hundred kilobytes. Flash animations will cheerfully exceed a megabyte or two on average. The "flashier" they are, the bigger they are.
We've gotten good at optimizing images even when used as navigation widgets. Flash, though... ugh. Just yucky and big and nasty. Imagine the folks still on modems. "You want me to wait how long to download a damned menu?"
I dunno; if this thing works without crashing my browser, hogging 100% of the system's CPU, or blasting irritating sounds (and if it's used for useful content and presentation instead of lame menus or "flash-only" styled pages), it might just take off.
Flash is disabled on this machine because it does exactly one of two things in a web page: 1) show an ad, or 2) replaces perfectly servicable text (or even image-based) links in menus and navigation widgets that just ends up slowing everything down. I've already loaded the page. I shouldn't have to wait for the menus to load, too, just so your cute logo can flicker or rotate or so your menus can do impressive, flashy transitions that slow things down even more.
Well, it's probably because we've all had 64-bit support in Linux so damned long we're just shocked Microsoft have caught up to the rest of the software industry. 64-bit Linux is just so old news nowadays...:)
Gentoo Linux for AMD64 has been out for well over a year. Plenty of other distros have too.
Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, and other Unices have been 64-bit for years (not in the x86 architecture, but still, it's there).
No drivers for my video card, wireless card, DVD+/-RW drive(!), etc., in Windows. If I upgrade Windows on this box (a brand new notebook) to the 64-bit edition, no games, networking, or burning for me. Wheee! But hey, "this is Windows" so I should be happy! Office should be enough for anybody.:)
You ain't putting your CPU to "good use" until your apps are rebuilt as 64-bit binaries, and really only math-intensive apps (and less so for memory and system bandwidth intensive apps) are going to benefit. Photoshop might benefit a little, but not much. Games, again, maybe, but not much.
Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit just for the fun of it will just cripple what you can currently do on the Windows platform right now. In Linux land, it all "just works" (with very few exceptions).
I'm no fan of Windows, but for once I can honestly say "64-bit Windows is the wrong tool for most every job right now."
No, what sucks is having to run an S3 UniChrome Pro KM8x series adapter on a notebook in !@#$ing VESA mode because x.org's Unichrome support doesn't yet properly grok this chipset. I've got a 1.8GHz 64-bit CPU in this monster with plenty of RAM and disk space and it's all throttled by having to use X in a damned compatibility mode. The S3 chips may suck but they can do 2D way better than standard VESA.
Actually on the (somewhat frequent:) occasions I see problems and outages, I see JSP errors. It looks to me like they're using a Java servlet beast instead of (or in addition to) ASP. Netcraft seem to think they're running Linux+Apache, so perhaps it's a Tomcat deployment?
Bingo! That's exactly what this guy pulled. He's acting confident hoping I'll decide "oh shit, he's got some super-sekrit knowledge he'll use in court to kill my complaint!" and won't go through with the suit. I honestly thought filing the suit itself (after he encouraged me to do so) would be enough to convince him to settle. Guess not; he's now apparently confident I won't drive out there to show up in Small Claims where he lives.
For awhile, I honestly did wonder "does he know something I don't?" A couple days of digging though has turned up the obvious: a bounced check is a bounced check. The only possible claim he can try to make is what he's already claimed: "well, the check bouncing was a blessing in disguise since I don't think you're doing any work." Too bad I can show otherwise. Odd that he'd demand work he hasn't paid for anyway.:)
Well, bragging rights and actually punishing the guilty.
The whole reason people get away with this crap is because of this knee-jerk reaction; "it's too expensive and not worth suing!"
Open-source projects will be victims to this kind of thing up until one of them gets frustrated enough to drum up donations/resources from users and other interested parties (besides, pro-bono attorneys are another option with a high-enough profile case) to sue the miserable jerks that pull this scam on a regular basis.
The bully keeps screwing with people until someone breaks his nose.
Others have already commented that this is apples-to-oranges, but I do want to agree with you that the stupid blogspam shit (everywhere, not just blogger.com) is absolutely rediculous.
For an even more entertaining few minutes, grab a throwaway account at GMail or Yahoo and sign up for some of the idiotic click exchange sites out there. There's a few legitimate-ish ones like blogexplosion.com and blogazoo.com (not linking since I don't want to seem like I'm shilling:) but even they have plenty of journals in rotation like those you linked to. The more scummy ones (mostly those that offer "auto-surf for credits" and promise to drive tons of new traffic to your sites) have almost nothing but junk sites.
It amazes me that people think they can make money putting up a junker journal like that, submit it to some link exchanges, leave an auto-surfing browser tab open, and drive traffic to their useless sites -- then expect the money to roll on in. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Oh ye cruel gods, what a time not to have mod points. You got a spit-take out of me with that one:)
John de Lancie would actually make an absolutely hilarious master, and Matt Frewer wouldn't be a bad choice for The Doctor either. Dude, that could be seriously funny:
[rolls eyes] "Tsk. For a Time Lord, you seem to think so... three dimensionally..."
Of course; my situtation is different but the same "evasive tactics" apply. They're trying to hide behind a "fear" of the judicial system most people seem to have. Honestly I don't care much about the cash as I do drilling home for this imbecile that he just shouldn't bounce checks.
I'm just saying these people sometimes seem to just be begging for it.
You're probably right. The sad truth is people don't actually have to comply with even a judge's order. I fully expect the guy I'm suing to completely ignore an order from the judge to pay the amount he bounced or the punitive damages. There's a number of options available at my disposal for dealing with this if it happens, including court-assisted enforcement, garnishing of wages and tax refunds, seizure of personal and business property, property liens, and so on, but the guy undoubtedly hopes I'm not actually going to bother with all that. It'll be fun to show him otherwise.
I wish the "threat" of lawsuit were more powerful than it is these days. You're exactly right on point #1 -- people just don't have the balls to actually file, or there's other reasons why it's not feasible or practical to do it. This guy's relying on the fact that I have to drive nearly 18 hours to take him to court in his home town because naturally the court in mine don't have jurisdiction. He's probably still holding out at least a little hope that I'll back out and change my mind.
Too bad I've got the time, the resources to go, and the payoff's high enough to make it worth it for me. If I were "busier," though, and somehow unable to pursue it, it might mean I also commanded more resources and could send a lawyer to do this job for me.
If more people actually stood up to people like this, though, this sort of trickery and deception would die out pretty quickly.
The most striking piece of this article, for me, was the comment that when a PearOS developer tried to contact someone at the offending company's offices, they were just dismissed summarily with a "go talk to an attorney" response.
In recent months I have dealt with someone who gave me two similar responses (not related to the GPL, but a bounced check). First he asked "well, since you've got my address, why don't you just come out here and arrest me?" Next in an online conversation he suggested I take his firm "I'll never honor that check" answer to the district attorney. Then, when he got the certified letter from me trying to resolve the problem without involving a court, he messaged me online inviting me to file the suit, even offering to give me a list of lawyers to consult.
I'm amazed people still bluff like this -- he says "go on, then, sue me!"... it's a no brainer to respond "um, okay, here's the suit" (I filed suit March 1, and take him to small claims April 11).
This CherryOS thing is clear-cut. It's as much a no-brainer as a bounced check small claims case is. The people working at this company have to know this. There's no conceivable way every person at that company (particularly the legal team, if it exists:) could honestly believe they have a unique, new product. There's no conceivable way this guy I'm suing can "win" the case -- a bounced check is actionable by itself regardless of circumstance (not that there are any).
There are only three possibilities in both these instances: 1) they're hoping we won't call their bluffs by actually filing suit, 2) they actually honestly think some magic loophole will save them, or 3) they really are as stupid as they seem.
Actually, I suppose there's a fourth option: they never plan to pay a judgment when they lose. It's easy for me; sell the judgment to a collection agency for 70% of its value, move on (punitive damages will still make it worth the trouble and the cut). For PearOS, it might be harder. If they actually win a judgment, there could be an appeal process (probably will be), and by the time that's over with, even when PearOS emerges triumphant, there won't be money left in the defendant company (or it'll just file for bankruptcy) to take. Hurrah, justice is served, or something.
I don't really know how to pick the most likely outcome here except, I suppose, to just wait and see.
1) Yes, it does. It prevents you from seeing what you're fast-forwarding through, rendering fast-forwards nearly useless when an ad appears.
2) I don't care whether the networks are happy with TiVo, and I actively hope every day that the advertisers drop dead and rot in the streets. I paid TiVo for a recording and scheduling device. I paid DirecTV for the broadcast of data. I don't really want the damned advertisers "in bed" with either of these two they clearly haven't got my best interests in mind or they might have asked me about some of this first.
3) But I do not want advertisements. Period. Naturally advertisers know this (I used to wonder "how can these idiots not understand that I don't want to hear their crap?" then realized "they do, they just don't give a shit"). I bought a TiVo years ago because it let me skip commercials and record lots of stuff I wanted to watch. Period. For nearly two years I watched lots of TV without ads. I paid for the satellite service to deliver it to me. I paid for the device to remove the shit I didn't want to see. I stopped using TiVo last January when I was no longer able to afford it and the satellite, but this would have easily been a "last straw" for me to abandon it. Before this annoyance the biggest slap in the face was that series 1 DirecTiVo receivers weren't getting folders (on a hacked-capacity unit, folders are a major plus). This would have been enough to kill my subscription immediately.
The bottom line is, this is invasive. Spin it any way you want, but it is a feature designed explicitly to show advertisements while a "normal" advertisement is being skipped. That is invasive. I skip ads because I don't want to see them.
The solution now, since we can't skip these popup commercials? Just turn the fucking thing off for good. No more ads, no more bad mixing, no more bad TV. Just no more.
It isn't the "same" risk but it's a similar one; there's no guarantee that a closed-source client isn't doing the same keyword scanning of your mail that Google Mail does for its targeted ads. Not saying they do so, but just pointing out there's no guarantees they're not.
Several others have chimed in here with opinions and experience, but I want to add mine to the pile too.
Several years ago, I was laid off amidst all the fun dot-com crash excitement. I was the office's senior systems administrator. Not five days after I was handed a cardboard box and a pink slip did one of my former coworkers call to ask me for some kind of administration/management advice.
Now, I was given no notice that my job was ending. I was given a hefty severance that the company welched on (they filed for bankruptcy protection after making only half the payments they should have). Here they were, though, expecting me to jump right back up and do my job for them just a little longer without pay.
I gave them my consulting rate ($50 an hour; given what they were paying me before the layoff, that was actually about even) and said the minute I get a check in hand for the work, I'd be right down. I never heard back.
More recently, a former employer popped up who wanted me to work to fix a project I'd worked on for her a year ago (not a major project, maybe a two hour scripting job) that mysteriously broke after a server move. She and I have not exactly have the most pleasant relationship in the past year, but she pulled essentialy the same thing: offered me part-time work at an ungodly low rate after I'd left the company in June for assorted reasons. Then in January comes this suggestion that I can work for her again at a pretty low rate. She was pretty upset when I asked for a higher rate of pay, but I imagine the final "no" decision from me was unexpected.
I just don't see the need to work for peanuts anymore.
In your case, I'd say two week's notice is plenty. If you've already said you'd give four weeks, stick with that. If he wants more, do as others here have suggested -- negotiate for a higher hourly rate than you were making as a regular, and go freelance with the company.
You don't want to come off as selfish and distrusting (though you should be both those things in this case) -- instead, just set some groundrules and limits.
Your basic hourly rate should be 20% higher than what you were making as a regular employee, just to compensate for lack of benefits and vacation days, etc. Your boss should have no trouble with that justification.
Your maximum hours per week should be capped at something like 10 hours or so; you don't want to be trapped having to work two full time jobs. Those ten hours should be scheduled at your convenience; it's no problem to let your boss call you to ask you to come in with little notice to help, but you should not be penalized for saying "no," apart from perhaps having the contracting gig go away. You should be scheduling your time with them, not the other way 'round.
On-call duty? That should cost them a pretty penny. Seriously. You should be paid a retainer simply for sacrificing your personal time, and there should still be some restrictions. For one thing, during your new job's working hours, you shouldn't be expected to drop what you're doing to help. They can page or contact you (if your new employer permits; you and the new boss should be the only people able to stipulate when contact can be made) when you're working the other job, but it's your call about when to help, when to show up, when to give up a lunch break, or when to head over before or after work at the new job.
Even with those restrictions, you should charge the old company at least half your current salary just to be on call. This does not include the billable hours you spend taking their call, driving to their office and back, and performing the desired work.
That's how it works. Lay it out in terms like this for the old boss, and if he agrees, put it in writing and get signatures on paper. Don't do a thing until that happens. Then, bill weekly, and if they slip more than 30 days past-due, stop wor
Heh. This is, of course, a variation on the "dude, fuckim" response:)
I agree with your assessment, though; instead of just saying "up yours, fool!" and walking, firmly grab hold of the "hourly rate" dial and crank it ever-upwards until just before the boss' purse strings snap closed.
I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.
You can use POP3 to fetch mail to a local mailbox (or another server elsewhere) and send through gmail via SSL+SMTP. Apart from the attachment size limit (not sure if SMTP lets you break it or not), where's the problem? Your local mail client won't offer up ads (and you can keep Eudora). It can use GPG plugins. It can skim through messages without being online. And much to my annoyance, those pesky "tags" you dislike are completely stripped when you pull mail via POP3 (it'd be handy, whether you specifically think so or not).
I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)
Yes, you did already say that. You repeat yourself a lot in this post, but that's okay. We still love you:) Besides, now I get to repeat myself too. Use POP3+SMTP and you're back on local client, no webmail interface.
Best I can tell, mail is parsed real-time for ads when you view them on gmail.google.com; presumably if you just POP3 them they're never parsed for ads. Then again, it's not as if Google's the first to do this; Yahoo and friends sometimes shove interstitial ads into their mail interfaces. They want you to pay for POP3 access too.
Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....
Sorry, but spam's a problem everywhere, not just gmail.com; the only reason a dictionary spam attack hasn't been launched against your domain is they haven't gotten to it yet.
And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).
Wait. So you want to use the VNC Java client, via your @!#$ing web browser, to read your mail on the local machine sitting wherever you're not when you get the burning urge to check your mail? Yet somehow just using the original damned webmail interface is beneath you?
I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.
Please, take yourself off the cross. You said you like Eudora, so you're "beholden" to them trusting their stuff isn't spying on you. You use VNC via Java, meaning you're beholden to Sun and their Java implementation (or one of the few other vendors, like IBM and Microsoft, who ship VMs of their own) for the viewer. Then there's the VNC vendors. Then there's the people who wrote the OS you're running.
I won't make the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you want to hide?" argument because it infuriates me and because I do think privacy is important, but please, please, please stop acting like e-mail is your achilles' heel. For truly secure communication you shouldn't even be using e-mail in the first place, but Gmail provides enough tools to encrypt mail as needed if you plug a mail client into it (like Eudora, which you already use).
I don't doubt it's being used for warez, but at the same time, we don't ban the sale of hammers just because they can bash skulls in; instead, we jail people who bash skulls in with hammers (or so I would hope:P).
However, I can easily see a "knee-jerk" reaction from the administrators/powers-that-be in this situation: "uh-oh, I've heard of this 'Linux' thing; isn't that the communist business killer application all those hackers are running these days? Ban it!" It's not hard to imagine PHB's making decisions like that without actually investigating further. Same could easily apply with BitTorrent too, sadly.
Slashdot Mirror
The editors have done their jobs -- note all these Google-related articles appear in the Google section of Slashdot's article system. Go hit up your profile page (select "Preferences," I believe) and turn off the Google section if you're sick of seeing that news on the front page, then go visit the Google section manually when you decide you want a Google news fix.
:)
Works with all the other sections, too
Hear, hear!
I'm keen to know who would honestly behave like this as well; if they're a big company, they wouldn't normally be this uptight about it (even Microsoft will replace missing/damaged product keys), and if they're small, they wouldn't want to risk losing business like that.
Odd, then, that this company is behaving like this.
Read the EULA for the app if it's handy (or available), just to make sure, but I believe in most cases using a keygen (if one is available) to get the application installed and running isn't actually against the EULA (which just wants you not to run the app on more than one computer without multiple licenses or copy it for your friends).
You can show you've paid for the application. You can show you've tried to resolve the situation in good faith with the vendor, and presumably you can show they were uncooperative. Obviously, you don't tell them you're using the keygen, and you keep complaining to their support group and even their ownership until you get your key back, but you've got your application up and running at least.
If they do somehow figure out you're using a keygen and get huffy/legal with you, you've got plenty to show a court that you are entitled to use the application because you paid for it and that you tried to clear it up with them.
It goes without saying you shouldn't (if you have any choice) do any business with a company like this again. Also, though you already know this, keep better track of keys next time as well.
The only other helpful suggestion I've seen here so far is to keep pestering the company's support team until they cave in, or get the BBB or AG involved (or both). Trying to contact the company's owners or upper management might be a good idea, too.
One final tip: if you've been dealing with the support minions by phone or e-mail, stop. Do it in writing, to leave a paper trail and give them a better sense of urgency about the problem. Make it clear that you will not stop until they make this right; letters are far more powerful and effective in this than persistent phone calls or e-mails.
Why do you get that impression? "Child pornography" is just the red herring people always trot out when they want to censor speech.
You've heard the expression "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," yes? Your idea of "offensive content" may differ wildly from someone else's; the question becomes "who is right?" Sure, you can refuse to run a FreeNet node because you're scared some evil recipe for "instant terror version 3.4" might get stored there or a nasty evil child pornographer might post some horrid icky pictures you don't like onto FreeNet and your node happens to harbor some of the data, but in that case you really are censoring in your own way.
The FAQ's response to this concern is dead-on right. Even with child pornography, you're trying to treat the symptoms instead of the disease when you reason like this -- "oh I'm not running that because it doesn't actively stop child pornographers!" Bad news, buddy, the internet itself doesn't "actively stop" any pornographers. Are you just going to unplug so your browser cache doesn't accidentally store a thumbnail with content that offends you?
If you want to censor what you participate in on a free speech-centric network, you don't belong there. If you believe that, ultimately, full-fledged freedom of speech is more vital to our society than taking a sad, impotent stab at a group you don't like, then run a damned node and deal with the fact that you may not like what lives on it. Remember, there's a far better chance that text a government doesn't like (but that you do like) will be stored on your node than pics of little Suzie.
Claiming FreeNet was just "designed" for child porn is like saying Slashdot was designed to attract trolls. Sure, it happened, but that wasn't the original intent; back when it started, I think they honestly wanted to encourage and support open, public debate on important topics. Heh. Whoops. :)
I couldn't agree more. It was a great idea until it got renamed from "journaling" to "blogging" (that term still makes me cringe), and until the angst-ridden teens got hold of the idea. I still write one, but at least I spell-check the damned thing and try to keep the "angst" to a minimum. But I don't spam it all over the place or plaster it full of ads (Google text ads are as far as it'll ever go) either.
There are some well-written ones buried amongst the mountains of drivel (I'd like to hope mine is one of the better ones), but finding them is a true bitch. You generally don't want to read about someone's personal life unless they can make it sound more interesting with good writing. "I shampooed my dog today" is boring. "My dog made sure I took a bath too as I washed his filthy carcass today" is better. The boring minutes of a person's day aren't worth it unless there's some good humor or "educational" value mixed in. "I wrote neat code today" versus "look how much faster and smaller this Python snippet is than the equivalent in PHP" will start flamewars and keep people interested.
Didn't Microsoft just recently get upset that someone posted screenshots of a recent build of Longhorn? Why would anyone suddenly jump at the chance to get a DMCA-style shutdown of their blog just to review a damned Longhorn beta?
Wish they'd make up their minds. A guy who (misguided or not) seems to run a legitimate Windows fan site (ye gods, that's insane :) gushes about their product and the company slams him down for it. What happens when some blogger with no love for Windows (I fit in this category, though I won't bother pirating/running the beta because I don't give a rat's arse about Windows releases nor will I review it for them) jumps on this "team" and decides some new "feature" sucks or finds a critical, egg-smeared-on-face kind of bug and writes about it?
Free speech sure ain't looking too healthy these days...
True, but images range between a few hundred bytes to a few hundred kilobytes. Flash animations will cheerfully exceed a megabyte or two on average. The "flashier" they are, the bigger they are.
We've gotten good at optimizing images even when used as navigation widgets. Flash, though ... ugh. Just yucky and big and nasty. Imagine the folks still on modems. "You want me to wait how long to download a damned menu?"
I dunno; if this thing works without crashing my browser, hogging 100% of the system's CPU, or blasting irritating sounds (and if it's used for useful content and presentation instead of lame menus or "flash-only" styled pages), it might just take off.
Flash is disabled on this machine because it does exactly one of two things in a web page: 1) show an ad, or 2) replaces perfectly servicable text (or even image-based) links in menus and navigation widgets that just ends up slowing everything down. I've already loaded the page. I shouldn't have to wait for the menus to load, too, just so your cute logo can flicker or rotate or so your menus can do impressive, flashy transitions that slow things down even more.
Well, it's probably because we've all had 64-bit support in Linux so damned long we're just shocked Microsoft have caught up to the rest of the software industry. 64-bit Linux is just so old news nowadays ... :)
- Gentoo Linux for AMD64 has been out for well over a year. Plenty of other distros have too.
- Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, and other Unices have been 64-bit for years (not in the x86 architecture, but still, it's there).
- No drivers for my video card, wireless card, DVD+/-RW drive(!), etc., in Windows. If I upgrade Windows on this box (a brand new notebook) to the 64-bit edition, no games, networking, or burning for me. Wheee! But hey, "this is Windows" so I should be happy! Office should be enough for anybody.
:) - You ain't putting your CPU to "good use" until your apps are rebuilt as 64-bit binaries, and really only math-intensive apps (and less so for memory and system bandwidth intensive apps) are going to benefit. Photoshop might benefit a little, but not much. Games, again, maybe, but not much.
- Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit just for the fun of it will just cripple what you can currently do on the Windows platform right now. In Linux land, it all "just works" (with very few exceptions).
I'm no fan of Windows, but for once I can honestly say "64-bit Windows is the wrong tool for most every job right now."No, what sucks is having to run an S3 UniChrome Pro KM8x series adapter on a notebook in !@#$ing VESA mode because x.org's Unichrome support doesn't yet properly grok this chipset. I've got a 1.8GHz 64-bit CPU in this monster with plenty of RAM and disk space and it's all throttled by having to use X in a damned compatibility mode. The S3 chips may suck but they can do 2D way better than standard VESA.
Actually on the (somewhat frequent :) occasions I see problems and outages, I see JSP errors. It looks to me like they're using a Java servlet beast instead of (or in addition to) ASP. Netcraft seem to think they're running Linux+Apache, so perhaps it's a Tomcat deployment?
Bingo! That's exactly what this guy pulled. He's acting confident hoping I'll decide "oh shit, he's got some super-sekrit knowledge he'll use in court to kill my complaint!" and won't go through with the suit. I honestly thought filing the suit itself (after he encouraged me to do so) would be enough to convince him to settle. Guess not; he's now apparently confident I won't drive out there to show up in Small Claims where he lives.
For awhile, I honestly did wonder "does he know something I don't?" A couple days of digging though has turned up the obvious: a bounced check is a bounced check. The only possible claim he can try to make is what he's already claimed: "well, the check bouncing was a blessing in disguise since I don't think you're doing any work." Too bad I can show otherwise. Odd that he'd demand work he hasn't paid for anyway. :)
Well, bragging rights and actually punishing the guilty.
The whole reason people get away with this crap is because of this knee-jerk reaction; "it's too expensive and not worth suing!"
Open-source projects will be victims to this kind of thing up until one of them gets frustrated enough to drum up donations/resources from users and other interested parties (besides, pro-bono attorneys are another option with a high-enough profile case) to sue the miserable jerks that pull this scam on a regular basis.
The bully keeps screwing with people until someone breaks his nose.
Others have already commented that this is apples-to-oranges, but I do want to agree with you that the stupid blogspam shit (everywhere, not just blogger.com) is absolutely rediculous.
For an even more entertaining few minutes, grab a throwaway account at GMail or Yahoo and sign up for some of the idiotic click exchange sites out there. There's a few legitimate-ish ones like blogexplosion.com and blogazoo.com (not linking since I don't want to seem like I'm shilling :) but even they have plenty of journals in rotation like those you linked to. The more scummy ones (mostly those that offer "auto-surf for credits" and promise to drive tons of new traffic to your sites) have almost nothing but junk sites.
It amazes me that people think they can make money putting up a junker journal like that, submit it to some link exchanges, leave an auto-surfing browser tab open, and drive traffic to their useless sites -- then expect the money to roll on in. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Oh ye cruel gods, what a time not to have mod points. You got a spit-take out of me with that one :)
John de Lancie would actually make an absolutely hilarious master, and Matt Frewer wouldn't be a bad choice for The Doctor either. Dude, that could be seriously funny:
[rolls eyes] "Tsk. For a Time Lord, you seem to think so ... three dimensionally..."
Of course; my situtation is different but the same "evasive tactics" apply. They're trying to hide behind a "fear" of the judicial system most people seem to have. Honestly I don't care much about the cash as I do drilling home for this imbecile that he just shouldn't bounce checks.
I'm just saying these people sometimes seem to just be begging for it.
You're probably right. The sad truth is people don't actually have to comply with even a judge's order. I fully expect the guy I'm suing to completely ignore an order from the judge to pay the amount he bounced or the punitive damages. There's a number of options available at my disposal for dealing with this if it happens, including court-assisted enforcement, garnishing of wages and tax refunds, seizure of personal and business property, property liens, and so on, but the guy undoubtedly hopes I'm not actually going to bother with all that. It'll be fun to show him otherwise.
I wish the "threat" of lawsuit were more powerful than it is these days. You're exactly right on point #1 -- people just don't have the balls to actually file, or there's other reasons why it's not feasible or practical to do it. This guy's relying on the fact that I have to drive nearly 18 hours to take him to court in his home town because naturally the court in mine don't have jurisdiction. He's probably still holding out at least a little hope that I'll back out and change my mind.
Too bad I've got the time, the resources to go, and the payoff's high enough to make it worth it for me. If I were "busier," though, and somehow unable to pursue it, it might mean I also commanded more resources and could send a lawyer to do this job for me.
If more people actually stood up to people like this, though, this sort of trickery and deception would die out pretty quickly.
The most striking piece of this article, for me, was the comment that when a PearOS developer tried to contact someone at the offending company's offices, they were just dismissed summarily with a "go talk to an attorney" response.
In recent months I have dealt with someone who gave me two similar responses (not related to the GPL, but a bounced check). First he asked "well, since you've got my address, why don't you just come out here and arrest me?" Next in an online conversation he suggested I take his firm "I'll never honor that check" answer to the district attorney. Then, when he got the certified letter from me trying to resolve the problem without involving a court, he messaged me online inviting me to file the suit, even offering to give me a list of lawyers to consult.
I'm amazed people still bluff like this -- he says "go on, then, sue me!" ... it's a no brainer to respond "um, okay, here's the suit" (I filed suit March 1, and take him to small claims April 11).
This CherryOS thing is clear-cut. It's as much a no-brainer as a bounced check small claims case is. The people working at this company have to know this. There's no conceivable way every person at that company (particularly the legal team, if it exists :) could honestly believe they have a unique, new product. There's no conceivable way this guy I'm suing can "win" the case -- a bounced check is actionable by itself regardless of circumstance (not that there are any).
There are only three possibilities in both these instances: 1) they're hoping we won't call their bluffs by actually filing suit, 2) they actually honestly think some magic loophole will save them, or 3) they really are as stupid as they seem.
Actually, I suppose there's a fourth option: they never plan to pay a judgment when they lose. It's easy for me; sell the judgment to a collection agency for 70% of its value, move on (punitive damages will still make it worth the trouble and the cut). For PearOS, it might be harder. If they actually win a judgment, there could be an appeal process (probably will be), and by the time that's over with, even when PearOS emerges triumphant, there won't be money left in the defendant company (or it'll just file for bankruptcy) to take. Hurrah, justice is served, or something.
I don't really know how to pick the most likely outcome here except, I suppose, to just wait and see.
1) Yes, it does. It prevents you from seeing what you're fast-forwarding through, rendering fast-forwards nearly useless when an ad appears.
2) I don't care whether the networks are happy with TiVo, and I actively hope every day that the advertisers drop dead and rot in the streets. I paid TiVo for a recording and scheduling device. I paid DirecTV for the broadcast of data. I don't really want the damned advertisers "in bed" with either of these two they clearly haven't got my best interests in mind or they might have asked me about some of this first.
3) But I do not want advertisements. Period. Naturally advertisers know this (I used to wonder "how can these idiots not understand that I don't want to hear their crap?" then realized "they do, they just don't give a shit"). I bought a TiVo years ago because it let me skip commercials and record lots of stuff I wanted to watch. Period. For nearly two years I watched lots of TV without ads. I paid for the satellite service to deliver it to me. I paid for the device to remove the shit I didn't want to see. I stopped using TiVo last January when I was no longer able to afford it and the satellite, but this would have easily been a "last straw" for me to abandon it. Before this annoyance the biggest slap in the face was that series 1 DirecTiVo receivers weren't getting folders (on a hacked-capacity unit, folders are a major plus). This would have been enough to kill my subscription immediately.
The bottom line is, this is invasive. Spin it any way you want, but it is a feature designed explicitly to show advertisements while a "normal" advertisement is being skipped. That is invasive. I skip ads because I don't want to see them.
The solution now, since we can't skip these popup commercials? Just turn the fucking thing off for good. No more ads, no more bad mixing, no more bad TV. Just no more.
It isn't the "same" risk but it's a similar one; there's no guarantee that a closed-source client isn't doing the same keyword scanning of your mail that Google Mail does for its targeted ads. Not saying they do so, but just pointing out there's no guarantees they're not.
Several others have chimed in here with opinions and experience, but I want to add mine to the pile too.
Several years ago, I was laid off amidst all the fun dot-com crash excitement. I was the office's senior systems administrator. Not five days after I was handed a cardboard box and a pink slip did one of my former coworkers call to ask me for some kind of administration/management advice.
Now, I was given no notice that my job was ending. I was given a hefty severance that the company welched on (they filed for bankruptcy protection after making only half the payments they should have). Here they were, though, expecting me to jump right back up and do my job for them just a little longer without pay.
I gave them my consulting rate ($50 an hour; given what they were paying me before the layoff, that was actually about even) and said the minute I get a check in hand for the work, I'd be right down. I never heard back.
More recently, a former employer popped up who wanted me to work to fix a project I'd worked on for her a year ago (not a major project, maybe a two hour scripting job) that mysteriously broke after a server move. She and I have not exactly have the most pleasant relationship in the past year, but she pulled essentialy the same thing: offered me part-time work at an ungodly low rate after I'd left the company in June for assorted reasons. Then in January comes this suggestion that I can work for her again at a pretty low rate. She was pretty upset when I asked for a higher rate of pay, but I imagine the final "no" decision from me was unexpected.
I just don't see the need to work for peanuts anymore.
In your case, I'd say two week's notice is plenty. If you've already said you'd give four weeks, stick with that. If he wants more, do as others here have suggested -- negotiate for a higher hourly rate than you were making as a regular, and go freelance with the company.
You don't want to come off as selfish and distrusting (though you should be both those things in this case) -- instead, just set some groundrules and limits.
Your basic hourly rate should be 20% higher than what you were making as a regular employee, just to compensate for lack of benefits and vacation days, etc. Your boss should have no trouble with that justification.
Your maximum hours per week should be capped at something like 10 hours or so; you don't want to be trapped having to work two full time jobs. Those ten hours should be scheduled at your convenience; it's no problem to let your boss call you to ask you to come in with little notice to help, but you should not be penalized for saying "no," apart from perhaps having the contracting gig go away. You should be scheduling your time with them, not the other way 'round.
On-call duty? That should cost them a pretty penny. Seriously. You should be paid a retainer simply for sacrificing your personal time, and there should still be some restrictions. For one thing, during your new job's working hours, you shouldn't be expected to drop what you're doing to help. They can page or contact you (if your new employer permits; you and the new boss should be the only people able to stipulate when contact can be made) when you're working the other job, but it's your call about when to help, when to show up, when to give up a lunch break, or when to head over before or after work at the new job.
Even with those restrictions, you should charge the old company at least half your current salary just to be on call. This does not include the billable hours you spend taking their call, driving to their office and back, and performing the desired work.
That's how it works. Lay it out in terms like this for the old boss, and if he agrees, put it in writing and get signatures on paper. Don't do a thing until that happens. Then, bill weekly, and if they slip more than 30 days past-due, stop wor
Heh. This is, of course, a variation on the "dude, fuckim" response :)
I agree with your assessment, though; instead of just saying "up yours, fool!" and walking, firmly grab hold of the "hourly rate" dial and crank it ever-upwards until just before the boss' purse strings snap closed.I don't know - I like the lack of ads. I like the speed of Eudora on messages on my local machine. I like being able to look through messages and not have to be online. I like the lack of "tags". I like unlimited attachment size. I like GPG plugins.
You can use POP3 to fetch mail to a local mailbox (or another server elsewhere) and send through gmail via SSL+SMTP. Apart from the attachment size limit (not sure if SMTP lets you break it or not), where's the problem? Your local mail client won't offer up ads (and you can keep Eudora). It can use GPG plugins. It can skim through messages without being online. And much to my annoyance, those pesky "tags" you dislike are completely stripped when you pull mail via POP3 (it'd be handy, whether you specifically think so or not).I like e-mail being separate from websites. I like not having my mail processed to show me ads.(wait I already said that didn't I?)
Yes, you did already say that. You repeat yourself a lot in this post, but that's okay. We still love you :) Besides, now I get to repeat myself too. Use POP3+SMTP and you're back on local client, no webmail interface.
Best I can tell, mail is parsed real-time for ads when you view them on gmail.google.com; presumably if you just POP3 them they're never parsed for ads. Then again, it's not as if Google's the first to do this; Yahoo and friends sometimes shove interstitial ads into their mail interfaces. They want you to pay for POP3 access too.
Oh, wait - I like not getting spam from those people who try every combination of @gmail, @yahoo etc....
Sorry, but spam's a problem everywhere, not just gmail.com; the only reason a dictionary spam attack hasn't been launched against your domain is they haven't gotten to it yet.
And, I like VNC through Java applet for checking my mail or anything elsewhere! Just me though, I like taking the whole interface if I can(which I can do via broadband).
Wait. So you want to use the VNC Java client, via your @!#$ing web browser, to read your mail on the local machine sitting wherever you're not when you get the burning urge to check your mail? Yet somehow just using the original damned webmail interface is beneath you?
I also like not being more beholden to big companies for my communication.
Please, take yourself off the cross. You said you like Eudora, so you're "beholden" to them trusting their stuff isn't spying on you. You use VNC via Java, meaning you're beholden to Sun and their Java implementation (or one of the few other vendors, like IBM and Microsoft, who ship VMs of their own) for the viewer. Then there's the VNC vendors. Then there's the people who wrote the OS you're running.
I won't make the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you want to hide?" argument because it infuriates me and because I do think privacy is important, but please, please, please stop acting like e-mail is your achilles' heel. For truly secure communication you shouldn't even be using e-mail in the first place, but Gmail provides enough tools to encrypt mail as needed if you plug a mail client into it (like Eudora, which you already use).
Well, I go with what the poster said :)
:P).
I don't doubt it's being used for warez, but at the same time, we don't ban the sale of hammers just because they can bash skulls in; instead, we jail people who bash skulls in with hammers (or so I would hope
However, I can easily see a "knee-jerk" reaction from the administrators/powers-that-be in this situation: "uh-oh, I've heard of this 'Linux' thing; isn't that the communist business killer application all those hackers are running these days? Ban it!" It's not hard to imagine PHB's making decisions like that without actually investigating further. Same could easily apply with BitTorrent too, sadly.