Makes me wonder if Linux is going to stratify into corporate and home user flavors? SUSE and RedHat for the office. And the raft of others for home users.
I don't think it's bad either way, just curious as to how it's going to shake out. Any Linux usage is good in my book. More apps available is very good. More alternatives to the bloated wares of Castle Redmondore, priceless.
Don't be surprised if the judge waits until SCO is done hanging themselves before he slams the case shut.
I've been listening to the rope theory for a year and half. They have enough rope. The appeals court recognizes that discovery is not an infinite process and should not be unduly burdensome on the defense. If this isn't the definition of unduly burdened then it's never happened.
It's way past time for Judge Wells to call bullshit on this nonsense. SCO's the plantiff for crying out loud. Yes, the courts give the plantiff a lot of leway during discovery, but this is past the point of absolutely f'ing ridiculous. Get on with it already.
I don't suppose Brent Hatch's dad sitting on the Judiciary Committee has anything to do with SCO getting so much time?
Then we had to extend that dependence to manufacturing by shipping our factories overseas and now we're shipping our brainshare to China as well. This is just f'ing brilliant.
On the other hand I used to work at a contract research laboratory and they'd charge the full cost of running the research plus 200-400% overhead. It's hard to blame someone for not wanting to pay those prices.
Something's gotta give before too much longer. We're replacing well paying jobs with Wal-Mart parking lot attendants.
It's not bad enough their products, that you pay a lot for, are a security freak show. Not bad enough you have to buy the OS, then pay a subscription for anti-virus software, and run a firewall, and ad blocking software. All that isn't bad enough so MSFT is going to stratify their customers.
First it was enterprise customers not being burdened with product activation, now they're getting advanced warning on vulnerabilities. ROFL! Nice going Redmond. Another demonstation that the millions of little people using your busted-ass products are worthless little annoyances that you'll get to sometime after you take care of your important customers.
It used to be fun watching the MSFT faithful take it up the pooper but after a while it's just kind of pathetic. It's lost its appeal as a spectator sport.
It doesn't bother anyone else that people in this country were seriously asking for UN observers for a US election?
Politics has always been kind of an ugly business, but I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime that was so bitter, petty, angry, divisive and deliberately misleading. We have collectively sunk to the ethical level of Karl Rove.
Not only do we not deserve a leadership position in the world, we are becoming ugly and pathetic. We are in real danger of turning into the richest third world country on the planet.
...but how long before the RIAA starts feeding copyrighted music into the system and then gets it shut down?
More likely some twitwit publishing a song full of samples. Gnomoradio is set apart in that they don't offer any content directly, it's merely a pointer to material hosted on other web servers. And it does a license check for a CreativeCommons license, although I don't know how thorough that check is yet. I'll find out when they spider my music site.
Even RIAA would have to tread carefully. They're in enough trouble with the legal actions against people who really are distributing material covered under copyright, pushing it to be an anti-competitive agent for independent artists could open up RIAA and their member record companies to some fairly significant liability (even by their standards).
The extra step of someone going to the trouble of embedding a CreativeCommons RDF in the files and hosting it on their own web server would seem to put gnomoradio on different ground than an unregulated file sharing service.
Then of course you are going to have to find a new job because you know they wont promote you anyway.
Or you can do what I did...hung a copy of my real estate license on the wall behind my desk. That makes a statement, and that statement is I'm not bluffing. I'm careful not practice that trade at a customer site, but they know if they fired me I'd be working the other job full time before I got to the parking lot.
I think sometimes you can play it too safe. Something like that could backfire, but so far it hasn't. In fact, I'd say it changes their perspective on things. Dick this guy around and he's going to tell us to stuff, hence they tend not to dick me around. If I get fired later I could suppose that I could've gotten dicked around for all that time, lived in fear of getting laid off and fired anyway. I don't need them to make a living, I don't need their recommendation to get another job, their non-compete is useless, I've paid off my credit cards and banked cash ahead and my health insurance comes from my wife's job. They have no leverage over me. It's very liberating.
That was over a year ago and I've heard the question a number of times, "How do you get out of XYZ and the rest of have to?" Because I'm not taking shit anymore. Running my own non-IT business is not a bluff and they know it. It really evens out our relationship which, strangely enough, has actually improved. I'm not afraid to be completely honest with them. Did it change their attitude or mine? Probably a little of both. A constant reminder that our relationship is by mutual consent.
Certainly JK isn't going to do ANY of the things you want as a conservative.
And that's a reason to support Bush? I'm sorry, I just can't get behind a draft dodger, I don't care what party they come from. I disagree with Senator Kerry on quite a lot but he took his chances in the shit at the pointy end of the spear and that means something to me. He protested the Viet Nam war, but he earned that right in the jungle. And what Karl Rove engineered against Max Cleland...disgusting.
If Bush was running against my dog, I'd vote for the dog. I don't think she would do much that I want as a conservative, either. But I know between the dog and King George who I'd want backing me up in a fight and it's not dubya.
Good luck. I crossed once many years ago and regret doing it to this day.
Don't worry, the chilly payback is already starting. But I got a good dog, a lot of friends on both sides of the fence and a clear conscience so I'm not backing down.
Look at the restrictions. 1 CPU and 5GB of storage, wtf? What kind of an "enterprise" does anyone run with a twinky database server like that? And Sybase is bashing OSS out of the other side of their face.
Free is a great way to get people to try your products, if it's really free and not some crippleware lame ass substitute. But with unrestricted MySQL available, why would anyone use a crippled version of Sybase? I'd recommend a full version MS SQL Server before this free piece of crippleware somewhere in the misty flats of functionality. If you want me to try it fine, give me a full version and maybe we'll actually like it well enough to buy the next version. Though I suppose it's okay for people wanting to add Sybase to their database skills, no one with two neurons left to make a spark is going to use this in production.
That the Republicans are backing a draft-dodging Connecticut Yankee for pres and a draft-dodging vice pres and don't see anything hypocritical about it. They used to rip on Clinton about that, called it lack of character. But it's no lack of character when it's their candidate. Nooooo.
I want my party back from these right wing fanatics calling themselves conservative when they don't know the meaning of the word. Back before the right turned into the religious right. Back when being a Republican stood for lower taxes, smaller government and keeping Big Brother out of your damn business. That's not the Republican party of today. Government spending is out of control, there's no such thing as an unreasonable search under Ashcroft and the number of government employees has surged more than 22% under Bush.
And my friends wonder why I'm backing Kerry. Even if he's a democrat I can't see him doing any worse than dubya.
The Great Windbag right wing (I refuse to call them conservative) mighty whitey, prescription drug abusing, mouthpiece managed to find plenty to complain about the last four years.
Funny that fat boy doesn't apply the same standards to both sides of the political fence. But I guess accuracy isn't the object, now is it?
This year's election is important enough to justify its own section. I think that was a really good move. It's good to see people passionate about politics again.
Like him or not you have to give dubya credit for one thing: He really inspires people on both ends of the political spectrum.
It's really tough to document just how fast the transition is taking place. I know for a fact a lot of NT 4 boxes are being upgraded to Linux, not 2000 or 2003. I don't remember reading in the article, which is written from MSFT's perspective, how those were counted.
Interesting that MSFT only expects 10 to 30% of their Software Assurance customers to renew. Not a surprise to anyone but MSFT. lol.
For some reason when I hear "Software Assurance" I always think of "Information Retrieval" in the movie Brazil. Great, now I've got that song stuck in my head all day. Dun-dun-dun, dun-ta-da-ta-dum....
How long have we been hearing software as a service has been coming? Web services were going to revolutionize the web and everything was going to be subscription.
And now it's closer than ever. Riiight. The only company I've seen make a success of it is SalesForce.com. Siebel made noise with IBM about a year ago with a plan to offer hosted service...haven't heard anything more about that, either.
Part of the problem might be people really don't want to rent software. I think a certain segment of the market will find it to be an advantage, like the CRM market. But many will not, especially smaller companies.
There's also a trust issue to deal with. You can see how many people qued up to give MSFT their credit card numbers with Passport, how many are going to trust MSFT with all their client data?
the belabored point from above is that Sweatshop America is realy TemporaryJobAmerica, in which companies hire on an as needed basis, works the employer as hard as possible, and then throws the employee away as soon as the job is done.
Part of the reason American businesses can stay competitive is that they can shed workers quickly when business falls off, add them back when...now "if"...business picks up again. And that would be fine if those laid off people had health insurance during the down time and we're able to get decent day care so they could work a lower paying job if it came along while they were looking for a better one.
Not sure a shorter work week is going to help the problem because so few of us over here work jobs that even qualify for a 40 hour week. Wal-Mart keeps their employee hours to less then 30 so they don't have to pay for any benefits. With the changes in the overtime rules more Americans than ever qualify to be worked more hours at the same pay, including nurses. I'm not really cranked about getting meds from a nurse who may be on the tail end of a 12 hour shift, it's going to be really scary to think that same nurse might be on their fourth or fifth 12 hour day in a row.
I don't have all the answers but I'm certain things can't keep going on like they are. And I'm certain if we put Bush back in office then big companies are going to be writing the work rules for another four years. Just like the drug companies wrote the prescription drug benefit. What a surprise that the biggest benefits went to the drug companies. What sucks is I'm not sure Kerry would be able to make any big changes even if he beats the long odds. He would still have work with a divided House and Senate.
Either way it pretty much looks like we're screwed.
This organization, acting on behalf of their client, is falsely accusing some people of copyright infringement. It would seem in the hyper-sensitive world of business we all live in that could possibly impinge the character of the accused and result in loss of income, future business, etc. It is, in effect, accusing someone of an ongoing criminal enterprise. And they seem to be doing it quite casually.
One company I sub-contract for...hyper-sensitive about any ethical type issue. Suppose I lost that contract because of that reckless accusation. Or didn't get another contract, who could say that wasn't the reason? And let's suppose...and this is a reasonable assumption...that I had the time, means and the will to pursue that case?
I need a trial lawyer to tell me how much a case like that could potentially be worth. And whether that would be federal or state court and which state court?
Face it, they're going to keep doing it until the party they're acting on behalf of gets burned for a big judgment. At which time I'm guessing they'll become somewhat more judicious in their conduct.
Remind me again which one of the clowns running for president wants to limit liabiltiy awards in court cases? Because this type of treatment is what you're going to get, from a lot of different companies, the day after that passes.
After versions 4.0 and 4.5, which totally wanked, I thought it was all but dead. Great program, but they really dorked themself with that buggy 4.0 release. We replaced it as our development platform but it's still hosting a couple old legacy sites for us.
We're doing most of our development in.NET now, lucky us.
...admitting we're second rate in anything. We're always right, and if not we're definitely dogmatic as hell about being wrong.
We're in danger of becoming a technology backwater, not because of slower broadband, but because we're not investing in technology infrastructure, technology and science eductation and we're shipping intellectual capital in the form of tech jobs overseas to save that precious shareholder value.
Unlikely we'll ever face up to being second in anything. For some reason we've developed a national concensous that our crap doesn't stink and if we're doing it, then that's the best thing to be doing. Even suggesting that we're not number one in damn all everything will likely get me mod'ed down because disagreement these days is tantamount to treason.
Most of us grew up with notion that the US was the greatest country on the planet. It's not going to go down easy or well that such a notion might not be true anymore, in any capactity. Whether it's something litlle like broadband, or something bigger like health care, education, privacy or quality of life.
...it's a Windows killer. I know, I know people have been saying that for years. But look, at the pace of development and innovation in Linux v Windows. Okay, maybe a killer, but it will most definitely be a nudge toward nitch market status for Windows.
Now that Shorthorn is starting to look like XP Rebloated, 5% of companies are contemplating a complete switch to Linux and 36% are considering some type of OSS introduction, this could push quite a few more over the edge.
Personally, the pressure has been on for 3 years and I am burning out... are you?
Sheez, yes. Major league burn out. Some days I dream about getting fired. I don't spook at the distant rumble of outsourcing, I relish it. Resource allocation? Go for it. Hasn't happened yet. I even told them one day, straight up, that I was really burned out and needed a break. Didn't work. Some days I feel guilty that I'm not more appreciative. Anyone else?
I've got a non-tech sideline ready to go but I think it would be fun to start a firm to help people transition off of MSFT products to Linux/OSS and provide contract administrative services. That would be fun and profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's bad either way, just curious as to how it's going to shake out. Any Linux usage is good in my book. More apps available is very good. More alternatives to the bloated wares of Castle Redmondore, priceless.
I've been listening to the rope theory for a year and half. They have enough rope. The appeals court recognizes that discovery is not an infinite process and should not be unduly burdensome on the defense. If this isn't the definition of unduly burdened then it's never happened.
It's way past time for Judge Wells to call bullshit on this nonsense. SCO's the plantiff for crying out loud. Yes, the courts give the plantiff a lot of leway during discovery, but this is past the point of absolutely f'ing ridiculous. Get on with it already.
I don't suppose Brent Hatch's dad sitting on the Judiciary Committee has anything to do with SCO getting so much time?
On the other hand I used to work at a contract research laboratory and they'd charge the full cost of running the research plus 200-400% overhead. It's hard to blame someone for not wanting to pay those prices.
Something's gotta give before too much longer. We're replacing well paying jobs with Wal-Mart parking lot attendants.
First it was enterprise customers not being burdened with product activation, now they're getting advanced warning on vulnerabilities. ROFL! Nice going Redmond. Another demonstation that the millions of little people using your busted-ass products are worthless little annoyances that you'll get to sometime after you take care of your important customers.
It used to be fun watching the MSFT faithful take it up the pooper but after a while it's just kind of pathetic. It's lost its appeal as a spectator sport.
Politics has always been kind of an ugly business, but I don't remember a campaign in my lifetime that was so bitter, petty, angry, divisive and deliberately misleading. We have collectively sunk to the ethical level of Karl Rove.
Not only do we not deserve a leadership position in the world, we are becoming ugly and pathetic. We are in real danger of turning into the richest third world country on the planet.
More likely some twitwit publishing a song full of samples. Gnomoradio is set apart in that they don't offer any content directly, it's merely a pointer to material hosted on other web servers. And it does a license check for a CreativeCommons license, although I don't know how thorough that check is yet. I'll find out when they spider my music site.
Even RIAA would have to tread carefully. They're in enough trouble with the legal actions against people who really are distributing material covered under copyright, pushing it to be an anti-competitive agent for independent artists could open up RIAA and their member record companies to some fairly significant liability (even by their standards).
The extra step of someone going to the trouble of embedding a CreativeCommons RDF in the files and hosting it on their own web server would seem to put gnomoradio on different ground than an unregulated file sharing service.
Or you can do what I did...hung a copy of my real estate license on the wall behind my desk. That makes a statement, and that statement is I'm not bluffing. I'm careful not practice that trade at a customer site, but they know if they fired me I'd be working the other job full time before I got to the parking lot.
I think sometimes you can play it too safe. Something like that could backfire, but so far it hasn't. In fact, I'd say it changes their perspective on things. Dick this guy around and he's going to tell us to stuff, hence they tend not to dick me around. If I get fired later I could suppose that I could've gotten dicked around for all that time, lived in fear of getting laid off and fired anyway. I don't need them to make a living, I don't need their recommendation to get another job, their non-compete is useless, I've paid off my credit cards and banked cash ahead and my health insurance comes from my wife's job. They have no leverage over me. It's very liberating.
That was over a year ago and I've heard the question a number of times, "How do you get out of XYZ and the rest of have to?" Because I'm not taking shit anymore. Running my own non-IT business is not a bluff and they know it. It really evens out our relationship which, strangely enough, has actually improved. I'm not afraid to be completely honest with them. Did it change their attitude or mine? Probably a little of both. A constant reminder that our relationship is by mutual consent.
And that's a reason to support Bush? I'm sorry, I just can't get behind a draft dodger, I don't care what party they come from. I disagree with Senator Kerry on quite a lot but he took his chances in the shit at the pointy end of the spear and that means something to me. He protested the Viet Nam war, but he earned that right in the jungle. And what Karl Rove engineered against Max Cleland...disgusting.
If Bush was running against my dog, I'd vote for the dog. I don't think she would do much that I want as a conservative, either. But I know between the dog and King George who I'd want backing me up in a fight and it's not dubya.
Good luck. I crossed once many years ago and regret doing it to this day.
Don't worry, the chilly payback is already starting. But I got a good dog, a lot of friends on both sides of the fence and a clear conscience so I'm not backing down.
Free is a great way to get people to try your products, if it's really free and not some crippleware lame ass substitute. But with unrestricted MySQL available, why would anyone use a crippled version of Sybase? I'd recommend a full version MS SQL Server before this free piece of crippleware somewhere in the misty flats of functionality. If you want me to try it fine, give me a full version and maybe we'll actually like it well enough to buy the next version. Though I suppose it's okay for people wanting to add Sybase to their database skills, no one with two neurons left to make a spark is going to use this in production.
I want my party back from these right wing fanatics calling themselves conservative when they don't know the meaning of the word. Back before the right turned into the religious right. Back when being a Republican stood for lower taxes, smaller government and keeping Big Brother out of your damn business. That's not the Republican party of today. Government spending is out of control, there's no such thing as an unreasonable search under Ashcroft and the number of government employees has surged more than 22% under Bush.
And my friends wonder why I'm backing Kerry. Even if he's a democrat I can't see him doing any worse than dubya.
The real question is were they closest to the target?
Funny that fat boy doesn't apply the same standards to both sides of the political fence. But I guess accuracy isn't the object, now is it?
Like him or not you have to give dubya credit for one thing: He really inspires people on both ends of the political spectrum.
Interesting that MSFT only expects 10 to 30% of their Software Assurance customers to renew. Not a surprise to anyone but MSFT. lol.
For some reason when I hear "Software Assurance" I always think of "Information Retrieval" in the movie Brazil. Great, now I've got that song stuck in my head all day. Dun-dun-dun, dun-ta-da-ta-dum....
And now it's closer than ever. Riiight. The only company I've seen make a success of it is SalesForce.com. Siebel made noise with IBM about a year ago with a plan to offer hosted service...haven't heard anything more about that, either.
Part of the problem might be people really don't want to rent software. I think a certain segment of the market will find it to be an advantage, like the CRM market. But many will not, especially smaller companies.
There's also a trust issue to deal with. You can see how many people qued up to give MSFT their credit card numbers with Passport, how many are going to trust MSFT with all their client data?
I'm such a liar, liar, liar my pants are on fi-re and I'm writtin' for the Neeeeww Yoooork Tiiiiiiimes! Yeah!
Part of the reason American businesses can stay competitive is that they can shed workers quickly when business falls off, add them back when...now "if"...business picks up again. And that would be fine if those laid off people had health insurance during the down time and we're able to get decent day care so they could work a lower paying job if it came along while they were looking for a better one.
Not sure a shorter work week is going to help the problem because so few of us over here work jobs that even qualify for a 40 hour week. Wal-Mart keeps their employee hours to less then 30 so they don't have to pay for any benefits. With the changes in the overtime rules more Americans than ever qualify to be worked more hours at the same pay, including nurses. I'm not really cranked about getting meds from a nurse who may be on the tail end of a 12 hour shift, it's going to be really scary to think that same nurse might be on their fourth or fifth 12 hour day in a row.
I don't have all the answers but I'm certain things can't keep going on like they are. And I'm certain if we put Bush back in office then big companies are going to be writing the work rules for another four years. Just like the drug companies wrote the prescription drug benefit. What a surprise that the biggest benefits went to the drug companies. What sucks is I'm not sure Kerry would be able to make any big changes even if he beats the long odds. He would still have work with a divided House and Senate.
Either way it pretty much looks like we're screwed.
One company I sub-contract for...hyper-sensitive about any ethical type issue. Suppose I lost that contract because of that reckless accusation. Or didn't get another contract, who could say that wasn't the reason? And let's suppose...and this is a reasonable assumption...that I had the time, means and the will to pursue that case?
I need a trial lawyer to tell me how much a case like that could potentially be worth. And whether that would be federal or state court and which state court?
Face it, they're going to keep doing it until the party they're acting on behalf of gets burned for a big judgment. At which time I'm guessing they'll become somewhat more judicious in their conduct.
Remind me again which one of the clowns running for president wants to limit liabiltiy awards in court cases? Because this type of treatment is what you're going to get, from a lot of different companies, the day after that passes.
Wonder if it has a sticker on the side that says: WARNING DO NOT DISPOSE IN TRASH.
We're doing most of our development in .NET now, lucky us.
We're in danger of becoming a technology backwater, not because of slower broadband, but because we're not investing in technology infrastructure, technology and science eductation and we're shipping intellectual capital in the form of tech jobs overseas to save that precious shareholder value.
Unlikely we'll ever face up to being second in anything. For some reason we've developed a national concensous that our crap doesn't stink and if we're doing it, then that's the best thing to be doing. Even suggesting that we're not number one in damn all everything will likely get me mod'ed down because disagreement these days is tantamount to treason.
Most of us grew up with notion that the US was the greatest country on the planet. It's not going to go down easy or well that such a notion might not be true anymore, in any capactity. Whether it's something litlle like broadband, or something bigger like health care, education, privacy or quality of life.
From a Yankee Group study published on ZDNET:
zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5330340.html
I like the way they say "only" 5% consider a total switch to Linux. I read 5% and thought HOLY SH--!! 5%!
Now that Shorthorn is starting to look like XP Rebloated, 5% of companies are contemplating a complete switch to Linux and 36% are considering some type of OSS introduction, this could push quite a few more over the edge.
Great idea.
Sheez, yes. Major league burn out. Some days I dream about getting fired. I don't spook at the distant rumble of outsourcing, I relish it. Resource allocation? Go for it. Hasn't happened yet. I even told them one day, straight up, that I was really burned out and needed a break. Didn't work. Some days I feel guilty that I'm not more appreciative. Anyone else?
I've got a non-tech sideline ready to go but I think it would be fun to start a firm to help people transition off of MSFT products to Linux/OSS and provide contract administrative services. That would be fun and profitable.
We here at Slashdot can usually settle our differences like adults. Isn't that right, Mr. Poopy Pants?