I've had software packages requiring the installation of the upgrade product first. Doesn't sound like a lot of work, but the reality is it's a major pain in the rear.
MSFT sure seems to be going to a lot of trouble to make this transition painful for their users. I can't tell if it's intent or incompetence. Ineptitude, raised to a high enough power, is indistinguishable from malice.
Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.
Not sure I'd want to put that one on my highlight reel. Sort of like Boise bragging about the SCO litigation.
It was an IT services company. Except I was already at the job site when they pulled their magic now you see it, now you don't act. But it was my mistake because they told me they would "help" with relocation. Turned out their definition of help and mine were quite different. That was the same job the customer described the "intent" of making the job permanent. In this case the road to a hellish job in a hell hole of a town was paved with helpful good intentions.
The others telling you this is a big, red flag are absolutely correct. If it starts out bad, there's nowhere to go but down, especially if this is a company renting you to another company. You will have endless niggling disagreements because they're squeezing you on one side and the customer on the other. The customer will always be expecting you to pay the tab, and in disagreements with your employer the policy will always be on their side. Besides, it's a cheap chisel and if you roll over on this they're going to keep chipping away at your hide.
Go back to your current employer, tell them you changed your mind and wanted to give them first chance before putting them through the expense of finding someone new and yourself through the expense of finding another job.
I made changes after getting a call from a local IT services company that said they had two of me in their database and wanted to resolve the discrepancy and update my information. What made that unusual is that I'd never applied for a job with them, they were collecting the data from Dice. That was a couple years ago.
What I started doing was stripping all the data out of my old profile and created a new one with the last name of Notdisclosed, or something like that. Then I stripped out my employer names and dates, created a new email address, and replaced my phone number with a message only number.
I have my own company and won't be applying for jobs anymore and their data is getting older by the day. This is going to be an ongoing problem with companies mining online sources for their own systems, but who knows how good their security is? Or if they even have any?
I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of outsourcing enterprise services, such as moving corporate email to Google mail. That is if Google would hire someone for enterprise sales and they'd return their fricken phone calls.
That might be a good start.
Google goes to the trouble of running the mail servers, providing security and spam filtering. It be easier to leave the mail services to them and dump that bloatware security horror freak show Exchange/Outlook.
Girouard promoted the software-as-a-service model, saying companies should join this growing trend of outsourcing IT tasks, even if it means trusting third parties with sensitive information.
Half the corporate users I know are forwarding all their email to Gmail anyway to get around the Exchange space limitations now. It's just insane to running parallel systems.
Maybe the first step in that innovative process should be returning your damn phone calls, Dave!
It boggles the mind the lengths this administration will go to to systematically erode the rights and privileges we have all counted on and held up as the granite pillars of our society since our nation was founded.
And yet 28% of Americans still support him. What does that say about us?
What's MSFT's motivation to make WGA in any way accurate? They can squeeze the gray area installs for license revenue and fall back on their back-stabbing EULA when innocents get run over by the Genuine Advantage bulldozer. Most people don't have the time or know-how to fight them, they may have lost their receipts or any of a number of other reasons they might be legal but undocumented.
MSFT has absolutely no financial interest in making WGA accurate. They get more license revenue the same way DRM impaired music brings more revenue to online media sellers. Selling something to users that was already paid for. They have the added advantage of being able to waive the Piracy of Doom flag on Capitol Hill and in the media, then use that to make product activation and WGA even more draconian! What a racket! You have to hand it to them for being smart enough to prison rape their user base like that and get away with it. Damn clever.
I used Rational Rose in a large avionics project. I can honestly say it is the worst piece of software I have ever encountered.
I'll second that. Worked next to a project that was built in four months by two primary programmers, a DBA and two analysts. The customer brought EDS in to take over long term maintenance and they wanted to move everything over to Rational for managing change requests. Today there are 30 people on the project and what used to take hours now takes months. Where they used to spend 10's of thousands they now spend 100's of thousands.
They brought in EDS because they didn't think they were getting good value from the team that built the original application.
Disk encryption. You can get TrueCrypt for free and encrypt a partition with a hidden partition inside. Keep it on a USB drive or external hard drive. See you in about five years after the NSA's supercomputer has been trying to decrypt it.
Of course, in the US today they'll probably just disappear you to GITMO while they work on it.
Systems Affected: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP
I'm not knocking Windows, the users contributed by not running antivirus software and not being terribly bright. But this is why I don't ever access any of my banking or investment accounts with Windows.
Just makes it that much harder to automate installation of a keylogger.
t takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.
If Voyager 1 is covering a million miles a day, that means an AU roughly every 90 days, a little less than 4 AU's a year. Being over 277,000 AU's to Alpha Centauri you'd be looking at close to 80,000 years. I'm too lazy to pull out a calculator and run the exact numbers.
Unless you physics experts invented some way to bend the time/space continuum or you've got a prototype for a working warp drive in your car, that trip will take a bit beyond 2009.
If there was a conspiracy, it would have been blown open right now.
By who? The Republican controlled Congress? Justice Dept. staff? Fox News? Who is going to do the digging and put up the research money? If they did how would they prove malfeasance when there is no paper trail supporting the results? How do you audit results when there are no permanent records of the results?
I'm so sick of these dumbass conspiracy theories.
Why do you think they're dumb? First off, these guys are Republican and their methods appear to be sound. So what makes it dumbass?
However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate.
To me it's more like dogma. There are so many people who accept conventional wisdom without spending any time actually learning anything and refusing to listen to those who do. I'm continually surprised how many managers exhibit a depth of understanding of IT issues that one might get skimming an in-flight magazine.
An administration that thinks they're above the law and justifies any indignity by simply declaring anything they want to do legal and constitutional? Or the right wing apologists sticking up for them? These are the same people who used to threatened revolution over the assault rifle ban and background checks for buying handguns. They'll fight to the death to be able to buy a gun at a flea market, but it's okay for the military and government check their credit report at will, bug phone calls without a warrant and military tribunals for criminal suspects. They've got no problem with all that!
Maybe not but it certainly might help. Rabbits can survive on grass and crude silage, can be grown in relatively small areas and reproduce reliably. Faster than goats, the most widely eaten animal on the planet.
Similar husbandry programs with cavia porcellus, guinea pigs to you, have helped many families lift themselves out of poverty in Peru and other areas in South America.
Rabbits would be better suited to the colder climate of North Korea. The fur would provide a secondary revenue source. It may not sound like much but when you're dirt poor having meat to eat and furs to trade is big deal.
How is this not a good thing? Why would you want to see the North Korean people starve just because their government is the asshat of the world? That's almost as silly as people hating all Americans because Bush is a douche bag. It's not like they elected that idiot in North Korea and there's growing evidence we didn't elect our idiot, either.
Hell, there isn't even a good equivalent for Quickbooks/Peachtree that's OSS. It's absolutely mind-boggling that any small businesses could ever go completely open source WITH NO FINANCIAL SOFTWARE (Yes, I know about GNUCash: it's a joke).
Simply amazing that those crazy Europeans manage to get by without Quickbooks. A miracle I manage in my own business(es) without ever once missing Quickbooks. I run OSS almost exclusively and actually spend less time dorking with my computers, which tend to stay working for extremely long periods of time. What is it I can't do without Quickbooks? Because I manage to track mileage and expenses, do billing, proposals and make financial projections with, what to me feels like, a minimum amount of effort. I must be living a torrid, pathetic existence. How sad for me to be so happy in a slime pit of unrealized potential. I don't have Quickbooks and I'm too cheap to spring for a copy of CrossOver to run it. But I do have a lot of fun with the money I'm not spending on MSFT products, so it's not a complete loss.
I'm not sure what makes that mind-boggling, because I think I'm doing just fine without MSFT. Perhaps you're easily boggled?
How you can tell this is an industry PR fluff piece:
SIIA said respondents claim to be meeting 80 percent to 100 percent of cost-saving goals.
That's a big, fat lie. I've never met the project that got even remotely close to their cost saving goals from an outsource vendor. 100% bullshit is more like it.
Give them a choice between using OSS software and getting a raise. You need a lot of cooperation from teachers to make any OS selection work an educational system and there's no better way of getting staff on your side than financial incentive.
Unfortunately MSFT will rig the game at every level. If the school opts for the change they'll pressure the school board. If the board balks they'll get state lawmakers to somehow tie school funding to their choice of OS or a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. If that failed they'd go to Congress.
It's really amazing to me how much money MSFT spends protecting their market share. It's buying votes with their own money but it works.
And don't forget the Mars Climate Orbiter "Dirt Dart" mission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter ). Okay the operators helped by plugging in the wrong units but neither did the software catch the discrepancy in the values.
The systems aboard the spacecraft were not able to reconcile the two systems of measurement, resulting in the navigation error.
Operator error but it would be interesting to figure in the number of accidents that the software could have prevented the operator from entering the wrong values, or at least prompted them that the values don't match.
I'm not blaming the programmers. It's amazing how well things work considering the distance, temperature extremes, radiation and it's not exactly like you can bring it into the shop if something goes wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else read that as Storing Wind Power in Cold Sores?
ROFL! That was my first read, too. Except my first question was why, which kind of says something because you think it would be how.
They should call the next version of Windows "Apology" and make it actually worth the money.
....+5 just isn't enough. :)
One hundred bellliiion dollars, Austin Powers!
The same state that:
ROFL! Georgia, Kansas and Alabama will be competing in a reality show to select the dumbest state in the union. Call in and vote for your favorite!
I've had software packages requiring the installation of the upgrade product first. Doesn't sound like a lot of work, but the reality is it's a major pain in the rear.
MSFT sure seems to be going to a lot of trouble to make this transition painful for their users. I can't tell if it's intent or incompetence. Ineptitude, raised to a high enough power, is indistinguishable from malice.
Eric Dezenhall has made a name for himself helping companies and celebrities protect their reputations, working for example with Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron chief now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud.
Not sure I'd want to put that one on my highlight reel. Sort of like Boise bragging about the SCO litigation.
It was an IT services company. Except I was already at the job site when they pulled their magic now you see it, now you don't act. But it was my mistake because they told me they would "help" with relocation. Turned out their definition of help and mine were quite different. That was the same job the customer described the "intent" of making the job permanent. In this case the road to a hellish job in a hell hole of a town was paved with helpful good intentions.
The others telling you this is a big, red flag are absolutely correct. If it starts out bad, there's nowhere to go but down, especially if this is a company renting you to another company. You will have endless niggling disagreements because they're squeezing you on one side and the customer on the other. The customer will always be expecting you to pay the tab, and in disagreements with your employer the policy will always be on their side. Besides, it's a cheap chisel and if you roll over on this they're going to keep chipping away at your hide.
Go back to your current employer, tell them you changed your mind and wanted to give them first chance before putting them through the expense of finding someone new and yourself through the expense of finding another job.
I made changes after getting a call from a local IT services company that said they had two of me in their database and wanted to resolve the discrepancy and update my information. What made that unusual is that I'd never applied for a job with them, they were collecting the data from Dice. That was a couple years ago.
What I started doing was stripping all the data out of my old profile and created a new one with the last name of Notdisclosed, or something like that. Then I stripped out my employer names and dates, created a new email address, and replaced my phone number with a message only number.
I have my own company and won't be applying for jobs anymore and their data is getting older by the day. This is going to be an ongoing problem with companies mining online sources for their own systems, but who knows how good their security is? Or if they even have any?
I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of outsourcing enterprise services, such as moving corporate email to Google mail. That is if Google would hire someone for enterprise sales and they'd return their fricken phone calls.
That might be a good start.
Google goes to the trouble of running the mail servers, providing security and spam filtering. It be easier to leave the mail services to them and dump that bloatware security horror freak show Exchange/Outlook.
Girouard promoted the software-as-a-service model, saying companies should join this growing trend of outsourcing IT tasks, even if it means trusting third parties with sensitive information.
Half the corporate users I know are forwarding all their email to Gmail anyway to get around the Exchange space limitations now. It's just insane to running parallel systems.
Maybe the first step in that innovative process should be returning your damn phone calls, Dave!
It boggles the mind the lengths this administration will go to to systematically erode the rights and privileges we have all counted on and held up as the granite pillars of our society since our nation was founded.
And yet 28% of Americans still support him. What does that say about us?
What's MSFT's motivation to make WGA in any way accurate? They can squeeze the gray area installs for license revenue and fall back on their back-stabbing EULA when innocents get run over by the Genuine Advantage bulldozer. Most people don't have the time or know-how to fight them, they may have lost their receipts or any of a number of other reasons they might be legal but undocumented.
MSFT has absolutely no financial interest in making WGA accurate. They get more license revenue the same way DRM impaired music brings more revenue to online media sellers. Selling something to users that was already paid for. They have the added advantage of being able to waive the Piracy of Doom flag on Capitol Hill and in the media, then use that to make product activation and WGA even more draconian! What a racket! You have to hand it to them for being smart enough to prison rape their user base like that and get away with it. Damn clever.
I used Rational Rose in a large avionics project. I can honestly say it is the worst piece of software I have ever encountered.
I'll second that. Worked next to a project that was built in four months by two primary programmers, a DBA and two analysts. The customer brought EDS in to take over long term maintenance and they wanted to move everything over to Rational for managing change requests. Today there are 30 people on the project and what used to take hours now takes months. Where they used to spend 10's of thousands they now spend 100's of thousands.
They brought in EDS because they didn't think they were getting good value from the team that built the original application.
Rule 1: Forget Rational
Rule 2: Never give a working application to EDS.
Disk encryption. You can get TrueCrypt for free and encrypt a partition with a hidden partition inside. Keep it on a USB drive or external hard drive. See you in about five years after the NSA's supercomputer has been trying to decrypt it.
Of course, in the US today they'll probably just disappear you to GITMO while they work on it.
The sender encouraged clients to download a "spam fighting" application.'"
The trojan in question only runs on Windows.
Systems Affected: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP
I'm not knocking Windows, the users contributed by not running antivirus software and not being terribly bright. But this is why I don't ever access any of my banking or investment accounts with Windows.
Just makes it that much harder to automate installation of a keylogger.
t takes 8 minutes to send a signal as far as mars and 4 years to send one to Alpha Centuri, which Voyager 1 is predicted to reach in later 2009.
If Voyager 1 is covering a million miles a day, that means an AU roughly every 90 days, a little less than 4 AU's a year. Being over 277,000 AU's to Alpha Centauri you'd be looking at close to 80,000 years. I'm too lazy to pull out a calculator and run the exact numbers.
Unless you physics experts invented some way to bend the time/space continuum or you've got a prototype for a working warp drive in your car, that trip will take a bit beyond 2009.
If there was a conspiracy, it would have been blown open right now.
By who? The Republican controlled Congress? Justice Dept. staff? Fox News? Who is going to do the digging and put up the research money? If they did how would they prove malfeasance when there is no paper trail supporting the results? How do you audit results when there are no permanent records of the results?
I'm so sick of these dumbass conspiracy theories.
Why do you think they're dumb? First off, these guys are Republican and their methods appear to be sound. So what makes it dumbass?
However, the 'proprietary vs FLOSS' debate is a battle which each day seems to more resemble the 'biblical literalism versus evolution' debate.
To me it's more like dogma. There are so many people who accept conventional wisdom without spending any time actually learning anything and refusing to listen to those who do. I'm continually surprised how many managers exhibit a depth of understanding of IT issues that one might get skimming an in-flight magazine.
An administration that thinks they're above the law and justifies any indignity by simply declaring anything they want to do legal and constitutional? Or the right wing apologists sticking up for them? These are the same people who used to threatened revolution over the assault rifle ban and background checks for buying handguns. They'll fight to the death to be able to buy a gun at a flea market, but it's okay for the military and government check their credit report at will, bug phone calls without a warrant and military tribunals for criminal suspects. They've got no problem with all that!
What's wrong with this picture?
All the rabbits in the world won't change that.
Maybe not but it certainly might help. Rabbits can survive on grass and crude silage, can be grown in relatively small areas and reproduce reliably. Faster than goats, the most widely eaten animal on the planet.
Similar husbandry programs with cavia porcellus, guinea pigs to you, have helped many families lift themselves out of poverty in Peru and other areas in South America.
Rabbits would be better suited to the colder climate of North Korea. The fur would provide a secondary revenue source. It may not sound like much but when you're dirt poor having meat to eat and furs to trade is big deal.
How is this not a good thing? Why would you want to see the North Korean people starve just because their government is the asshat of the world? That's almost as silly as people hating all Americans because Bush is a douche bag. It's not like they elected that idiot in North Korea and there's growing evidence we didn't elect our idiot, either.
Hell, there isn't even a good equivalent for Quickbooks/Peachtree that's OSS. It's absolutely mind-boggling that any small businesses could ever go completely open source WITH NO FINANCIAL SOFTWARE (Yes, I know about GNUCash: it's a joke).
Simply amazing that those crazy Europeans manage to get by without Quickbooks. A miracle I manage in my own business(es) without ever once missing Quickbooks. I run OSS almost exclusively and actually spend less time dorking with my computers, which tend to stay working for extremely long periods of time. What is it I can't do without Quickbooks? Because I manage to track mileage and expenses, do billing, proposals and make financial projections with, what to me feels like, a minimum amount of effort. I must be living a torrid, pathetic existence. How sad for me to be so happy in a slime pit of unrealized potential. I don't have Quickbooks and I'm too cheap to spring for a copy of CrossOver to run it. But I do have a lot of fun with the money I'm not spending on MSFT products, so it's not a complete loss.
I'm not sure what makes that mind-boggling, because I think I'm doing just fine without MSFT. Perhaps you're easily boggled?
How you can tell this is an industry PR fluff piece:
SIIA said respondents claim to be meeting 80 percent to 100 percent of cost-saving goals.
That's a big, fat lie. I've never met the project that got even remotely close to their cost saving goals from an outsource vendor. 100% bullshit is more like it.
This message was brought to you by stylusinc.com. Tank you for letting us helping you!
Give them a choice between using OSS software and getting a raise. You need a lot of cooperation from teachers to make any OS selection work an educational system and there's no better way of getting staff on your side than financial incentive.
Unfortunately MSFT will rig the game at every level. If the school opts for the change they'll pressure the school board. If the board balks they'll get state lawmakers to somehow tie school funding to their choice of OS or a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. If that failed they'd go to Congress.
It's really amazing to me how much money MSFT spends protecting their market share. It's buying votes with their own money but it works.
And don't forget the Mars Climate Orbiter "Dirt Dart" mission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter ). Okay the operators helped by plugging in the wrong units but neither did the software catch the discrepancy in the values.
The systems aboard the spacecraft were not able to reconcile the two systems of measurement, resulting in the navigation error.
Operator error but it would be interesting to figure in the number of accidents that the software could have prevented the operator from entering the wrong values, or at least prompted them that the values don't match.
I'm not blaming the programmers. It's amazing how well things work considering the distance, temperature extremes, radiation and it's not exactly like you can bring it into the shop if something goes wrong.