The new generation of DVD disc will spearhead a fresh assault by Microsoft on the home-entertainment market."
More like a fresh assault on what's left of our fair use rights. MSFT can't get into bed with the MPAA fast enough. Although all the sucking up to RIAA and record labels didn't pay off very well, now did it?
Think MSFT learned anything from that? Ha! When does MSFT ever learn?
What's next? Cats barking at dogs? It's outta control! Obviously these people have never read those MSFT funded TCO studies or they would never have let that commie OS through the door.
Hehe. MSFT is going to be pretty unhappy with Capgemini.
Google announced the opening of its new campus in the Bahamas. That comes after last week's announcement that they were moving their headquarters to Nevada, citing the high cost of doing business in California.
Just keep up your whining about nit picky little crap and that headline will be true one day. It's a lot easier to move a tech company than a company like Boeing, but they still managed to shift a lot of their work to other states.
I can't find on the web site what software they used for the bridge modeling, though I'm sure someone here knows. What about the ship drawings? It has a 3D Studio Max feel to it.
Fly By The Book: This is a trick airline pilots use to slow everything down. They fly strictly by the book, not cutting any corners for anything. You can do the same thing in IT. If someone is nice, we cut corners to help them out. If they're buttholes, they have to file a trouble ticket. Address, with exacting specificity, only the items they have outlined in the trouble ticket, usually entered in haste. Rinse, lather, repeat. It's a trick to look and sound helpful while dragging your feet.
Selective Enforcement; Gay sex web sites at work? No problem if it's someone who is nice. But if they're a department head fighting for a piece of your budget, no mercy. Selective enforcement is similar to flying by the book.
Selective Infection: Not saying I'd deliberately infect someone's machine with a virus but if virus updates just happened to be late getting to the butthead department, well that's just a darn shame, isn't it? And, oh look, they infected everyone else in their department. Hey, it looks like one of them was visiting gay sex web sites on his work machine! You bastard!
I find that works particularly well working with the financial departments. You scratch my budget, I'll make sure you're always at the top of the priority list. But painful budget cuts...owww, tisk-tisk. You know tisk-tisk is really BAD. Someone cut all your linked spreadsheets? Oh, my, that sounds bad. Must be a permissions issue. Those can take a long time to track down, too bad you cut my staff as we don't have a lot of people to spare right now.
You can do even more fun things if you run their phone system. One of the people I used to work for shut off all the phones at the security office, except the emergency lines, because he got a speeding ticket. Couple phone calls and the ticket went away and the phones mysteriously started working again.
I'd be willing to bet Apple to could survive and thrive as a music producer AND distributor. It might take a while, but if Apple started cutting new groups a good deal for hosting their music, they could attract a lot of talent away from the big labels.
If that's what Apple is thinking, and I'd love to see them do that, they'll call their bluff on the threat.
Wow, they're really digging deep on this one. It also raises a really interesting question. I bought my own international unlocked phone. They can't try a DMCA claim on me unless they want to argue that they're transmitting copy protected software to my phone. And if an unlocked phone works without the "secret handshake" then they're going to have a hard time making a case.
The courts have already established that trying to use the DMCA as a protection racket isn't going to work. At least it won't work for anyone but the entertainment industry. Wasn't that their legislative baby? The cell service providers are going to need to pony up more cash, more private jet rides and more very accommodating "flight attendants" for their Congress creatures if they want to get their own sweetheart legislation. Cheap bastards, quit trying to piggyback on someone elses gains obtained by graft! How tacky. Start coughing up your own graft.
Washington, TN and Texas don't have a state income tax. It's understandable why they need the sales tax revenue.
But you guys in Nebraska. You already have high property taxes, a state income tax and now they're trying to add this. Plus really crapass weather in the winter. Just doesn't seem fair.
100% of shoplifters and cheaters (whatever that is) exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen across thin, moist membranes. Therefore anyone who respirates is a potential shoplifter.
If you breath, you might be a copyright infringer!
What amazes me is that they had IBM hardware and RedHat Engineers working on this and it still didn't work.
They didn't do any configuration testing? Take typical hardware and run a bench top install to see if there were going to be any problems? And the engineer asking the customer to run a diagnostic, wtf? Get your fanny in there and nail down the problem, don't ask the customer to do your support. That should apply in *nix as well as Windows environment.
After running my own business. There are stresses and strains running your own show just like there are working for someone else. A butthole boss is replaced by butthole customers. Not only do your coworkers still get on your nerves but you're PAYING them and they still get on your nerves. And you'll be amazed how many customers drag their feet paying bills. In my experience the bigger the company, the slower they are paying their invoices. That's one thing a lot of new business owners don't budget for. Quarterly tax payments, regulatory hoops, time out stumping for new business...lots of that. You trade working regular hours for working all the time.
Despite all the niggling nit picky stuff, the endless telemarketers, slow paying customers and being responsible for people who sometimes duck out at critical times...the worst day working for yourself is better than the best day at the best company as an employee. Because no matter how nice they are, how well they treat people, you're still their little cubical bitch. Your morals and ethics, assuming you have any...this is/. after all;)...are in some ways limited by your employer. Good or bad you live and work by their rules. If they ask you to do something that violates your conscience, your only options are do it or quit. Your privacy is at their discretion. Monitor your email, computer use, pee in a cup, regulate your outward appearance. Do it or you're out. And they can get rid of you any time they want, even if you have 15 years there. Some would do it nicely, some would have security give you the frog walk but the end result is the same. They owe you nothing. You're a bitch in their stable.
In all my travels in the IT business, the only advice I'd offer the new guys: The only way to truly like the boss, is to be the boss. If you want job security, own the company.
Anyone in the military already has their DNA on file, this is extending it to anyone suspected of a crime.
And somewhere a police chief is going to get it in his head that everyone in a certain building at a certain time is a suspect, or anyone passing a check point somewhere. You were in the shopping mall last Friday? You're a suspect.
The Republican controlled Congress and White House has done more to undermine human rights and civil rights than any other American leaders in history. Trying to turn this country into a nation of christian hall monitors.
Kids today are growing up being used to having their backpacks and lockers searched, drug tested to play sports or be in band, I don't think they're going to see anything wrong with this. They're used to not having any privacy. It's just like a frog in a pan of water. Turn the heat up gradually and they'll boil alive. Imagine what the next generation will be able to get away with? They've grown up never knowing privacy, so why would they value it?
Not only am I going to keep voting for people of either party with a brain but I'm going to break down and get involved. At least run for something. State, county...something. We have to get our country back from the retards running it now.
Now that we have that terrorist thing under control, I can't think of a finer use of valuable federal resources. We know fears of widespread corruption in government are unfounded, you don't hear much about the drug war anymore and violent crime has taken a holiday.
Hell, yeah, go after those pornographers. What else would the FBI be doing with their time?
You have to wonder why more big companies aren't setting an open file format standard? It would ensure that 10 years from now you could still access archived data.
Whenever I bring it up to any of my clients, government or private side, they give me that deer in the headlights look. Even if you can dig out an old backup tape and demonstrate the files aren't conveniently recoverable it still doesn't seem to sink in.
The same with database storage. I'm amazed how many companies don't even have a freakin data dictionary. If you have to ask why you need one of those, then you need one. Maybe you just really like transposing fields and data types on the fly between every application you build. People must find that pleasurable because there's sure enough of them doing it.
It's interesting to hear how their software development survived in such an anarchistic environment - everyone producing their own code, with ad-hoc integration.
What's amazing is not only did it work, but it worked for so long. Most of us in the business have known for years that MSFT was fielding sub-standard products. We'd see the same mistakes cropping up over and over, unless it was a product MSFT bought from someone else like Visio or SQL Server.
If anything MSFT's process was even weaker than most OSS projects. Try throwing buggy code at the Linux base and see how far it gets. Not only does bad code not get past the door but you'll probably get bitched at for wasting people's time by turning in such a piece of crap. The less automated version of what Allchin put in place.
Overall I think this change will be good for Windows and MSFT. It took getting their ass kicked by Google, Apple and OSS to open their eyes but give them credit for listening, even though Gates fought the change. Vista might actually be a big improvement.
The complainers later disappeared as part of an ongoing terrorism investigation, which no one could talk about because the FBI invoked the Patriot Act.
Life is good. Isn't that right, commrad?
Of course, because it's a secret, we'll never know if this was a real security issue or if Lucent paid off their friendly Congressman to lean on one of his country club buddies who happened to work in that branch of government.
And while this is going on, the Justice Department is fearlessly pursuing p0rn. Brilliant.
Because the FBI can tell people they can't even talk about it because it's part of ongoing terrorist investigation.
If freedom isn't worth dying for, it's not worth having. People in England have decided their safety is more important. Same story on this side of the pond. Still it's nice to see someone else being the asshat of civil rights for a change. Now we have someone we can point fingers at a claim the moral high ground because "we're not THAT bad". Thanks you guys!
Self-replicating, self-repairing, independent targeting capability, alert and attack modes, built in night vision system, able to navigate complicated terrain features and function in any weather.
An iPod charger and hand crank radios? Holy urban living Batman!
I've got a 4,000 watt generator and enough gas to run it for weeks. MRE's, firewood, water, emergency shelter, 55 gallons of kerosene for the heaters, a 30 watt solar panel and two deep cycle trolling motor batteries, a four acre fresh water pond, fish traps and a box of chem lights.
There's no way MPAA can win this way, trying to build a hack proof bunker around their product. In the age old arms race between warhead and bunker, always bet on warhead.
Ran into a perfect example of this concept in operation yesterday. Heard a song on a commercial that I liked. The company had a link to the site that had the song.
I would've had to download their special player and set up an account, just to download one song. Screw that, there's no way. If I could've gone somewhere and downloaded a high res copy for.50-.75 cents that would play on my Linux box, I would have done it. But all the hoops I'd have to go through, forget it.
Getting tough didn't work, getting tougher isn't going to work any better.
I don't know what's worse: the frighteningly bizarre concept of a voting machine with no voter-verified paper trail, or the small group of people who defend this literally indefensible practice.
If they don't defend it they have to admit the election was rigged. What's really frightening is the right wing has no moral problem rigging elections.
No moral problems tromping on the poor
No moral problems starting a war on false a false pretext and getting a lot of good people killed
No moral problems selling the American people to big business like there's no tomorrow
Replacing good science with bad religion.
No moral issues with implementing state support of religion
Wow, I guess it's lucky these are all Christian people or I'd think we were being taken over by the Taliban.
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More like a fresh assault on what's left of our fair use rights. MSFT can't get into bed with the MPAA fast enough. Although all the sucking up to RIAA and record labels didn't pay off very well, now did it?
Think MSFT learned anything from that? Ha! When does MSFT ever learn?
Hehe. MSFT is going to be pretty unhappy with Capgemini.
Just keep up your whining about nit picky little crap and that headline will be true one day. It's a lot easier to move a tech company than a company like Boeing, but they still managed to shift a lot of their work to other states.
But given what they had to work with...fantastic.
Selective Enforcement; Gay sex web sites at work? No problem if it's someone who is nice. But if they're a department head fighting for a piece of your budget, no mercy. Selective enforcement is similar to flying by the book.
Selective Infection: Not saying I'd deliberately infect someone's machine with a virus but if virus updates just happened to be late getting to the butthead department, well that's just a darn shame, isn't it? And, oh look, they infected everyone else in their department. Hey, it looks like one of them was visiting gay sex web sites on his work machine! You bastard!
I find that works particularly well working with the financial departments. You scratch my budget, I'll make sure you're always at the top of the priority list. But painful budget cuts...owww, tisk-tisk. You know tisk-tisk is really BAD. Someone cut all your linked spreadsheets? Oh, my, that sounds bad. Must be a permissions issue. Those can take a long time to track down, too bad you cut my staff as we don't have a lot of people to spare right now.
You can do even more fun things if you run their phone system. One of the people I used to work for shut off all the phones at the security office, except the emergency lines, because he got a speeding ticket. Couple phone calls and the ticket went away and the phones mysteriously started working again.
If that's what Apple is thinking, and I'd love to see them do that, they'll call their bluff on the threat.
This is great.
Anyone besides me read that the first time through as Peeping Up Windows?
The courts have already established that trying to use the DMCA as a protection racket isn't going to work. At least it won't work for anyone but the entertainment industry. Wasn't that their legislative baby? The cell service providers are going to need to pony up more cash, more private jet rides and more very accommodating "flight attendants" for their Congress creatures if they want to get their own sweetheart legislation. Cheap bastards, quit trying to piggyback on someone elses gains obtained by graft! How tacky. Start coughing up your own graft.
But you guys in Nebraska. You already have high property taxes, a state income tax and now they're trying to add this. Plus really crapass weather in the winter. Just doesn't seem fair.
If you breath, you might be a copyright infringer!
They didn't do any configuration testing? Take typical hardware and run a bench top install to see if there were going to be any problems? And the engineer asking the customer to run a diagnostic, wtf? Get your fanny in there and nail down the problem, don't ask the customer to do your support. That should apply in *nix as well as Windows environment.
Despite all the niggling nit picky stuff, the endless telemarketers, slow paying customers and being responsible for people who sometimes duck out at critical times...the worst day working for yourself is better than the best day at the best company as an employee. Because no matter how nice they are, how well they treat people, you're still their little cubical bitch. Your morals and ethics, assuming you have any...this is /. after all ;)...are in some ways limited by your employer. Good or bad you live and work by their rules. If they ask you to do something that violates your conscience, your only options are do it or quit. Your privacy is at their discretion. Monitor your email, computer use, pee in a cup, regulate your outward appearance. Do it or you're out. And they can get rid of you any time they want, even if you have 15 years there. Some would do it nicely, some would have security give you the frog walk but the end result is the same. They owe you nothing. You're a bitch in their stable.
In all my travels in the IT business, the only advice I'd offer the new guys: The only way to truly like the boss, is to be the boss. If you want job security, own the company.
Losers. Dismissed with prejudice.
The Republicans are running China!
And somewhere a police chief is going to get it in his head that everyone in a certain building at a certain time is a suspect, or anyone passing a check point somewhere. You were in the shopping mall last Friday? You're a suspect.
The Republican controlled Congress and White House has done more to undermine human rights and civil rights than any other American leaders in history. Trying to turn this country into a nation of christian hall monitors.
Kids today are growing up being used to having their backpacks and lockers searched, drug tested to play sports or be in band, I don't think they're going to see anything wrong with this. They're used to not having any privacy. It's just like a frog in a pan of water. Turn the heat up gradually and they'll boil alive. Imagine what the next generation will be able to get away with? They've grown up never knowing privacy, so why would they value it?
Not only am I going to keep voting for people of either party with a brain but I'm going to break down and get involved. At least run for something. State, county...something. We have to get our country back from the retards running it now.
Hell, yeah, go after those pornographers. What else would the FBI be doing with their time?
Whenever I bring it up to any of my clients, government or private side, they give me that deer in the headlights look. Even if you can dig out an old backup tape and demonstrate the files aren't conveniently recoverable it still doesn't seem to sink in.
The same with database storage. I'm amazed how many companies don't even have a freakin data dictionary. If you have to ask why you need one of those, then you need one. Maybe you just really like transposing fields and data types on the fly between every application you build. People must find that pleasurable because there's sure enough of them doing it.
What's amazing is not only did it work, but it worked for so long. Most of us in the business have known for years that MSFT was fielding sub-standard products. We'd see the same mistakes cropping up over and over, unless it was a product MSFT bought from someone else like Visio or SQL Server.
If anything MSFT's process was even weaker than most OSS projects. Try throwing buggy code at the Linux base and see how far it gets. Not only does bad code not get past the door but you'll probably get bitched at for wasting people's time by turning in such a piece of crap. The less automated version of what Allchin put in place.
Overall I think this change will be good for Windows and MSFT. It took getting their ass kicked by Google, Apple and OSS to open their eyes but give them credit for listening, even though Gates fought the change. Vista might actually be a big improvement.
Life is good. Isn't that right, commrad?
Of course, because it's a secret, we'll never know if this was a real security issue or if Lucent paid off their friendly Congressman to lean on one of his country club buddies who happened to work in that branch of government.
And while this is going on, the Justice Department is fearlessly pursuing p0rn. Brilliant.
If freedom isn't worth dying for, it's not worth having. People in England have decided their safety is more important. Same story on this side of the pond. Still it's nice to see someone else being the asshat of civil rights for a change. Now we have someone we can point fingers at a claim the moral high ground because "we're not THAT bad". Thanks you guys!
A rottweiler named Jaws and a Belgium Shepherd.
I've got a 4,000 watt generator and enough gas to run it for weeks. MRE's, firewood, water, emergency shelter, 55 gallons of kerosene for the heaters, a 30 watt solar panel and two deep cycle trolling motor batteries, a four acre fresh water pond, fish traps and a box of chem lights.
Sheez, city folk.
Ran into a perfect example of this concept in operation yesterday. Heard a song on a commercial that I liked. The company had a link to the site that had the song.
I would've had to download their special player and set up an account, just to download one song. Screw that, there's no way. If I could've gone somewhere and downloaded a high res copy for .50-.75 cents that would play on my Linux box, I would have done it. But all the hoops I'd have to go through, forget it.
Getting tough didn't work, getting tougher isn't going to work any better.
If it was a false paradise it would come with a tropical island, Nicole Kidman and bathtub full of champagne.
If they don't defend it they have to admit the election was rigged. What's really frightening is the right wing has no moral problem rigging elections.
Wow, I guess it's lucky these are all Christian people or I'd think we were being taken over by the Taliban.