The logical solution if you're plotting against your employer...and I think the term "plotting" is a little inflamatory...is to get your own devices and don't use them to connect to the corporate servers. It's good advice for anything not job related, even if you're not "plotting" something. You little plotters.:)
Sheez, 60 bucks a month or something like that. Cheap insurance.
Technically a corporation is an artificial person. I can't defend myself in court if my corporation was one of the parties because technically that would mean I'm representing another person, practicing law without a license.
I agree with the sentiment that it might be time to look at changing some of those rules. Seeing a corporation as an instrument of business and not a person.
Now they'll start with the "it was never about winning money, it was about raising consciousness" song and dance routine. Like suing thousands of customers was some educational project they started out of the goodness of their hearts.
A group of German patients has filed a lawsuit against financially beleaguered Integrated Surgical Systems Inc., alleging that the Davis company' Robodoc surgical robot is defective and dangerous
Because in a little known incident one of their surgical robots went on a rampage, careening wildly down the hospital corridors wielding a variety of surgical scalpels while shouting, "YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME, MEAT SACK?!"
MSFT does plenty to shoot themselves in the foot. Not only are they getting eaten up on security issues, but there are a number of issues that could be the last straw for a lot of people. If they ever wake up and start reading what's actually in the EULA they're going to start thinking about alternatives more seriously.
The next "last straw" for some people may be this prediction from Microsoft-Watch:
Microsoft's biggest announcement of the year won't be Yukon (SQL Server 2005) or Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). Instead, it will be an as-yet-unannounced anti-virus/anti-spyware subscription service for which Microsoft will charge.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/3sht4
More likely MSFT will quietly offer this to their bigger customers to keep them from switching to OSS while the great sea of consumer users will have to pay. Or maybe they'll be smart and give it away, but that's a little like hoping dubya will really be a uniter and not a divider.
I think IDC's estimates are conservative. Now that the ball is rolling down hill it will only continue to accelerate. Aided by MSFT's almost uncanny ability to treat their customers like criminals.
Microsoft Help is the most astounding collection of utterly worthless "troubleshooting tips" I have ever seen.
I busted out laughing when I read that because I can't count the times sitting in front of busted Windows box thinking the exact same thing about the help files. They are absolutely the most useless, bloated piece of an already bloated, barely functional operating system.
I have never once had a problem that that thing came anywhere near helping me solve.
So true. Why bother including them at all? The help files are so divorced from reality they could easily be for a different operating system. If you're going to go to all the trouble and cost to include them, at least make them somewhat functional.
Some of the parafoil kites I've owned would pick up a beer cooler but the concept seems kind of clumsy. A kite holding the top wheel of the loop that's being turned by smaller kites. Seems like a lot to go wrong. A wind turbine is pretty robust technology. The wind blows, blades turn, electricity comes out. Simple.
If height is the issue, then why not have a tethered blimp hoist wind turbines? You could even cover the top of the blimp with flexible solar panels and have a high-flying hybrid system and you don't have worry about bombing people with a giant bicycle wheel if the wind died. If the weather gets bad just reel the blimp in.
Use the pancake rotor types, carbon composite blades, you could make some pretty high production turbines that were light enough to be raised by a blimp. Some kind of frame and the tether could double as the transmission cable.
You get the blame now. Republicans have run both houses and the White House for the last four years and made gains in the mid-terms. If there is corruption in government, you own it. You 52% who put the most corrupt group in office since the Robber Barons. And you did it for a handful of hot button issues that don't have anything to do with the character of people you were putting in office.
You can't duck responsibility anymore. Republicans are 100% responsible for the continuing corruption and the no lobbyist left behind mentality in Washington. That's you, pal. You are responsible. You and your other red state buddies. Don't give me that crap about the Dems not being any better, these are YOUR people. And they ran on a holier-than-thou platform, the moral high ground. A moral high ground that condones selling out their constituents to the highest donations.
Your people, your responsibility. And that makes you a chump.
I was actually sorry to see that ride go even though it was ultra gay with fairy sprinkles on top. We had corrupted that song as follows:
It goes out the door, it goes 'round the block we pay hundreds of bucks to put up with this crock It goes up, it goes down, it goes all around town it's a long line after allllllll. It's a long line after all, it's a long line after all, it's a long, long line!
Our crowning moment was getting escorted out of line for singing that little ditty by the Disney cops. I'd like to tell you they rousted us but in reality they were extremely polite and good natured, armed only with walkie talkies and little mouse ear badges. We walked out with our hands on our heads and they were like, "That's not really necessary." Unfortunately before the days camcorders were conveniently portable, because that was a classic. Back when even corporations had a sense of humor.
Why on earth would the MPAA care about sabotaging some little scrunts computer? Look who they're trying to hire as a lobbyist:
"Tauzin, when he was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this year, negotiated to take jobs with two major lobbying groups, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; he just took the PhRMA job."
Source: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6771489/
They're hiring former Congressmen and Committee chairman. lol. They can buy their way to the kind of clout it will take to get their sweetheart legislation through our Congress, which is more than happy to sell the America public if the donations are high enough. Lobbyists are expecting to spend 2 billion dollars this year.
Don't complain, you elected them. And the first thing they do is loosen up the ethics rules so they can bone the taxpayer even more blatantly than they already are.
This is what the red state mentality considers good government. Chumps.
The problem is, the end users who will visit these types of sites...
That's good, blame the victim. Just what sites are those? Where's the big list of sites you shouldn't visit? We might know where to avoid, but how is Joe User going to know?
Typical MSFT response. Instead of fixing their busted ass software they blame the victim. How's the weather in Redmond today?
I remember when MSFT was hyping this loser and the presenter said something about users storing their credit cards on MSFT's servers. HAHAHAHA! Right. Like anyone is going to trust MSFT with their credit card numbers. That's almost as smart as storing a unencrypted credit card number on a Windoze box. And of course this droid was prattling on about how MSFT listened to what their customers wanted during the design. HAHAHA!
I always wonder who those mystery customers are that they listen to? Because they sure are a bunch of twit wits. I've never met anyone in the business who's admitted to being one of the people MSFT listens to and I've represented some pretty big customers.
WIll the customer that MSFT listens to please raise your hand so we can kick the crap out of you. Thank you.
I've gotten so cozy in my nearly MS-free world since I managed to offload the last W2K machine that I forget about the risks
Hehe. I know exactly what you mean. At home it's all non-MSFT and I get spoiled by how fast my computers are. And I can focus on doing things with my system instead of endless patching and virus definitions and all the constant tweaking you have to do to a MSFT box.
Then going to the customer site and it's like running in sand. You catch yourself sitting there thinking, "Did it always take this long to boot up?" You can whistle while you wait for applications to open. Oh, great, now there are automatic updates to install. Another download, another restart, wait all over again for the apps to launch. Drives me crazy.
MSFT will take their usual tact of blaming the victim.
Before it was paid for TCO studies that...shockingly...showed MSFT products with the best TCO. This is just a new tact to smear OSS. As illustrated by this recent article.
Some of those efforts are legitimately aimed at making sure a proprietary code base isn't inappropriately using open source code. But it doesn't take much tweaking to try and make OSS look like some kind of virus. An image based on ignorance, but when has MSFT ever hesitated to promote an uneducated view when it suits them?
They're really turning into a sad, pathetic company. It's bad enough they produce bloated, insecure, DRM crippled, overpriced software, but to magnify it by being such low class PR whore is just embarrassing.
MSFT is living proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
Oh, boy, now you've done it. Football fans over here will be thinking about blinding the wide receiver or the qb. Or batters at the plate. Just enough to distract them.
Pretty freaking sad when athletes and musicians have to start wearing these
any time they're in front of a crowd.
And unless the governments of earth pay me 100 beeelion dollars I will allow my asteroid to destroy all life on this planet while I watch from the safety of my e-vil space station.
Muahahahahahahaha!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
And, Number 2, make a note to shoot everyone at NASA for giving away my e-vil plan before I took over the satellite TV system and announced it myself. I'll teach those meddling bastards.
There's got to be some corner of federal prison somewhere we can stuff the infringer gang. Because obviously we don't have enough of our population in jail now that we have to give college students 15 years and remove any possibility of them ever finishing school and doing anything productive.
This way we can pay to keep them in prison, then continue to pay when they end up going back and back and back because they can't ever get a job anywhere.
But we sure showed them we're serious about getting tough, didn't we? Ha! Just like getting tough on drugs. That's been a really successful program, too. Got tough on those druggies to where today the cost of drugs is...well,lower than it used to be but that's besides the point. You gotta throw those bastards in jail! Not a grain of common sense, but we're definitely tough.
I got one of those settlement forms. There were something like 3 pages of form for a ten dollar voucher. If I'm remembering it right you had to get the serial numbers. Screw that.
I had a house with bad siding. That class action settlement had to have an inspection and lots of other stupid crap. Had to reschedule the inspection three times. The siding didn't look that bad and finally all the process just wore me down. Who has infinite time to pursue a petty settlement?
Class action suits are a ripoff for everyone but the lawyers. Consumers don't get jack and probably end up paying the tab with higher prices. By the time they wind their way through the ponderous court process most people aren't even using the products anymore.
For most companies it's easier just to count them as the cost of doing business. By the time they have to pay anything and negotiate the amount down to some petty dollar figure and make the conditions so difficult hardly anyone files it's chump change compared to what they made by criminal behavior.
I'm not sure what the solution is but this ain't it.
Not just the database platform and front end but who built it. This just has E-D-S stamped all over it. Everybody has a system go down once in a while, but it just seems like EDS has had more than their share.
This is a worst case scenario for a system of that nature because of so many dependent calculations and calls to other systems. It takes more than just having a plane and a crew...which is a lot of work all by itself. It has to have a gate and connecting flights. Then multiply all that by 30,000 people, roughly 120 plane loads, and complicate it by some airports being closed. I bet you could actually watch the lights get dimmer in the server room. Still when you know the potential peak demand you have reserve capacity. Slow is okay, stop is unacceptable.
It seems that after Sep. 11th, the news wants to try to connect everything even remotely bad with terrorism
What else do they have to do? They've got this huge ass budget, all those people watching a lot of honest citizens. It was 10 years between the first attempt on the world trade center and the second. We've built and paid for this entire monster agency for an event that might be 10 or 15 years away. What are they going to do in the meantime? Grope women at the airport. They have to do something to justify their existence, Otherwise we'd have admit we over-reacted to 9-11.
That is so true. Seen it happen over and over again. Use Firefox and Thunderbird to move them into OSS tools for the internet. Then introduce OpenOffice and pretty soon the underlying OS is immaterial.
It's odd that it seems to take time to sink in that part of the value in OSS is that it comes bundled with all those goodies and there's no need to buy anything else. For instance (these are retail prices):
XP Pro $120.00
Office XP Pro $320.00
Norton Antivirus $39.95
McAfee antispyware $24.95
OEM pricing may vary as will the prices to big buyers. But even counting that where's the value? You still have to spend an insane amount of time keeping everything updated to combat the threat of the day and even that won't stop all the crap. It's insane. Get off Windows.
Take one of your gift cards and go buy yourself a copy of Xandros 3.0 (www.xandros.com). It's a good distro if you're a Wincrip. Superior hardware detection, CrossOver Office which can run some of your "must have" Windows apps.
At least dual boot, shhez. What does it take for MSFT users before they finally get enough?
If it gets any worse they're going to have to start including a jar of anal lube with a Windows license. Knowing MSFT they'll try to charge you for it and blame users for not being able to keep a tight bunghole.
1) The loss only occurrs once. The non-DRM copy can then be shared digitally with no further loss of quality.
So true. I can take speaker output and patch it through my digital recorder. What comes out...to me...is indistinguishable from the original. I can get a clean enough copy that it takes better ears than mine to hear any difference.
But there's always some twit telling me that's okay if I'm willing to settle for the loss of quality. Yeah? What loss? If I can't hear the difference then there's no loss. And after that I have a non-DRM copy that I can digitally modify from format to format from now until whenever.
The initial loss of quality is really minor if it's coming out of good equipment.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheez, 60 bucks a month or something like that. Cheap insurance.
I agree with the sentiment that it might be time to look at changing some of those rules. Seeing a corporation as an instrument of business and not a person.
Scumbags.
Because in a little known incident one of their surgical robots went on a rampage, careening wildly down the hospital corridors wielding a variety of surgical scalpels while shouting, "YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME, MEAT SACK?!"
The next "last straw" for some people may be this prediction from Microsoft-Watch:
Microsoft's biggest announcement of the year won't be Yukon (SQL Server 2005) or Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). Instead, it will be an as-yet-unannounced anti-virus/anti-spyware subscription service for which Microsoft will charge.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/3sht4
More likely MSFT will quietly offer this to their bigger customers to keep them from switching to OSS while the great sea of consumer users will have to pay. Or maybe they'll be smart and give it away, but that's a little like hoping dubya will really be a uniter and not a divider.
I think IDC's estimates are conservative. Now that the ball is rolling down hill it will only continue to accelerate. Aided by MSFT's almost uncanny ability to treat their customers like criminals.
I busted out laughing when I read that because I can't count the times sitting in front of busted Windows box thinking the exact same thing about the help files. They are absolutely the most useless, bloated piece of an already bloated, barely functional operating system.
I have never once had a problem that that thing came anywhere near helping me solve.
So true. Why bother including them at all? The help files are so divorced from reality they could easily be for a different operating system. If you're going to go to all the trouble and cost to include them, at least make them somewhat functional.
If height is the issue, then why not have a tethered blimp hoist wind turbines? You could even cover the top of the blimp with flexible solar panels and have a high-flying hybrid system and you don't have worry about bombing people with a giant bicycle wheel if the wind died. If the weather gets bad just reel the blimp in.
Use the pancake rotor types, carbon composite blades, you could make some pretty high production turbines that were light enough to be raised by a blimp. Some kind of frame and the tether could double as the transmission cable.
You can't duck responsibility anymore. Republicans are 100% responsible for the continuing corruption and the no lobbyist left behind mentality in Washington. That's you, pal. You are responsible. You and your other red state buddies. Don't give me that crap about the Dems not being any better, these are YOUR people. And they ran on a holier-than-thou platform, the moral high ground. A moral high ground that condones selling out their constituents to the highest donations.
Your people, your responsibility. And that makes you a chump.
It goes out the door, it goes 'round the block
we pay hundreds of bucks to put up with this crock
It goes up, it goes down, it goes all around town
it's a long line after allllllll.
It's a long line after all, it's a long line after all, it's a long, long line!
Our crowning moment was getting escorted out of line for singing that little ditty by the Disney cops. I'd like to tell you they rousted us but in reality they were extremely polite and good natured, armed only with walkie talkies and little mouse ear badges. We walked out with our hands on our heads and they were like, "That's not really necessary." Unfortunately before the days camcorders were conveniently portable, because that was a classic. Back when even corporations had a sense of humor.
"Tauzin, when he was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee earlier this year, negotiated to take jobs with two major lobbying groups, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; he just took the PhRMA job."
Source: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6771489/
They're hiring former Congressmen and Committee chairman. lol. They can buy their way to the kind of clout it will take to get their sweetheart legislation through our Congress, which is more than happy to sell the America public if the donations are high enough. Lobbyists are expecting to spend 2 billion dollars this year.
Don't complain, you elected them. And the first thing they do is loosen up the ethics rules so they can bone the taxpayer even more blatantly than they already are.
This is what the red state mentality considers good government. Chumps.
That's good, blame the victim. Just what sites are those? Where's the big list of sites you shouldn't visit? We might know where to avoid, but how is Joe User going to know?
Typical MSFT response. Instead of fixing their busted ass software they blame the victim. How's the weather in Redmond today?
Please swipe patient's insurance card to continue.
I always wonder who those mystery customers are that they listen to? Because they sure are a bunch of twit wits. I've never met anyone in the business who's admitted to being one of the people MSFT listens to and I've represented some pretty big customers.
WIll the customer that MSFT listens to please raise your hand so we can kick the crap out of you. Thank you.
Hehe. I know exactly what you mean. At home it's all non-MSFT and I get spoiled by how fast my computers are. And I can focus on doing things with my system instead of endless patching and virus definitions and all the constant tweaking you have to do to a MSFT box.
Then going to the customer site and it's like running in sand. You catch yourself sitting there thinking, "Did it always take this long to boot up?" You can whistle while you wait for applications to open. Oh, great, now there are automatic updates to install. Another download, another restart, wait all over again for the apps to launch. Drives me crazy.
MSFT will take their usual tact of blaming the victim.
Some of those efforts are legitimately aimed at making sure a proprietary code base isn't inappropriately using open source code. But it doesn't take much tweaking to try and make OSS look like some kind of virus. An image based on ignorance, but when has MSFT ever hesitated to promote an uneducated view when it suits them?
They're really turning into a sad, pathetic company. It's bad enough they produce bloated, insecure, DRM crippled, overpriced software, but to magnify it by being such low class PR whore is just embarrassing.
MSFT is living proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
Pretty freaking sad when athletes and musicians have to start wearing these any time they're in front of a crowd.
Muahahahahahahaha!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
And, Number 2, make a note to shoot everyone at NASA for giving away my e-vil plan before I took over the satellite TV system and announced it myself. I'll teach those meddling bastards.
Well, that's lunch everyone.
This way we can pay to keep them in prison, then continue to pay when they end up going back and back and back because they can't ever get a job anywhere.
But we sure showed them we're serious about getting tough, didn't we? Ha! Just like getting tough on drugs. That's been a really successful program, too. Got tough on those druggies to where today the cost of drugs is...well,lower than it used to be but that's besides the point. You gotta throw those bastards in jail! Not a grain of common sense, but we're definitely tough.
I had a house with bad siding. That class action settlement had to have an inspection and lots of other stupid crap. Had to reschedule the inspection three times. The siding didn't look that bad and finally all the process just wore me down. Who has infinite time to pursue a petty settlement?
Class action suits are a ripoff for everyone but the lawyers. Consumers don't get jack and probably end up paying the tab with higher prices. By the time they wind their way through the ponderous court process most people aren't even using the products anymore.
For most companies it's easier just to count them as the cost of doing business. By the time they have to pay anything and negotiate the amount down to some petty dollar figure and make the conditions so difficult hardly anyone files it's chump change compared to what they made by criminal behavior.
I'm not sure what the solution is but this ain't it.
This is a worst case scenario for a system of that nature because of so many dependent calculations and calls to other systems. It takes more than just having a plane and a crew...which is a lot of work all by itself. It has to have a gate and connecting flights. Then multiply all that by 30,000 people, roughly 120 plane loads, and complicate it by some airports being closed. I bet you could actually watch the lights get dimmer in the server room. Still when you know the potential peak demand you have reserve capacity. Slow is okay, stop is unacceptable.
What else do they have to do? They've got this huge ass budget, all those people watching a lot of honest citizens. It was 10 years between the first attempt on the world trade center and the second. We've built and paid for this entire monster agency for an event that might be 10 or 15 years away. What are they going to do in the meantime? Grope women at the airport. They have to do something to justify their existence, Otherwise we'd have admit we over-reacted to 9-11.
Bullshit.
That is so true. Seen it happen over and over again. Use Firefox and Thunderbird to move them into OSS tools for the internet. Then introduce OpenOffice and pretty soon the underlying OS is immaterial.
It's odd that it seems to take time to sink in that part of the value in OSS is that it comes bundled with all those goodies and there's no need to buy anything else. For instance (these are retail prices):
OEM pricing may vary as will the prices to big buyers. But even counting that where's the value? You still have to spend an insane amount of time keeping everything updated to combat the threat of the day and even that won't stop all the crap. It's insane. Get off Windows.
At least dual boot, shhez. What does it take for MSFT users before they finally get enough?
If it gets any worse they're going to have to start including a jar of anal lube with a Windows license. Knowing MSFT they'll try to charge you for it and blame users for not being able to keep a tight bunghole.
So true. I can take speaker output and patch it through my digital recorder. What comes out...to me...is indistinguishable from the original. I can get a clean enough copy that it takes better ears than mine to hear any difference.
But there's always some twit telling me that's okay if I'm willing to settle for the loss of quality. Yeah? What loss? If I can't hear the difference then there's no loss. And after that I have a non-DRM copy that I can digitally modify from format to format from now until whenever.
The initial loss of quality is really minor if it's coming out of good equipment.