I run both VMWare and Win4Lin. My guest operating system of choice? Windows 95 original retail version.
Why? For one, it takes up about 30MB for the initial install (compared to the multiple 100's of MB for Win{98,98SE, ME, 2000}). And for another, it's much faster than the others.
So, if you need to run few MS apps you can't live without, use the leanes 32-bit (*cough*) MS OS out there!
Once upon a time, I worked for a great little (50 employees) company. Then management was successfully wooed by a larger company (200 employees), and we soon merged.
As is often the case with this kind of change, there was much animosity between the two groups. A great deal of Us vs. Them mentality, in spite of many great efforts to get along.
One of my biggest gripes with the new company was this silly awards thing they did once a year. A weak attempt to boost internal morale if I ever saw one.
I soon found myself awarded (along with a few others) a Team Player Award (or something like that). The funny thing was that that all of the other guys in my department were of the Other Side -- also physically in another state -- and I hardly considered us much of a team. It was a diamond-shaped Lexan (or similar hard plastic) thing with etched writing on it. I knew a guy who was into guns, so I gave him my trophy and told him to shoot a hole in it.
It was a very cool sight, that modified award. I still have it. A high-powered round at about 2 yards punched a hole right in the middle of it, with about six or so spidery cracks radiating from the hole. I took it to the office for a couple of days, and word spread quickly back to Corporate HQ.
A short while later, I was browsing the company's internal weblog, known ironically as "SpeakEasy". It was a place for employees to "anonymously" vent and bring up internal issues that were troubling them. To my surprise, a few of the lemmings from HQ started posting things about how horrible this unknown person was who shot their award. It was quite amusing.
Eventually, I cut loose on the board. I explained why I did what I did, that the entire concept of silly awards to make things all shiny and happy in a company with many problems was too bogus for me to take sitting down. I made a few pointed observations about upper management and that was that.
To everyone's surprise, the CEO totally blasted me and the original company on this discussion forum. He truly made an ass of himself, and the consensus from many people (from both camps) was that he stepped over the line. Word got back to me that even some of Them thought my demonstration and explanation was right on the mark.
After catching some heat from other on the forum, the CEO issued an apology. It was so sincere, you could almost see the gun to his head as you read it.:-)
The next Monday, I found myself unemployed. The reason? (I mean aside from the obvious.) I was fired for subordination, for failing to complete a yearly evaluation of my performance months before this very incident. This was my first, and only, offence in almost 3 years of respected employment with this company. I knew others who also refused to piss away their time with the evaluation, but none of them ever got fired (as a direct result, at least).
The funny thing was that they tried to bribe me with severance pay. I could receive 2 more weeks of pay if I only ageed to: 1) Not discuss my reasons for departing; and 2) Not take legal action against the company. I flatly refused, much to the astonishment of one of my managers. Is this kind of bribery standard practice in the private sector?
If you don't like it, don't use it. Or make a holster or something for it. It's really lame to bitch about the the quality of something that you got for free.
If they're trying to be as "ubiquitous as the mouse" they'd better come up with a more pleasing design. That's all I'm trying to point out.
And I very likely will the device. Just not in the way they intended it to be used, though. Time for a free BCDB (Bar Code Data Base), anyone?
Or perhaps we should start a bounty for CueCats? I'll send you a dollar for every device you send me. Hell, cut the tails off so I can't resell them. The possibilities are endless!
After the initial post, I ran out to my nearest Radio Shack and grabbed one of the gadgets (after leaving false name/address). My biggest gripes, aside from the stink they've put up about the free decoders are:
1. Each device has a unique serial number. You can see this number spit out with the perl decoder available on the net. (I will not post link, for fear of having author harassed) This RISK needs no explanation.
2. Their database depends on customer contributions, just like CDDB does. They clearly state that the submissions become the sole property of them. (In case you were thinking about polluting the database in protest, as I did, it appears that the submissions are queued up and reviewed by humans.)
I'm also annoyed that the damned device has no off switch or a cover for the scanner LED. My computer desk now gives off an eerie red glow at night unless I cover up the ugly cat-shaped device.
Still, I can't see they have any hope of defending this. AFAIK, there are no patents on the absurd encoding scheme they use. They gave away the hardware (I will not be bound by a shrink-wrap click/through license on hardware!). And now now they're bitching that someone can potentially built a better mouse trap.
I'm not angry with this company, really. It's more like pity for dreaming up such a poor business model. I hope the employees are looking for other jobs, as these folks won't be around much longer, IMHO.
You know, I've always wondered about how feasible it would be to DoS a company's legal team. After all, in the US there's almost no risk in filing a lawsuit (unlike, say, the UK where the plaintiff is held liable for damages/costs if they loose).
What if every time someone gets a threatening quasi-legal-looking email/letter, they respond with a true legal response, suing for harassment? I'm certainly no lawyer, but this should be easy enough to do pro se, right?
Help BigGreedyCorp.com rack up legal expenses. Take your case as far as you can sans lawyer and they'd be overwhealmed with cases.
Of course, this has the negative side effect of flooding our legal system with even more garbage. But it seems that cases truly worthy of court time are few and far between anyway.
Let's get real here and call the Street Performer Protocol what it really is: the Extortionist Artist Prototcol.
Firstly, I never said that Marillion used the the Street Performer Protocol. That was the title of NPR's article, which is how I referenced it.
What Stephen King did was closer to extortion. He gave you a piece, then threatened to not follow up if he made no money. He had the resources to write the story anyway, but he wanted payment after the fact.
What Marillion did was say to its fans, "Hey, we're not giving up our copyrights anymore to the labels. We want to make another album, but we can't afford it. However, if you front us the money, we will make the album and you'll get a copy of the final product."
This, in my opinion, is a very significant change in business practice for bands. The model is closer to getting venture capitol from your fans -- if people want a new product, they can "invest" in its creation ahead of time.
Personally, I would love to see more known artists take this approach.
There's still the problem of the unknown act. How does a group gain enough fan momentum without being well-known first? From the griping I've heard in the mp3.com forums, this problem has yet to be tackled correctly.
Use Fairtunes.com for the tipping bit. I read about this early this week on Slashdot and I'm already allocating money from my next paycheck to go towards some of the artists I've downloaded ("illegally") from the net.
There are other models of music creation and compensation on the horizon.
See NPR's article on the Street Performer Protocol to see how British band Marilion got more control of their music while still planning to sign with a major label.
I've never bought the arguement that there's not enough land for wide-scale (and useful) solar power deployment.
While driving around my home of Salt Lake City, I'm always disgusted at the waste of land due to urban sprawl, houses, parking lots, etc. I'm sure it's like that in every major US city.
After reading a/. article on electric cars a while back, I got to thinking. Why the hell can't PV cells be deployed on roof-tops (residential as well as business) and on covered parking areas? I mean, how much land does a typical Wal Mart parking lot waste? Why not cover it and put PV cells on the coverings? The cars are covered from sun, rain, snow -- and we get "free" electricity to boot!
Hell, if I had the money, I'd put PV cells on my roof and make a carport (i have no garage) to place more PV cells on it. If it weren't so damned expensive (and it wouldn't be if everyone did it), I'd run "off grid" as much as I could.
The new oracle pricing model isn't based upon users anymore. You basically pay $15 per MHz of cpu speed you have, at least for the standard edition. The enterprise edition rings in for quite more. For instance, if you have oracle running on a dual PIII at 700MHz, that's 1400 total cpu points.
Somebody please tell me that this is complete bullshit. Firstly, I can't even fathom a company being this arrogant about its own product. I thought that Microsoft's "per seat or per head, whichever is greater" Client Access Licensing was absurd. But more importantly, I can't believe that people would actually buy into a license like that.
Have software vendors stooped that low? (Well, I guess they have is MS wants us to "rent" it's software for a monthly fee in the near future...)
One day she decided to see what the latest in swimsuit fads were, so she went to a search engine and entered in the appropriate key words. Needless to say, she happened across quite a few porn sites. Being a very live-and-let-live kind of person, she didn't really care about the content. What she did find disturbing was the endless spawning of pop-up windows for similar sites.
She finally got so annoyed that she called me at work. I had to log into our machine at home (isn't dsl and linux a great combo!) and kill the offending netscape processes. That's when I taught her the "disable javascript" option of Netscape.:)
We both got a good chuckle out of it, but it does illustrate a problem with these kinds of tactics.
Check out www.squidGuard.org for what is likely the closest thing to an open source filter project. It runs as a redirector plugin for Squid proxy server.
I checked it out one day, to use as a JunkBuster on steroids. I'm really impressed with it. You can craft categories (such as porn, banner adds, tracking sites like doubleclick) and determine who they affect by source machine, destination machine, and even by the time of day. If you're really clever with regular expressions you can do a really good job with it. It has the same failings as any other block-list based filter, but it's open for all to contribute. The site even has a canned set of lists. You can even "anonymize" the logs, so as to only see that there is a problem, and not that it's Bob in Accounting.
Mind you, I don't like censoring -- even at the workplace. However, I will concede that I may be asked someday to set up such a system. And given the recent "scandals" with the commecial filter vendors, I could only recommend this solution. Besides... it's open source!:-)
I use that shitty software, VersaCheck. I can't stand the damned thing. It has to be the worst piece of software that need to use. To think that I paid good money for it makes me even more furious.
If you need beta testers for this program, I'll gladly volunteer. I'll even write real checks to see if they clear the bank!:)
The internet desperately needs an efficient, secure and convenient implementation of micro-payments. But it simply won't happen until the banks get together and agree on a common system.
This would not be in the banks' best interest, as least as far as I understand it. The banks make huge amounts of money from credit card transaction fees and service fees to merchants. I'm no sure what the fees are, but isn't the reason you don't have micro-prices on the 'net is because the vendors would not make profit from them due to high credit card free overhead?
In any case, I would love to see a good micropayment system. I had high hopes for Chaum's company (was it CyberCash or e-Cash?), but I think it went bankrupt a few years back. It's a pity, because the description of the protocol (as I read it in Applied Cryptography) sounded really cool.
Was it the fact that the web back then wasn't ready for such a system that they wnt under, or did the bank cartels interfere? Hmm...
I can't remmeber the key sequence, but if you powered on the original SMS console without a game cartridge and quickly entered a sequence on the controller you'd get this maze and a timer would begin. You'd have to navigate a snail through the maze before the time ran out. I even liked the cheezey tune it played (anyone have a WAV of it lying around?).
I spent more time in that stupid maze game than some of the games I bought (excepting Phantasy Star -- my all time favorite console game to date).
I still hard it find to believe that handheld electronics can cause a problem.
I was an intern at Pratt & Whitney a few years back (they make jet engines, competing with the likes of G.E.). During my 6 months there, I got to see all kinds of talks and film clips about the industry.
I recall seeing a really cool video on lightning strikes, and how planes are designed to handle them. It always struck me as odd to hear the in-flight warnings about handheld devices, knowing that the plane was built to withstand a direct lightning hit.
Sure... some yahoo will probably make a point about how the two are totally differemt. But still, to a layman like myself, I have a tough time reconciling the two scenarios.
I bought a pair of silver wedding bands from these folks for my wife and I several years ago. Very nice people, and great work. (No relation to said company, other than a very happy customer!)
Would, say, an MD5 hash of a binary be sufficient grounds to sue on? Why not put the source, a link to vX.y.z of a compiler for a given platform and then the corresponding hash.
When I was in 4th or 5th grade, I woke up Christmas morning to find a TI-994/A, complete with TV, cassette deck, and joystick. On it was a cheesey demo of a bunch of colored bars cycling through the color pallete.
I was hooked. For months, I would bang in BASIC programs and examples from the manual (a huge, ugly green, 3-ring binder), modifying the examples, and later "stealing" bits of code from small programs into larger ones that I dreamed up. I then got a large book of generic BASIC programs (to discover they were for 80-column screens, when I only had 40), which included classics like Eliza, and Hunt the Wumpus.
I outgrew that pretty quickly, and I got the Extended BASIC cartridge. I could do sprites! (oooooh!) I eventually peaked out, though, as the interpretted environment got too slow for the "huge" programs I began writing. Had I known someone with a clue, I may have learned just how to make use of those mysterious PEAK and POKE commands, and I might have learned assembly at an early age. In retrospect, I suspect I might have become a true code hacker (in the awe-inspiring sense) had I had a mentor for emulate.:-(
But I soon lost interest in my slow little TI. It wasn't until my senior year in high school, where I was forced to take a "keyboarding" course (PC's for Dummies), which I breezed through. Taking notice of my obvious non-interest in basic DOS and WordPerfect asignments, the instructor asked if I would like to jump into the next semester's AP Pascal class. I took him up on the challenge, and subsequently got my first glimpse of the interenet (this was 1989/90), as the course was taught via email correspondence from the U. of Michigan (I was stationed overseas in Germany on an Army base).
It was that stupid high-school course that re-sparked my interest in computers. I ended up at Purdue, where I took some C and FORTRAN and learned to love the Unix command line. I failed out of numerous engineering courses due to many late nite "hacking" sessions, and I eventually found my calling as a unix admin (I never did graduate). I don't program for a living, but I like knowing how to bang out 1-page quickies to get grunt work done, be it in perl, c, awk, or whatever...
I think most anyone will agree that, without publishing the methodology (and maybe the raw data), the NetPD report cannot be taken at face value. As such, any conclusions based on the report cannot be taken seriously, including the one made by Lars.
To a degree this is all true. However, explain to me why a Beatles CD of an album from 1965 still runs $15 new? Whoever owns "The Beatles" has gotten a huge return from originally promoting the Beatles (I somehow think the Beatles never needed promoting to begin with).
We're still getting gouged, in my opinion.
After an album hits Platinum (how many units is that anyway?), they should ease off on the price a bit as I'm sure they've made a good profit by then. Just like the movie houses that run 3-month old "current" releases for $1 a seat.
Please prove that open source software is better than closed source software.
I'll bite.
You will always have one additional feature -- the source.
For a real-world example I present the commercial PKZip and the GPL'd zip/unzip package. Both are vitually identical. Both are "free" to use for non-commercial purposes. Yet I always use zip/unzip, rather than PKZip. Why? Because I have the source and I can use it if I need to.
No, I'm no programmer. I can tweak Makefiles and the compilation process, however. So for CPU-intensive apps like compression, encryption, raytracing (povray), I go the extra mile to use pgcc to compile with insane optimizations (I used the optimizations found in the GOGO mp3 encoder makefile) to wring every last bit of performace from my 700MHz Athlon.
In my mind, if all things are equal between 2 products, then having the source to one will make it better.
Okay, I'm boycotting the movies. No, really. There is one whole person actually willing to admit they're actually boycotting, and it's me. I feel like a minority of one, but there you go.
I'm boycotting, too. Well... sort of.
I refuse to see news movies, or buy new movies and CDs. I buy from sites like SecondSpin to get stuff. In the past month I've purchased a Matrix DVD and a Phantom Menace VHS tape. Prices are competive with new (they ought to be!), and I get that warm fuzzy of knowing the MPAA and RIAA are not benefiting from my purchases in any way.
Now if I could find a place with Enigma's latest CD that is used...
First, Bill Gates announces (during the aftermath) that a breakup of MS would increase the likelihood of virus outbreaks. (Personally, I can't remotely begin to grasp what kind of logic he was using to arrive at that statement.) Then, MS receives a lot of criticism from the guv'ment and security "experts" alike that say it's OS and apps come too loose by default.
And now this.:-) When you're under the microscope, it's amazing what you'll do. I seriously doubt that they'd be so willing to "fix" this problem had they not been involved with the DOJ.
But what I wonder is... why is the PhotoCD file format affected???
Ahhh, but the real point here is that Linux distros and most of the software within them (or, more generally, most unix software we can freely snarf from the web) don't have that "feature" enabled by default.
I use pine for most of my email, though I don't think kmail (or the GNOME counterpart) has the ability to launch scripts with a click out of the box.
So, while and unix variant may have the potential to be just as bad as MS products, they aren't set up that way.
I was under the impression that all government employees (the original post said he worked for the government) had more rights to privacy than those in the private sector. Check with a lawyer if you're gonna hand-monitor people.
I onced worked for a nosy private company, and it sucked. I don't like being watched. It's distracting, and it's more than a little demoralizing. But you gotta do what the boss says (or hit the road, I guess), so good luck to the original poster.
Slashdot Mirror
I run both VMWare and Win4Lin. My guest operating system of choice? Windows 95 original retail version.
Why? For one, it takes up about 30MB for the initial install (compared to the multiple 100's of MB for Win{98,98SE, ME, 2000}). And for another, it's much faster than the others.
So, if you need to run few MS apps you can't live without, use the leanes 32-bit (*cough*) MS OS out there!
As is often the case with this kind of change, there was much animosity between the two groups. A great deal of Us vs. Them mentality, in spite of many great efforts to get along.
One of my biggest gripes with the new company was this silly awards thing they did once a year. A weak attempt to boost internal morale if I ever saw one.
I soon found myself awarded (along with a few others) a Team Player Award (or something like that). The funny thing was that that all of the other guys in my department were of the Other Side -- also physically in another state -- and I hardly considered us much of a team. It was a diamond-shaped Lexan (or similar hard plastic) thing with etched writing on it. I knew a guy who was into guns, so I gave him my trophy and told him to shoot a hole in it.
It was a very cool sight, that modified award. I still have it. A high-powered round at about 2 yards punched a hole right in the middle of it, with about six or so spidery cracks radiating from the hole. I took it to the office for a couple of days, and word spread quickly back to Corporate HQ.
A short while later, I was browsing the company's internal weblog, known ironically as "SpeakEasy". It was a place for employees to "anonymously" vent and bring up internal issues that were troubling them. To my surprise, a few of the lemmings from HQ started posting things about how horrible this unknown person was who shot their award. It was quite amusing.
Eventually, I cut loose on the board. I explained why I did what I did, that the entire concept of silly awards to make things all shiny and happy in a company with many problems was too bogus for me to take sitting down. I made a few pointed observations about upper management and that was that.
To everyone's surprise, the CEO totally blasted me and the original company on this discussion forum. He truly made an ass of himself, and the consensus from many people (from both camps) was that he stepped over the line. Word got back to me that even some of Them thought my demonstration and explanation was right on the mark.
After catching some heat from other on the forum, the CEO issued an apology. It was so sincere, you could almost see the gun to his head as you read it. :-)
The next Monday, I found myself unemployed. The reason? (I mean aside from the obvious.) I was fired for subordination, for failing to complete a yearly evaluation of my performance months before this very incident. This was my first, and only, offence in almost 3 years of respected employment with this company. I knew others who also refused to piss away their time with the evaluation, but none of them ever got fired (as a direct result, at least).
The funny thing was that they tried to bribe me with severance pay. I could receive 2 more weeks of pay if I only ageed to: 1) Not discuss my reasons for departing; and 2) Not take legal action against the company. I flatly refused, much to the astonishment of one of my managers. Is this kind of bribery standard practice in the private sector?
Oh, what fun times we live in! :-)
If they're trying to be as "ubiquitous as the mouse" they'd better come up with a more pleasing design. That's all I'm trying to point out.
And I very likely will the device. Just not in the way they intended it to be used, though. Time for a free BCDB (Bar Code Data Base), anyone?
Or perhaps we should start a bounty for CueCats? I'll send you a dollar for every device you send me. Hell, cut the tails off so I can't resell them. The possibilities are endless!
1. Each device has a unique serial number. You can see this number spit out with the perl decoder available on the net. (I will not post link, for fear of having author harassed) This RISK needs no explanation.
2. Their database depends on customer contributions, just like CDDB does. They clearly state that the submissions become the sole property of them. (In case you were thinking about polluting the database in protest, as I did, it appears that the submissions are queued up and reviewed by humans.)
I'm also annoyed that the damned device has no off switch or a cover for the scanner LED. My computer desk now gives off an eerie red glow at night unless I cover up the ugly cat-shaped device.
Still, I can't see they have any hope of defending this. AFAIK, there are no patents on the absurd encoding scheme they use. They gave away the hardware (I will not be bound by a shrink-wrap click/through license on hardware!). And now now they're bitching that someone can potentially built a better mouse trap.
I'm not angry with this company, really. It's more like pity for dreaming up such a poor business model. I hope the employees are looking for other jobs, as these folks won't be around much longer, IMHO.
What if every time someone gets a threatening quasi-legal-looking email/letter, they respond with a true legal response, suing for harassment? I'm certainly no lawyer, but this should be easy enough to do pro se, right?
Help BigGreedyCorp.com rack up legal expenses. Take your case as far as you can sans lawyer and they'd be overwhealmed with cases.
Of course, this has the negative side effect of flooding our legal system with even more garbage. But it seems that cases truly worthy of court time are few and far between anyway.
Firstly, I never said that Marillion used the the Street Performer Protocol. That was the title of NPR's article, which is how I referenced it.
What Stephen King did was closer to extortion. He gave you a piece, then threatened to not follow up if he made no money. He had the resources to write the story anyway, but he wanted payment after the fact.
What Marillion did was say to its fans, "Hey, we're not giving up our copyrights anymore to the labels. We want to make another album, but we can't afford it. However, if you front us the money, we will make the album and you'll get a copy of the final product."
This, in my opinion, is a very significant change in business practice for bands. The model is closer to getting venture capitol from your fans -- if people want a new product, they can "invest" in its creation ahead of time.
Personally, I would love to see more known artists take this approach.
There's still the problem of the unknown act. How does a group gain enough fan momentum without being well-known first? From the griping I've heard in the mp3.com forums, this problem has yet to be tackled correctly.
There are other models of music creation and compensation on the horizon.
See NPR's article on the Street Performer Protocol to see how British band Marilion got more control of their music while still planning to sign with a major label.
While driving around my home of Salt Lake City, I'm always disgusted at the waste of land due to urban sprawl, houses, parking lots, etc. I'm sure it's like that in every major US city.
After reading a /. article on electric cars a while back, I got to thinking. Why the hell can't PV cells be deployed on roof-tops (residential as well as business) and on covered parking areas? I mean, how much land does a typical Wal Mart parking lot waste? Why not cover it and put PV cells on the coverings? The cars are covered from sun, rain, snow -- and we get "free" electricity to boot!
Hell, if I had the money, I'd put PV cells on my roof and make a carport (i have no garage) to place more PV cells on it. If it weren't so damned expensive (and it wouldn't be if everyone did it), I'd run "off grid" as much as I could.
Somebody please tell me that this is complete bullshit. Firstly, I can't even fathom a company being this arrogant about its own product. I thought that Microsoft's "per seat or per head, whichever is greater" Client Access Licensing was absurd. But more importantly, I can't believe that people would actually buy into a license like that.
Have software vendors stooped that low? (Well, I guess they have is MS wants us to "rent" it's software for a monthly fee in the near future...)
One day she decided to see what the latest in swimsuit fads were, so she went to a search engine and entered in the appropriate key words. Needless to say, she happened across quite a few porn sites. Being a very live-and-let-live kind of person, she didn't really care about the content. What she did find disturbing was the endless spawning of pop-up windows for similar sites.
She finally got so annoyed that she called me at work. I had to log into our machine at home (isn't dsl and linux a great combo!) and kill the offending netscape processes. That's when I taught her the "disable javascript" option of Netscape. :)
We both got a good chuckle out of it, but it does illustrate a problem with these kinds of tactics.
Check out www.squidGuard.org for what is likely the closest thing to an open source filter project. It runs as a redirector plugin for Squid proxy server.
I checked it out one day, to use as a JunkBuster on steroids. I'm really impressed with it. You can craft categories (such as porn, banner adds, tracking sites like doubleclick) and determine who they affect by source machine, destination machine, and even by the time of day. If you're really clever with regular expressions you can do a really good job with it. It has the same failings as any other block-list based filter, but it's open for all to contribute. The site even has a canned set of lists. You can even "anonymize" the logs, so as to only see that there is a problem, and not that it's Bob in Accounting.
Mind you, I don't like censoring -- even at the workplace. However, I will concede that I may be asked someday to set up such a system. And given the recent "scandals" with the commecial filter vendors, I could only recommend this solution. Besides... it's open source! :-)
I use that shitty software, VersaCheck. I can't stand the damned thing. It has to be the worst piece of software that need to use. To think that I paid good money for it makes me even more furious.
If you need beta testers for this program, I'll gladly volunteer. I'll even write real checks to see if they clear the bank! :)
This would not be in the banks' best interest, as least as far as I understand it. The banks make huge amounts of money from credit card transaction fees and service fees to merchants. I'm no sure what the fees are, but isn't the reason you don't have micro-prices on the 'net is because the vendors would not make profit from them due to high credit card free overhead?
In any case, I would love to see a good micropayment system. I had high hopes for Chaum's company (was it CyberCash or e-Cash?), but I think it went bankrupt a few years back. It's a pity, because the description of the protocol (as I read it in Applied Cryptography) sounded really cool.
Was it the fact that the web back then wasn't ready for such a system that they wnt under, or did the bank cartels interfere? Hmm...
I spent more time in that stupid maze game than some of the games I bought (excepting Phantasy Star -- my all time favorite console game to date).
I was an intern at Pratt & Whitney a few years back (they make jet engines, competing with the likes of G.E.). During my 6 months there, I got to see all kinds of talks and film clips about the industry.
I recall seeing a really cool video on lightning strikes, and how planes are designed to handle them. It always struck me as odd to hear the in-flight warnings about handheld devices, knowing that the plane was built to withstand a direct lightning hit.
Sure... some yahoo will probably make a point about how the two are totally differemt. But still, to a layman like myself, I have a tough time reconciling the two scenarios.
I bought a pair of silver wedding bands from these folks for my wife and I several years ago. Very nice people, and great work. (No relation to said company, other than a very happy customer!)
Would that work?
When I was in 4th or 5th grade, I woke up Christmas morning to find a TI-994/A, complete with TV, cassette deck, and joystick. On it was a cheesey demo of a bunch of colored bars cycling through the color pallete.
I was hooked. For months, I would bang in BASIC programs and examples from the manual (a huge, ugly green, 3-ring binder), modifying the examples, and later "stealing" bits of code from small programs into larger ones that I dreamed up. I then got a large book of generic BASIC programs (to discover they were for 80-column screens, when I only had 40), which included classics like Eliza, and Hunt the Wumpus.
I outgrew that pretty quickly, and I got the Extended BASIC cartridge. I could do sprites! (oooooh!) I eventually peaked out, though, as the interpretted environment got too slow for the "huge" programs I began writing. Had I known someone with a clue, I may have learned just how to make use of those mysterious PEAK and POKE commands, and I might have learned assembly at an early age. In retrospect, I suspect I might have become a true code hacker (in the awe-inspiring sense) had I had a mentor for emulate. :-(
But I soon lost interest in my slow little TI. It wasn't until my senior year in high school, where I was forced to take a "keyboarding" course (PC's for Dummies), which I breezed through. Taking notice of my obvious non-interest in basic DOS and WordPerfect asignments, the instructor asked if I would like to jump into the next semester's AP Pascal class. I took him up on the challenge, and subsequently got my first glimpse of the interenet (this was 1989/90), as the course was taught via email correspondence from the U. of Michigan (I was stationed overseas in Germany on an Army base).
It was that stupid high-school course that re-sparked my interest in computers. I ended up at Purdue, where I took some C and FORTRAN and learned to love the Unix command line. I failed out of numerous engineering courses due to many late nite "hacking" sessions, and I eventually found my calling as a unix admin (I never did graduate). I don't program for a living, but I like knowing how to bang out 1-page quickies to get grunt work done, be it in perl, c, awk, or whatever...
Hmmm... What was the questions again???
I think most anyone will agree that, without publishing the methodology (and maybe the raw data), the NetPD report cannot be taken at face value. As such, any conclusions based on the report cannot be taken seriously, including the one made by Lars.
We're still getting gouged, in my opinion.
After an album hits Platinum (how many units is that anyway?), they should ease off on the price a bit as I'm sure they've made a good profit by then. Just like the movie houses that run 3-month old "current" releases for $1 a seat.
I'll bite.
You will always have one additional feature -- the source.
For a real-world example I present the commercial PKZip and the GPL'd zip/unzip package. Both are vitually identical. Both are "free" to use for non-commercial purposes. Yet I always use zip/unzip, rather than PKZip. Why? Because I have the source and I can use it if I need to.
No, I'm no programmer. I can tweak Makefiles and the compilation process, however. So for CPU-intensive apps like compression, encryption, raytracing (povray), I go the extra mile to use pgcc to compile with insane optimizations (I used the optimizations found in the GOGO mp3 encoder makefile) to wring every last bit of performace from my 700MHz Athlon.
In my mind, if all things are equal between 2 products, then having the source to one will make it better.
I'm boycotting, too. Well... sort of.
I refuse to see news movies, or buy new movies and CDs. I buy from sites like SecondSpin to get stuff. In the past month I've purchased a Matrix DVD and a Phantom Menace VHS tape. Prices are competive with new (they ought to be!), and I get that warm fuzzy of knowing the MPAA and RIAA are not benefiting from my purchases in any way.
Now if I could find a place with Enigma's latest CD that is used...
And now this. :-) When you're under the microscope, it's amazing what you'll do. I seriously doubt that they'd be so willing to "fix" this problem had they not been involved with the DOJ.
But what I wonder is... why is the PhotoCD file format affected???
I use pine for most of my email, though I don't think kmail (or the GNOME counterpart) has the ability to launch scripts with a click out of the box.
So, while and unix variant may have the potential to be just as bad as MS products, they aren't set up that way.
I onced worked for a nosy private company, and it sucked. I don't like being watched. It's distracting, and it's more than a little demoralizing. But you gotta do what the boss says (or hit the road, I guess), so good luck to the original poster.