It's all about the money, in the end. Linux and AIX are important to IBMs business.
It seems to me, though, that IBM wants to give a boatload of STFU to all the shill writers in the mainstream computing press who wrote up SCOs claims verbatim, and spread a massive amount of corporate FUD.
If they can find, and expose the activities of certain other companies in this, all the better.
It's an attempt to charge different prices for different markets.
Someone in Thailand won't pay £15 for a DVD, which either means charging £4 globally and making less in Europe, or charging £15 and losing Thailand.
So, region coding was invented, the idea being that you could sell a DVD to Thailand for £4 and one to the west for £15 and maximise profits.
Lots of people in the UK buy from abroad now. There are specialists who cater to the UK market on the web (they aren't allowed to sell here for licensing reasons) selling discs from all over. It's not just a geek thing. My plumber buys films because he can often get the DVD from the USA at the same time as a film comes out at the cinema. There's even a multiregion price check site, allowing me to check global prices for ordering.
I'll give you a possible reason: Standard Product Catalogue.
If you work in a large bureaucracy, it's often a lot easier to order a known item that's been through the process of getting on the approved list than to ask for the cheaper item that hasn't.
I seem to recall that the advice from Microsoft is to have IIS and SQL Server on different boxes because both try and grab as much memory as possible, and having both together ends up in a big fight.
It's a flawed methodology, because it really predates the growth of Linux in the server room, and ignores all the Win to Lin upgrades that happen, which fall under the radar of cost.
All but one of my friends has a player that's been adapted by chipping or remote hacks to be multiregion. The all defeat RCE discs.
It's time to just ditch it. Get together and agree that it's an idea that's past, and quit forcing your customers to waste their time with finding codes on the net.
But do a classified ad paper have to check that everything for sale is not stolen before an ad goes in?
Do eBay have to check every item before being listed?
On the other hand, both will pull an ad if there reasonable suspicion that the item is stolen, and co-operate with the authorities.
Google aren't be deliberately negligent, or avoiding responsibility.
If I was Google, I'd set their page rank right down. The last thing I'd want is to help support the business of a company out to sue me for something that's basically unavoidable.
Am I the only person who finds RSS on browsers to be a bit pointless?
I use RSS, with Thunderbird. That's where the delivery of RSS makes sense to me, along with Mail and News. What I might call "passive delivery". It gives me a list of articles that I can go to or ignore, all while I'm doing something else.
A browser is "active delivery", stuff I want to go to right now.
A friend of mine applied for a job with a company and had an interview lined up, and mentioned this fact to another agent. He later phoned up just to double check the time of the interview, only to be told by a confused voice that he thought he'd phone to cancel. He suspected that the other agency had cancelled the interview in order to try and get another contractor in.
Another friend had applied for a job, and accidentally went through two agencies, except that the 2nd agency was not on the supplier list to the client. But they still tried to get some commission for the placement.
Another time, I applied for a job. Spoke to the agent. Went through exactly what was my minimum requirements. Went for the job, interview went well, only to be told that my minimum could not be met, but great prospects blah blah. When I turned it down, the agent really tried to hard sell the job to me. A complete waste of my time.
Dire need? Are you offering considerably over market rates to fill them?
My experience of jobs that I get contacted about with messages like "we are struggling to fill this role and if you know anyone... " is simply that they are paying under market rates.
I once had to hire someone, and ended up using a recruitment company, because finding people was a difficult.
I happened to know a good recruiter (in the UK) who was an ex-programmer and did some filtering and found us a couple of good guys.
I have worked in companies and seen CVs come across our desk that were a complete joke. When skills were specifically demanded, they didn't appear. Agencies are often asked to provide 3 CVs, and that's what they'll get - the best 3 CVs they can find.
I also used to get recruiters cold calling me. I'd tell them to send me their card, but if they called me again, before I called them, I'd tear their card up. I found it quite a good way to filter out the cheap salesman types.
Personally, I do a bit of networking for finding people for work now. I keep in regular contact with people. I haven't had to hire technical people, but my lawyer and accountant both came from word-of-mouth. I also now know a lot of great software guys just in case.
But, a fee-paying one that took a "don't be evil" approach to jobs would be a good start. In other words, take payment from employers/recruiters, but certain practises would result in banination. The people you are dealing with have a similar moral outlook to spammers.
I work as a consultant, and use agencies about 80% of the time.
The weird thing is that the jobs with C# + Oracle + C++ + VB + PHP + COBOL + IDMS + MUMPS + QuickBasic + SSADM + UML +..... are often some of the worst paying jobs.
The best paying people focus on 4 or 5 core competencies (normally language/database/environment/analysis).
The problem is similar to search engines. People are paid to post false job ads, or fill job ad pages, because their time compared to getting clients is worth it.
I'm starting to think that such things need a policing mechanism (like if you suspect that a job is fake, you mark them down). It's an even bigger problem when you realise what a bunch of utter lowlifes many recruiters are. They are mostly the worst sort of salesmen, who would sell their grandmother to place someone. I've got a few stories of some of their tactics.
Just to add, I worked at a company and was in charge of hiring a contractor. There is almost nothing on the web that fits employers needs.
An employer needs to find people who have their approximate skills (because a contractor is a reasonably short term proposition) and have up-to-date availability. The sites I found had consultants who were not available.
Agencies can find people. Even then, don't trust the CVs they give you. Very few agencies do any real screening of skills.
Best of all, use people you know. I've networked a lot, finding people with all sorts of skills, which means I've got a good chance of avoiding agencies.
For contract work, recruiters can get someone in quick.
However, I would never apply for a permanent job with a recruiter. The bottom line is that they want to place you. In some cases, they will do anything to get you to take the job. When you deal direct, if it's not for you, the employer can be cool about it.
I couldn't care less about Mars. It's a "because it's there" project. A giant-size waste of money. Personally, I can think of hundreds of better things to spend public money on.
The key question is for intellectuals, not engineers. And that is the question of how to travel beyond our current limitations. Once we crack the physics of that, then we can deal with the engineering questions.
Exactly. I pay about £30 a month, and get as many free calls as I normally use.
The alternative is to have a basic rental (say £15/month) and then have to have a separate wifi account and be switching around based on whether I can get a wifi signal with a network that I signed up for £20+/month. Bear in mind that often, I'm not near wifi and need to make a call.
It's not a big enough saving to make it worth it.
The interesting thing is whether wifi will even survive. 3G cards are coming down in price, and are now at a point where they may cost a little more (45+VAT vs 23 inc VAT) the convenience may soon start to outweigh the savings.
Can you buy a cross-network monthly card for hotspots? I don't want a wifi phone that means I have to sign up with T-mobile, BT, The Cloud etc.
To me, this is the issue of "another account". Spending £20+ a month on unlimited wifi that I'm unlikely to completely use, as well as £30 for a GSM phone. I already get about the right amount of calls on my plan.
So, what happens if I'm on the train? Or in a village. Does this roam?
I guess it will work in a town, assuming I've got a hotspot for the network that I've signed up with for a month, and not one of the other providers. In which case, I'll have to sign up again to use their service, all with my easy to use cellphone web browser.
Someone tried something called Rabbit in the UK where people would have to be near a basepoint. The mobile networks offered more flexibility and costs were coming down.
This won't be like Rabbit, but I don't imagine the network providers are quaking in their boots.
The only thing is that if they are operating over Vodafone's 3G network, they could do this (there's an unlimited card in the UK). That said, the 3G network isn't as full as the GSM network in the UK.
However, I already have a business phone. I pay a monthly charge that includes plenty of calls. I'm not going to switch it off completely, so, the saving is marginal. Would an international businessman making hundreds of pounds of calls switch to this? Possibly, but unlikely, and for the same reason that they get to stay in good hotels. Because in the end, making good deals is paramount. Saving a quid a month on calls is a drop in the ocean compared to losing a client because of an unreliable service.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me, though, that IBM wants to give a boatload of STFU to all the shill writers in the mainstream computing press who wrote up SCOs claims verbatim, and spread a massive amount of corporate FUD.
If they can find, and expose the activities of certain other companies in this, all the better.
Someone in Thailand won't pay £15 for a DVD, which either means charging £4 globally and making less in Europe, or charging £15 and losing Thailand.
So, region coding was invented, the idea being that you could sell a DVD to Thailand for £4 and one to the west for £15 and maximise profits.
Lots of people in the UK buy from abroad now. There are specialists who cater to the UK market on the web (they aren't allowed to sell here for licensing reasons) selling discs from all over. It's not just a geek thing. My plumber buys films because he can often get the DVD from the USA at the same time as a film comes out at the cinema. There's even a multiregion price check site, allowing me to check global prices for ordering.
If you work in a large bureaucracy, it's often a lot easier to order a known item that's been through the process of getting on the approved list than to ask for the cheaper item that hasn't.
I seem to recall that the advice from Microsoft is to have IIS and SQL Server on different boxes because both try and grab as much memory as possible, and having both together ends up in a big fight.
It's a flawed methodology, because it really predates the growth of Linux in the server room, and ignores all the Win to Lin upgrades that happen, which fall under the radar of cost.
It's time to just ditch it. Get together and agree that it's an idea that's past, and quit forcing your customers to waste their time with finding codes on the net.
You aren't cutting sales of R1 discs to the UK.
And yes, all my recent players were cheapo ones from Tesco and Asda in the UK, and nearly all are a doddle to change region codes with a remote hack.
Do eBay have to check every item before being listed?
On the other hand, both will pull an ad if there reasonable suspicion that the item is stolen, and co-operate with the authorities.
Google aren't be deliberately negligent, or avoiding responsibility.
If I was Google, I'd set their page rank right down. The last thing I'd want is to help support the business of a company out to sue me for something that's basically unavoidable.
I use RSS, with Thunderbird. That's where the delivery of RSS makes sense to me, along with Mail and News. What I might call "passive delivery". It gives me a list of articles that I can go to or ignore, all while I'm doing something else.
A browser is "active delivery", stuff I want to go to right now.
Another friend had applied for a job, and accidentally went through two agencies, except that the 2nd agency was not on the supplier list to the client. But they still tried to get some commission for the placement.
Another time, I applied for a job. Spoke to the agent. Went through exactly what was my minimum requirements. Went for the job, interview went well, only to be told that my minimum could not be met, but great prospects blah blah. When I turned it down, the agent really tried to hard sell the job to me. A complete waste of my time.
My experience of jobs that I get contacted about with messages like "we are struggling to fill this role and if you know anyone... " is simply that they are paying under market rates.
I happened to know a good recruiter (in the UK) who was an ex-programmer and did some filtering and found us a couple of good guys.
I have worked in companies and seen CVs come across our desk that were a complete joke. When skills were specifically demanded, they didn't appear. Agencies are often asked to provide 3 CVs, and that's what they'll get - the best 3 CVs they can find.
I also used to get recruiters cold calling me. I'd tell them to send me their card, but if they called me again, before I called them, I'd tear their card up. I found it quite a good way to filter out the cheap salesman types.
Personally, I do a bit of networking for finding people for work now. I keep in regular contact with people. I haven't had to hire technical people, but my lawyer and accountant both came from word-of-mouth. I also now know a lot of great software guys just in case.
But, a fee-paying one that took a "don't be evil" approach to jobs would be a good start. In other words, take payment from employers/recruiters, but certain practises would result in banination. The people you are dealing with have a similar moral outlook to spammers.
Then the recruiter won't even tell you which it is because they are scared that you'll figure out who the client is.
Of course, they'll then use their own name. At which point, you ban them.
Want to set it up? ;)
The weird thing is that the jobs with C# + Oracle + C++ + VB + PHP + COBOL + IDMS + MUMPS + QuickBasic + SSADM + UML + ..... are often some of the worst paying jobs.
The best paying people focus on 4 or 5 core competencies (normally language/database/environment/analysis).
I'm starting to think that such things need a policing mechanism (like if you suspect that a job is fake, you mark them down). It's an even bigger problem when you realise what a bunch of utter lowlifes many recruiters are. They are mostly the worst sort of salesmen, who would sell their grandmother to place someone. I've got a few stories of some of their tactics.
An employer needs to find people who have their approximate skills (because a contractor is a reasonably short term proposition) and have up-to-date availability. The sites I found had consultants who were not available.
Agencies can find people. Even then, don't trust the CVs they give you. Very few agencies do any real screening of skills.
Best of all, use people you know. I've networked a lot, finding people with all sorts of skills, which means I've got a good chance of avoiding agencies.
However, I would never apply for a permanent job with a recruiter. The bottom line is that they want to place you. In some cases, they will do anything to get you to take the job. When you deal direct, if it's not for you, the employer can be cool about it.
The key question is for intellectuals, not engineers. And that is the question of how to travel beyond our current limitations. Once we crack the physics of that, then we can deal with the engineering questions.
The one joy about being on the tube is that people get disconnected. I can't imagine a 5pm tube with lots of people saying "HELLO! I'M ON THE TUBE!" ;)
The alternative is to have a basic rental (say £15/month) and then have to have a separate wifi account and be switching around based on whether I can get a wifi signal with a network that I signed up for £20+/month. Bear in mind that often, I'm not near wifi and need to make a call.
It's not a big enough saving to make it worth it.
The interesting thing is whether wifi will even survive. 3G cards are coming down in price, and are now at a point where they may cost a little more (45+VAT vs 23 inc VAT) the convenience may soon start to outweigh the savings.
To me, this is the issue of "another account". Spending £20+ a month on unlimited wifi that I'm unlikely to completely use, as well as £30 for a GSM phone. I already get about the right amount of calls on my plan.
So, what happens if I'm on the train? Or in a village. Does this roam?
I guess it will work in a town, assuming I've got a hotspot for the network that I've signed up with for a month, and not one of the other providers. In which case, I'll have to sign up again to use their service, all with my easy to use cellphone web browser.
Someone tried something called Rabbit in the UK where people would have to be near a basepoint. The mobile networks offered more flexibility and costs were coming down.
This won't be like Rabbit, but I don't imagine the network providers are quaking in their boots.
However, I already have a business phone. I pay a monthly charge that includes plenty of calls. I'm not going to switch it off completely, so, the saving is marginal. Would an international businessman making hundreds of pounds of calls switch to this? Possibly, but unlikely, and for the same reason that they get to stay in good hotels. Because in the end, making good deals is paramount. Saving a quid a month on calls is a drop in the ocean compared to losing a client because of an unreliable service.