This is a time when the R&B era is over and Hip-hop is on the decline. Traditional Pop music seems to have all but vanished, rock music has never recovered since the 90's and Punk for several years has been hit & miss.
Bingo - this is the first decade where I'll argue we've not had any defining music genre. The 90's were filled with Glam Rock, Grunge, R&B, Hip-Hop and Rap. Music coming out in the 90's was brilliant and creative. Even the 80's had their share of stuff too like electronic music, 80's alternative, pop, and the birth of glam rock.
Early 2000's we saw Nu-Metal but that's about it that I can think of, and it really spilled over from the late 90's...
That said there's still some great music coming out nowadays but it seems more from Indie labels than from the majour record labels.
C'mon - did you really expect the media to finally "get" the difference between an energy storage medium (batteries, hydrogen, compressed air) and an energy source* (Oil, solar, nuclear)?
So your definition of a storage medium is one where we create it, such as hydrogen, compared to one we extract from the earth like Hydrocarbons?
Interesting distinction... You had me thinking when you put oil in with energy sources and hydrogen in with storage medium...
Do you seriously think IT puts these policies in place just for the fun of it?
Sometimes yes. It justifies their presence although there's no proof that blocking that site really benefited your company.
If you accidentally brought down the network and cost the company $10,000
If your entire network is so pathetically weak that a file from a third party email company ( who does their own virus checking btw ) can bring down your whole LAN, then there's bigger issues than that user checking their email. You're directing blame at the wrong person. You're a shitty sysadmin, and blocking yahoo mail is simply a knee-jerk reaction by an IT person to save face when in reality there's security issues on the LAN that need to be resolved first.
Wow. Right now, I really wish there was a moderation option for "-1, Way Too Full of Himself."
Not really - he has a point... If you're considered a good employee that gets his work done, why should anyone care if you slack once in a while? I sometimes find myself slacking off on/. (irony here?).
Doesn't make me a bad employee unless I miss targets for stuff. GP is bang on. If I get stuff done, why should IT care if I waste some time checking my personal email?
And no, the whole "it can bring vbs files to us" is crap because those can just as easily be downloaded off any site, and on top of that these email providers do some pretty good scans on their own too, and furthermore why do you, as a sysadmin not run good antivirus on your lan anyway?
We have had those moderately bright chaps get fired for doing it as well.
Yeah, like that's a great reason to can a person... Violating the ego of the IT department...
Blocking third party email sites is a superficial solution that sounds good on paper but in reality the only benefit is that company time isn't wasted checking hotmail/gmail/etc... All those mail providers already filter out bad content. Hell Yahoo is quite vocal about their use of Norton to scan attachments.
And the BS about people being able to email off company data - that's bullshit too... Unless you block all http/post requests any data can be sent off your network anyway...
The only problem I've had is with opera, and that's because they've called something a security hole that isn't.
My bank, upon logging in, opens a frame in a subdomain and that frame has some javascript in it to mvoe the top frame too. Kludgy yes, but neither FF nor IE call it a hole. Opera insists that allowing subdomains is too hard, and that it's the banks fault.
So I stopped using Opera:)
They should have coded it to allow subdomains to redirect.
FWIW, my bank lets me pay my electric, gas, credit cards, and even property taxes... I haven't mailed off a payment in over two years - it's all done online...
I feel your plight though, but still, if you bark enough and explain that you have a Mac and that the project manager who made the choice to only support IE is a tool who's living in 1999...
Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core? I don't like them and it is currently impossible to turn them completely off
Then don't use them?? Seriously, why not hit ctrl-n instead of ctrl-t?
Maybe taking it out won't make the code base any more efficient - it's like comparing sdi vs mdi.
You're probably the only user on the plant who hates tabs, as it's a fewture native now to IE, Opera and FF. As well as epiphany, Konqueror and Safari.
You're an island amongst yourself. If there was a desire for a non-tabbed browser, then someone would have forked firefox to have one.
How about the FBI while you're at it? Sure we can protect you from terrorists, but we need to be able to spy on you at will without court intereference.
Same thing isn't it? They've been given a carte-blance to do as they will when investigating without checks and balances.
My wife has two degrees - a BA in Geography and a B.Ed. Only a B.Ed. is required to work as a teacher here in Canada. My opinion's a bit biased. She's gone to considerable expense to get her degrees. She gets constantly kicked around by school boards here because of her lack of experience - they pass her applications on by for on-call positions - 20k/yr jobs that have no guarantees or benefits.
They make her fight her ass off for a job that starts her off at $15 an hour. Note that here, much like the US the state has a virtual monopoly on teaching and employs more than 98% of the teachers. Now granted they can top off at 60k/yr after they get a Master's degree. However if my wife were to have a master's degree now she can kiss her teaching career goodbye. A typical teacher without grad school will max out I believe here at 48k.
On top of that, my wife was unable to find work in the public system. The Catholic schools require her get a letter from a priest, so that's out. She's had to take a job in a private school for muslim kids teaching in an environment she hates, for pay less than a greeter at Wal-Mart. She earns $125 a day, and works 10 hours.
So you write:
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
Which real world? In any trade that belongs to a union, people are paid on seniority. In the IT industry, someone with 10 or 20 years of experience [should] be getting paid better than a brand new MCSE.
Do we pay teachers on how well the kids review them, how well parents review them, or how good the grades are of the kids? Do you pay teachers based on a state decided examination, where perhaps the state sets the exam so hard that no teacher gets paid well? All of those will result in shitty results, and I don't blame teachers for getting pissy.
Teachers have the hardest jobs. They have to answer to parents, students and school boards alike for fucked up kids. No one likes to blame anyone but the teacher - not the parents or the students themselves. So next time your teacher's union goes on strike, do them a favour and get out and support them. They have a hell of a tough job that's thankless with shitty pay.
I hear people lay claims that teachers ask for too much, and that they should do the job for a simple love for teaching.
IANAL first off, but I have had disputes in the past with employers that made me sign bogus agreements - stuff like signing away accrued vacation days in order to continue employment. I took those up with a lawyer who laughed off the agreement and told me to go ahead and sign it because it's unenforceable anyway and you can sue their asses off plus interest and court costs.
(1) Yes, EULAs are generally enforceable. It's still not tested yet here in Canada where I'm at. From what I've understood, Canada and the UK share similar common law, and a contract only exists where the money has changed hands. Under contract law the Ginger Beer case would have failed because there was no contractual relationship between the manufacturer and the purchaser of the soda. EULA != Contract as far as English Common law is concerned.
(2) To what statute are you referring? To my knowledge, there's no general reason you can't sign away privacy rights.
See my point below about statutes trumping contract. Again, I'm not certain about privacy rights in the US, but in Canada there's Privacy legislation that prevents that.
(3) Statute does not always trump contract. People often waive statutory rights in a contract.
It seems to me that it is unethical to have a consumer product license that is unreadable/unparsable to an average consumer. The "madman" here would be anyone who thought that such nonsense was an enforceable contract.
The problem here is that courts have ruled on this in the past... At least in Canada, if you have the ability to read you can read the terms of the contract yourself or pay a lawyer to explain it to you.
Not being able to understand a contract is not grounds to get a contract thrown out...
Although like someone else has pointed out, the EULA in Canada is untested yet. I'd tell microsoft to lick my balls if they ever waved an EULA in my face. Hell they can lick my balls anyway;)
You chose to install the Windows Update ActiveX control, didn't you? And you clicked "I agree" when it told you it could send this info to Microsoft, didn't you? So why would you be angry when it does exactly that? Perhaps people need to read the licensing agreements they agree to before agreeing to them, instead of just clicking "yes, I agree" like a madman.
Okay, despite your trollish comments, I'll bite.
1. WGA != Windows Update. RTFA. 2. Has the validity of an EULA ever been tested? AFAIK, an EULA cannot violate your privacy rights, even if you sign those away. Argue as you like, statute always trumps contracts. 3. Microsoft releases an OS that's broken and tells you the only way they'll fix it is if you'll subject yourself to their privacy terms. Not freaking cool. My copy of Windows is paid for, but that doesn't mean I want them invading my privacy.
Ever installed XP without any service packs? Do you know how many minutes it takes before the machine is pwn3d? IMO that's not a functional OS any more.
Ever tried getting that refund from your hardware manufacturer for the part of your purchase that went to Microsoft? It's a freaking pain in the arse, and one where you have to usually drag a vendor to small claims court to get your money.
. I mean, does the EU really want to open the Pandora's Box of letting a country like Turkey in?
The prospect of EU membership has made Turkey evolve quite a bit in her respect for human rights. It'd be a slap in the face to reject Turkey, however this is a slap in the face to the EU's stance on freedom of expression as well.
And btw, both my parents are Greek. I myself am pretty ambivalent myself to Turkish people, but many Greeks are not. Turkish people committed many atrocities against Greeks ( and many others including Armenians ). I can see why Greece in particular still begrudges Turkey and opposes Turkey's membership to the EU.
Although both sides have come a long way - with the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece a few years ago, both sides were wise enough to put aside differences and rush to each other's aid.
I think the path the EU is taking is great... Dubya should take a look and see what the EU has accomplished so far in Turkey.
I didn't have to make sure it was aligned correctly, there was no socket parts that would raise the copper and disable it from cooling the CPU. There wasn't any huge force involved fastening the CPU, just align it with the 4 holes on the motherboard and push the locks until they clicked.
No thermal grease? When did we stop having to do that???
Plus, from what I've understood Dell and other OEM manufacturers make sure there's a really nice fit with the heat sink - I'm not 100% if they lap them or not, but from what I've noticed they seem to just cool better...
Yes but you're also forced to run 32-bit Firefox then.
Truth is, it's a blunder by Adobe. The OSX version of flash is already 64 bit, and I'd bet there's lots of code that the Adobe devs can swipe.
Like I said, Adobe doesn't give a fart about Linux unless it has to. They knew that not providing a linux version of flash would piss off sysadmins and web developers, so they did it ( but took their sweet assed time to do it )
I'm consistently surprised that Adobe, in particular, hasn't gone balls-to-the-wall to try to make CS work on some subset of Linux.
Adobe barely goes balls to the cubicle divider to bring flash for Linux and even then you only get a 32-bit version, tough shit if you run in a 64bit desktop environment.
They know us Linux users are cheap goofs who most are probably just going to pirate Photoshop anyway...
But what about the "ribbon". Surely you find that a new technology. There's NO WAY anyone could consider THAT an annoying format.
Actually as stupid as I think the Ribbon is, I've heard some pretty positive feedback from users actually using it, claiming that it increases their productivity. How I don't know, but still...
Honestly, I thought the OSX dock was kind of stupid, but lots of users love it.
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This is a time when the R&B era is over and Hip-hop is on the decline. Traditional Pop music seems to have all but vanished, rock music has never recovered since the 90's and Punk for several years has been hit & miss.
Bingo - this is the first decade where I'll argue we've not had any defining music genre. The 90's were filled with Glam Rock, Grunge, R&B, Hip-Hop and Rap. Music coming out in the 90's was brilliant and creative. Even the 80's had their share of stuff too like electronic music, 80's alternative, pop, and the birth of glam rock.
Early 2000's we saw Nu-Metal but that's about it that I can think of, and it really spilled over from the late 90's...
That said there's still some great music coming out nowadays but it seems more from Indie labels than from the majour record labels.
C'mon - did you really expect the media to finally "get" the difference between an energy storage medium (batteries, hydrogen, compressed air) and an energy source* (Oil, solar, nuclear)?
So your definition of a storage medium is one where we create it, such as hydrogen, compared to one we extract from the earth like Hydrocarbons?
Interesting distinction... You had me thinking when you put oil in with energy sources and hydrogen in with storage medium...
Do you seriously think IT puts these policies in place just for the fun of it?
Sometimes yes. It justifies their presence although there's no proof that blocking that site really benefited your company.
If you accidentally brought down the network and cost the company $10,000
If your entire network is so pathetically weak that a file from a third party email company ( who does their own virus checking btw ) can bring down your whole LAN, then there's bigger issues than that user checking their email. You're directing blame at the wrong person. You're a shitty sysadmin, and blocking yahoo mail is simply a knee-jerk reaction by an IT person to save face when in reality there's security issues on the LAN that need to be resolved first.
Wow. Right now, I really wish there was a moderation option for "-1, Way Too Full of Himself."
/. (irony here?).
Not really - he has a point... If you're considered a good employee that gets his work done, why should anyone care if you slack once in a while? I sometimes find myself slacking off on
Doesn't make me a bad employee unless I miss targets for stuff. GP is bang on. If I get stuff done, why should IT care if I waste some time checking my personal email?
And no, the whole "it can bring vbs files to us" is crap because those can just as easily be downloaded off any site, and on top of that these email providers do some pretty good scans on their own too, and furthermore why do you, as a sysadmin not run good antivirus on your lan anyway?
We have had those moderately bright chaps get fired for doing it as well.
Yeah, like that's a great reason to can a person... Violating the ego of the IT department...
Blocking third party email sites is a superficial solution that sounds good on paper but in reality the only benefit is that company time isn't wasted checking hotmail/gmail/etc... All those mail providers already filter out bad content. Hell Yahoo is quite vocal about their use of Norton to scan attachments.
And the BS about people being able to email off company data - that's bullshit too... Unless you block all http/post requests any data can be sent off your network anyway...
The only problem I've had is with opera, and that's because they've called something a security hole that isn't.
:)
My bank, upon logging in, opens a frame in a subdomain and that frame has some javascript in it to mvoe the top frame too. Kludgy yes, but neither FF nor IE call it a hole. Opera insists that allowing subdomains is too hard, and that it's the banks fault.
So I stopped using Opera
They should have coded it to allow subdomains to redirect.
FWIW, my bank lets me pay my electric, gas, credit cards, and even property taxes... I haven't mailed off a payment in over two years - it's all done online...
I feel your plight though, but still, if you bark enough and explain that you have a Mac and that the project manager who made the choice to only support IE is a tool who's living in 1999...
Yes, for example, could we get tabs out of the core? I don't like them and it is currently impossible to turn them completely off
Then don't use them?? Seriously, why not hit ctrl-n instead of ctrl-t?
Maybe taking it out won't make the code base any more efficient - it's like comparing sdi vs mdi.
You're probably the only user on the plant who hates tabs, as it's a fewture native now to IE, Opera and FF. As well as epiphany, Konqueror and Safari.
You're an island amongst yourself. If there was a desire for a non-tabbed browser, then someone would have forked firefox to have one.
paying bills, etc
I dump my bank if it doesn't support Firefox.
Honestly, it's become stupid to write IE only sites, as you're now alienating 20% of the population...
if a site requires IE it's just ignorant project managers that made it so.
Besides, forge your headers - the site will probably work anyway in Firefox.
How about the FBI while you're at it? Sure we can protect you from terrorists, but we need to be able to spy on you at will without court intereference.
Same thing isn't it? They've been given a carte-blance to do as they will when investigating without checks and balances.
Greeting at walmart pays 12.50 an hour, wow, sign me up.
:)
I was rounding up
Okay, I'm going to grand-stand for a minute.
My wife has two degrees - a BA in Geography and a B.Ed. Only a B.Ed. is required to work as a teacher here in Canada. My opinion's a bit biased. She's gone to considerable expense to get her degrees. She gets constantly kicked around by school boards here because of her lack of experience - they pass her applications on by for on-call positions - 20k/yr jobs that have no guarantees or benefits.
They make her fight her ass off for a job that starts her off at $15 an hour. Note that here, much like the US the state has a virtual monopoly on teaching and employs more than 98% of the teachers. Now granted they can top off at 60k/yr after they get a Master's degree. However if my wife were to have a master's degree now she can kiss her teaching career goodbye. A typical teacher without grad school will max out I believe here at 48k.
On top of that, my wife was unable to find work in the public system. The Catholic schools require her get a letter from a priest, so that's out. She's had to take a job in a private school for muslim kids teaching in an environment she hates, for pay less than a greeter at Wal-Mart. She earns $125 a day, and works 10 hours.
So you write:
I don't see why paying people based on merit (versus seniority) is unacceptable. That's how most of the real world works.
Which real world? In any trade that belongs to a union, people are paid on seniority. In the IT industry, someone with 10 or 20 years of experience [should] be getting paid better than a brand new MCSE.
Do we pay teachers on how well the kids review them, how well parents review them, or how good the grades are of the kids? Do you pay teachers based on a state decided examination, where perhaps the state sets the exam so hard that no teacher gets paid well? All of those will result in shitty results, and I don't blame teachers for getting pissy.
Teachers have the hardest jobs. They have to answer to parents, students and school boards alike for fucked up kids. No one likes to blame anyone but the teacher - not the parents or the students themselves. So next time your teacher's union goes on strike, do them a favour and get out and support them. They have a hell of a tough job that's thankless with shitty pay.
I hear people lay claims that teachers ask for too much, and that they should do the job for a simple love for teaching.
Jean Grey's story line and death was one of the best I read.
Yeah - that and Batman: A Death in the Family was one of my favourites.
Watching Robin die was actually kind of satisfying.
$600 is the current and near future price. This "feature" will be on after the price drops.
Just to point out that Sony's been saying there won't be any PS3 price drops for a year.
Not that I believe anything that comes out of Sony...
IANAL first off, but I have had disputes in the past with employers that made me sign bogus agreements - stuff like signing away accrued vacation days in order to continue employment. I took those up with a lawyer who laughed off the agreement and told me to go ahead and sign it because it's unenforceable anyway and you can sue their asses off plus interest and court costs.
(1) Yes, EULAs are generally enforceable.
It's still not tested yet here in Canada where I'm at. From what I've understood, Canada and the UK share similar common law, and a contract only exists where the money has changed hands. Under contract law the Ginger Beer case would have failed because there was no contractual relationship between the manufacturer and the purchaser of the soda. EULA != Contract as far as English Common law is concerned.
(2) To what statute are you referring? To my knowledge, there's no general reason you can't sign away privacy rights.
See my point below about statutes trumping contract. Again, I'm not certain about privacy rights in the US, but in Canada there's Privacy legislation that prevents that.
(3) Statute does not always trump contract. People often waive statutory rights in a contract.
This article from Yale would suggest otherwise:
This article from Yale Law seems to refute your assertion
Apache is not an operating system. And you are about the last person to be calling somebody else a troll.
Are you responding to me or the post above you?
My post never mentions Apache and the post above you never uses the word Troll. I'm so confused!
It seems to me that it is unethical to have a consumer product license that is unreadable/unparsable to an average consumer. The "madman" here would be anyone who thought that such nonsense was an enforceable contract.
;)
The problem here is that courts have ruled on this in the past... At least in Canada, if you have the ability to read you can read the terms of the contract yourself or pay a lawyer to explain it to you.
Not being able to understand a contract is not grounds to get a contract thrown out...
Although like someone else has pointed out, the EULA in Canada is untested yet. I'd tell microsoft to lick my balls if they ever waved an EULA in my face. Hell they can lick my balls anyway
You chose to install the Windows Update ActiveX control, didn't you? And you clicked "I agree" when it told you it could send this info to Microsoft, didn't you? So why would you be angry when it does exactly that? Perhaps people need to read the licensing agreements they agree to before agreeing to them, instead of just clicking "yes, I agree" like a madman.
Okay, despite your trollish comments, I'll bite.
1. WGA != Windows Update. RTFA.
2. Has the validity of an EULA ever been tested? AFAIK, an EULA cannot violate your privacy rights, even if you sign those away. Argue as you like, statute always trumps contracts.
3. Microsoft releases an OS that's broken and tells you the only way they'll fix it is if you'll subject yourself to their privacy terms. Not freaking cool. My copy of Windows is paid for, but that doesn't mean I want them invading my privacy.
Ever installed XP without any service packs? Do you know how many minutes it takes before the machine is pwn3d? IMO that's not a functional OS any more.
Ever tried getting that refund from your hardware manufacturer for the part of your purchase that went to Microsoft? It's a freaking pain in the arse, and one where you have to usually drag a vendor to small claims court to get your money.
and find that RealPlayer and Adobe Reader also phone home
All the old Macromedia studio products also phone home too...
That means Adobe Dreamweaver etc...
anada is full of flappy headed fart jokers, plus a few seal clubbing, back bacon eating French Canadians.
Flappy headed fart joker? I've never heard us generalized like that before... Beer drinking hosers, definitely eh. But not flappy headed far joker...
. I mean, does the EU really want to open the Pandora's Box of letting a country like Turkey in?
The prospect of EU membership has made Turkey evolve quite a bit in her respect for human rights. It'd be a slap in the face to reject Turkey, however this is a slap in the face to the EU's stance on freedom of expression as well.
And btw, both my parents are Greek. I myself am pretty ambivalent myself to Turkish people, but many Greeks are not. Turkish people committed many atrocities against Greeks ( and many others including Armenians ). I can see why Greece in particular still begrudges Turkey and opposes Turkey's membership to the EU.
Although both sides have come a long way - with the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece a few years ago, both sides were wise enough to put aside differences and rush to each other's aid.
I think the path the EU is taking is great... Dubya should take a look and see what the EU has accomplished so far in Turkey.
I didn't have to make sure it was aligned correctly, there was no socket parts that would raise the copper and disable it from cooling the CPU. There wasn't any huge force involved fastening the CPU, just align it with the 4 holes on the motherboard and push the locks until they clicked.
No thermal grease? When did we stop having to do that???
Plus, from what I've understood Dell and other OEM manufacturers make sure there's a really nice fit with the heat sink - I'm not 100% if they lap them or not, but from what I've noticed they seem to just cool better...
Yes but you're also forced to run 32-bit Firefox then.
Truth is, it's a blunder by Adobe. The OSX version of flash is already 64 bit, and I'd bet there's lots of code that the Adobe devs can swipe.
Like I said, Adobe doesn't give a fart about Linux unless it has to. They knew that not providing a linux version of flash would piss off sysadmins and web developers, so they did it ( but took their sweet assed time to do it )
I'm consistently surprised that Adobe, in particular, hasn't gone balls-to-the-wall to try to make CS work on some subset of Linux.
Adobe barely goes balls to the cubicle divider to bring flash for Linux and even then you only get a 32-bit version, tough shit if you run in a 64bit desktop environment.
They know us Linux users are cheap goofs who most are probably just going to pirate Photoshop anyway...
But what about the "ribbon". Surely you find that a new technology. There's NO WAY anyone could consider THAT an annoying format.
Actually as stupid as I think the Ribbon is, I've heard some pretty positive feedback from users actually using it, claiming that it increases their productivity. How I don't know, but still...
Honestly, I thought the OSX dock was kind of stupid, but lots of users love it.