Actually, I wanted to try out a few things fairly early on in the proceedings. But said employer wouldn't pay for a thing unless and until it had been recommended by someone else, and this was the kind of place where you probably wouldn't be allowed to provide your own keyboard and mouse.
Came out of it OK in the end, they let me take the keyboard & trackball with me when I left and I still use them today.
This is the UK, where we supposedly have strong health and safety legislation. My employer's compliance department looked carefully at their legal requirements, concluded that all they had to do was "recommend I see my doctor" and they were off the hook. Even if my doctor said "I can't help you, you'll have to speak to on a private basis" - tough.
Fortunately, my line manager (and his line manager) had rather more sense than that. They were nice enough to pay for me to speak to a few people who were rather more helpful - they put it through the books and decided to ignore the compliance manager. After a few hundred pounds and much messing around getting to see these people, that's essentially what they said. "Make changes to your environment until you're happy - different keyboards, mice, chairs, desks, screen height etc. can all have an impact and are all the kind of changes you should be considering. Even once happy, you should still move things around a bit occasionally so the parts of your body you've been using have a chance to recover".
Your argument sounds like "It's never affected me so therefore it's pointless".
Bullshit.
The problem with a normal mouse is that it encourages you to do a lot of sideways movement from your wrist, whereas the correct technique is supposed to be "move your entire forearm to move the mouse".
I had intense pain in the wrists, but a trackball solved that by changing the joints which do the moving to the fingers - which are designed to move around all day in many more directions than the wrist is. I'd expect that with a vertical mouse, the "sideways" movement becomes a "move wrist up and down" movement (albeit turned 90 degrees in the Z-axis), thus substantially reducing the sideways wrist movement.
I'd like to believe it's all secured and encrypted thoroughly, and transported over a network with no physical connection to the Internet. However, I've been told (don't know how accurate it is, so take with as much salt as you think it needs) that at least one country's banks have used plain, unsecured telephone lines.
Firstly, let me say that I agree with more or less everything you said.
Though you did miss out the bit that the wording of most commercial software licenses is incredibly hard to follow - I sincerely believe that 90% of them are written by lawyers who are briefed to make sure it's practically impossible to understand them, much less follow them to the letter.
However, there remains just one practical problem: IT works for the business, not the other way around.
When you have a free, real alternative to Sage MMS (which handles multi-user, multi-company, multi-currency accounting and payroll, following the legal/tax requirements of the country or countries of my choice), a free alternative to Photoshop which won't have artists baying for my blood (unfortunately that rules out the Gimp, despite the fact that it's perfectly capable 99% of the time), a free, real alternative to the combination of Exchange and Outlook which integrates with PDAs and does not suck big floppy donkey dick AND a free, real alternative to all the other boring as hell business related software that you or I in IT do not understand, but is nevertheless demanded by various departments within the company, let me know.
I don't debate for one minute that a migration is possible. However, to paint Free software as being a panacea is in my opinion neither wise nor correct.
No, they are teaching companies what to do to make it look like they are complying with the laws when they have no intention of following the spirit of the law itself.
Plenty of companies do everything in their power to do exactly that - comply with the laws to the letter yet only follow the spirit when it suits them. It's not exactly an unusual business practice.
This is, after all, what corporate lawyers are there for - not to tell you what you can do without breaking the law, but rather to tell you how you can do what you want while remaining within the letter of the law.
They (sometimes) send an inspector - who has no legal right of entry and no powers of arrest - they can only come in if you let them in - around, if s/he spots a TV but your property isn't licensed they report you and you get taken to court. At no point do you get arrested. It's treated as a civil case.
As often as not though, they assume every household in the country has a TV and try and prosecute anyone without a license without checking to see if you need one first.
If you were let the TV license inspector in and then start threatening them with violence - that's rather different. But even then, you'd be done for assault rather than not having a TV licence.
I guess this would fall under "attempting to police the police" (which IS needed in a lot of cases) and is one of the actions listed in the FBI JTTF pamphlet as being the action of a "potential domestic terrorist."
This is bullshit.
Not at all. Clearly the thought of being filmed strikes terror into the heart of the authorities. A terrorist, by definition, tries to achieve their aims by causing terror.
Try owning a TV, openly without paying your fee. Defend your right to own it without paying, to the point of offering physical resistance with a weapon to any who try to deny you your right. If you are competent enough, I guarantee it will be enforced at gunpoint.
I guarantee it won't.
They can take you to court, the court can give you a whacking great fine, the court can send bailiffs around to your house to take items to pay the fine but at no point will it be done at gunpoint.
As a UK citizen, I wish I could see it helping. But I can't. We have more CCTV cameras than practically anywhere else in the world yet still, when Jean Charles de Menzes was shot - on a busy public underground train in front of many witnesses, the police essentially got away with it.
For days after, the media was reporting complete rubbish as "facts" - the biggest thing they latched onto was "He was wearing a coat in summer and was therefore suspicious" - even though he wasn't.
That's not the only case, either. On several occasions where police brutality has been suspected, the CCTV footage was mysteriously "unavailable" due to technical breakdown.
You'd think in a nation festooned with CCTV cameras we'd have them working reasonably reliably by now.
On a similar note, I am told that in the UK, when the policeman says "Anything you say will be taken down...", the correct response is "Please don't hit me again, Officer".
Technically it isn't - BIND 9 won't let you have host names with underscores in unless you explicitly configure it as such, there's an RFC somewhere (I forget which one) and at least one BSD blocks then in gethostbyname().
I'd be astonished if you could get Win95 to boot on anything vaguely modern - it was full of timing issues on very fast systems. Don't know if the same was true of 3.1
My opinion is that the inventor of such a device would ptobably find themselves dead and the device destroyed in short order - too many people in high places would be permanently disrupted for them to just sit by and let it happen.
The only way I can see it working is as part of a communist society. Communism is in theory a wonderful idea. Nobody ever goes hungry or cold, everyone has all that they need - but human greed breeds corruption and breaks communism before it can really get started. When everyone can be as greedy as they like without consequence to the rest of society, suddenly it could work.
Actually, the point of my post wasn't to make you think a particular idea at all.
What I'm trying to do is encourage you to consider the possible implications of what the device could do.
Most of the replies so far have been fairly shallow - along the lines of "it would be great - nobody would ever need to work again" - well, that's as maybe, but whether you like it or not we live in a society based on capitalism. You think the likes of Ford or General Motors would take the invention of such a device lying down?
How about drug dealers? I can't see them being too impressed at the thought of their customers never having to buy anything from them ever again.
What about terrorist groups? Now, I'm not trying to push the "terrorists OMG think of our safety!" button, but there's no denying that a machine which, given a small quantity of weapons and explosives, can quickly and easily turn it into a large quantity of weapons and explosives would be most attractive to people of such a mind.
How about governments? Most of what they do is concerned with moving money in various directions - if you can literally make your own money, that system is completely broken.
What about healthcare? The healthcare system of every western nation depends on there being a group of people who know how to fix injuries and treat illnesses, and someone being prepared to pay them. If the economy's collapsed, you'll probably find there are suddenly a lot fewer doctors and nurses.
Place lots of power in the hands of outsourced vendors (ie. private companies) yet don't hold them legally accountable for their products.
Don't bother testing any of the systems - that's what the pilot is for, isn't it?
Don't put anyone with any technical expertise in place on the government side of the supplier/customer relationship.
In short, such monumental managerial incompetence as to make me question if there are darker forces at work. I know you shouldn't ascribe to malice that which may be attributable to stupidity, but really, is anyone over the age of 12 that naive?
Scarcity is a great evil, if it can be abolished it must.
OK, let me run a thought experiment by you.
Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that I invent a cheap 3-dimensional copying device which produces perfect copies of anything placed in it. Even down to the material used to produce the copy, its strength and its colour. This device can be made and sold cheaply enough to market it to the general public, and it's not really possible to spot the difference between the copies are originals.
Note that it doesn't allow you to create an object from scratch (so it's a bit different to computer software in that respect, and thus the ability for individuals to innovate with it is substantially curtailed). Considering the economy as a whole (including the number of people currently employed in manufacturing), Is it a good or a bad thing?
Epson printers (and hence the all-in-one machines based on them) have substantially less intelligence in the cartridge than HP, Lexmark or Canon and are thus generally far cheaper for 3rd party inks.
The only snag is that the printhead isn't built into the cartridge and can (if not used regularly) be prone to clogging.
Though to be honest, I am of the opinion that unless you have a very particular need for an inkjet printer today (and I'm hard pressed to think what that need might be...), you're a fool to buy one.
The part of the disc reserved for the disc's security keys are not burnable in retail DVD-R(w) discs (and even if they were I would be astonished if most DVD burners would burn those sectors).
I never studied business, and I'm no expert, but I was of the understanding that "make life more difficult for your legitimate customers than it is for those who would take your product without paying" is generally considered a big no-no, regardless of if you're selling loaves of bread, electronics or DVDs.
They don't intend to enforce it against you the individual who has enough clue to be able to do this for themselves.
I think they've looked at the Kaliedescape product and the video iPod and reckon that within a few years, such items could be as commonplace as the DVD player is today. And as soon as the movie can be seamlessly, easily copied from the medium it's distributed on by even the least technical person, the studios start to lose control of what happens to it - something which the MPAA appear to be absolutely terrified of.
The idea of this is to prevent such products ever hitting the marketplace, and thus maintain control.
Really? So with Vista, you can't just copy data across to a USB hard disk and then copy back at a later date should you need to?
(yes, I know what you really mean, but Windows has always lagged behind in terms of "tools included which do real, useful stuff like, oh, I don't know, BACK UP YOUR STUFF".)
We already do. Various Windows updates (including at least one security update) have come with a separate EULA which is different to that which shipped with Windows.
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Actually, I wanted to try out a few things fairly early on in the proceedings. But said employer wouldn't pay for a thing unless and until it had been recommended by someone else, and this was the kind of place where you probably wouldn't be allowed to provide your own keyboard and mouse.
Came out of it OK in the end, they let me take the keyboard & trackball with me when I left and I still use them today.
A few years ago, I had exactly this problem.
This is the UK, where we supposedly have strong health and safety legislation. My employer's compliance department looked carefully at their legal requirements, concluded that all they had to do was "recommend I see my doctor" and they were off the hook. Even if my doctor said "I can't help you, you'll have to speak to on a private basis" - tough.
Fortunately, my line manager (and his line manager) had rather more sense than that. They were nice enough to pay for me to speak to a few people who were rather more helpful - they put it through the books and decided to ignore the compliance manager. After a few hundred pounds and much messing around getting to see these people, that's essentially what they said. "Make changes to your environment until you're happy - different keyboards, mice, chairs, desks, screen height etc. can all have an impact and are all the kind of changes you should be considering. Even once happy, you should still move things around a bit occasionally so the parts of your body you've been using have a chance to recover".
Your argument sounds like "It's never affected me so therefore it's pointless".
Bullshit.
The problem with a normal mouse is that it encourages you to do a lot of sideways movement from your wrist, whereas the correct technique is supposed to be "move your entire forearm to move the mouse".
I had intense pain in the wrists, but a trackball solved that by changing the joints which do the moving to the fingers - which are designed to move around all day in many more directions than the wrist is. I'd expect that with a vertical mouse, the "sideways" movement becomes a "move wrist up and down" movement (albeit turned 90 degrees in the Z-axis), thus substantially reducing the sideways wrist movement.
I think it depends on the bank.
I'd like to believe it's all secured and encrypted thoroughly, and transported over a network with no physical connection to the Internet. However, I've been told (don't know how accurate it is, so take with as much salt as you think it needs) that at least one country's banks have used plain, unsecured telephone lines.
Firstly, let me say that I agree with more or less everything you said.
Though you did miss out the bit that the wording of most commercial software licenses is incredibly hard to follow - I sincerely believe that 90% of them are written by lawyers who are briefed to make sure it's practically impossible to understand them, much less follow them to the letter.
However, there remains just one practical problem: IT works for the business, not the other way around.
When you have a free, real alternative to Sage MMS (which handles multi-user, multi-company, multi-currency accounting and payroll, following the legal/tax requirements of the country or countries of my choice), a free alternative to Photoshop which won't have artists baying for my blood (unfortunately that rules out the Gimp, despite the fact that it's perfectly capable 99% of the time), a free, real alternative to the combination of Exchange and Outlook which integrates with PDAs and does not suck big floppy donkey dick AND a free, real alternative to all the other boring as hell business related software that you or I in IT do not understand, but is nevertheless demanded by various departments within the company, let me know.
I don't debate for one minute that a migration is possible. However, to paint Free software as being a panacea is in my opinion neither wise nor correct.
No, they are teaching companies what to do to make it look like they are complying with the laws when they have no intention of following the spirit of the law itself.
Plenty of companies do everything in their power to do exactly that - comply with the laws to the letter yet only follow the spirit when it suits them. It's not exactly an unusual business practice.
This is, after all, what corporate lawyers are there for - not to tell you what you can do without breaking the law, but rather to tell you how you can do what you want while remaining within the letter of the law.
ICBW, but if memory serves people were saying similar things about the Dock when Mac OS X 10.0 was in development.
I'm pretty sure they're not saying that now.
But they don't try and take your TV away.
They (sometimes) send an inspector - who has no legal right of entry and no powers of arrest - they can only come in if you let them in - around, if s/he spots a TV but your property isn't licensed they report you and you get taken to court. At no point do you get arrested. It's treated as a civil case.
As often as not though, they assume every household in the country has a TV and try and prosecute anyone without a license without checking to see if you need one first.
If you were let the TV license inspector in and then start threatening them with violence - that's rather different. But even then, you'd be done for assault rather than not having a TV licence.
I guess this would fall under "attempting to police the police" (which IS needed in a lot of cases) and is one of the actions listed in the FBI JTTF pamphlet as being the action of a "potential domestic terrorist."
This is bullshit.
Not at all. Clearly the thought of being filmed strikes terror into the heart of the authorities. A terrorist, by definition, tries to achieve their aims by causing terror.
Try owning a TV, openly without paying your fee. Defend your right to own it without paying, to the point of offering physical resistance with a weapon to any who try to deny you your right. If you are competent enough, I guarantee it will be enforced at gunpoint.
I guarantee it won't.
They can take you to court, the court can give you a whacking great fine, the court can send bailiffs around to your house to take items to pay the fine but at no point will it be done at gunpoint.
As a UK citizen, I wish I could see it helping. But I can't. We have more CCTV cameras than practically anywhere else in the world yet still, when Jean Charles de Menzes was shot - on a busy public underground train in front of many witnesses, the police essentially got away with it.
For days after, the media was reporting complete rubbish as "facts" - the biggest thing they latched onto was "He was wearing a coat in summer and was therefore suspicious" - even though he wasn't.
That's not the only case, either. On several occasions where police brutality has been suspected, the CCTV footage was mysteriously "unavailable" due to technical breakdown.
You'd think in a nation festooned with CCTV cameras we'd have them working reasonably reliably by now.
On a similar note, I am told that in the UK, when the policeman says "Anything you say will be taken down...", the correct response is "Please don't hit me again, Officer".
Technically it isn't - BIND 9 won't let you have host names with underscores in unless you explicitly configure it as such, there's an RFC somewhere (I forget which one) and at least one BSD blocks then in gethostbyname().
I'd be astonished if you could get Win95 to boot on anything vaguely modern - it was full of timing issues on very fast systems. Don't know if the same was true of 3.1
Well, we're all entitled to our opinion.
My opinion is that the inventor of such a device would ptobably find themselves dead and the device destroyed in short order - too many people in high places would be permanently disrupted for them to just sit by and let it happen.
The only way I can see it working is as part of a communist society. Communism is in theory a wonderful idea. Nobody ever goes hungry or cold, everyone has all that they need - but human greed breeds corruption and breaks communism before it can really get started. When everyone can be as greedy as they like without consequence to the rest of society, suddenly it could work.
Actually, the point of my post wasn't to make you think a particular idea at all.
What I'm trying to do is encourage you to consider the possible implications of what the device could do.
Most of the replies so far have been fairly shallow - along the lines of "it would be great - nobody would ever need to work again" - well, that's as maybe, but whether you like it or not we live in a society based on capitalism. You think the likes of Ford or General Motors would take the invention of such a device lying down?
How about drug dealers? I can't see them being too impressed at the thought of their customers never having to buy anything from them ever again.
What about terrorist groups? Now, I'm not trying to push the "terrorists OMG think of our safety!" button, but there's no denying that a machine which, given a small quantity of weapons and explosives, can quickly and easily turn it into a large quantity of weapons and explosives would be most attractive to people of such a mind.
How about governments? Most of what they do is concerned with moving money in various directions - if you can literally make your own money, that system is completely broken.
What about healthcare? The healthcare system of every western nation depends on there being a group of people who know how to fix injuries and treat illnesses, and someone being prepared to pay them. If the economy's collapsed, you'll probably find there are suddenly a lot fewer doctors and nurses.
It sounds like a typical UK government IT scheme:
In short, such monumental managerial incompetence as to make me question if there are darker forces at work. I know you shouldn't ascribe to malice that which may be attributable to stupidity, but really, is anyone over the age of 12 that naive?
Scarcity is a great evil, if it can be abolished it must.
OK, let me run a thought experiment by you.
Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that I invent a cheap 3-dimensional copying device which produces perfect copies of anything placed in it. Even down to the material used to produce the copy, its strength and its colour. This device can be made and sold cheaply enough to market it to the general public, and it's not really possible to spot the difference between the copies are originals.
Note that it doesn't allow you to create an object from scratch (so it's a bit different to computer software in that respect, and thus the ability for individuals to innovate with it is substantially curtailed). Considering the economy as a whole (including the number of people currently employed in manufacturing), Is it a good or a bad thing?
Epson printers (and hence the all-in-one machines based on them) have substantially less intelligence in the cartridge than HP, Lexmark or Canon and are thus generally far cheaper for 3rd party inks.
The only snag is that the printhead isn't built into the cartridge and can (if not used regularly) be prone to clogging.
Though to be honest, I am of the opinion that unless you have a very particular need for an inkjet printer today (and I'm hard pressed to think what that need might be...), you're a fool to buy one.
It's a bigger pain than you imagine.
The part of the disc reserved for the disc's security keys are not burnable in retail DVD-R(w) discs (and even if they were I would be astonished if most DVD burners would burn those sectors).
I never studied business, and I'm no expert, but I was of the understanding that "make life more difficult for your legitimate customers than it is for those who would take your product without paying" is generally considered a big no-no, regardless of if you're selling loaves of bread, electronics or DVDs.
Yeah, but most of them have been complete crap.
They don't intend to enforce it against you the individual who has enough clue to be able to do this for themselves.
I think they've looked at the Kaliedescape product and the video iPod and reckon that within a few years, such items could be as commonplace as the DVD player is today. And as soon as the movie can be seamlessly, easily copied from the medium it's distributed on by even the least technical person, the studios start to lose control of what happens to it - something which the MPAA appear to be absolutely terrified of.
The idea of this is to prevent such products ever hitting the marketplace, and thus maintain control.
Inkjet ink works out to be more expensive, by volume, than the most expensive Bollinger champagne
Agreed. That's why I don't bother refilling ink cartridges with ink any more. I use vintage champagne instead.
The results are disappointing, but I can drink anything that's left over in the "refill kit" after I've finished refilling the cartridge.
Really? So with Vista, you can't just copy data across to a USB hard disk and then copy back at a later date should you need to?
(yes, I know what you really mean, but Windows has always lagged behind in terms of "tools included which do real, useful stuff like, oh, I don't know, BACK UP YOUR STUFF".)
We already do. Various Windows updates (including at least one security update) have come with a separate EULA which is different to that which shipped with Windows.