Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Alas I've already commented in this thread or I'd mod you insightful. But this is exactly the point - it's something Apple fully understands, something that Linux vendors don't seem too sure about and something that Microsoft completely fails to understand.
The job of the operating system is to set everything up so it works then get the hell out of the way so the user can get on with doing what they want. As soon as the OS gets in the way, it's Doing It Wrong.
Somehow or other Microsoft's Office team does seem to have broadly figured that one out - while the new interface to Office does tend to engender feelings of "love it or hate it", at least it was developed with an understanding that people don't buy software in order to spend all day wrestling with the user interface. I would say Win7 is heading in that direction (I actually think there are quite a few significant improvements over XP, though they still haven't grasped the idea that if you can't be sure that everything will JFW, about the worst thing you can do is pretend it JFW and provide no hint anywhere as to why it patently doesn't), but still has a way to go.
Vista was a dog but let's not blame Vista for lost man-hours of innovation - look at your corporate culture and you'll find the problem.
Not a chance without major upheaval in Redmond.
As long as Microsoft is still seen as a good investment (in other words: the stock is either growing or remaining fairly static but returning a good dividend), the investors won't make any serious effort to get Ballmer kicked out - and when was the last time you saw the incumbent CEO who presided over corporate culture going to hell making a serious effort to re-appraise something as fundamental as that? It'd mean admitting that everything he'd stood for for the last 20 years was a load of garbage.
No it doesn't. It requires a simple, mindless process: supply all agents with shielded bags for mobile phones, instruct them that the process for mobile phone evidence is it goes in the special bag and does not come out before it gets to the lab.
And if there's one thing most law enforcement agencies worldwide are extremely good at, it's simple mindless processes.
Had you RTFA, you'd know that this is already in place. It's just that the occasional agent here and there has forgotten to follow it and has sent a device off to the lab without removing the battery and/or putting it in the shielded envelope.
The entire FA is a big fuss about nothing, AFAICT. Even the lab admitted that it happens occasionally but it's not a huge problem.
Canada, the UK and Denmark all have dangerous offender laws that allow indefinite confinement. None of them has anything like the prison population the US does, or locks up 18 year olds forever because they had sex with a girl a few months younger than they are (I don't believe that's even mildly illegal in any of the three).
It's certainly illegal in the UK, and if the age difference is more than a few years, "I didn't know they were underage" is not a defence. Though it's unlikely two 15 year olds would be prosecuted because prosecution is only meant to happen when it's "in the public interest".
How can we best prevent Joe Perp from becoming Joe Recidivist. Sure, locking him away for life is one option, but far from the best one. I fear that all it teaches other potential perpetrators is "don't get caught".
Purely out of curiosity, how efficient is your police force at finding Joe Perp?
Reason I ask is that here in the UK we also have a huge recidivism problem. I've heard it said before this is because criminals aren't afraid of punishment because they don't think it's going to happen. It's not going to happen because they don't think they'll get caught.
I looked at the clear-up rates of my own local police force, and frankly I was forced to conclude that the criminals probably have a point.
Maybe it means something different in the US, but in the UK (and I imagine much of Europe, since most European countries have similar labour laws), "put employee B on warning" has a specific meaning which shouldn't be taken lightly.
It implies that a record is taken of this warning and it may have a significant impact in future disciplinary investigations.
It follows from this that a vindictive woman can get a male colleague sacked simply by making an accusation of (completely fictional) sexual harassment. Even if it doesn't work the first time, if the allegation is repeated a few months later it probably will because now the person she's accusing has a record with HR.
(I'm not saying that no HR department would wind up doing something like that - I'm sure it's happened, and more than once - but we should be wary of becoming so sensitive to some issues that as soon as they come about the accuser is put on a pedestal as some sort of poor unfortunate and the accused is to be reviled as the anti-christ).
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
It's the only way anyone learns - to borrow an IT analogy, there are two types of people in this world. Those who take backups and those who have never lost any data.
In unrelated news, a GM spokesman denies putting wholly unrelated features into the radio in order to encourage owners to upgrade by purchasing an OEM radio at approximately four to eight times the price of an equivalent aftermarket model.
AFAICT, some of the logic comes not from "Google is teh evil!!11" but from "Outsourcing is teh evil!!11".
Something I can fully understand, considering so many of us have seen what happens when an outsourcing deal doesn't quite go according to plan. But frankly, if outsourcing was so terrible there would be no such things as payroll bureaux, accounting firms or HR consultancies.
Purely out of curiosity, how is having your data locked into Google's application and stored in who-knows-what format on the backend any better than being locked into Microsoft?
(Yes I know Google allows you to download your files in a number of common formats and they provide a scripting API. Does it store the data in, say, ODF at the backend? Considering GFS isn't POSIX compliant, is it even stored in a form that conceptually resembles a file? If the document is converted on the fly when you download it, is the conversion process perfect?)
Though it's a PITA if you're in an industry where finding suitable hires is handled extensively by employment agencies. Which frequently demand your CV in.doc format and simply won't even put it forward if it isn't.
Yeah, but the problem with screen-scraping is that you'll spend a large chunk of your life trying to turn HTML back into the structured data it would have started at before the bank's systems processed it and dealing with every tiny little change which may not be immediately obvious to the naked eye but may well affect the processing. Which is a PITA if that's not your main business.
Well, bits themselves don't rot, but the hardware that runs them certainly does. PSUs fail, hard disk motors seize up, motherboards start inexplicably misbehaving. The only reason it's not a huge problem for Windows shops right now is that XP has been available for an unusually long time, otherwise I could genuinely ask "can you get drivers for modern hardware to run on the version of Windows you were running 7 years ago?" and there's a good chance you'd have to think very carefully before answering. I wouldn't bank on that being a silly question in a few years time.
That's intentional. It's virtually impossible to do that in Linux when you get a kernel panic, and for the same reason.
The kernel knows something has gone horribly wrong.
Now, while in some circumstances it may be possible to continue, that something that's gone horribly wrong could have all sorts of unknown issues. If you're lucky, the computer would do one of the following:
Crash anyway
Overwrite your financial database for the last five years with the lyrics to "Star Spangled Banner" (which would be particularly irritating for me as I'm not even American).
Wipe the firmware in your CD-ROM drive.
That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it may just overwrite a few numbers here and there in your financial database. Not enough that you'd immediately notice, but enough to ensure the accounts you submit are going to place you on the wrong end of a very painful audit. It's going to be even more painful when the auditor reveals that your computer seems to think that 1+1 doesn't always equal 2.
Not necessarily true, as it happens. If you look to many developing countries where there is no social safety net of any description, infant mortality rates are so high that couples have many children in order to increase the likelihood that at least a couple will survive into adulthood.
I thought this number was curious, so I did some research.
Granted, it was 30-second see-what-Wikipedia-brings-up and follow the referenced article research, so it may be wildly inaccurate. Feel free to reply with corrections.
The BSA says that software theft exceeded $51 billion. Right, OK. That's simple enough to understand. Hold that thought.
They also say "few businesses could survive such a loss".
Well, I'dd add something to that.
Few countries could survive such a loss. The GDP of Hong Kong is estimated at around $208 billion. Considering how jumpy the stock markets can get over a drop of a couple of percent, I wouldn't want to see what would happen to their economy if 25% of its value were to disappear overnight. It'd be even worse in Singapore (GDP: $177 billion), New Zealand ($117.7 billion) and as for Luxembourg, they'd be completely screwed. Their GDP is $51.7 billion.
Put it this way, if there were a 100% guaranteed effective method to ensure nobody used pirated software of any description, it wouldn't add $51 billion to the coffers of BSA members. More likely that lots of companies would cease trading altogether, others would very quickly discover the benefits of F/OSS.
Re-posting because I forgot to log in and I didn't want to say this as AC:
The record industry and the film industry are two sides of the same coin - hell, in many cases they're different arms of the same company. What we see now with the MPAA is an almost exact action-replay of what we've seen with the RIAA over the last 10 years.
The first thing the record industry did was ignore the existence of the Internet, MP3s and other such things. Then came Napster and suddenly ignoring it wasn't an option.
The second thing the record industry did was sue Napster into the ground and attempt to force ISPs to block file sharing (they're still doing this to a certain extent, though I'm not sure how much is being driven by the MPAA and how much is being driven by the RIAA these days).
Next up, we've got "refuse to license songs for distribution over the Internet, put draconian DRM on CDs which doesn't really achieve the desired aim and just hacks off your customers". Erm... anyone see any parallels with DVDs and BluRay?
After that, we had "License songs on condition that DRM is used to 'protect' them". iTunes used to apply DRM, and there didn't used to be any such thing as a company selling plain unencumbered MP3s unless you count dubious Russian site allofmp3.com. I would say we're somewhere between this and the "refuse to license for Internet distribution" stage for movies and TV shows.
Today we have "License songs without the DRM conditions", and several companies are selling plain unencumbered MP3s quite legitimately without having to set up shop in some part of the world where copyright is considered broadly optional. Despite all the screams of how MP3s would kill the music industry, I know of no major record label which has gone out of business, and alas it seems we still have squeaky-clean teenage Britney Fucking Spears (seriously, "Fucking"'s her middle name) clones churning out dross. I don't think we've entirely moved on from the record-exec induced hysteria, but for the most part it seems that we can at least have a sensible adult discussion as to how the Internet can be used to help a band, which is more than we could 10 years ago.
My prediction is that in 5 years time, the movie industry will have gone in much the same direction, and in 10 years time most of us will have forgotten all of this. Until the next thing that forces them to re-think their business comes up.
There is another issue, which hasn't been discussed yet:
Bob does own the changes Alice made but Bob may not even be aware that Alice has used GPL libraries written by Claire.
Given the original question specifically said "my boss was not interested, and it was made clear to me that the department's position was that copyright of the whole thing belonged to them.", this is a very important point.
The issue here is not "someone passed a guideline". The clue's right there in the description of what they passed.
It's a GUIDELINE. Meaning (do schools in the US provide food?) that food provided on-campus should meet those guidelines, meaning that perhaps you should write to parents asking them to give their children healthy snacks. You know, if they wouldn't mind.
Some complete arse doesn't know what a guideline is. Nothing new there, frankly.
Not strictly true. There is such a thing as a 100% secure computer system.
Of course you have to grind it to dust, embed that dust in concrete then throw the concrete off a ship somewhere over the Marianas Trench, by which time it's not a terribly useful computer. But I bet you anything you like you couldn't hack it.
A new algorithm to crack, Math is Fun! (They don't realize that some of us do this as a passion, no I endorse fully supporting those companies that deserve it, but not everyone does this for piracy, its just a hella lotta fun to crack the reported "uncrackable".)
Just my take, I love math.
Which I find curious, considering the number of people in creative industries who are working because they too are driven by a passion and (were it not for minor irritations such as paying the mortgage and eating) would happily do it for free.
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Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Alas I've already commented in this thread or I'd mod you insightful. But this is exactly the point - it's something Apple fully understands, something that Linux vendors don't seem too sure about and something that Microsoft completely fails to understand.
The job of the operating system is to set everything up so it works then get the hell out of the way so the user can get on with doing what they want. As soon as the OS gets in the way, it's Doing It Wrong.
Somehow or other Microsoft's Office team does seem to have broadly figured that one out - while the new interface to Office does tend to engender feelings of "love it or hate it", at least it was developed with an understanding that people don't buy software in order to spend all day wrestling with the user interface. I would say Win7 is heading in that direction (I actually think there are quite a few significant improvements over XP, though they still haven't grasped the idea that if you can't be sure that everything will JFW, about the worst thing you can do is pretend it JFW and provide no hint anywhere as to why it patently doesn't), but still has a way to go.
Vista was a dog but let's not blame Vista for lost man-hours of innovation - look at your corporate culture and you'll find the problem.
Not a chance without major upheaval in Redmond.
As long as Microsoft is still seen as a good investment (in other words: the stock is either growing or remaining fairly static but returning a good dividend), the investors won't make any serious effort to get Ballmer kicked out - and when was the last time you saw the incumbent CEO who presided over corporate culture going to hell making a serious effort to re-appraise something as fundamental as that? It'd mean admitting that everything he'd stood for for the last 20 years was a load of garbage.
Try yelling "fire" in the crowded theater.
Why is that always the example that gets trotted out? Did somebody actually do it?
No it doesn't. It requires a simple, mindless process: supply all agents with shielded bags for mobile phones, instruct them that the process for mobile phone evidence is it goes in the special bag and does not come out before it gets to the lab.
And if there's one thing most law enforcement agencies worldwide are extremely good at, it's simple mindless processes.
Had you RTFA, you'd know that this is already in place. It's just that the occasional agent here and there has forgotten to follow it and has sent a device off to the lab without removing the battery and/or putting it in the shielded envelope.
The entire FA is a big fuss about nothing, AFAICT. Even the lab admitted that it happens occasionally but it's not a huge problem.
You'd better tell my employer. They think that the USB 3G units they're using for a Linux embedded device work just fine, thanks.
Canada, the UK and Denmark all have dangerous offender laws that allow indefinite confinement. None of them has anything like the prison population the US does, or locks up 18 year olds forever because they had sex with a girl a few months younger than they are (I don't believe that's even mildly illegal in any of the three).
It's certainly illegal in the UK, and if the age difference is more than a few years, "I didn't know they were underage" is not a defence. Though it's unlikely two 15 year olds would be prosecuted because prosecution is only meant to happen when it's "in the public interest".
How can we best prevent Joe Perp from becoming Joe Recidivist. Sure, locking him away for life is one option, but far from the best one. I fear that all it teaches other potential perpetrators is "don't get caught".
Purely out of curiosity, how efficient is your police force at finding Joe Perp?
Reason I ask is that here in the UK we also have a huge recidivism problem. I've heard it said before this is because criminals aren't afraid of punishment because they don't think it's going to happen. It's not going to happen because they don't think they'll get caught.
I looked at the clear-up rates of my own local police force, and frankly I was forced to conclude that the criminals probably have a point.
Maybe it means something different in the US, but in the UK (and I imagine much of Europe, since most European countries have similar labour laws), "put employee B on warning" has a specific meaning which shouldn't be taken lightly.
It implies that a record is taken of this warning and it may have a significant impact in future disciplinary investigations.
It follows from this that a vindictive woman can get a male colleague sacked simply by making an accusation of (completely fictional) sexual harassment. Even if it doesn't work the first time, if the allegation is repeated a few months later it probably will because now the person she's accusing has a record with HR.
(I'm not saying that no HR department would wind up doing something like that - I'm sure it's happened, and more than once - but we should be wary of becoming so sensitive to some issues that as soon as they come about the accuser is put on a pedestal as some sort of poor unfortunate and the accused is to be reviled as the anti-christ).
Crap close to home seems to be the only way Americans learn - so some pollution close by is always good.
It's the only way anyone learns - to borrow an IT analogy, there are two types of people in this world. Those who take backups and those who have never lost any data.
In unrelated news, a GM spokesman denies putting wholly unrelated features into the radio in order to encourage owners to upgrade by purchasing an OEM radio at approximately four to eight times the price of an equivalent aftermarket model.
Where are you getting this information of yours?
AFAICT, some of the logic comes not from "Google is teh evil!!11" but from "Outsourcing is teh evil!!11".
Something I can fully understand, considering so many of us have seen what happens when an outsourcing deal doesn't quite go according to plan. But frankly, if outsourcing was so terrible there would be no such things as payroll bureaux, accounting firms or HR consultancies.
Purely out of curiosity, how is having your data locked into Google's application and stored in who-knows-what format on the backend any better than being locked into Microsoft?
(Yes I know Google allows you to download your files in a number of common formats and they provide a scripting API. Does it store the data in, say, ODF at the backend? Considering GFS isn't POSIX compliant, is it even stored in a form that conceptually resembles a file? If the document is converted on the fly when you download it, is the conversion process perfect?)
Though it's a PITA if you're in an industry where finding suitable hires is handled extensively by employment agencies. Which frequently demand your CV in .doc format and simply won't even put it forward if it isn't.
Yeah, but the problem with screen-scraping is that you'll spend a large chunk of your life trying to turn HTML back into the structured data it would have started at before the bank's systems processed it and dealing with every tiny little change which may not be immediately obvious to the naked eye but may well affect the processing. Which is a PITA if that's not your main business.
Erm... I'm afraid they do, actually.
Well, bits themselves don't rot, but the hardware that runs them certainly does. PSUs fail, hard disk motors seize up, motherboards start inexplicably misbehaving. The only reason it's not a huge problem for Windows shops right now is that XP has been available for an unusually long time, otherwise I could genuinely ask "can you get drivers for modern hardware to run on the version of Windows you were running 7 years ago?" and there's a good chance you'd have to think very carefully before answering. I wouldn't bank on that being a silly question in a few years time.
In which case, why bother messing around with a debugger when someone else has already done all the hard work for you?
That's intentional. It's virtually impossible to do that in Linux when you get a kernel panic, and for the same reason.
The kernel knows something has gone horribly wrong.
Now, while in some circumstances it may be possible to continue, that something that's gone horribly wrong could have all sorts of unknown issues. If you're lucky, the computer would do one of the following:
That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it may just overwrite a few numbers here and there in your financial database. Not enough that you'd immediately notice, but enough to ensure the accounts you submit are going to place you on the wrong end of a very painful audit. It's going to be even more painful when the auditor reveals that your computer seems to think that 1+1 doesn't always equal 2.
Not necessarily true, as it happens. If you look to many developing countries where there is no social safety net of any description, infant mortality rates are so high that couples have many children in order to increase the likelihood that at least a couple will survive into adulthood.
I thought this number was curious, so I did some research.
Granted, it was 30-second see-what-Wikipedia-brings-up and follow the referenced article research, so it may be wildly inaccurate. Feel free to reply with corrections.
The BSA says that software theft exceeded $51 billion. Right, OK. That's simple enough to understand. Hold that thought.
They also say "few businesses could survive such a loss".
Well, I'dd add something to that.
Few countries could survive such a loss. The GDP of Hong Kong is estimated at around $208 billion. Considering how jumpy the stock markets can get over a drop of a couple of percent, I wouldn't want to see what would happen to their economy if 25% of its value were to disappear overnight. It'd be even worse in Singapore (GDP: $177 billion), New Zealand ($117.7 billion) and as for Luxembourg, they'd be completely screwed. Their GDP is $51.7 billion.
Put it this way, if there were a 100% guaranteed effective method to ensure nobody used pirated software of any description, it wouldn't add $51 billion to the coffers of BSA members. More likely that lots of companies would cease trading altogether, others would very quickly discover the benefits of F/OSS.
Re-posting because I forgot to log in and I didn't want to say this as AC:
The record industry and the film industry are two sides of the same coin - hell, in many cases they're different arms of the same company. What we see now with the MPAA is an almost exact action-replay of what we've seen with the RIAA over the last 10 years.
The first thing the record industry did was ignore the existence of the Internet, MP3s and other such things. Then came Napster and suddenly ignoring it wasn't an option.
The second thing the record industry did was sue Napster into the ground and attempt to force ISPs to block file sharing (they're still doing this to a certain extent, though I'm not sure how much is being driven by the MPAA and how much is being driven by the RIAA these days).
Next up, we've got "refuse to license songs for distribution over the Internet, put draconian DRM on CDs which doesn't really achieve the desired aim and just hacks off your customers". Erm... anyone see any parallels with DVDs and BluRay?
After that, we had "License songs on condition that DRM is used to 'protect' them". iTunes used to apply DRM, and there didn't used to be any such thing as a company selling plain unencumbered MP3s unless you count dubious Russian site allofmp3.com. I would say we're somewhere between this and the "refuse to license for Internet distribution" stage for movies and TV shows.
Today we have "License songs without the DRM conditions", and several companies are selling plain unencumbered MP3s quite legitimately without having to set up shop in some part of the world where copyright is considered broadly optional. Despite all the screams of how MP3s would kill the music industry, I know of no major record label which has gone out of business, and alas it seems we still have squeaky-clean teenage Britney Fucking Spears (seriously, "Fucking"'s her middle name) clones churning out dross. I don't think we've entirely moved on from the record-exec induced hysteria, but for the most part it seems that we can at least have a sensible adult discussion as to how the Internet can be used to help a band, which is more than we could 10 years ago.
My prediction is that in 5 years time, the movie industry will have gone in much the same direction, and in 10 years time most of us will have forgotten all of this. Until the next thing that forces them to re-think their business comes up.
There is another issue, which hasn't been discussed yet:
Bob does own the changes Alice made but Bob may not even be aware that Alice has used GPL libraries written by Claire.
Given the original question specifically said "my boss was not interested, and it was made clear to me that the department's position was that copyright of the whole thing belonged to them.", this is a very important point.
The issue here is not "someone passed a guideline". The clue's right there in the description of what they passed.
It's a GUIDELINE. Meaning (do schools in the US provide food?) that food provided on-campus should meet those guidelines, meaning that perhaps you should write to parents asking them to give their children healthy snacks. You know, if they wouldn't mind.
Some complete arse doesn't know what a guideline is. Nothing new there, frankly.
Not strictly true. There is such a thing as a 100% secure computer system.
Of course you have to grind it to dust, embed that dust in concrete then throw the concrete off a ship somewhere over the Marianas Trench, by which time it's not a terribly useful computer. But I bet you anything you like you couldn't hack it.
A new algorithm to crack, Math is Fun! (They don't realize that some of us do this as a passion, no I endorse fully supporting those companies that deserve it, but not everyone does this for piracy, its just a hella lotta fun to crack the reported "uncrackable".)
Just my take, I love math.
Which I find curious, considering the number of people in creative industries who are working because they too are driven by a passion and (were it not for minor irritations such as paying the mortgage and eating) would happily do it for free.