A license is a grant of rights. It doesn't claim to be anything beyond that, so it's not 'nothing' (if it was nothing, you'd have no permission to use or distribute any software you didn't write yourself).
I'm not sure about this, but given that I don't need a license to use a book (covered by copyright law) once I buy it, and that even in the GPL it says I don't have to accept the license to use the software, I'm not clear that I would need permission from anyone to use something (even something copyrighted) once I bought it.
Now of course distribution makes sense, but use would be covered by buying the product.
Indeed, as far as I can tell, those features can be added to XP by Find And Run Robot and Locate32 for free? I'm, not really a fan of the large start menu in XP or Vista, and I think you have to scroll the start menu in vista rather than it "folding" out. not so great for me.
I can't fathom why HSBC in the US would offer $500 credit card to an 18yr old student with NO income and only require $15 a month minimum payment, and not offer that to working adults in other countries.
It's unfathomable that the banks will throw credit at students with no income, sometimes up to $2,000 limits, and what seems like no credit (never had any credit cards or bank accounts before) in the US, and be so limiting in other countries.
But somehow I doubt Microsoft would let me use Office like that. That is, $0.62 a day, maybe 3 times a year... (Assuming $15 a month). I'd have to pay $15 each time, at a minimum, if not actually have some cellphoneish 2 year contract...
I guess a lot of this comes down to what, specifically we're talking about in personal use. As I've stated elsewhere, I don't have a problem with people surfing the web or sending e-mails. They can use AIM Express etc.
But I don't quite get why you feel that you should be able to treat company property as your private property. I mean, they don't pay you for work mode 24x7 when not travelling, that (likely) doesn't mean they are being unreasonable when they say you can't host a party after work in the conference room. Or when they mention that you can't use the company car for stock racing at the local track. Or say that you can't run 500 copies of your moose club newsletter on their photocopier.
I could go on but you see the point? If you don't like your contract, rather than feeling slighted at proper business use of company property, renegotiate your contract. If you feel your company should flat out give you a laptop, ask them - some companies will do this.
Sure, I use OCSNG for inventory and sending out installs. But the problem is if I don't know what's on the machine I can't necessarily know that what the inventory gets is going to work. For instance software firewalls, or application firewalls. They can outright block some random part of the "push" process. Or, when I do know what's on machines, I can't replicate each machine and build a custom install for it. If every machine is different, I can't test the install on something like it. I can't even really have a baseline for testing.
So I just don't see pushing it out randomly like that. Of course, if your ball of wax is essentially testing on the production machines, then this can work.
Finally, what if the users don't like having the inventory client on their machines? If they're admin, they can just remove it.
Yes. What need does a biller have for any kind of entertainment. Yea, during work hours, why are they looking for entertainment? Shouldn't they be doing what we're paying them to do vs watching internet TV?
When they have a break they can read a book or do whatever they want for that time. But that doesn't mean you can use company resources to entertain yourself during that break - just like we don't let users just walk in and turn on MTV on the conference room TVs, they need to bring their own video iPod or whatever to watch videos during the break. Likewise, streaming radio costs money, we don't get the nice "unlimited" internet for a flat rate per month, we pay per gigabyte. And one user often eats 500 megs a day on that. That's no big deal, but if everyone used it the monthly cost would be pretty high, especially compared to using a standard radio.
I'm all for builds based on work catagories. I'm also for having people figure out the software they need. But if Drafting standardized on Autodesk Inventor, then some random user wanting a Mac and ClarisCAD has a lot of work to convince me this makes sense.
Likewise, some software may be loved, but isn't supported anymore. We are currently migrating from Eudora 6 to Thunderbird for all sorts of good reasons, and someone wanting to keep Eudora or use Eudora 7 has a case to make.
Likewise, I'm ok with people using Linux for statistical analysis, we have half our people on Linux - Scientific Linux 4. But we're not goint to install and support Gentoo for them.
Umm, if what you want to do personally can't be done withing the work specifications of the machine, then yes. If you really must have random games, programs or whatever on a machine, then get a personal machine.
Now of course this depends on the setup, but where I work, the provided laptops have limited user domain accounts with cached credentials for X logins before having to get back on the network, where X is pretty high. You have Firefox on there for web access, that is not restricted by us - we don't block sites. You have Thunderbird configured for our e-mail system, and VPN back to our network if you want it, SSH if you prefer that. You've got MS Office and PDF Creator. The default Windows games like solitare for wasting time.
We've gone to Sudowin for allowing installation of hardware for flash drives, with the proper warnings. Other software is included as you can make a business case for it. Now, you can add your own e-mail account to thunderbird if you want, or you can use FF to access just about any webmail. You can go to arbitrary sites online.
We've occasionally installed DVD playing software for frequent travellers.
So what would you need on a laptop for business trips? Remember that IT is there to allow you to get work done. Not to set up your dream gaming machine, or your multimedia center (unless your job is creating video presentations or the like).
We do give users the option to own their own laptops, and we'll work with them for getting the proper home use licensing from the vendors, and they can do what they want. But then our support is limited, we will wipe and install our image if they want, but then they lose their flexibility. Otherwise we send them to Best Buy if they want their own PC support.
I'm sorry, but making users responsible for their own machines is a nightmare in a largeish orginzation. How do you track patches? Licensing? Do you send them to the Geek Squad when some random conflict between the 500 freeware programs, 3 improperly licensed programs, 3 work programs, 5 OSS programs, 2 pirated programs and 1000 spyware traces comes up? Do you just reformat and reinstall? How long does that take you?
And how the hell do you roll out new software packages? Cause you have no idea what state the individual machine is in, I'm guessing you don't have a mass deployment tool, so do you put it on a file share and say go for it in an e-mail?
It's not even just federal or coporate or university or whoever requirements, it also supportability. How do you deal with it when users throw on IE7 and it breaks AutoDesk and Ansys so they now 1) can't do the work they're getting paid for 2) cause you MORE work?
What about Google Desktop that was known to break some browsers accessing pages on the net, and had other vulnerabilities?
What about plain old spyware?
Hell, what about Skype - that now makes your network a "supernode" and you're now paying for other people's calls in bandwidth charges?
Look, IT can only test so many configurations. It makes sense to have a number of configurations, but you can't arbitrairly let users manage their machines. It's because you have to be a control freak to ensure: 1) Stability - you can't do this if random hardware, drivers, and software is hooked up 2) Security - again, see all of the above 3) Licensing - If you're audited, and you can't say what software Joe installed because it helped him with productitivty, then you can be fined a lot. Especially if Joe pirated that software. Or he bought the consumer license. And he neglected to see the terms about machines owned by him - so now the company needs the license - at a higher cost - with more work tracking that etc...
The only way for users to be realistically able to put on whatever they want is to have the users own their PCs, and pay whatever support contractor themselves. Otherwise, if the company owns the PCs, they will control them, and limit the uses to mostly business uses.
This is one of the things lots of people don't realise - for the majority of legal stuff on the net, you don't need broadband. You don't even need a dedicated phone line what with having cell phones etc... If I didn't download large files frequently, I'd save money with dialup.
It's the same as if you privatised the mail system. The providers will cherry pick the more profitable metro areas to service and leave the less profitable rural areas.
You would think that, but UPS, FedEx and DHL all deliver to just about anywhere in the US, certainly to my area where broadband is scarce.
You know, this may be the first time I totally 100% agree with what you are saying. I've posted basically this same argument to slashdot many many times.
What's worse is there's a pretty effective open source SUDO for Windows on Sourceforge -search for sudowin, that works in XP, and mostly works like I'd expect SUDO to. That is, I can explicitly right click + sudo, and it asks for my password again (not just a click). Or I can do a command line sudo blah....
What's nice is that for admins, there is an XML configuration file where you can really lock down what can and can't be sudoed per user or group, by IP and by arguments passed to the program...
Oh, I don't know. How does paying for anything in perpetuity create an incentive to produce more? When it was created has some bearing as if someone is dead, it's an easier case to make, however it doesn't change the following issue I have with copyright.
I spend 1 hour doing desktop support and get paid ~$15. I spend 1 hour recording a famous song, I get paid $0.05 per album sale. now to the next hour.
Doing desktop support, I have to spend another hour working to get another $15. I don't have to do any more work to get another $0.05 per album, ever!. How does that provide any incentive to do more work? I only have financial motivation if I suck and don't sell lots of albums. If I'm really popular, I can live off of that recording potentially forever, so can my kids.
I'm not saying this happens often, or even ever, just saying that it in no way creates an incentive to continue working, just an incentive to hit it big once. Not the same thing at all. Finally, it doesn't map to any other sort of work, where you have to do something continually to get paid. Imagine the look on my bosses face if I stated with a straight face I should get paid for today's work for up until 75 years after my death. Yet everyone says that's ok if I record a song.
I don't have a problem paying someone to perform for me (concert). I do have a problem paying someone for something they didn't do, like for a 3rd pressing of a popular CD. The band could have been dead as indicated - they don't do work, I don't think they should get paid. Simple as that.
VPN. Your university ought to offer it for offsite researchers. Hell, I can make it work for near free with Hamachi, OpenVPN or whatever and a machine inside the network. Push your libriarians/IT support to make your work easier (if you're actually doing research for the university).
I agree that if you're in a bittorrent swarm, it's likely you're distributing/downloading content. However, I do think that this lazyness mixed with much of the other unsure items regarding only having an IP vs who did the downloading in many cases might just help show that the RIAA wants to handwave lots of aspects of this.
I mean, at this point, the RIAA has done very little diligence to see if they have the right person. I mean, they've already sued people without PCs and dead people...
Finally, given that it seems more and more sure they just see an IP and fire off a lawsuit to someone who may have had that IP at some time, I'd say this could help build a case against discovery/ISP giving up subscriber info for what seems more and more like harrassment as opposed to any real knowledge that even someone at the address of the accused was on the internet, much less that one specific person broke any laws.
At some point we need to answer all the hundereds of ways you could be implicated for torrenting etc, and what specific instances you are liable for. Botnet, Trojans, Neighbors using PC, open or hacked Wireless, Friend over with laptop, forget about just extortion for innocent people who are fingered by ISP records slips, spoofed IP addresses and more. That list is pretty long, and again the courts can't afford to let shotgun lawsuits to work through, especially with continued cases and technical evidence that the RIAA isn't making any effort to really work past any of this.
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A license is a grant of rights. It doesn't claim to be anything beyond that, so it's not 'nothing' (if it was nothing, you'd have no permission to use or distribute any software you didn't write yourself).
I'm not sure about this, but given that I don't need a license to use a book (covered by copyright law) once I buy it, and that even in the GPL it says I don't have to accept the license to use the software, I'm not clear that I would need permission from anyone to use something (even something copyrighted) once I bought it.
Now of course distribution makes sense, but use would be covered by buying the product.
Well, on windows there is coreforce - though it's still at 0.95, I don't really know how good it is.
Mmm, you can save lots of money by adding Find and Run Robot and Locate32 to XP to do the same thing.
Indeed, as far as I can tell, those features can be added to XP by Find And Run Robot and Locate32 for free? I'm, not really a fan of the large start menu in XP or Vista, and I think you have to scroll the start menu in vista rather than it "folding" out. not so great for me.
Knoppix live CD an Qparted.
I can't fathom why HSBC in the US would offer $500 credit card to an 18yr old student with NO income and only require $15 a month minimum payment, and not offer that to working adults in other countries.
It's unfathomable that the banks will throw credit at students with no income, sometimes up to $2,000 limits, and what seems like no credit (never had any credit cards or bank accounts before) in the US, and be so limiting in other countries.
But somehow I doubt Microsoft would let me use Office like that. That is, $0.62 a day, maybe 3 times a year... (Assuming $15 a month). I'd have to pay $15 each time, at a minimum, if not actually have some cellphoneish 2 year contract...
I guess a lot of this comes down to what, specifically we're talking about in personal use. As I've stated elsewhere, I don't have a problem with people surfing the web or sending e-mails. They can use AIM Express etc.
But I don't quite get why you feel that you should be able to treat company property as your private property. I mean, they don't pay you for work mode 24x7 when not travelling, that (likely) doesn't mean they are being unreasonable when they say you can't host a party after work in the conference room. Or when they mention that you can't use the company car for stock racing at the local track. Or say that you can't run 500 copies of your moose club newsletter on their photocopier.
I could go on but you see the point? If you don't like your contract, rather than feeling slighted at proper business use of company property, renegotiate your contract. If you feel your company should flat out give you a laptop, ask them - some companies will do this.
Sure, I use OCSNG for inventory and sending out installs. But the problem is if I don't know what's on the machine I can't necessarily know that what the inventory gets is going to work. For instance software firewalls, or application firewalls. They can outright block some random part of the "push" process. Or, when I do know what's on machines, I can't replicate each machine and build a custom install for it. If every machine is different, I can't test the install on something like it. I can't even really have a baseline for testing.
So I just don't see pushing it out randomly like that. Of course, if your ball of wax is essentially testing on the production machines, then this can work.
Finally, what if the users don't like having the inventory client on their machines? If they're admin, they can just remove it.
Yes. What need does a biller have for any kind of entertainment.
Yea, during work hours, why are they looking for entertainment? Shouldn't they be doing what we're paying them to do vs watching internet TV?
When they have a break they can read a book or do whatever they want for that time. But that doesn't mean you can use company resources to entertain yourself during that break - just like we don't let users just walk in and turn on MTV on the conference room TVs, they need to bring their own video iPod or whatever to watch videos during the break. Likewise, streaming radio costs money, we don't get the nice "unlimited" internet for a flat rate per month, we pay per gigabyte. And one user often eats 500 megs a day on that. That's no big deal, but if everyone used it the monthly cost would be pretty high, especially compared to using a standard radio.
etc.
I'm all for builds based on work catagories. I'm also for having people figure out the software they need. But if Drafting standardized on Autodesk Inventor, then some random user wanting a Mac and ClarisCAD has a lot of work to convince me this makes sense.
Likewise, some software may be loved, but isn't supported anymore. We are currently migrating from Eudora 6 to Thunderbird for all sorts of good reasons, and someone wanting to keep Eudora or use Eudora 7 has a case to make.
Likewise, I'm ok with people using Linux for statistical analysis, we have half our people on Linux - Scientific Linux 4. But we're not goint to install and support Gentoo for them.
Umm, if what you want to do personally can't be done withing the work specifications of the machine, then yes. If you really must have random games, programs or whatever on a machine, then get a personal machine.
Now of course this depends on the setup, but where I work, the provided laptops have limited user domain accounts with cached credentials for X logins before having to get back on the network, where X is pretty high. You have Firefox on there for web access, that is not restricted by us - we don't block sites. You have Thunderbird configured for our e-mail system, and VPN back to our network if you want it, SSH if you prefer that. You've got MS Office and PDF Creator. The default Windows games like solitare for wasting time.
We've gone to Sudowin for allowing installation of hardware for flash drives, with the proper warnings. Other software is included as you can make a business case for it. Now, you can add your own e-mail account to thunderbird if you want, or you can use FF to access just about any webmail. You can go to arbitrary sites online.
We've occasionally installed DVD playing software for frequent travellers.
So what would you need on a laptop for business trips? Remember that IT is there to allow you to get work done. Not to set up your dream gaming machine, or your multimedia center (unless your job is creating video presentations or the like).
We do give users the option to own their own laptops, and we'll work with them for getting the proper home use licensing from the vendors, and they can do what they want. But then our support is limited, we will wipe and install our image if they want, but then they lose their flexibility. Otherwise we send them to Best Buy if they want their own PC support.
I'm sorry, but making users responsible for their own machines is a nightmare in a largeish orginzation. How do you track patches? Licensing? Do you send them to the Geek Squad when some random conflict between the 500 freeware programs, 3 improperly licensed programs, 3 work programs, 5 OSS programs, 2 pirated programs and 1000 spyware traces comes up? Do you just reformat and reinstall? How long does that take you?
And how the hell do you roll out new software packages? Cause you have no idea what state the individual machine is in, I'm guessing you don't have a mass deployment tool, so do you put it on a file share and say go for it in an e-mail?
It's not even just federal or coporate or university or whoever requirements, it also supportability. How do you deal with it when users throw on IE7 and it breaks AutoDesk and Ansys so they now
1) can't do the work they're getting paid for
2) cause you MORE work?
What about Google Desktop that was known to break some browsers accessing pages on the net, and had other vulnerabilities?
What about plain old spyware?
Hell, what about Skype - that now makes your network a "supernode" and you're now paying for other people's calls in bandwidth charges?
Look, IT can only test so many configurations. It makes sense to have a number of configurations, but you can't arbitrairly let users manage their machines. It's because you have to be a control freak to ensure:
1) Stability - you can't do this if random hardware, drivers, and software is hooked up
2) Security - again, see all of the above
3) Licensing - If you're audited, and you can't say what software Joe installed because it helped him with productitivty, then you can be fined a lot. Especially if Joe pirated that software. Or he bought the consumer license. And he neglected to see the terms about machines owned by him - so now the company needs the license - at a higher cost - with more work tracking that etc...
The only way for users to be realistically able to put on whatever they want is to have the users own their PCs, and pay whatever support contractor themselves. Otherwise, if the company owns the PCs, they will control them, and limit the uses to mostly business uses.
Perhaps a levy on premium newsgroup access? Or a reinstatement of binary newsgroups for ISPs with the fee?
That's more than the average media cost in the US, which is down to ~$0.20 per blank in bulk (100+).
This is one of the things lots of people don't realise - for the majority of legal stuff on the net, you don't need broadband. You don't even need a dedicated phone line what with having cell phones etc... If I didn't download large files frequently, I'd save money with dialup.
It's the same as if you privatised the mail system. The providers will cherry pick the more profitable metro areas to service and leave the less profitable rural areas.
You would think that, but UPS, FedEx and DHL all deliver to just about anywhere in the US, certainly to my area where broadband is scarce.
You know, this may be the first time I totally 100% agree with what you are saying. I've posted basically this same argument to slashdot many many times.
What's worse is there's a pretty effective open source SUDO for Windows on Sourceforge -search for sudowin, that works in XP, and mostly works like I'd expect SUDO to. That is, I can explicitly right click + sudo, and it asks for my password again (not just a click). Or I can do a command line sudo blah....
What's nice is that for admins, there is an XML configuration file where you can really lock down what can and can't be sudoed per user or group, by IP and by arguments passed to the program...
Oh, I don't know. How does paying for anything in perpetuity create an incentive to produce more? When it was created has some bearing as if someone is dead, it's an easier case to make, however it doesn't change the following issue I have with copyright.
I spend 1 hour doing desktop support and get paid ~$15. I spend 1 hour recording a famous song, I get paid $0.05 per album sale. now to the next hour.
Doing desktop support, I have to spend another hour working to get another $15. I don't have to do any more work to get another $0.05 per album, ever!. How does that provide any incentive to do more work? I only have financial motivation if I suck and don't sell lots of albums. If I'm really popular, I can live off of that recording potentially forever, so can my kids.
I'm not saying this happens often, or even ever, just saying that it in no way creates an incentive to continue working, just an incentive to hit it big once. Not the same thing at all. Finally, it doesn't map to any other sort of work, where you have to do something continually to get paid. Imagine the look on my bosses face if I stated with a straight face I should get paid for today's work for up until 75 years after my death. Yet everyone says that's ok if I record a song.
I don't have a problem paying someone to perform for me (concert). I do have a problem paying someone for something they didn't do, like for a 3rd pressing of a popular CD. The band could have been dead as indicated - they don't do work, I don't think they should get paid. Simple as that.
VPN. Your university ought to offer it for offsite researchers. Hell, I can make it work for near free with Hamachi, OpenVPN or whatever and a machine inside the network. Push your libriarians/IT support to make your work easier (if you're actually doing research for the university).
Pandora.
I agree that if you're in a bittorrent swarm, it's likely you're distributing/downloading content. However, I do think that this lazyness mixed with much of the other unsure items regarding only having an IP vs who did the downloading in many cases might just help show that the RIAA wants to handwave lots of aspects of this.
I mean, at this point, the RIAA has done very little diligence to see if they have the right person. I mean, they've already sued people without PCs and dead people...
Finally, given that it seems more and more sure they just see an IP and fire off a lawsuit to someone who may have had that IP at some time, I'd say this could help build a case against discovery/ISP giving up subscriber info for what seems more and more like harrassment as opposed to any real knowledge that even someone at the address of the accused was on the internet, much less that one specific person broke any laws.
At some point we need to answer all the hundereds of ways you could be implicated for torrenting etc, and what specific instances you are liable for. Botnet, Trojans, Neighbors using PC, open or hacked Wireless, Friend over with laptop, forget about just extortion for innocent people who are fingered by ISP records slips, spoofed IP addresses and more. That list is pretty long, and again the courts can't afford to let shotgun lawsuits to work through, especially with continued cases and technical evidence that the RIAA isn't making any effort to really work past any of this.
Do these do any of the relaying of other users network traffic that the application does?