I work for one of the other Big Five and we've got a "theme song" as well. Pretty shameful if you ask me and dozens of other consultants I've talked to. There are advantages to work in a Big Five but there are also a lot of dumb things like this. In our case, I know the song was created by a group in our accounting department... I'll have to assume that they have somewhat of a different "culture" than we do in our consulting branch.
I don't know about you guys but eventhough KPMG got some extra hits to their web site out of this story, they didn't quite improve their reputation with this story... certainly not as far as corporate web presence is concerned.
What is interesting though is that according to this survey and other surveys on hand guns, most Americans want to make sure that their right to own a gun is protected (even for nutcases) while their right to encryption is removed.
Sounds like suicidal tendencies to me.
In this day and age, I'd think that if Americans want to protect their right to raise against an oppressive gouvernment (a popular argument for gun owners), they'll need strong encryption to organize their rebellion.
I have two very different experiences in getting DSL setup at home:
1- In Atlanta, GA. It took over two months to get the connection setup. A COVAD technician had to come over to my place twice to setup new RJ45 hookups to my phone line. The connection was slow (180kbps download) and expensive (90$/month).
2- In Montreal, Canada. I got my ADSL connection setup in just over a week, 1.4Mb download, with static IP, for 35$/month. I received the modem, plugged it in the phone line, hooked it to the hub and voila!
My point would be that I think the quality of service depends a lot of where you reside.
Now that we have the lovely DMCA hanging over our heads, are such reverse-engineering activities deemed illegal? Can Capcom turn around and sue FinalBurn's ass to oblivion?
With all the discussion we've had about MS monopolizing the browser market, it's nice to see some other big name (Sony) trying to push an appliance that doesn't have IE. I don't use IE and I don't plan to purchase an EvilLA (it's all in the capitalization:-) but if other large corporations get in on the bandwagon, this may give a push to alternative browsers which would be an excellent thing.
Also, I don't know if a market yet exists for these internet appliances but give them enough cool advertizing on TV and you'll see a lot of people developing a need for them.
I've been considering doing the same thing for a few months now and I'm facing a hard decision on this matter. I'm a Canadian citizen working in the US so I cannot help you with VISA related matters. However, I've done a fair amount of thinking about this over the last few months.
Basically, I've got my arguments categorized in three categories: carrer progression, compensation, and life style.
From a carreer progression point of view, you'll have a hard time beating the US. The wide array of opportunities in the US is mind boggling compared to what is available in France. There is a positive side to this if you decide to go work in France though: France is roughly 2 to 4 years behind the US in most aspects related to IT jobs (mind you they are ahead of the US on certain things too like portable computing). This is a good thing for you because if you are up to date here, you'll be ahead of everyone over there. The difficult part, will be to come back in a few years if you ever plan to.
As far as compensation is concerned, prepare to be dissapointed. US salaries are much more generous than French salaries, without even taking into consideration the strength of the currency. The US dollar is currently about 7x stronger than the French Franc, yet if your US salary is around $50K/year, don't expect to get offers in the 350K FF/year range; the same goes if you make $100K/year, you won't get a 700K FF/year offer. Of course, this would be a crude conversion that doesn't take into account the HUGE number of vacation days (between 5 to 7 weeks per year!) and other benefits that you get (healthcare) when you work in France. Still, overall... if you plan to visit other countries (let's say Switzerland), you are much more wealthy when you walk in there with your American salary than your French one.
On the lifestyle issue, there is no comparaison either. You might want to try a little trip over there for a couple of weeks before you make up your mind but from my perspective, the French people know much more what "life is all about" than Americans (before I get flamed by Americans, let me just say that is is a generalization and *of course* this doesn't apply to everyone in particular). The 35 hours work week, 5 to 7 weeks of vacation, excellent public transportation, and many other obvious things makes living in Paris very attractive from the lifestyle perspective (if you can get used to the small apartment that is:-).
In the end, there is no simple answers. Many other factors come into play if you have a family. Good luck with your decision; I'm sure you'll make the right one and wish you all the best.
I've been running 2.6 for about a year now and I'm considering upgrading to 2.8. Has anyone ever tried the "Upgrade" function of the install procedure? My goal is to minimize my downtime and I don't want to end up with a crippled system after I've done my upgrade.
>Every time i go grocery shopping i see products
>labelled "New Look! Same Great TASTE!!" "Smaller
>Size for Your CONVENIENCE" and the absolute
>winner, i kid you not ---- "Now! Made with REAL
>Ingredients!!!"
Hahaha! You've made my day!:-)
I'm so tired of overstated product labels and advertizing it's not even funny. There is no reason in any commercial image anymore.
This amazing, one-of-a-kind, "you've never seen anything quite like it", post was made with real virtual letters!
I have money in MP3.com and I'm keeping it there (of course, I'd be loosing big time if I were to sell right now). I still think that their business model makes sense (more than Napster's).
Unfortunately, they haven't been doing so good legally (so I might just be full of crap by keeping faith in MPPP) but the fact that they got agreements with other labels means that they may yet survive in the long run and become one of the pioneering audio broadcasting companies once the RIAA calms down with their legal sillyness.
www.digitalrenegades.org is a great idea! I hope that a good number of people saw the post and bookmark the site. It has happened quite a number of times on/. that people were looking for more places to voice their opinions. If dr catches on and gains some recognition by receiving intelligent contributions, it could be a nice voice of the people. I'll be checking the site over the next few weeks and will try to find the time to contribute something myself.
X is one of the greatest graphical platform that I've ever seen. I don't know how someone can come up with such negative comments on it.
NeXT also had something cool going on in the early 90s, Apple's new Aqua seems quite well engeneered but none of those have the flexibility, user and developer base of X. Plus, I can't install them on my Linux and FreeBSD boxes at home.
Sure, there are a bunch of things that could be improved on X but I don't see any other initiatives out there that is even remotely close to accomplish what X has done.
The original poster might want to check out Windows 2000. I hear it has a very standardized, and 'agreed upon' user interface.
Has anyone ever heard of Audio ReQuest? (http://www.request.com) I heard of it from mp3.com's web site. ReQuest is basically an mp3 player for your home Audio-Video system.
Why hack your TiVo when you can buy a 17gb networkable mp3 player that connects to your TV?
Then again, why buy a 800$ ReQuest when you can simply hack your TiVo?
Heck! The solution might be to shell out the cash to buy both a TiVo and a ReQuest, and then proceed to turn one into the other just for the heck of it.:-)
"It is obvious that book covers are there to protect its content from being read without a licence," commented Judge Corp. "
<sarcasm on> Come on, you have to understand the judge's perspective: that because books have now been hacked, anybody can just lift the cover and are then free to COPY THE CONTENT OF THE BOOK AT WILL!!! This is totally unacceptable!
Of course, you'd still need a pen or a copy machine to copy the book once the cover has been flipped but that's irrelevent! Whomever came up with that flipping hack certainly deserves to be arrested --and the authorities should confiscate his cellphone too, just for the heck of it--. </sarcasm>
Re:One of your better articles, Katz
on
China and the MPA
·
· Score: 1
A full-featured (at least professional looking) application that any luser can install and play DVDs out of the box would really get the point of this lawsuit across to the various journalists and shapers of public opinion.
IANAL yet, I think Stiletto has an excellent point here. As long as the DeCSS code stays in its current mystic form, it'll be easy for the MPAA's layers to manipulate a technologically-challenged judge into any sort of demented rulings. Yet, it we were to have a product to show to the judge and argue "See, we couldn't do this without DeCSS", I think the MPAA's case would be much harder to sell.
Do all of the HP Colorado family have drivers for Linux? A previous poster mentionned that the 5GB version worked right out of the box. What about the 8 or 14GB?
Wow! So this is actually an existing technology? (I wasn't sure if I should believe the article) A microchip implant in the eye to restore eyesight... sounds pretty freaky to me. Then again, he doesn't have anything to loose.
Does anybody know how much this operation cost??? If simple laser surgery is $1500/eye, this must be in the $15K/eye or something.
I am writing to you in regards with the recent legal actions that you took against the etoy.com community.
Your attitude and actions in this case are short-sighted and attack the very essence of what the Internet is all about --people, commerce, community and information--. Obviously, the counselor behind this decision does not grasp the nature of the medium that pays his paycheck and makes the very existence of eToys possible.
What you are doing in this case is simply exploiting the American legal system to censure a voice that you do not agree with.
Such news goes a long way on the Internet and many people are judging your actions in this case. This judgement is independent of the American judge that issued the injunction. This judgement comes from the people on the Internet (let's call them netizens). As you very well know, these netizens are also your clientele base AND the source of investors most likely to purchase shares of ETYS.
Of course, this is my personnal point of view, as a netizen, on this situation. It is simply based on news articles from various sources on the Internet. I am a fairly objective and reasonnable person and make my living off electronic commerce myself. The point is, there are many others like me who have the same impressions and make similar judgements.
News of actions like your attack on etoy.com does not often make it to mainstream television and radio media but is readilly available to the netizens. A search for 'etoys' on Yahoo does not only bring up etoys.com but also news articles and links to competitors like Toys-R-Us and amazon.com.
I'm afraid this Xmas season, I'll have to take my money somewhere else. (BTW, I bought 100% of my 1999 Xmas gifts (approx.$1000usd) over the Internet.) You made a good name for yourself and certainly should protect it but etoy.com is not attacking your brand and their name is, also, their own. This sort of action does not protect your name, it tarnishes it. (and made me discover etoy.com which I hadn't even heard about before this incident!)
You have a few months to re-polish your image before I need to buy more toys and I don't think that court judgements and injunctions will affect my opinion.
Regardless of all this, I do wish you a very prosper future and a merry holiday season.
Have you seen "The Postman"? It's another post-disaster movie starring Kevin. AFAIK, it didn't even made it to the theaters, it went straight to video. Besides its length (if I remember well, it is over 3 hours long), I liked it better than Waterworld.
P.S. And what's with those lame-ass non-conformance HTML character entities for em dashes in the interview? Geesh. (You Windows weenies won't see the problem because your OS is subverting the standard and insidiously hiding the problem from you.) Guess what. I'm stuck at work right now and had to read the article using Win98/IE4 and... I also got plagues with the "mdash" stuff.
There is a meta tag at the top of the pages that suggests that the pages were created with "GoLive CyberStudio 3". I would venture to guess that that software is the true culprit for the "mdash" entities.
Slashdot Mirror
It might just be beyond their understanding...
I work for one of the other Big Five and we've got a "theme song" as well. Pretty shameful if you ask me and dozens of other consultants I've talked to. There are advantages to work in a Big Five but there are also a lot of dumb things like this. In our case, I know the song was created by a group in our accounting department... I'll have to assume that they have somewhat of a different "culture" than we do in our consulting branch.
I don't know about you guys but eventhough KPMG got some extra hits to their web site out of this story, they didn't quite improve their reputation with this story... certainly not as far as corporate web presence is concerned.
What is interesting though is that according to this survey and other surveys on hand guns, most Americans want to make sure that their right to own a gun is protected (even for nutcases) while their right to encryption is removed.
Sounds like suicidal tendencies to me.
In this day and age, I'd think that if Americans want to protect their right to raise against an oppressive gouvernment (a popular argument for gun owners), they'll need strong encryption to organize their rebellion.
It's great that MS "apologizes for the inconvenience"
They even "thank you (...) for your understanding".
Of course, they haven't given us anything to understand but I guess that's besides the point.
I have two very different experiences in getting DSL setup at home:
1- In Atlanta, GA. It took over two months to get the connection setup. A COVAD technician had to come over to my place twice to setup new RJ45 hookups to my phone line. The connection was slow (180kbps download) and expensive (90$/month).
2- In Montreal, Canada. I got my ADSL connection setup in just over a week, 1.4Mb download, with static IP, for 35$/month. I received the modem, plugged it in the phone line, hooked it to the hub and voila! My point would be that I think the quality of service depends a lot of where you reside.
Now that we have the lovely DMCA hanging over our heads, are such reverse-engineering activities deemed illegal? Can Capcom turn around and sue FinalBurn's ass to oblivion?
With all the discussion we've had about MS monopolizing the browser market, it's nice to see some other big name (Sony) trying to push an appliance that doesn't have IE. I don't use IE and I don't plan to purchase an EvilLA (it's all in the capitalization :-) but if other large corporations get in on the bandwagon, this may give a push to alternative browsers which would be an excellent thing.
Also, I don't know if a market yet exists for these internet appliances but give them enough cool advertizing on TV and you'll see a lot of people developing a need for them.
I've been considering doing the same thing for a few months now and I'm facing a hard decision on this matter. I'm a Canadian citizen working in the US so I cannot help you with VISA related matters. However, I've done a fair amount of thinking about this over the last few months.
:-).
Basically, I've got my arguments categorized in three categories: carrer progression, compensation, and life style.
From a carreer progression point of view, you'll have a hard time beating the US. The wide array of opportunities in the US is mind boggling compared to what is available in France. There is a positive side to this if you decide to go work in France though: France is roughly 2 to 4 years behind the US in most aspects related to IT jobs (mind you they are ahead of the US on certain things too like portable computing). This is a good thing for you because if you are up to date here, you'll be ahead of everyone over there. The difficult part, will be to come back in a few years if you ever plan to.
As far as compensation is concerned, prepare to be dissapointed. US salaries are much more generous than French salaries, without even taking into consideration the strength of the currency. The US dollar is currently about 7x stronger than the French Franc, yet if your US salary is around $50K/year, don't expect to get offers in the 350K FF/year range; the same goes if you make $100K/year, you won't get a 700K FF/year offer. Of course, this would be a crude conversion that doesn't take into account the HUGE number of vacation days (between 5 to 7 weeks per year!) and other benefits that you get (healthcare) when you work in France. Still, overall... if you plan to visit other countries (let's say Switzerland), you are much more wealthy when you walk in there with your American salary than your French one.
On the lifestyle issue, there is no comparaison either. You might want to try a little trip over there for a couple of weeks before you make up your mind but from my perspective, the French people know much more what "life is all about" than Americans (before I get flamed by Americans, let me just say that is is a generalization and *of course* this doesn't apply to everyone in particular). The 35 hours work week, 5 to 7 weeks of vacation, excellent public transportation, and many other obvious things makes living in Paris very attractive from the lifestyle perspective (if you can get used to the small apartment that is
In the end, there is no simple answers. Many other factors come into play if you have a family. Good luck with your decision; I'm sure you'll make the right one and wish you all the best.
I've been running 2.6 for about a year now and I'm considering upgrading to 2.8. Has anyone ever tried the "Upgrade" function of the install procedure? My goal is to minimize my downtime and I don't want to end up with a crippled system after I've done my upgrade.
>Every time i go grocery shopping i see products
:-)
>labelled "New Look! Same Great TASTE!!" "Smaller
>Size for Your CONVENIENCE" and the absolute
>winner, i kid you not ---- "Now! Made with REAL
>Ingredients!!!"
Hahaha! You've made my day!
I'm so tired of overstated product labels and advertizing it's not even funny. There is no reason in any commercial image anymore.
This amazing, one-of-a-kind, "you've never seen anything quite like it", post was made with real virtual letters!
Hey,
:-)
I have money in MP3.com and I'm keeping it there (of course, I'd be loosing big time if I were to sell right now). I still think that their business model makes sense (more than Napster's).
Unfortunately, they haven't been doing so good legally (so I might just be full of crap by keeping faith in MPPP) but the fact that they got agreements with other labels means that they may yet survive in the long run and become one of the pioneering audio broadcasting companies once the RIAA calms down with their legal sillyness.
Only the future will tell, wish me luck
www.digitalrenegades.org is a great idea! I hope that a good number of people saw the post and bookmark the site. It has happened quite a number of times on /. that people were looking for more places to voice their opinions. If dr catches on and gains some recognition by receiving intelligent contributions, it could be a nice voice of the people. I'll be checking the site over the next few weeks and will try to find the time to contribute something myself.
X is one of the greatest graphical platform that I've ever seen. I don't know how someone can come up with such negative comments on it.
NeXT also had something cool going on in the early 90s, Apple's new Aqua seems quite well engeneered but none of those have the flexibility, user and developer base of X. Plus, I can't install them on my Linux and FreeBSD boxes at home.
Sure, there are a bunch of things that could be improved on X but I don't see any other initiatives out there that is even remotely close to accomplish what X has done.
The original poster might want to check out Windows 2000. I hear it has a very standardized, and 'agreed upon' user interface.
Has anyone ever heard of Audio ReQuest? (http://www.request.com) I heard of it from mp3.com's web site. ReQuest is basically an mp3 player for your home Audio-Video system.
:-)
Why hack your TiVo when you can buy a 17gb networkable mp3 player that connects to your TV?
Then again, why buy a 800$ ReQuest when you can simply hack your TiVo?
Heck! The solution might be to shell out the cash to buy both a TiVo and a ReQuest, and then proceed to turn one into the other just for the heck of it.
K.
"It is obvious that book covers are there to protect its content from being read without a licence," commented Judge Corp. "
<sarcasm on>
Come on, you have to understand the judge's perspective: that because books have now been hacked, anybody can just lift the cover and are then free to COPY THE CONTENT OF THE BOOK AT WILL!!! This is totally unacceptable!
Of course, you'd still need a pen or a copy machine to copy the book once the cover has been flipped but that's irrelevent! Whomever came up with that flipping hack certainly deserves to be arrested --and the authorities should confiscate his cellphone too, just for the heck of it--.
</sarcasm>
A full-featured (at least professional looking) application that any luser can install and play DVDs out of the box would really get the point of this lawsuit across to the various journalists and shapers of public opinion.
IANAL yet, I think Stiletto has an excellent point here. As long as the DeCSS code stays in its current mystic form, it'll be easy for the MPAA's layers to manipulate a technologically-challenged judge into any sort of demented rulings. Yet, it we were to have a product to show to the judge and argue "See, we couldn't do this without DeCSS", I think the MPAA's case would be much harder to sell.
How about building an open-source DVD player?
If such an application is made available to the public before the end of the trials, wouldn't that be sort-of a defacto defeat for the MPAA?
Obviously I know next to nothing when it comes to legal issues so I don't even know what sort of trouble we would get by doing this.
Still, the whole case would seem less relevant to me if I had an open-source DVD player installed on my box right now.
K.
We should build a /. petition engine that would allow people to type in their comments and fire off a daily digest to the targeted organisation.
/. a political face that is not necessarely desired.
Not only would it be easier to get 'signatures' for various causes but it could also provide interesting stats.
It could be called... Your Voice Online or something.
Then again, this could give
K.
Do all of the HP Colorado family have drivers for Linux? A previous poster mentionned that the 5GB version worked right out of the box. What about the 8 or 14GB?
K.
Wow! So this is actually an existing technology? (I wasn't sure if I should believe the article) A microchip implant in the eye to restore eyesight... sounds pretty freaky to me. Then again, he doesn't have anything to loose.
Does anybody know how much this operation cost??? If simple laser surgery is $1500/eye, this must be in the $15K/eye or something.
To whom it may concern,
I am writing to you in regards with the recent legal actions that you took against the etoy.com community.
Your attitude and actions in this case are short-sighted and attack the very essence of what the Internet is all about --people, commerce, community and information--. Obviously, the counselor behind this decision does not grasp the nature of the medium that pays his paycheck and makes the very existence of eToys possible.
What you are doing in this case is simply exploiting the American legal system to censure a voice that you do not agree with.
Such news goes a long way on the Internet and many people are judging your actions in this case. This judgement is independent of the American judge that issued the injunction. This judgement comes from the people on the Internet (let's call them netizens). As you very well know, these netizens are also your clientele base AND the source of investors most likely to purchase shares of ETYS.
Of course, this is my personnal point of view, as a netizen, on this situation. It is simply based on news articles from various sources on the Internet. I am a fairly objective and reasonnable person and make my living off electronic commerce myself. The point is, there are many others like me who have the same impressions and make similar judgements.
News of actions like your attack on etoy.com does not often make it to mainstream television and radio media but is readilly available to the netizens. A search for 'etoys' on Yahoo does not only bring up etoys.com but also news articles and links to competitors like Toys-R-Us and amazon.com.
I'm afraid this Xmas season, I'll have to take my money somewhere else. (BTW, I bought 100% of my 1999 Xmas gifts (approx.$1000usd) over the Internet.) You made a good name for yourself and certainly should protect it but etoy.com is not attacking your brand and their name is, also, their own. This sort of action does not protect your name, it tarnishes it. (and made me discover etoy.com which I hadn't even heard about before this incident!)
You have a few months to re-polish your image before I need to buy more toys and I don't think that court judgements and injunctions will affect my opinion.
Regardless of all this, I do wish you a very prosper future and a merry holiday season.
Sincerely yours,
{my real name}
Atlanta, GA.
Have you seen "The Postman"? It's another post-disaster movie starring Kevin. AFAIK, it didn't even made it to the theaters, it went straight to video. Besides its length (if I remember well, it is over 3 hours long), I liked it better than Waterworld.
K.
P.S. And what's with those lame-ass non-conformance HTML character entities for em dashes in the interview? Geesh. (You Windows weenies won't see the problem because your OS is subverting the standard and insidiously hiding the problem from you.)
Guess what. I'm stuck at work right now and had to read the article using Win98/IE4 and... I also got plagues with the "mdash" stuff.
There is a meta tag at the top of the pages that suggests that the pages were created with "GoLive CyberStudio 3". I would venture to guess that that software is the true culprit for the "mdash" entities.
K.