You bring up a real issue, not from an end-user standpoint, but from major corporations. Shouldn't these companies get into serious legal trouble? I can think of two ways right off the top of my head.
First, if they're sticking adware on an illegal file and uploading it, don't the same laws apply to them uploading the illegal file? Is the **AA suing these companies along with 12-year-old kids? After all, it's adware-infested, but it's still an illegal file, right?
Second, if they are modifying warez software, not only does the previous apply, but doesn't it fall under the protection of software that outlaws modifying binary code and distributing it without the publisher's consent? I mean think about it, this kind of thing not only supposedly denies companies revenue, but it can give them a serious black eye. What if people get the incorrect impression that an adware-infested version of a respectable piece of software is the real thing? All of a sudden, you have a really bad--and undeserved--reputation for distributing spyware on everyone's computers.
If I coded closed source software, I think I would probably deliberately load my code up with funnier comments. Something like:
/* I'm feeling lazy today, so I'll just kludge this for now and let the smart open source people figure out a better way to do it in a few years when it's released. Good luck, guys. */
or...
/* This is probably a HUGE security hole, but since the software is closed source, security doesn't matter much. */
or even something corny (a blatant ripoff of a ThinkGeek t-shirt I have):
/* Q. What's the difference between dead coders and me? A. 57,004 programmers. */
Any better suggestions? Reply, because I need something amusing to read this afternoon!
I don't think it is. I can't cite them now because I don't have time to search for them, but studies have shown that proficient typists using qwerty keyboards are just as fast as proficient typists using Dvorak keybaords.
Check out the wikipedia article for a good balanced look at both.
I'd rather pay now. I'm one of those people who likes to buy stuff like printers to keep for ten or fifteen years. The problem with cheap printers and expensive supplies is that people like me end up paying a couple of grand for stupid $200 printer over the course of its lifetime. I would much rather pay a few hundred bucks extra and buy ink that's dirt cheap, something a lot closer to what the actual cost of producing it. In the long run, we'd save a LOT of money.
The quality often wasn't as good as with the name-brand cartdriges.
I've observed this as well. Where I used to work, we had a laser printer that got totally screwed up. We had an independent repair company come out, and they told us that it was because of the refurbished toner catridge we were using. We didn't think it made that much of a difference, so management kept buying them. Well, guess what, the printer screwed up again. By that time, we had switched to a different independent repair company, and they came out and said the same thing. All the while, when the printer did work, it was awful at producing broken letters and such; sometimes the output was nearly unreadable. After that, we only bought manufacturer-branded toner and ink supplies, and we never had any more problems with that printer.
I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that printer manufacturers are the only people capable of producing high-quality toner and ink supplies. And these supplies must be really, really cheap to produce; they make a killing off of selling them. I don't understand why a company doesn't come along that specializes in making super high-quality ink and toner products--even better than printer manufacturer supplies--and selling them for more than the crap refurbished cartridges and kits (to account for the added expense in producing quality) but less than printer manufacturer-branded products (since the production costs are still relatively cheap).
If I could find a company like that, I'd buy from them. Maybe there is one, but all the companies that I know of that sell off-brand supplies are notorious for selling crap that, at best, is inferior and, at worst, will actually screw up your printer.
I've just tried this and it doesn't do that on any of the forms or fields I'm using.
It doesn't do it in regular e-mails. I was using a stationery template. Honestly, I don't know if this is a built-in Notes feature or something our developers put together, but I'm almost certain that it's a feature of Notes. It's in my Tools folder of my mailbox along with Rules.
trying to force the tool to fit what you know instead of learning what the tool is actually for
That's my point--the tool isn't actually good for anything. Even the Notes support and development people I know admit that as an e-mail system, it really sucks compared with other products on the market that are available. I know it's not an RDBMS, which makes it pretty much useless as a database in any sense that databases are used today. It sucks as a RAD tool when you compare its capabilities and ease-of-use to other RAD tools out there. It does Web service, but can't hold a candle to Apache or even (gasp!) IIS, especially when combined with something like OWA. (It's been a while since I've administered Exchange, is it still called Outlook Web Access?)
Maybe you're right and I'm just not using Lotus Notes for what it was intended. But if that's the case, then can someone please explain what the hell was it intended for? Because to me, it just seems like a mish-mash of substandard stuff thrown together, a jack of all trades and a dismal failure at every one when compared to other products that are cheaper or, in many cases, free, and in all cases easier to use and administer.
Seriously. In so-called real life, the most vitriolic rants I've ever handed out have been about politics, religion, and Lotus Notes. God, they have been doozies, too.
Okay, normally I'm not one to shout, but I've got to on this one. First, I respect your opinion, and if Lotus Notes works for you, fantastic. But...
I work at a really big company, and our e-mail/calendaring application standard is Lotus Notes. It has caused me nothing but immense pain and anguish. I've used and supported both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, along with their various clients, and I would much rather sell my soul to Bill Gates than use Lotus Notes a single day longer.
I once composed a document three pages long of nothing but bullet points of complaints about Lotus Notes. The "idiosyncratic" interface has literally cost me days of man-hours of work trying to do the simplest of tasks. I won't post the entire list here, because most of the time it boils down to stupid stuff like the fact that it doesn't use standard Windows interface guidelines that allow everyone in the world to just use it like they use every other business application on their desktop.
But I'll point out a few that are causes of my most recent irritations. The first thing that you do in Lotus Notes is launch it, and they even frickin' screwed that up. The first thing you see is a huge Lotus Notes splash screen. Lots of applciations have splash screens, so that in itself doesn't bother me. But the goobers who developed this crapplication have decided to force the splash screen to be a topmost window, so while Notes loads all of its cruft, the user is FORCED to sit there and watch a stupid dialog box. You can't Alt-tab over to Word and continue writing a letter, you can't Alt-tab to Firefox and check out the sports scores; no, you have to watch a stupid splash screen.
How about another? I've been working on throwing together a simple report database where a user can simply compose a new document, fill in some fields, hit a button, and e-mail a report to a list of people. One of the things I would like this form to do is to generate a richtext read-only version of the report in the document, a kind of "preview" feature. The problem is that richtext fields on a form just plain don't work. I've read hundreds of pages of documentation about it, and it all boils down to something like this: "Richtext fields, from a low-level system point of view, do not work like any other field or control in Lotus Notes, so we highly avoid doing anything programmatically with them."
Or how about one of my favorites? Right now, we're doing the above-mentioned report manually by opening up a stationery item, changing it appropriately, and sending it out. Depending on what all goes on during the day, this report can take a few minutes or a couple of hours to compose. I was writing one of the latter reports when I decided that I really ought to save it in case something happens and I lose the copy I'm working on. That is important: I was making a conscious effort to avoid losing data. So I reach for the Ctrl-S key, which is the Windows standard "save what I'm working on" key, and indeed performs the same function in Lotus Notes. The problem is that although I've hit Ctrl-S a thousand times before, on this particular occasion, I accidentally reached to far and hit Ctrl-E instead. I was prompted with a dialog box that said, "Do you want to send, save, or discard your changes? Choose Cancel to continue editing." Now at this point, I realized that I had hit the wrong key, and frankly, I have no idea what Ctrl-E does, so I chose Cancel to continue editing my document.
As it turns out, apparently Ctrl-E is the "Lose everything I've been working on without warning me" button, because my report that I had been working on for a couple of hours suddenly vanished and reverted back to the blank template! Cancel and continue editing my ass, who came up with this idiocy!?
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones). Yes, I've heard a
no one - not even Microsoft - is going to go after a community computer lab
True, but if they use pirated software as a perfectly viable option and the practice becomes widespread, it could seriously hinder any future economic dealings with countries (not just the U.S.) that do strictly enforce copyright laws.
As for the U.S., remember who you're talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if big corporations started lobbying Congress to make financial aid to impoverished and/or developing countries dependent on enforcing copyrights. (Yes, that would be stupid. Yes, I think they'd do it if they thought they could wring a few more bucks out of starving populations.)
Re:Unlicensed copies of proprietary software?
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Researching Open Source
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To the repliers of this post, I wanted to make a couple of points.
First of all, I know that not everyone thinks like me and that copyright laws are not exactly a determining factor in many of these government's decisions. That's why I stated that I can accept this from an informational standpoint. However, the self-stated purpose of the study is not just to provide information, but also advice. As such, I am worried that people reading the study may make the decision to go with commercial software because it's okay to pirate that software. Bridges.org is a joint American / South African organization, so I wouldn't think that this is the kind of inferrence that they would want people to draw.
Second, I hate to point out the obvious, but one of the points I would hope that a study like this--one that provides advice--would try to emphasize is that these African labs don't have to scrounge to get the software they need, and no one needs to break international copyright laws, no matter how little regard they have for those laws. That's kind of the point of FOSS. Or stated another way, why pirate software when you can get software of the same or better quality to do the same thing for free? It seems to me that they're implying, "Cost isn't (shouldn't be?) a factor in your decision, because commercial software is free, too."
Someone doesn't know what they're talking about
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Researching Open Source
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, and one more thing. I don't know if you don't know what you're talking about or the people at your meeting didn't know, but neither Samba nor SMB/CIFS, the protocol on which it is based, is a proprietary protocol. It's implementation within Windows is, but the protocol itself isn't. From an article about CIFS posted at Microsoft:
CIFS is an open, cross-platform technology based on the native file-sharing protocols built into Microsoft Windows and other popular PC operating systems, and supported on dozens of other platforms.
In either case, someone is a nutcase. If it's the speaker at your meeting, he or she is certainly not representative of the open source development community I've seen and experienced, and I'm probably inclined to agree that he or she is ignorant and arrogant. If it's you, well then, you do deserve to be modded down in spite of your complaining reply to your own post.
(No offense, but I'm leaning toward believing that in this case, it's you...)
Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. Samba is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
Am I missing something? Samba was developed by a bunch of (ignorant? arrogant?) free software developers.
Unlicensed copies of proprietary software?
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Researching Open Source
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· Score: 4, Interesting
From the "Key ground-level findings":
...the fact that FOSS is available free of license costs has little financial benefits for African labs, which almost never pay for the software they use because of donations and unlicensed copies.
Donations, fine, but unlicensed copies? So they're saying that one consideration in the FOSS versus proprietary software situation is the willingness of the public labs to break international copyright laws?
Okay, maybe I can accept that from an informational standpoint, but are decisions on how to proceed and what software is going to be used going to be made based on this information?
[This study] was published this week to provide needed background information and advice to people who want to make sound software choices that are right for their local environments...
From the home site (because I didn't know myself...):
The 6th annual GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) will bring developers, GNOME Foundation leaders, individuals, businesses and governments, as well as Free Software and Open Source software users together in Stuttgart, Germany from the 29th to the 31st of May, 2005.
The conference is a unique forum that highlights the capabilities and direction of GNOME - the user environment for desktop computers, networked servers and portable Internet devices. Come to GUADEC 6 to learn about -
That's not new, Microsoft has made a pretty profitable business from learning lessons (or stealing ideas, one could also argue) from its competitors. That is, after all, how we got Windows in the first place.
And as long as some people are dead-set on using IIS, it seems that making it more Apache-like in ways that Apache is superior to IIS is a good idea. Let's just hope that they continue to learn the more useful lessons and scrapping bad ideas.
Re:Bland anti-geek sentiment
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Chuck E. Cheese 2.0
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· Score: 5, Insightful
guy is fat and ugly, girl is blonde with big bosum
I didn't see anything in his post about the girl having to be a supermodel or porn star.
it would seem you need to rely on your parents to support you
How do you know this guy isn't supporting his parents? Or that his parent's aren't sick and in need of a caregiver? Or that his family isn't just a very close-knit family? Or that the guy hasn't been saving up to pay CASH for a new house (as in, no mortgage) and is just a few grand short?
there is nothing worse than having your parents interrupt you when you are trying to get it on
Sure there is. Living in an expensive place beyond your means, screwing up your financial security, declaring bankrupcy, sacrificing a comfortable retirement, living paycheck-to-paycheck, all so you can have a few minutes of guaranteed peace when you are "trying to get it on" with a superficial girl who only likes you because of your demonstrated willingness to go into debt up to your eyeballs? I think that's a LOT worse.
Call me crazy, but I wish a lot more people in this country had this guy's standards instead of yours.
Re:Bland anti-geek sentiment
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Chuck E. Cheese 2.0
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Frickin' amen, already!
I am so sick and tired of people acting like to be a REAL man you have to have the so-called "high class" type of girl who wouldn't be caught dead in a Chuck E. Cheese, playing video games, or otherwise engaging in nerdy practices.
I don't go to bars to meet girls because frankly, I don't WANT the kind of girl that hangs out in bars to meet men. I don't live with my parents, but I respect people who do--it saves an awful lot of money and keeps families closer together. I don't drive a fancy car because I don't need one and don't want to attract the kind of girls who only go for guys in fancy cars. And as weird as it may sound to some people, there are more important things in my life than hooking up with some bar or club skank just because I'm that starved for sex.
Now if I someday run across a girl that respects my priorities and my lighthearted attitude, great. If she's good-looking, fantastic. If I don't meet anyone like that, too bad, I'll live. Some of us like to enjoy the things we think are fun instead of dwelling on the lack of just any ol' female to satisfy a pathethic insatiable sexual craving.
The irony is that the bar-hopping club crawlers are the people I feel sorry for. I may be a nerd, but at least I'm a pretty durn happy one most of the time.
Good grief. I'm guilty of doing this sort of thing all the time.
I'd never really read about what exactly the applicants did before. If the article is right, all they did was poke around the system with URL munged from information they already had. It's not like they exploited buffer overflows to gain control of the system or anything.
Like I said, I do this type of thing all the time. If I'm on a Web site with content I like and I see a series of URLs named something1.htm, something2.htm, something4.htm, etc., you'd better believe I'm going to type something3.htm in and see what happens. On my own dinky Web sites I have, if I don't want people browsing around the system, I take steps to prevent it, such as making sure the server doesn't allow one to list directories, always having an index.htm file in every directory in case I forget, naming files randomly instead of in series, etc.
And, on top of all of that, as the post above states, all these candidates did was find out information that was going to be disclosed to them soon anyway.
So I gotta ask, what the hell is the big deal here? Why is Stanford being such a hard ass about this? If anyone is to blame here for any significant wrongdoing, it has got to be the company that designed software that so easily gives up unauthorized information. I wonder what Stanford did to seek redress against them. (Probably nothing.)
Not that I'm a big fan of outsourcing because it totally sucks for those of us left in the tech industry in the U.S., but...
By worrying about things such as computers and development models, India is vastly improving its economic situation, raising the standard of living for its citizens and enabling itself to provide basic necessities of which you speak.
If I were Inidan, I would see their (our, I guess, if I were Indian) progress over the past decade as an extremely hopeful sign of economic power that the country has never known before; perhaps even strong enough someday soon to compete with the big bad U.S. We (I'm not Indian any more, I'm referring to the U.S.) may not be the "land of opportunity" much longer, and I'll bet that India is one a lot of places that would be more than willing to take our place.
Remember how Japan dominated our auto industry over the course of less than a decade? It's very possible that we won't hold on to our software development leadership role for much longer precisely because places like India are setting their goals higher than merely managing war and poverty.
Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package"
Bah, using Linux is much easier than this; all I have to do is turn my computer on with the Knoppix disc in the drive, and I'm good to go; no fuss, no muss.
Seriously, this is a wonderful thing. If Linux can get out there on the desktops in widespread use before Microsoft gets its crippleware in front of everyone, it will set a standard that will be hard for Microsoft to overcome. Somebody (preferably some non-me person) should set up a fund that presses CDs with the goal of getting one in the hands of every country's citizens for free, especially countries where Microsoft doesn't have a firm grasp on the market yet. Hey, it worked for AOL. Before long, maybe zealots will be answering lame questions about how to get Tux Racer to run on Windows for those weird people that are using it instead of the free operating system everyone else is using...
I'm amused by their veiled threat to "take their ball and go home," as the submitter put it. This is such an empty threat. If they take their ball and go home, they make no money, and the industry they're supposedly protecting will hemorrhage when consumers will figure out something else to watch or do. That, of course, would pretty much take away their tiny little kingdom.
In other words, what they're really scared of is that we will take our ball and go home. When the RIAA pulled this crap, a large number of people basically said, "to hell with you and your stupid laws, I'm going to download and share these files anyway." Their little temper tantrum lawsuits have done very little to make a dent in that, and in fact, has mainly served the opposite effect as a publicity tool for peer-to-peer networks.
Right now, not many people share or download movies. Right now, studios and organizations like the MPAA are trying to stifle people's ability to do so. Right now, it is still happening (witness all of the hoopla over Revenge of the Sith). The more they fight it, the more they publicize it and the more people will do it.
If a television or DVD player won't play a movie or television show I want to watch for whatever reason, I'll simply get my television or DVD player from somewhere else. I hope that most consumers aren't foolish enough to buy into the sales pitch that a valuable feature is, "Hey, this device protects the industry by keeping you from watching stuff you want to!"
If these organizations were truly interested in helping studios and consumers, instead of trying to figure out how to put proverbial genies back into their respective bottles, they would be helping to figure out innovative ways to make people WANT to use non-illegal means to view their content. What they're doing now is only hurting the industry and will continue to do so until someone makes them stop.
So my response to Mr. Glickman: Go ahead, take your ball and go home. Will it hurt the consumer? A little bit, you bet. But after a little while when people like you are finally out of the equation because your own stupid beliefs and decisions and caused the industry and consumers to openly rebel against you, maybe we'll finally have an industry that can make everyone happy. You seem to keep forgetting that it's our game, not yours, to play.
Okay, you've got a deal. I'll check out 400 Blows. And I agree with your thoughts about "thinking" movies. Some of them would be on my top 100 list, though maybe not the same ones that are one other people's lists. I hope I conveyed that I try to at least put some effort into liking various genres, such as comedy, sci-fi, drama, horror, action, and so on. I've got to admit that like most XY's out there, I don't care too much for romantic comedies, but I won't deny that some of them are pretty good.
And for the record, no matter how much your cinematic taste leans towards the obscure or the popular, it will NEVER detract from the coolness of you juggling. Jesus, how I wish I could keep five pins in the air...
Looking through some of the replies, I'd say that you folks are proving my point.
I'll be the first to admit that there is a lot of crap that comes out now. Like everyone else, I wish I had the time and money back that I invested in The Hulk and Battlefield Earth. I'm not saying that because a movie is flashy and new, it's better than that old black and white stuff. But the opposite is not true, either. Just because a film is old or the first to innovate doesn't make it better than today's films.
Maybe our difference of opinion stems from our respective definitions of "best" in the sense of the 100 all-time best movies. Call me pedestrian (not the walking kind), but when I evaluate what a top movie is, I don't think about "mise-en-scene, composition, editing, lighting, plot, sound, historical importance, and direction." I think about how entertained I was. Depending on the genre, some of the things that are important to me are: Did I laugh? Did I cry? Did it get me to think? Did I feel like I connected with it? Did I talk about it with my friends afterwards? Did I want to watch it again? Do I still like it as much today as I did then?
Hey, I like the movie Psycho as much as most people do. Alfred Hitchcock was truly a master, and as far as suspense/horror movies goes, it was certainly out there on the edge at the time. But if I were to compare it to a movie such as, say, Silence of the Lambs, which really scares the bejesus outta me, I'd have to rate the latter as the better movie. Sorry Hitchcock fans, but I even think that Jaws is more suspenseful and scary. Maybe you disagree, and that's okay, I don't care. But if you disagree because Psycho is more historically significant (a point which I concede), then I think that's sad.
It's a Wonderful Life is a genuinely touching feel-good movie. But have you seen Mr. Holland's Opus? Jesus, it's a good thing I'm secure in my masculinity because I've never felt more like a girl in my life, crying with giddiness by the end.
I mean for real, come on people. Read the description for a movie on the list such as The 400 Blows or Umberto D and ask yourself, does this sound better than the quality movies (note: not the crap) that are coming out today? Maybe more historically significant, but this list isn't the all-time 100 most historically significant movies, it's the all-time 100 BEST movies, and therefore my uneducated opinion is a firm "I think not."
Okay, I'll reply once, but only as semantic clarification, not to try to further fan any flames...
That's why I put quotes around the word "supposed." It's the parent post's word that I borrowed. My point was that there is no amount of money that a worker is "supposed" to get paid, and that executives and the corporations they work for in general drive the amount as low as possible. Because they have to eat, workers have no counteracting power to force the amount up, except what is provided to them by means of liberal legislation and unions. (Oh, and to quit, of course, which was discussed in my original post.)
That's one of the failings of the free market in this country. As it exists, it is geared to benefit the rich and powerful. It's not really a free market when executives engage in deceptive practices, when corporations own the government, when laws and regulations supress consumers' rights, and so on. Where I work, there are--
Ack, I almost got going again. I must hit the Submit button quickly to resist further temptation! Maybe I'll take more thoughts offline and post them to my blog.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up a real issue, not from an end-user standpoint, but from major corporations. Shouldn't these companies get into serious legal trouble? I can think of two ways right off the top of my head.
First, if they're sticking adware on an illegal file and uploading it, don't the same laws apply to them uploading the illegal file? Is the **AA suing these companies along with 12-year-old kids? After all, it's adware-infested, but it's still an illegal file, right?
Second, if they are modifying warez software, not only does the previous apply, but doesn't it fall under the protection of software that outlaws modifying binary code and distributing it without the publisher's consent? I mean think about it, this kind of thing not only supposedly denies companies revenue, but it can give them a serious black eye. What if people get the incorrect impression that an adware-infested version of a respectable piece of software is the real thing? All of a sudden, you have a really bad--and undeserved--reputation for distributing spyware on everyone's computers.
Excellent idea; anyone know where I can get a torrent of VMWare?
(For those conserving humor filter battery power, I'm kidding--please don't reply...)
If I coded closed source software, I think I would probably deliberately load my code up with funnier comments. Something like:
or...
or even something corny (a blatant ripoff of a ThinkGeek t-shirt I have):
Any better suggestions? Reply, because I need something amusing to read this afternoon!
I don't think it is. I can't cite them now because I don't have time to search for them, but studies have shown that proficient typists using qwerty keyboards are just as fast as proficient typists using Dvorak keybaords.
Check out the wikipedia article for a good balanced look at both.
you either pay now or pay later
I'd rather pay now. I'm one of those people who likes to buy stuff like printers to keep for ten or fifteen years. The problem with cheap printers and expensive supplies is that people like me end up paying a couple of grand for stupid $200 printer over the course of its lifetime. I would much rather pay a few hundred bucks extra and buy ink that's dirt cheap, something a lot closer to what the actual cost of producing it. In the long run, we'd save a LOT of money.
The quality often wasn't as good as with the name-brand cartdriges.
I've observed this as well. Where I used to work, we had a laser printer that got totally screwed up. We had an independent repair company come out, and they told us that it was because of the refurbished toner catridge we were using. We didn't think it made that much of a difference, so management kept buying them. Well, guess what, the printer screwed up again. By that time, we had switched to a different independent repair company, and they came out and said the same thing. All the while, when the printer did work, it was awful at producing broken letters and such; sometimes the output was nearly unreadable. After that, we only bought manufacturer-branded toner and ink supplies, and we never had any more problems with that printer.
I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that printer manufacturers are the only people capable of producing high-quality toner and ink supplies. And these supplies must be really, really cheap to produce; they make a killing off of selling them. I don't understand why a company doesn't come along that specializes in making super high-quality ink and toner products--even better than printer manufacturer supplies--and selling them for more than the crap refurbished cartridges and kits (to account for the added expense in producing quality) but less than printer manufacturer-branded products (since the production costs are still relatively cheap).
If I could find a company like that, I'd buy from them. Maybe there is one, but all the companies that I know of that sell off-brand supplies are notorious for selling crap that, at best, is inferior and, at worst, will actually screw up your printer.
I've just tried this and it doesn't do that on any of the forms or fields I'm using.
It doesn't do it in regular e-mails. I was using a stationery template. Honestly, I don't know if this is a built-in Notes feature or something our developers put together, but I'm almost certain that it's a feature of Notes. It's in my Tools folder of my mailbox along with Rules.
trying to force the tool to fit what you know instead of learning what the tool is actually for
That's my point--the tool isn't actually good for anything. Even the Notes support and development people I know admit that as an e-mail system, it really sucks compared with other products on the market that are available. I know it's not an RDBMS, which makes it pretty much useless as a database in any sense that databases are used today. It sucks as a RAD tool when you compare its capabilities and ease-of-use to other RAD tools out there. It does Web service, but can't hold a candle to Apache or even (gasp!) IIS, especially when combined with something like OWA. (It's been a while since I've administered Exchange, is it still called Outlook Web Access?)
Maybe you're right and I'm just not using Lotus Notes for what it was intended. But if that's the case, then can someone please explain what the hell was it intended for? Because to me, it just seems like a mish-mash of substandard stuff thrown together, a jack of all trades and a dismal failure at every one when compared to other products that are cheaper or, in many cases, free, and in all cases easier to use and administer.
Seriously. In so-called real life, the most vitriolic rants I've ever handed out have been about politics, religion, and Lotus Notes. God, they have been doozies, too.
Okay, normally I'm not one to shout, but I've got to on this one. First, I respect your opinion, and if Lotus Notes works for you, fantastic. But...
I work at a really big company, and our e-mail/calendaring application standard is Lotus Notes. It has caused me nothing but immense pain and anguish. I've used and supported both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, along with their various clients, and I would much rather sell my soul to Bill Gates than use Lotus Notes a single day longer.
I once composed a document three pages long of nothing but bullet points of complaints about Lotus Notes. The "idiosyncratic" interface has literally cost me days of man-hours of work trying to do the simplest of tasks. I won't post the entire list here, because most of the time it boils down to stupid stuff like the fact that it doesn't use standard Windows interface guidelines that allow everyone in the world to just use it like they use every other business application on their desktop.
But I'll point out a few that are causes of my most recent irritations. The first thing that you do in Lotus Notes is launch it, and they even frickin' screwed that up. The first thing you see is a huge Lotus Notes splash screen. Lots of applciations have splash screens, so that in itself doesn't bother me. But the goobers who developed this crapplication have decided to force the splash screen to be a topmost window, so while Notes loads all of its cruft, the user is FORCED to sit there and watch a stupid dialog box. You can't Alt-tab over to Word and continue writing a letter, you can't Alt-tab to Firefox and check out the sports scores; no, you have to watch a stupid splash screen.
How about another? I've been working on throwing together a simple report database where a user can simply compose a new document, fill in some fields, hit a button, and e-mail a report to a list of people. One of the things I would like this form to do is to generate a richtext read-only version of the report in the document, a kind of "preview" feature. The problem is that richtext fields on a form just plain don't work. I've read hundreds of pages of documentation about it, and it all boils down to something like this: "Richtext fields, from a low-level system point of view, do not work like any other field or control in Lotus Notes, so we highly avoid doing anything programmatically with them."
Or how about one of my favorites? Right now, we're doing the above-mentioned report manually by opening up a stationery item, changing it appropriately, and sending it out. Depending on what all goes on during the day, this report can take a few minutes or a couple of hours to compose. I was writing one of the latter reports when I decided that I really ought to save it in case something happens and I lose the copy I'm working on. That is important: I was making a conscious effort to avoid losing data. So I reach for the Ctrl-S key, which is the Windows standard "save what I'm working on" key, and indeed performs the same function in Lotus Notes. The problem is that although I've hit Ctrl-S a thousand times before, on this particular occasion, I accidentally reached to far and hit Ctrl-E instead. I was prompted with a dialog box that said, "Do you want to send, save, or discard your changes? Choose Cancel to continue editing." Now at this point, I realized that I had hit the wrong key, and frankly, I have no idea what Ctrl-E does, so I chose Cancel to continue editing my document.
As it turns out, apparently Ctrl-E is the "Lose everything I've been working on without warning me" button, because my report that I had been working on for a couple of hours suddenly vanished and reverted back to the blank template! Cancel and continue editing my ass, who came up with this idiocy!?
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones). Yes, I've heard a
no one - not even Microsoft - is going to go after a community computer lab
True, but if they use pirated software as a perfectly viable option and the practice becomes widespread, it could seriously hinder any future economic dealings with countries (not just the U.S.) that do strictly enforce copyright laws.
As for the U.S., remember who you're talking about. I wouldn't be surprised if big corporations started lobbying Congress to make financial aid to impoverished and/or developing countries dependent on enforcing copyrights. (Yes, that would be stupid. Yes, I think they'd do it if they thought they could wring a few more bucks out of starving populations.)
To the repliers of this post, I wanted to make a couple of points.
First of all, I know that not everyone thinks like me and that copyright laws are not exactly a determining factor in many of these government's decisions. That's why I stated that I can accept this from an informational standpoint. However, the self-stated purpose of the study is not just to provide information, but also advice. As such, I am worried that people reading the study may make the decision to go with commercial software because it's okay to pirate that software. Bridges.org is a joint American / South African organization, so I wouldn't think that this is the kind of inferrence that they would want people to draw.
Second, I hate to point out the obvious, but one of the points I would hope that a study like this--one that provides advice--would try to emphasize is that these African labs don't have to scrounge to get the software they need, and no one needs to break international copyright laws, no matter how little regard they have for those laws. That's kind of the point of FOSS. Or stated another way, why pirate software when you can get software of the same or better quality to do the same thing for free? It seems to me that they're implying, "Cost isn't (shouldn't be?) a factor in your decision, because commercial software is free, too."
Oh, and one more thing. I don't know if you don't know what you're talking about or the people at your meeting didn't know, but neither Samba nor SMB/CIFS, the protocol on which it is based, is a proprietary protocol. It's implementation within Windows is, but the protocol itself isn't. From an article about CIFS posted at Microsoft:
CIFS is an open, cross-platform technology based on the native file-sharing protocols built into Microsoft Windows and other popular PC operating systems, and supported on dozens of other platforms.
In either case, someone is a nutcase. If it's the speaker at your meeting, he or she is certainly not representative of the open source development community I've seen and experienced, and I'm probably inclined to agree that he or she is ignorant and arrogant. If it's you, well then, you do deserve to be modded down in spite of your complaining reply to your own post.
(No offense, but I'm leaning toward believing that in this case, it's you...)
Umm...
From the Samba home page:
Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that has, since 1992, provided file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. Samba is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
Am I missing something? Samba was developed by a bunch of (ignorant? arrogant?) free software developers.
From the "Key ground-level findings":
Donations, fine, but unlicensed copies? So they're saying that one consideration in the FOSS versus proprietary software situation is the willingness of the public labs to break international copyright laws?
Okay, maybe I can accept that from an informational standpoint, but are decisions on how to proceed and what software is going to be used going to be made based on this information?
[This study] was published this week to provide needed background information and advice to people who want to make sound software choices that are right for their local environments...
Oh, I guess indeed they are.
From the home site (because I didn't know myself...):
The 6th annual GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) will bring developers, GNOME Foundation leaders, individuals, businesses and governments, as well as Free Software and Open Source software users together in Stuttgart, Germany from the 29th to the 31st of May, 2005.
The conference is a unique forum that highlights the capabilities and direction of GNOME - the user environment for desktop computers, networked servers and portable Internet devices. Come to GUADEC 6 to learn about -
Microsoft is learning lessons
That's not new, Microsoft has made a pretty profitable business from learning lessons (or stealing ideas, one could also argue) from its competitors. That is, after all, how we got Windows in the first place.
And as long as some people are dead-set on using IIS, it seems that making it more Apache-like in ways that Apache is superior to IIS is a good idea. Let's just hope that they continue to learn the more useful lessons and scrapping bad ideas.
guy is fat and ugly, girl is blonde with big bosum
I didn't see anything in his post about the girl having to be a supermodel or porn star.
it would seem you need to rely on your parents to support you
How do you know this guy isn't supporting his parents? Or that his parent's aren't sick and in need of a caregiver? Or that his family isn't just a very close-knit family? Or that the guy hasn't been saving up to pay CASH for a new house (as in, no mortgage) and is just a few grand short?
there is nothing worse than having your parents interrupt you when you are trying to get it on
Sure there is. Living in an expensive place beyond your means, screwing up your financial security, declaring bankrupcy, sacrificing a comfortable retirement, living paycheck-to-paycheck, all so you can have a few minutes of guaranteed peace when you are "trying to get it on" with a superficial girl who only likes you because of your demonstrated willingness to go into debt up to your eyeballs? I think that's a LOT worse.
Call me crazy, but I wish a lot more people in this country had this guy's standards instead of yours.
Frickin' amen, already!
I am so sick and tired of people acting like to be a REAL man you have to have the so-called "high class" type of girl who wouldn't be caught dead in a Chuck E. Cheese, playing video games, or otherwise engaging in nerdy practices.
I don't go to bars to meet girls because frankly, I don't WANT the kind of girl that hangs out in bars to meet men. I don't live with my parents, but I respect people who do--it saves an awful lot of money and keeps families closer together. I don't drive a fancy car because I don't need one and don't want to attract the kind of girls who only go for guys in fancy cars. And as weird as it may sound to some people, there are more important things in my life than hooking up with some bar or club skank just because I'm that starved for sex.
Now if I someday run across a girl that respects my priorities and my lighthearted attitude, great. If she's good-looking, fantastic. If I don't meet anyone like that, too bad, I'll live. Some of us like to enjoy the things we think are fun instead of dwelling on the lack of just any ol' female to satisfy a pathethic insatiable sexual craving.
The irony is that the bar-hopping club crawlers are the people I feel sorry for. I may be a nerd, but at least I'm a pretty durn happy one most of the time.
Good grief. I'm guilty of doing this sort of thing all the time.
I'd never really read about what exactly the applicants did before. If the article is right, all they did was poke around the system with URL munged from information they already had. It's not like they exploited buffer overflows to gain control of the system or anything.
Like I said, I do this type of thing all the time. If I'm on a Web site with content I like and I see a series of URLs named something1.htm, something2.htm, something4.htm, etc., you'd better believe I'm going to type something3.htm in and see what happens. On my own dinky Web sites I have, if I don't want people browsing around the system, I take steps to prevent it, such as making sure the server doesn't allow one to list directories, always having an index.htm file in every directory in case I forget, naming files randomly instead of in series, etc.
And, on top of all of that, as the post above states, all these candidates did was find out information that was going to be disclosed to them soon anyway.
So I gotta ask, what the hell is the big deal here? Why is Stanford being such a hard ass about this? If anyone is to blame here for any significant wrongdoing, it has got to be the company that designed software that so easily gives up unauthorized information. I wonder what Stanford did to seek redress against them. (Probably nothing.)
Not that I'm a big fan of outsourcing because it totally sucks for those of us left in the tech industry in the U.S., but...
By worrying about things such as computers and development models, India is vastly improving its economic situation, raising the standard of living for its citizens and enabling itself to provide basic necessities of which you speak.
If I were Inidan, I would see their (our, I guess, if I were Indian) progress over the past decade as an extremely hopeful sign of economic power that the country has never known before; perhaps even strong enough someday soon to compete with the big bad U.S. We (I'm not Indian any more, I'm referring to the U.S.) may not be the "land of opportunity" much longer, and I'll bet that India is one a lot of places that would be more than willing to take our place.
Remember how Japan dominated our auto industry over the course of less than a decade? It's very possible that we won't hold on to our software development leadership role for much longer precisely because places like India are setting their goals higher than merely managing war and poverty.
Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package"
Bah, using Linux is much easier than this; all I have to do is turn my computer on with the Knoppix disc in the drive, and I'm good to go; no fuss, no muss.
Seriously, this is a wonderful thing. If Linux can get out there on the desktops in widespread use before Microsoft gets its crippleware in front of everyone, it will set a standard that will be hard for Microsoft to overcome. Somebody (preferably some non-me person) should set up a fund that presses CDs with the goal of getting one in the hands of every country's citizens for free, especially countries where Microsoft doesn't have a firm grasp on the market yet. Hey, it worked for AOL. Before long, maybe zealots will be answering lame questions about how to get Tux Racer to run on Windows for those weird people that are using it instead of the free operating system everyone else is using...
I'm amused by their veiled threat to "take their ball and go home," as the submitter put it. This is such an empty threat. If they take their ball and go home, they make no money, and the industry they're supposedly protecting will hemorrhage when consumers will figure out something else to watch or do. That, of course, would pretty much take away their tiny little kingdom.
In other words, what they're really scared of is that we will take our ball and go home. When the RIAA pulled this crap, a large number of people basically said, "to hell with you and your stupid laws, I'm going to download and share these files anyway." Their little temper tantrum lawsuits have done very little to make a dent in that, and in fact, has mainly served the opposite effect as a publicity tool for peer-to-peer networks.
Right now, not many people share or download movies. Right now, studios and organizations like the MPAA are trying to stifle people's ability to do so. Right now, it is still happening (witness all of the hoopla over Revenge of the Sith). The more they fight it, the more they publicize it and the more people will do it.
If a television or DVD player won't play a movie or television show I want to watch for whatever reason, I'll simply get my television or DVD player from somewhere else. I hope that most consumers aren't foolish enough to buy into the sales pitch that a valuable feature is, "Hey, this device protects the industry by keeping you from watching stuff you want to!"
If these organizations were truly interested in helping studios and consumers, instead of trying to figure out how to put proverbial genies back into their respective bottles, they would be helping to figure out innovative ways to make people WANT to use non-illegal means to view their content. What they're doing now is only hurting the industry and will continue to do so until someone makes them stop.
So my response to Mr. Glickman: Go ahead, take your ball and go home. Will it hurt the consumer? A little bit, you bet. But after a little while when people like you are finally out of the equation because your own stupid beliefs and decisions and caused the industry and consumers to openly rebel against you, maybe we'll finally have an industry that can make everyone happy. You seem to keep forgetting that it's our game, not yours, to play.
Okay, you've got a deal. I'll check out 400 Blows. And I agree with your thoughts about "thinking" movies. Some of them would be on my top 100 list, though maybe not the same ones that are one other people's lists. I hope I conveyed that I try to at least put some effort into liking various genres, such as comedy, sci-fi, drama, horror, action, and so on. I've got to admit that like most XY's out there, I don't care too much for romantic comedies, but I won't deny that some of them are pretty good.
And for the record, no matter how much your cinematic taste leans towards the obscure or the popular, it will NEVER detract from the coolness of you juggling. Jesus, how I wish I could keep five pins in the air...
Looking through some of the replies, I'd say that you folks are proving my point.
I'll be the first to admit that there is a lot of crap that comes out now. Like everyone else, I wish I had the time and money back that I invested in The Hulk and Battlefield Earth. I'm not saying that because a movie is flashy and new, it's better than that old black and white stuff. But the opposite is not true, either. Just because a film is old or the first to innovate doesn't make it better than today's films.
Maybe our difference of opinion stems from our respective definitions of "best" in the sense of the 100 all-time best movies. Call me pedestrian (not the walking kind), but when I evaluate what a top movie is, I don't think about "mise-en-scene, composition, editing, lighting, plot, sound, historical importance, and direction." I think about how entertained I was. Depending on the genre, some of the things that are important to me are: Did I laugh? Did I cry? Did it get me to think? Did I feel like I connected with it? Did I talk about it with my friends afterwards? Did I want to watch it again? Do I still like it as much today as I did then?
Hey, I like the movie Psycho as much as most people do. Alfred Hitchcock was truly a master, and as far as suspense/horror movies goes, it was certainly out there on the edge at the time. But if I were to compare it to a movie such as, say, Silence of the Lambs, which really scares the bejesus outta me, I'd have to rate the latter as the better movie. Sorry Hitchcock fans, but I even think that Jaws is more suspenseful and scary. Maybe you disagree, and that's okay, I don't care. But if you disagree because Psycho is more historically significant (a point which I concede), then I think that's sad.
It's a Wonderful Life is a genuinely touching feel-good movie. But have you seen Mr. Holland's Opus? Jesus, it's a good thing I'm secure in my masculinity because I've never felt more like a girl in my life, crying with giddiness by the end.
I mean for real, come on people. Read the description for a movie on the list such as The 400 Blows or Umberto D and ask yourself, does this sound better than the quality movies (note: not the crap) that are coming out today? Maybe more historically significant, but this list isn't the all-time 100 most historically significant movies, it's the all-time 100 BEST movies, and therefore my uneducated opinion is a firm "I think not."
Okay, I'll reply once, but only as semantic clarification, not to try to further fan any flames...
That's why I put quotes around the word "supposed." It's the parent post's word that I borrowed. My point was that there is no amount of money that a worker is "supposed" to get paid, and that executives and the corporations they work for in general drive the amount as low as possible. Because they have to eat, workers have no counteracting power to force the amount up, except what is provided to them by means of liberal legislation and unions. (Oh, and to quit, of course, which was discussed in my original post.)
That's one of the failings of the free market in this country. As it exists, it is geared to benefit the rich and powerful. It's not really a free market when executives engage in deceptive practices, when corporations own the government, when laws and regulations supress consumers' rights, and so on. Where I work, there are--
Ack, I almost got going again. I must hit the Submit button quickly to resist further temptation! Maybe I'll take more thoughts offline and post them to my blog.
I hope I don't sound too dense, but...
Huh?