Yeah, but when the corporation doesn't explicitly tell their employees to make sure that customers understand what they're signing up for, and that corporation goes so far as to make it an incentive for employees to hard sell, then the problem is corporate policy, not a rogue employee.
You're right, a single guy getting charged for a month of MSN isn't going to raise the stock price of Microsoft or Best buy. This is a class action lawsuit which means there are many guys (and gals) who got charged for a service they didn't know they were signing up for. Add it all up, and the companies may very well have made a great deal of money from the way their employees are trained. And it's pretty easy to speculate that this problem isn't limited to being sneaky about MSN subscriptions. I think it's pretty clear that these companies, like many others, use all sorts of methods to extract money unnecessarily from customers. (service contract anyone?)
The name AOL has come up a lot on Slashdot today, and they're a great example of using underhanded tactics like this to generate revenue. Either their billing computer was perpetually broken, or I just happen to know a whole lot of people who had a whole lot of trouble canceling their service with the company in such a way that they would actually stop being billed (all automatic bill pay customers too, go figure).
I myself have fallen victim to a similar scheme by Discover card. Somehow I was enrolled in some kind of insurance program "trial", and then after a year I started getting billed for it. I have no idea how they did it, but I'd be willing to bet that they have me on record somewhere as saying "yeah, ok" to *something* that had this insurance program tagged on. And I probably got myself into the mess by calling them for a completely unrelated customer service issue, during which they always try to sell something and I don't want to be rude to them because, hey, my finances are at their mercy. So I got them to cancel the program from my account and refund the money that they'd been charging for several months (I don't carry a balance on the card so don't check the bill like I should). Getting them to do so was no picnic though. I was told for several minutes that I needed the service or my life would eventually deteriorate into a hellish nightmare. Then I was told that they would cancel the service, but not refund any of my money. After all, they provided the service that I didn't know that I was getting. I was literally told that they couldn't do it. So I kept asking and asking and eventually the person I was talking to gave in and reset my card balance back to zero and then gave me a little mini-lecture about responsibility. (credit card companies are the worst when it comes to these kinds of scams. they know that a certain percentage of people aren't going to notice or complain when they do things like arbitrarily raise an interest rate, and they take it to the bank...that they own)
Make no mistake. When employees of large corporations act like this, it's very rarely the problem of a single bad egg. These people are trained to get money from you above all else. Hell, they know you'll be back anyhow. We're all suckers. Even if a company hides behind an excuse like, "we don't tell them to be dishonest, we simply offer a sales incentive", it's total bullshit.
Everyone knows that everyone knows, but nobody can seem to figure out how to fix it.
AOL existed prior to the web becoming mainstream. They were actually a little late to the game. And for a good while there they tried to maintain their service as being separate from the rest of the internet, with web access tacked on.
I don't think that AOL encouraged people to get on the web so much as they marketed their way onto people's computers. One could make a similar argument that Windows is what made personal computing take off, but it didn't; it just happened to win because of (dubious) business strategy.
And I would argue that all of those people duped into signing up with AOL during those years STILL didn't know what the Internet was. AOL's "internet" in 1995 was not the same "internet" you could get from a local provider, who could often charge less and provide superior service. Granted people would have missed out on the amazing AOL keyword feature.:)
Windows 95 was certainly built with the Internet in mind. They didn't need AOL links to educate people about its existence.
Re:You can't force people to keep salaries secret.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Having been through this one before a few times, it's not just in the company's best interest to keep people in the dark, it's in the employees' best interest as well. No good can ever come from discussing your compensation with your coworkers. It will always turn into chaos because everyone feels important enough to be compensated more, but not every employee is equally important. When any group of employees starts getting pissed about money, it impacts everyone.
It's much better to read up on what your position pays on average for your area, evaluate your own performance, and then try to negotiate more money on your own. And think about it, if you're management, and all your employees suddenly know what everyone else makes, do you rectify the situation in the future by paying everyone more? No, probably something closer to the opposite of that. Maybe you can rectify things by talking to everyone like adults until everybody is on the same page and walks away with a newfound respect for the way life works....yeah.
Blabbing on about your compensation is a typical just-out-of-college-now-show-me-the-money mistake. It's amateur. Not only should a person never disclose what they make to their coworkers, but they should never disclose this information to anyone. This is one of the few parts of life that is actually very gamey. Keep your finances, religion, and (strong) politics closely guarded with only your most trusted family. It's personal encapsulation. Only expose what you need to expose and you'll have less people mucking in your business.
If you want to be one of the people who get the larger yearly increases, and the bigger bonuses, then make yourself appear invaluable...which often means that you'll have to do more, and do more things that "wow" people. You can verify that you're being treated well by *paying attention.*
What? The opensource community has always had a love / hate thing when it comes to Google. Sure Google supports opensource in many ways, but they themselves are sitting on a whole load of proprietary code that they have no plans to release. They're most certainly developer-friendly, but that's not the same thing as the "savior of opensource."
In this respect Google operates like many companies that are "opensource-friendly", in that they support many projects that may ultimately benefit them, release a few non-threatening bits of their own source, release a whole bunch of APIs, but then hide the rest because they don't fully believe, internally, that FOSS as a concept is completely viable in all situations.
Yep. Anytime we examine a complicated problem it's always tempting to scratch the current solution and re-start with something more simple.
The folly in this is that we start running into exceptions in which the simplified solution doesn't work, and must be modified. And modified. And modified. Soon our simple little system isn't so simple anymore. Eventually we end up right about where we started from, with a big, hairy, complicated mess. At this point somebody will stand up and say, "this is stupid, why don't we just simplify everything," and it would be prudent to shut that person up right quick.
We don't need to scratch the patent system, we need to fix certain aspects. Something must be done to address software patents specifically. In the meantime, fighting patent lawsuits with patent lawsuits seems to be where we're headed. Over time I can actually see it working itself out, but really I think it needs some helping along, and now.
As far as I can tell, I'm technically committing a DoS attack if I steal your keyboard.
I think that most people reserve it for attacks against shared resources, or at least require that some abstract resource (such as disk space or bandwidth) is consumed. Otherwise, anything that I do to disrupt you from doing anything with your computer is a denial of service.
This got me too. I expected to hear something about anti-piracy websites, not a marketing campaign which has nothing to do with RIAA. Yes, in this case the label was ok with the distribution, and therefore RIAA should not have taken any action, but the article summary completely missed this point.
My initial reaction was "huh?", and I laughed out loud when I read the top post subject:)
If the cheating friends were able to secure positions in respected corporations and are successful in their work, then perhaps their cheating during school was less important than we'd make it out to be. If the friend who studied and worked hard was unable to land a good job in his field, and is unable to move up the ladder, then perhaps all of the cheating in the world would not have helped him.
For these reasons, I don't particularly buy the grandparent's anecdote. Perhaps the friends cheated in certain classes that they didn't find important (which I wouldn't condone), but I find it very difficult to believe that anybody cheated their way through a degree; not an engineering degree anyhow. I also believe that a person can be quite successful in the work world without a stellar GPA as long as he makes a strong effort to bring something unique to the table. Success means making yourself (appear) invaluable and staying motivated for the long climb.
Hmm, that gave me a thought. Perhaps cheating your way through school is really the best way to prepare for certain careers... say... sales or marketing?:)
I'm proud to announce that I've just now finished the world's easiest linux distribution, called ObscureNameo, based on the Ulteo distro, based on the Ubuntu distro, based on Debian.
I hope to have ObscureNameo LameuVersiono Alpha 1 ready for download soon.
For many minutes I've been thinking about how users are accustomed to working in the Windows world, and I've taken all that is great about Windows and injected it into ObscureNameo. We're talking scroll-wheel support, desktop backgrounds, and even the world wide web. These features combined with all the things like/etc and glibc make for one powerful user experience.
ObscureNameo LameuVersiono Alpha 1 includes software like Kolongo 1.3.9, Kgruntsi 0.1.0a, and of course BINAGN (Binagn Is Not A Good Name) 3.7.4.
Ok, but seriously, maybe they've got something here. Ubuntu could certainly use some competition. But I'm a little put off by the website copy: "Ulteo was designed as a new concept which benefits from internet access to ease the way people use computers.... It won't try to provide the ultimate desktop to users - we believe that current Linux desktops are most often excellent. Massive Linux adoption relies on something else."
Hmm. I'd rather have the ultimate desktop than a sub-ultimate desktop. Or is ultimate now a negative thing? Regardless, the one screenshot they managed to put up looks suspiciously like everything that we've ever seen. I'll have to download the alpha and give it a whirl though... all cynicism aside, I am interested. I'm guessing that this is a stripped down Ubuntu with what appears to be some kind of active desktop.
I agree with you. I couldn't find what I would consider a death threat in the article. It's extremely disturbing, perhaps even illegal, but I didn't see anything that I'd consider an actual, direct threat. What I'm seeing here is a generic "I'd kill that bitch/asshole/whatever" commentary. Completely inappropriate. Completely out of line. But not a statement of actual intent. This is a prankster (or group of) with no cooth and a terrible sense of humor.
Then again, I'm no detective. Maybe this behavior is indicative of more, but I really doubt it.
I just ran their configuration script and I think you're right. It's coming up with a figure that is easily twice the price I paid for a dual Xeon Intel-based server with redundant power and cooling, 10 SCA HD bays, multichannel RAID, and 4GB of ECC.
In a small business environment I need heavy duty features, but on a small scale. A single beefed up server can handle most of the workload, and scalability isn't really a concern. The xserve products look really, really nice, but to me appear to be overkill for small business (50 employees, manufacturing). This is the kind of hardware that I drool over a little bit as I imagine our network growing over the years, but ultimately don't purchase because I don't need anything that fancy just yet.
This sort of reminds me of the sales calls I used to get from Cisco/etc where they try to convince that I need managed switches with all sorts of features and proven efficiency... at many, many times the cost of my generic gigabit switches that handle our data flow just fine. They're fast enough, and reliable enough...and cheap enough that a failure means a simple, low-cost swap out (this never happens though).
In the small business environment, we just need something that will work efficiently, and work reliably. Issues that face real data centers aren't really applicable. Power requirements: don't care. Environmental requirements: don't care. Size/form factor: don't care. Scalability: minor concern. Monitoring capabilities/KVM/etc: minor concern. Just work well enough that nobody notices that it's working well, and reliably enough that I can go on vacation with the little peace of mind afforded by redundancy and automation. Oh yeah, and unfortunately, it has to be on the cheap. Think the Honda Civic of server hardware.
Don't go around calling "3rd grade" if you're just going to summarize a summary. RTFA already.
Here, this will help:
"The report found that Microsoft (Quote) Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.
During this period, 39 vulnerabilities, 12 of which were ranked high priority or severe, were found in Microsoft Windows and the company took an average of 21 days to fix them. It's an increase of the 22 vulnerabilities and 13-day turnaround time for the first half of 2006 but still bested the competition handily.
Red Hat Linux was the next-best performer, requiring an average of 58 days to address a total of 208 vulnerabilities. However, this was a significant increase in both problems and fix time over the first half of 2006, when there were 42 vulnerabilities in Red Hat and the average turnaround was 13 days.
The one bright spot in all of this is that of the 208 Red Hat vulnerabilities, the most of the top five operating systems, only two were considered high severity, 130 were medium severity, and 76 were considered low.
Then there's Mac OS X. Despite the latest TV ads ridiculing the security in Vista with a Matrix-like Agent playing the UAC in Vista, Apple (Quote) has nothing to brag about. Symantec found 43 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X and a 66 day turnaround on fixes. Fortunately, only one was high priority.
Like the others, this is also an increase over the first half of the year. For the first half of 2006, 21 vulnerabilities were found in Mac OS X and Apple took on average 37 days to fix them. "
On the other hand, you have to punch the clock. When you are hourly your cost to the company is based on the number of hours you work. Thus when you work overtime and start costing the company more money than they expected, you fall under the management microscope. "Why aren't you getting you work done in forty hours?"
When you are salary and not punching the clock, your cost is fixed and you are judged on performance alone. Whether you work 10 hours or 60 hours.
That's the theory anyhow. It all depends on the company how it really works.
I'm salary exempt and it works out in my favor. I typically put in around 40 hours, sometimes a little less. I don't feel bad about the weeks where I work less because there are a few times a year where I have to put in 70 hours in one week.
Another benefit, to me, is that I don't feel at all pressured to perform within an alloted time period. If I waste an hour bullshitting with co-workers I don't feel guilty about it. I still have to have my work done. How I get it done is up to me.
"But what about my freedom to become a dictator!?"
Re:On the contrary...
on
ReactOS Revealed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
We're kind of ruining the top post which was actually pretty funny, but...
I would almost agree with you, if only looking at a snapshot from about 2002 until 2006 during which I was no longer dealing with 9x and NT4 installations. Installation headaches were pretty commonplace prior to these years. Once hardware vendors had all gotten used to the ways of NT5, installing Win2K and XP became a total breeze. Rarely have I had trouble installing either operating system. They will choke occasionally on cheap and/or new hardware, but with typical stuff installation is usually a no-brainer.
And now Vista is upon us, and it's not detecting a lot of real obscure hardware, like say, MY CDROM DRIVE. WTF. Once again it's become hit and miss...or would be, if I chose to install Vista in production at this time.
Difficulty installing an OS isn't really a good measure of quality anyhow. I recently had a bad experience installing Ubuntu 6.05LTS to an array on an adaptec I2O controller. Rock solid once I got it fixed. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
So, essentially, if I like what your computer program does, I can certainly write my own that does the same thing. I cannot, however, use your code even if I have access to it.
And no matter how good your spec is, my interpretation in code does not "have to be written" in a certain way.
for(x=0;x9;x++);... x=0; while(x9) x++;... int count_to_ten(int n) {
if (n 9)
n = count_to_ten(n++);
return n; }... x = new awesome_number_class; x.count_to_ten();... 10 X = 0 20 X = X + 1 30 IF X 9 THEN 40 GOTO 20 50 END IF... do
x = x + 1 loop until x = 9
I don't buy it. If they secretly wanted people to pirate software, then they wouldn't have gone through all of the trouble to implement activation and genuine advantage, or the BSA for that matter; we'd still just be keying in product codes. Of course the volume licensing backdoor is still there, because they know that those of us in the business world aren't going to tolerate a bunch of activation nonsense.
No, I'm pretty sure that they genuinely dislike piracy and are actively trying to stop it, albeit in a clumsy Microsoft kind of way. It's really not that easy of a task to prevent piracy, really, unless you're prepared to sacrifice a lot of customers to false positive or excessively annoying situations. I'm also sure that they would prefer people to pirate their software than to pirate their competitor's software, or use OSS, but that doesn't imply that they like piracy.
We can argue that the piracy is good for their business, but I really don't believe that they think it is good for their business. If they did believe that, then they've spent way too much money trying to pretend like they're trying to prevent piracy.
Certainly it's much harder to casually pirate MS Windows today as it was in 2000, and they've made it annoying for people with pirated copies of Windows to obtain certain updates; we can actually substitute "Office" for "Windows" here too. Contrast this with Mac OSX, which is as trivial to copy and install (e.g. pirate) as Windows 98.
No, Microsoft is truly trying to figure out how to prevent people from pirating their software. They try to lock people in not through a piracy support conspiracy, but through traditional means of vendor lock, educational discounts, "home use" programs, and brute strength in the marketplace.
The point was that the source of energy *is* important.
Your car engine does not dip when you turn your headlights on while driving down the road, and your headlights are such a small draw on power that you will not notice it at the pump. You can't just discount mechanical energy and pretend that it always takes the same amount of *fuel* to power your headlights just because they draw a constant amount of power.
Now if you ran your headlights on D batteries, you'd certainly notice it, fast.
The source of energy *is* important. It is, in cases like this, just as or more important as how much power is actually required.
The source of energy is certainly not irrelevant. What if the source of energy was solar? In this case the turning engine has a whole buttload of momentum and I suspect that in real world terms, turning your lights on has no measurable impact on gas mileage. That's not to say that the energy is free, but in the case of a car, you're turning the alternator regardless of whether you've got the lights on or not, and headlights are not a significant enough power draw to impact performance. With some of the big giant over powered inefficient engines we have today, in some vehicles you can drive with the A/C on and not notice a change in mileage.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but when the corporation doesn't explicitly tell their employees to make sure that customers understand what they're signing up for, and that corporation goes so far as to make it an incentive for employees to hard sell, then the problem is corporate policy, not a rogue employee.
You're right, a single guy getting charged for a month of MSN isn't going to raise the stock price of Microsoft or Best buy. This is a class action lawsuit which means there are many guys (and gals) who got charged for a service they didn't know they were signing up for. Add it all up, and the companies may very well have made a great deal of money from the way their employees are trained. And it's pretty easy to speculate that this problem isn't limited to being sneaky about MSN subscriptions. I think it's pretty clear that these companies, like many others, use all sorts of methods to extract money unnecessarily from customers. (service contract anyone?)
The name AOL has come up a lot on Slashdot today, and they're a great example of using underhanded tactics like this to generate revenue. Either their billing computer was perpetually broken, or I just happen to know a whole lot of people who had a whole lot of trouble canceling their service with the company in such a way that they would actually stop being billed (all automatic bill pay customers too, go figure).
I myself have fallen victim to a similar scheme by Discover card. Somehow I was enrolled in some kind of insurance program "trial", and then after a year I started getting billed for it. I have no idea how they did it, but I'd be willing to bet that they have me on record somewhere as saying "yeah, ok" to *something* that had this insurance program tagged on. And I probably got myself into the mess by calling them for a completely unrelated customer service issue, during which they always try to sell something and I don't want to be rude to them because, hey, my finances are at their mercy. So I got them to cancel the program from my account and refund the money that they'd been charging for several months (I don't carry a balance on the card so don't check the bill like I should). Getting them to do so was no picnic though. I was told for several minutes that I needed the service or my life would eventually deteriorate into a hellish nightmare. Then I was told that they would cancel the service, but not refund any of my money. After all, they provided the service that I didn't know that I was getting. I was literally told that they couldn't do it. So I kept asking and asking and eventually the person I was talking to gave in and reset my card balance back to zero and then gave me a little mini-lecture about responsibility. (credit card companies are the worst when it comes to these kinds of scams. they know that a certain percentage of people aren't going to notice or complain when they do things like arbitrarily raise an interest rate, and they take it to the bank...that they own)
Make no mistake. When employees of large corporations act like this, it's very rarely the problem of a single bad egg. These people are trained to get money from you above all else. Hell, they know you'll be back anyhow. We're all suckers. Even if a company hides behind an excuse like, "we don't tell them to be dishonest, we simply offer a sales incentive", it's total bullshit.
Everyone knows that everyone knows, but nobody can seem to figure out how to fix it.
AOL existed prior to the web becoming mainstream. They were actually a little late to the game. And for a good while there they tried to maintain their service as being separate from the rest of the internet, with web access tacked on.
I don't think that AOL encouraged people to get on the web so much as they marketed their way onto people's computers. One could make a similar argument that Windows is what made personal computing take off, but it didn't; it just happened to win because of (dubious) business strategy.
And I would argue that all of those people duped into signing up with AOL during those years STILL didn't know what the Internet was. AOL's "internet" in 1995 was not the same "internet" you could get from a local provider, who could often charge less and provide superior service. Granted people would have missed out on the amazing AOL keyword feature. :)
Windows 95 was certainly built with the Internet in mind. They didn't need AOL links to educate people about its existence.
Having been through this one before a few times, it's not just in the company's best interest to keep people in the dark, it's in the employees' best interest as well. No good can ever come from discussing your compensation with your coworkers. It will always turn into chaos because everyone feels important enough to be compensated more, but not every employee is equally important. When any group of employees starts getting pissed about money, it impacts everyone.
It's much better to read up on what your position pays on average for your area, evaluate your own performance, and then try to negotiate more money on your own. And think about it, if you're management, and all your employees suddenly know what everyone else makes, do you rectify the situation in the future by paying everyone more? No, probably something closer to the opposite of that. Maybe you can rectify things by talking to everyone like adults until everybody is on the same page and walks away with a newfound respect for the way life works....yeah.
Blabbing on about your compensation is a typical just-out-of-college-now-show-me-the-money mistake. It's amateur. Not only should a person never disclose what they make to their coworkers, but they should never disclose this information to anyone. This is one of the few parts of life that is actually very gamey. Keep your finances, religion, and (strong) politics closely guarded with only your most trusted family. It's personal encapsulation. Only expose what you need to expose and you'll have less people mucking in your business.
If you want to be one of the people who get the larger yearly increases, and the bigger bonuses, then make yourself appear invaluable...which often means that you'll have to do more, and do more things that "wow" people. You can verify that you're being treated well by *paying attention.*
What? The opensource community has always had a love / hate thing when it comes to Google. Sure Google supports opensource in many ways, but they themselves are sitting on a whole load of proprietary code that they have no plans to release. They're most certainly developer-friendly, but that's not the same thing as the "savior of opensource."
In this respect Google operates like many companies that are "opensource-friendly", in that they support many projects that may ultimately benefit them, release a few non-threatening bits of their own source, release a whole bunch of APIs, but then hide the rest because they don't fully believe, internally, that FOSS as a concept is completely viable in all situations.
Yep. Anytime we examine a complicated problem it's always tempting to scratch the current solution and re-start with something more simple.
The folly in this is that we start running into exceptions in which the simplified solution doesn't work, and must be modified. And modified. And modified. Soon our simple little system isn't so simple anymore. Eventually we end up right about where we started from, with a big, hairy, complicated mess. At this point somebody will stand up and say, "this is stupid, why don't we just simplify everything," and it would be prudent to shut that person up right quick.
We don't need to scratch the patent system, we need to fix certain aspects. Something must be done to address software patents specifically. In the meantime, fighting patent lawsuits with patent lawsuits seems to be where we're headed. Over time I can actually see it working itself out, but really I think it needs some helping along, and now.
Unfortunately, the term Denial of Service is extremely vague and broad. Basically to the point of being useless.
t ml
http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/denial_of_service.h
As far as I can tell, I'm technically committing a DoS attack if I steal your keyboard.
I think that most people reserve it for attacks against shared resources, or at least require that some abstract resource (such as disk space or bandwidth) is consumed. Otherwise, anything that I do to disrupt you from doing anything with your computer is a denial of service.
This got me too. I expected to hear something about anti-piracy websites, not a marketing campaign which has nothing to do with RIAA. Yes, in this case the label was ok with the distribution, and therefore RIAA should not have taken any action, but the article summary completely missed this point.
:)
My initial reaction was "huh?", and I laughed out loud when I read the top post subject
But consider this:
:)
If the cheating friends were able to secure positions in respected corporations and are successful in their work, then perhaps their cheating during school was less important than we'd make it out to be. If the friend who studied and worked hard was unable to land a good job in his field, and is unable to move up the ladder, then perhaps all of the cheating in the world would not have helped him.
For these reasons, I don't particularly buy the grandparent's anecdote. Perhaps the friends cheated in certain classes that they didn't find important (which I wouldn't condone), but I find it very difficult to believe that anybody cheated their way through a degree; not an engineering degree anyhow. I also believe that a person can be quite successful in the work world without a stellar GPA as long as he makes a strong effort to bring something unique to the table. Success means making yourself (appear) invaluable and staying motivated for the long climb.
Hmm, that gave me a thought. Perhaps cheating your way through school is really the best way to prepare for certain careers... say... sales or marketing?
Newsflash: machosim linked to fear of roosting chickens.
I'm proud to announce that I've just now finished the world's easiest linux distribution, called ObscureNameo, based on the Ulteo distro, based on the Ubuntu distro, based on Debian.
/etc and glibc make for one powerful user experience.
... It won't try to provide the ultimate desktop to users - we believe that current Linux desktops are most often excellent. Massive Linux adoption relies on something else."
I hope to have ObscureNameo LameuVersiono Alpha 1 ready for download soon.
For many minutes I've been thinking about how users are accustomed to working in the Windows world, and I've taken all that is great about Windows and injected it into ObscureNameo. We're talking scroll-wheel support, desktop backgrounds, and even the world wide web. These features combined with all the things like
ObscureNameo LameuVersiono Alpha 1 includes software like Kolongo 1.3.9, Kgruntsi 0.1.0a, and of course BINAGN (Binagn Is Not A Good Name) 3.7.4.
Ok, but seriously, maybe they've got something here. Ubuntu could certainly use some competition. But I'm a little put off by the website copy: "Ulteo was designed as a new concept which benefits from internet access to ease the way people use computers.
Hmm. I'd rather have the ultimate desktop than a sub-ultimate desktop. Or is ultimate now a negative thing? Regardless, the one screenshot they managed to put up looks suspiciously like everything that we've ever seen. I'll have to download the alpha and give it a whirl though... all cynicism aside, I am interested. I'm guessing that this is a stripped down Ubuntu with what appears to be some kind of active desktop.
No, it's a perfect example of one application's method of using the X11 clipboard logic.
The parent to your reply still has a point: sometimes a person has to first select the text that they intend replace with text from the clipboard.
I agree with you. I couldn't find what I would consider a death threat in the article. It's extremely disturbing, perhaps even illegal, but I didn't see anything that I'd consider an actual, direct threat. What I'm seeing here is a generic "I'd kill that bitch/asshole/whatever" commentary. Completely inappropriate. Completely out of line. But not a statement of actual intent. This is a prankster (or group of) with no cooth and a terrible sense of humor.
Then again, I'm no detective. Maybe this behavior is indicative of more, but I really doubt it.
I just ran their configuration script and I think you're right. It's coming up with a figure that is easily twice the price I paid for a dual Xeon Intel-based server with redundant power and cooling, 10 SCA HD bays, multichannel RAID, and 4GB of ECC.
In a small business environment I need heavy duty features, but on a small scale. A single beefed up server can handle most of the workload, and scalability isn't really a concern. The xserve products look really, really nice, but to me appear to be overkill for small business (50 employees, manufacturing). This is the kind of hardware that I drool over a little bit as I imagine our network growing over the years, but ultimately don't purchase because I don't need anything that fancy just yet.
This sort of reminds me of the sales calls I used to get from Cisco/etc where they try to convince that I need managed switches with all sorts of features and proven efficiency... at many, many times the cost of my generic gigabit switches that handle our data flow just fine. They're fast enough, and reliable enough...and cheap enough that a failure means a simple, low-cost swap out (this never happens though).
In the small business environment, we just need something that will work efficiently, and work reliably. Issues that face real data centers aren't really applicable. Power requirements: don't care. Environmental requirements: don't care. Size/form factor: don't care. Scalability: minor concern. Monitoring capabilities/KVM/etc: minor concern. Just work well enough that nobody notices that it's working well, and reliably enough that I can go on vacation with the little peace of mind afforded by redundancy and automation. Oh yeah, and unfortunately, it has to be on the cheap. Think the Honda Civic of server hardware.
Don't go around calling "3rd grade" if you're just going to summarize a summary. RTFA already.
Here, this will help:
"The report found that Microsoft (Quote) Windows had the fewest number of patches and the shortest average patch development time of the five operating systems it monitored in the last six months of 2006.
During this period, 39 vulnerabilities, 12 of which were ranked high priority or severe, were found in Microsoft Windows and the company took an average of 21 days to fix them. It's an increase of the 22 vulnerabilities and 13-day turnaround time for the first half of 2006 but still bested the competition handily.
Red Hat Linux was the next-best performer, requiring an average of 58 days to address a total of 208 vulnerabilities. However, this was a significant increase in both problems and fix time over the first half of 2006, when there were 42 vulnerabilities in Red Hat and the average turnaround was 13 days.
The one bright spot in all of this is that of the 208 Red Hat vulnerabilities, the most of the top five operating systems, only two were considered high severity, 130 were medium severity, and 76 were considered low.
Then there's Mac OS X. Despite the latest TV ads ridiculing the security in Vista with a Matrix-like Agent playing the UAC in Vista, Apple (Quote) has nothing to brag about. Symantec found 43 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X and a 66 day turnaround on fixes. Fortunately, only one was high priority.
Like the others, this is also an increase over the first half of the year. For the first half of 2006, 21 vulnerabilities were found in Mac OS X and Apple took on average 37 days to fix them. "
On the other hand, you have to punch the clock. When you are hourly your cost to the company is based on the number of hours you work. Thus when you work overtime and start costing the company more money than they expected, you fall under the management microscope. "Why aren't you getting you work done in forty hours?"
When you are salary and not punching the clock, your cost is fixed and you are judged on performance alone. Whether you work 10 hours or 60 hours.
That's the theory anyhow. It all depends on the company how it really works.
I'm salary exempt and it works out in my favor. I typically put in around 40 hours, sometimes a little less. I don't feel bad about the weeks where I work less because there are a few times a year where I have to put in 70 hours in one week.
Another benefit, to me, is that I don't feel at all pressured to perform within an alloted time period. If I waste an hour bullshitting with co-workers I don't feel guilty about it. I still have to have my work done. How I get it done is up to me.
Are you arguing the freedom of the oppressor?
"But what about my freedom to become a dictator!?"
We're kind of ruining the top post which was actually pretty funny, but...
I would almost agree with you, if only looking at a snapshot from about 2002 until 2006 during which I was no longer dealing with 9x and NT4 installations. Installation headaches were pretty commonplace prior to these years. Once hardware vendors had all gotten used to the ways of NT5, installing Win2K and XP became a total breeze. Rarely have I had trouble installing either operating system. They will choke occasionally on cheap and/or new hardware, but with typical stuff installation is usually a no-brainer.
And now Vista is upon us, and it's not detecting a lot of real obscure hardware, like say, MY CDROM DRIVE. WTF. Once again it's become hit and miss...or would be, if I chose to install Vista in production at this time.
Difficulty installing an OS isn't really a good measure of quality anyhow. I recently had a bad experience installing Ubuntu 6.05LTS to an array on an adaptec I2O controller. Rock solid once I got it fixed. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
I believe you are wrong. Almost right, but wrong.
... ... ... ... ...
You can't copyright an algorithm. That would fall under patent law as it is simply an idea.
You can copyright the code, comments included, as it is an expression of an idea.
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.html
http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html
So, essentially, if I like what your computer program does, I can certainly write my own that does the same thing. I cannot, however, use your code even if I have access to it.
And no matter how good your spec is, my interpretation in code does not "have to be written" in a certain way.
for(x=0;x9;x++);
x=0; while(x9) x++;
int count_to_ten(int n) {
if (n 9)
n = count_to_ten(n++);
return n;
}
x = new awesome_number_class;
x.count_to_ten();
10 X = 0
20 X = X + 1
30 IF X 9 THEN
40 GOTO 20
50 END IF
do
x = x + 1
loop until x = 9
The person quoted works for Microsoft? I thought he worked at a bank?
So are you implying that this person is being intentionally misleading, or just stupid?
I don't buy it. If they secretly wanted people to pirate software, then they wouldn't have gone through all of the trouble to implement activation and genuine advantage, or the BSA for that matter; we'd still just be keying in product codes. Of course the volume licensing backdoor is still there, because they know that those of us in the business world aren't going to tolerate a bunch of activation nonsense.
No, I'm pretty sure that they genuinely dislike piracy and are actively trying to stop it, albeit in a clumsy Microsoft kind of way. It's really not that easy of a task to prevent piracy, really, unless you're prepared to sacrifice a lot of customers to false positive or excessively annoying situations. I'm also sure that they would prefer people to pirate their software than to pirate their competitor's software, or use OSS, but that doesn't imply that they like piracy.
We can argue that the piracy is good for their business, but I really don't believe that they think it is good for their business. If they did believe that, then they've spent way too much money trying to pretend like they're trying to prevent piracy.
Certainly it's much harder to casually pirate MS Windows today as it was in 2000, and they've made it annoying for people with pirated copies of Windows to obtain certain updates; we can actually substitute "Office" for "Windows" here too. Contrast this with Mac OSX, which is as trivial to copy and install (e.g. pirate) as Windows 98.
No, Microsoft is truly trying to figure out how to prevent people from pirating their software. They try to lock people in not through a piracy support conspiracy, but through traditional means of vendor lock, educational discounts, "home use" programs, and brute strength in the marketplace.
The point was that the source of energy *is* important.
Your car engine does not dip when you turn your headlights on while driving down the road, and your headlights are such a small draw on power that you will not notice it at the pump. You can't just discount mechanical energy and pretend that it always takes the same amount of *fuel* to power your headlights just because they draw a constant amount of power.
Now if you ran your headlights on D batteries, you'd certainly notice it, fast.
The source of energy *is* important. It is, in cases like this, just as or more important as how much power is actually required.
Somebody denied that C02 is a greenhouse gas?
Straw man.
The source of energy is certainly not irrelevant. What if the source of energy was solar? In this case the turning engine has a whole buttload of momentum and I suspect that in real world terms, turning your lights on has no measurable impact on gas mileage. That's not to say that the energy is free, but in the case of a car, you're turning the alternator regardless of whether you've got the lights on or not, and headlights are not a significant enough power draw to impact performance. With some of the big giant over powered inefficient engines we have today, in some vehicles you can drive with the A/C on and not notice a change in mileage.