Go work for ANY Microsoft 'Gold Partner' and you'll see how far a company has to open it's behind to get the cheaper licensing. And oh I forgot to mention, they can always come around and change stuff or make a 'friendly request' to implement a solution using their software (and friendly request as in, if you don't we'll pull your status). This is especially true in Gold Partners that provide services to other customers (like hosting companies).
My record: I have worked so far for 5 Gold Partners in Europe and the US and they all have the same 'problem'.
A few years ago some countries in Europe adopted a similar taxing on media-carriers and media. The problem is that not a single musician or even a record label sees any of the money. The state forwards it to this 'non-profit' organization and recently a 'scandal' quickly buried by the media came out that actually in over 3 years, millions of euros have been collected and none have been paid out. It also came out that the employees of this 'non-profit' organization (similar to RIAA) had salary's exceeding 250k/year.
The average white (caucasian) male American between 15 and 55 is the most discriminated and censored group in the US. Sure, there might be a majority in numbers, but they are being treated as the minority in anything we do making us the oppressed group. And the main culprit seems to be scares of lawsuits because of discrimination (there is a typical law that handles such situations here in the States).
Take jobs for example: the hiring manager (especially in big corporations) sometimes HAS to hire or at least evaluate somebody of the so-called 'minority' (whether that is non-caucasian or female) whether or not they do fill the requirements so they get to present 'non-discriminating' numbers to the government.
And there are so much other examples going from social services to customer service. I am a minority group (I am not American) but I look just like any other American (except for the typical weight) and I sometimes feel that (both in job (hiring) situations and other) that I am not treated as should be and even shunned for selection until I mention that I actually moved to the States a short while ago and that I am an immigrant.
I even got selected for a job once that was totally out of my league and interests (but I needed the money) while initially the recruiter didn't sound very interested, I mentioned that I was immigrated recently and I got a job offer after the first interview. Of course I didn't keep the job (for different reason's including my interest).
Look at the war the US lost in Vietnam (looks a lot like the Iraq war). The US troops had planes, jeeps, tanks which guess what, they kept working but got stuck in the mud or were very slow in the woods. The Vietnamese defenders were using freakin' bicycles to get their stuff transported. They were much more quiet, they did it without being noticed, didn't need an airstrip, and they didn't get stuck as often. Of course, I imagine their tires would frequently go flat or their frames rusted through, probably much more often than the US equipment but the US equipment was very inefficient at doing the same job.
But that's his biggest problem, he can't just cash out whenever he wants, that would wreck MSFT and leave him short on a whole lot of dough. Most of Bill Gates' wealth is invested or IS MSFT stock. Sure he has billions of dollars, but if you take away the stock in MSFT (he holds approx. $24 Billion of that) you will see the problem. If you sell that much stock in a short time (a few days), the stock will probably crash.
How does Bill Gates change a light bulb? He doesn't. He just declares darkness the new industry standard.
I was being funny about it. TFS says that you can't look at it, which is utterly wrong because you can look at it all you want, you can't read the quantum particle's state without changing it.
Yep, as soon as you buy one, you can file for bankruptcy. It will also not work if you look at it, so the lienholder on your loans (to buy this computer) will not be able to sell it since everybody wants to look at what they buy, and then it stops working... so as soon as you're done with your bankruptcy, you can buy it for a few hundred dollars. It's the perfect scam
These days the power supplies are so small that they aren't (fully) galvanic separated from the net anymore (as is the case with clunky transformers) so a leakage there or somewhere a separated ground cable (in the power supply or anywhere else).
The backlight (kinda like a fluorescent tube) for the screen is also powered with high voltage or more, but the 12-48V internally is then souped up by a converter to ~100V.
It's not because a power supply or a battery can give 12V, it can't be modified to give something else (for example the 110/220V-connections in a camper car)
I refuse to use Skype since it has it's own 'standard' and is not interoperable with SIP or any other standard and open VoIP protocol. It's also closed source so you don't know what it's doing. I hope a lot of these 'privacy' breaches will be uncovered and people will start seeing the benefit of having truly open source code.
Ad Space. I'm hardly home, so I don't care that much. But I'll start selling parts of the exterior wall for ad-space. They can photograph all they want, I don't care.
Apparently Apple was forced to put DRM up. If you remember correctly, a few years ago, Apple even promoted copying music as one of the things you could do with the (back then) new Apple with CDRW (G3's).
Steve Jobs and Apple have always been holding their leg stiff against the record companies as much as possible and now they're kicking back. I think the record companies and affiliates finally see that DRM is hurting them bad, worse than the so-called pirating going on.
I don't buy DRM'ed music, I refuse and I rather buy an MP3 from an indie artist or download a good song through BitTorrent. Well, I hope they finally start offering MP3's or any other codec (Ogg perhaps) without DRM.
I first quit a very good job to move to the US. They paid an extra airfare back and forth to the US and paid me for staying another 3 weeks in an apartment near the office. My contract stated a 2-week notice.
In the case that I was laid off, they didn't give me any notice nor any severance although the contract stated they would do so as a professional courtesy. I just got an escort to collect my stuff and get out of the building. The same happened to the 50-some other employees that got laid off. I did get paid for the rest of the day and they paid out my paid time off.
I got fired then and I just could finish the day (I was on contract) very laid back, but I didn't do anything that day anymore. Just filed my resume everywhere.
The employer will not give you the courtesy of the 2-week notice whether it's in the contract or not (especially for IT). They usually consider you a security risk and thus escort you out the building. Usually they don't want to pay you either for that time passing.
Sueing is something completely different and you'll have to check your contract to see what is possible. It might be you unknowingly signed a non-compete notice somewhere. Check with the HR-department of the company to make sure. In any case, I would get some legal advice as to their possibilities. It might just have been a threat because they were mad at you (especially coming from a VP of sales)
Actually I gave up a long time ago for home and small office use (2 years Windows-free -except for the desktop work environment of course-). It's just too expensive, and every time I do something, I hit a bug or something doesn't work as expected.
Give Linux and/or MacOSX a try. If you can't get your Exchange e-mail, it's your own fault that you got locked in by your vendor. You should have stuck with those Unix boxes in the 90's and actually demanded (open) standards that everybody can use. Now it's coming back to bite a lot of companies. Microsoft decided to switch their whole UI and everything that you were expecting to be, isn't anymore. Vista doesn't have a 'start' button, now you'll have to describe the button with the little flag. Office 2007 doesn't have a menu in which you can find stuff. I am an experienced IT person and I have trouble finding my way for the simplest functions in Word 2k7m. Switching users to those systems will require a lot of training, time and productivity and a lot of companies are looking at alternatives, but unless they're looking at a complete overhaul of their server systems, they're kinda locked in between a rock and a hard place. OK, you can migrate your Exchange boxes etc. but a lot of Windows 'admins' don't have any knowledge beyond the GUI of Windows so they're stuck there, let's see what Windows 'Longhorn' Server brings, if the GUI changes like Vista, I know quite some Windows Admins looking at a retraining.
-I have used RT which is awesome but indeed somewhat difficult. Hire a consultant (like me) if necessary. -I also have used and implemented BugZilla, it's somewhat pointed at the developers, but good enough for anything else. -Sharepoint does have an issue tracker implemented, but DON'T USE IT. It's awful, I am currently building a custom issue tracker through Sharepoint and I have to modify just about everything from fields to forms. -I also used OCS-NG in combination with GLPI. It's pretty simple and has a lot of features.
Either way you'll probably want to modify stuff and thus I recommend you learn the language the Request Tracker you're using is talking or get a consultant to do it for you.
California might have quite some sunlight but still not during the night. Classic energy saving bulbs are imho still not a good replacement for incandescent or halogen light bulbs. The light is cold, weak and flickers (it is a fluorescent tube after all) and gives me a headache.
I would use halogen everywhere if I could, I like a lot of light. Maybe if someone took some time (and money) to improve the existing LED lighting (power-led's like Luxeon 3W come close but still not enough) AND make it cheaper, would be a better improvement.
Actually, you could use the same copy (@ $129) on all 5 of your computers although it wouldn't be 'legal' if multiple users were using them. Apple doesn't do any activation at all, let's you re-use the media and unless you're installing the Server-edition, you don't even have to key in a code.
And I think it's fair and better to fork over the extra $70 for your 5 licenses than risk having a single license and someone telling on you.
I haven't seen these coming on any computer any more since 1999. Oh, you must be using PC's! Really, the G4's came with a ZIP drive instead of a floppy and I haven't used any floppy's since I got my CD burner in the late 90's of the past century ($250 for a SCSI external Plextor at 2x,1x,8x)
It's not how it's pronounced that is important, it's how it's used. It's a protected path to YOUR media. The media being the body parts that excrete feces.
Mine doesn't. Why? If people want to look into my house and see me walking around without a shirt or less, then they can feel free to and if they are that persistent to do so and not disgusted by that sight, they could as well drill a hole and feed a camera.
Privacy in my home is a non-issue for me, since I am shameless. That is what that type of privacy you're describing is, just an issue of cultural shame to show your body to the world.
Privacy anywhere else (eg. public, internet) IS an issue for me, not because I am ashamed there, but because people can get to know more about my private life without being as obvious as staring down my window. It could also ruin me financially and otherwise since the combination of marketing and store databases, my bank, my employer and the government owns a lot more information about me, what I do and what I have than what you can see by looking through my windows.
If you want to know more about me, just come and talk to me, sure you can do so and if you are female, you could even date me to get to know me. If you sneak in the woods behind my house and set up a camera and I find out, I will punch you in the face not because you wanted to know more about me or occasionally saw me walking around in my underwear whilst walking by, but because you intently wanted to continuously gather the information and either use it for your own (commercial) gain or to use it against me.
And that lady's and gentlemen is what (in my eyes) privacy is all about. It's not about somebody remotely seeing you in public or private doing something (whether that be walking around naked or otherwise) but the continuous monitoring of individuals for your own or your organization's gain, seeing you every step and as soon as you cross a line (and who sets those anyway?) picking you up and punishing you for it, be that either oppressive by locking me up or annoying by sending me junk mail.
1. Not necessarily. If I order stuff from a website (eg. Apple), I usually don't pay VAT (here in the US) because it's interstate sales while going to the local Apple store does get me 8% added to the sales price for tax. 2. You might have a point, although proving jurisdiction is going to be difficult 3. The government can't just collect data, submit it to a court and say you did "Bad Things (tm)". That's why we have a constitution, search warrants, the burden of proof and so. Of course some people in our government wish they could just tap into your phone lines and bank accounts without any of that. 4. And thus concluding from the above, there are people here in the US that are putting that to the test, I recently saw on the news a guy that is having his home ready for 'urban warfare', posted his property with big warnings that the government isn't allowed to come on his ground. The IRS is not a part of the government, it's a separate entity of course endorsed and working for the government but it's a separate office just as the CIA, NSA and FBI. And actually, since the right to labor is in the constitution, it cannot be taxed by the state (Murdoc vs. Pennsylvania). Compensation for Labor is your property and, as such, is an "item of income, under the Constitution, not taxable by the Federal Government " and is, therefore, excluded from Gross Income and exempt from tax under Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code!
well, you forgot this IS slashdot so somebody else will find a shorter way to do this, it will look ugly, probably done in perl and thus unreadable. If you want to do it in shell script, you could have used zgrep (not all distro's have it) and/or used grep to count the lines and recurse through the files.
Actually, they started a few years ago. According to the 'taskforce' they aren't targetting single resellers on e-bay. They are targetting (pseudo) companies that sell large amounts of stuff and thus also generating lots of income through these sites. Usually such sites also want to appear legit to their customers and probably are (except for their taxable income) also legit and thus have their contact information, website and address with the auction or at least a link to it.
I have however doubts as to how 'enforceable' this is since
1) where is the sale closed as constituted by law, it's on the internet on a server somewhere. Did you close the sale on e-bays servers in the US (which might be in another state than both buyer and seller), on the buyers computer or on your own computer. 2) where is the company then located as doing business. If they didn't file the paperwork needed to constitute a full business, and they sold something, where exactly are they doing business and thus in what state/country are they looking to be persecuted under 3) is it even legal for a government to do this, collecting evidence out of collated pieces of data in a remote database and 4) is it even legal for governments to tax those income, given that there are people that say taxes aren't constitutional (in the US there is currently no law that says we have to pay taxes) and that that income generated might be reselling stuff that has already undergone sales and income tax (second hand stuff)
Slashdot Mirror
Go work for ANY Microsoft 'Gold Partner' and you'll see how far a company has to open it's behind to get the cheaper licensing. And oh I forgot to mention, they can always come around and change stuff or make a 'friendly request' to implement a solution using their software (and friendly request as in, if you don't we'll pull your status). This is especially true in Gold Partners that provide services to other customers (like hosting companies).
My record: I have worked so far for 5 Gold Partners in Europe and the US and they all have the same 'problem'.
A few years ago some countries in Europe adopted a similar taxing on media-carriers and media. The problem is that not a single musician or even a record label sees any of the money. The state forwards it to this 'non-profit' organization and recently a 'scandal' quickly buried by the media came out that actually in over 3 years, millions of euros have been collected and none have been paid out. It also came out that the employees of this 'non-profit' organization (similar to RIAA) had salary's exceeding 250k/year.
The average white (caucasian) male American between 15 and 55 is the most discriminated and censored group in the US. Sure, there might be a majority in numbers, but they are being treated as the minority in anything we do making us the oppressed group. And the main culprit seems to be scares of lawsuits because of discrimination (there is a typical law that handles such situations here in the States).
Take jobs for example: the hiring manager (especially in big corporations) sometimes HAS to hire or at least evaluate somebody of the so-called 'minority' (whether that is non-caucasian or female) whether or not they do fill the requirements so they get to present 'non-discriminating' numbers to the government.
And there are so much other examples going from social services to customer service. I am a minority group (I am not American) but I look just like any other American (except for the typical weight) and I sometimes feel that (both in job (hiring) situations and other) that I am not treated as should be and even shunned for selection until I mention that I actually moved to the States a short while ago and that I am an immigrant.
I even got selected for a job once that was totally out of my league and interests (but I needed the money) while initially the recruiter didn't sound very interested, I mentioned that I was immigrated recently and I got a job offer after the first interview. Of course I didn't keep the job (for different reason's including my interest).
Look at the war the US lost in Vietnam (looks a lot like the Iraq war). The US troops had planes, jeeps, tanks which guess what, they kept working but got stuck in the mud or were very slow in the woods. The Vietnamese defenders were using freakin' bicycles to get their stuff transported. They were much more quiet, they did it without being noticed, didn't need an airstrip, and they didn't get stuck as often. Of course, I imagine their tires would frequently go flat or their frames rusted through, probably much more often than the US equipment but the US equipment was very inefficient at doing the same job.
But that's his biggest problem, he can't just cash out whenever he wants, that would wreck MSFT and leave him short on a whole lot of dough. Most of Bill Gates' wealth is invested or IS MSFT stock. Sure he has billions of dollars, but if you take away the stock in MSFT (he holds approx. $24 Billion of that) you will see the problem. If you sell that much stock in a short time (a few days), the stock will probably crash.
How does Bill Gates change a light bulb? He doesn't. He just declares darkness the new industry standard.
I was being funny about it. TFS says that you can't look at it, which is utterly wrong because you can look at it all you want, you can't read the quantum particle's state without changing it.
Yep, as soon as you buy one, you can file for bankruptcy. It will also not work if you look at it, so the lienholder on your loans (to buy this computer) will not be able to sell it since everybody wants to look at what they buy, and then it stops working... so as soon as you're done with your bankruptcy, you can buy it for a few hundred dollars. It's the perfect scam
Yeah, but once you converted to Exchange you wished you could still choose your vendor and switch back to Notes
These days the power supplies are so small that they aren't (fully) galvanic separated from the net anymore (as is the case with clunky transformers) so a leakage there or somewhere a separated ground cable (in the power supply or anywhere else).
The backlight (kinda like a fluorescent tube) for the screen is also powered with high voltage or more, but the 12-48V internally is then souped up by a converter to ~100V.
It's not because a power supply or a battery can give 12V, it can't be modified to give something else (for example the 110/220V-connections in a camper car)
I refuse to use Skype since it has it's own 'standard' and is not interoperable with SIP or any other standard and open VoIP protocol. It's also closed source so you don't know what it's doing. I hope a lot of these 'privacy' breaches will be uncovered and people will start seeing the benefit of having truly open source code.
Ad Space. I'm hardly home, so I don't care that much. But I'll start selling parts of the exterior wall for ad-space. They can photograph all they want, I don't care.
Apparently Apple was forced to put DRM up. If you remember correctly, a few years ago, Apple even promoted copying music as one of the things you could do with the (back then) new Apple with CDRW (G3's).
Steve Jobs and Apple have always been holding their leg stiff against the record companies as much as possible and now they're kicking back. I think the record companies and affiliates finally see that DRM is hurting them bad, worse than the so-called pirating going on.
I don't buy DRM'ed music, I refuse and I rather buy an MP3 from an indie artist or download a good song through BitTorrent. Well, I hope they finally start offering MP3's or any other codec (Ogg perhaps) without DRM.
I first quit a very good job to move to the US. They paid an extra airfare back and forth to the US and paid me for staying another 3 weeks in an apartment near the office. My contract stated a 2-week notice.
In the case that I was laid off, they didn't give me any notice nor any severance although the contract stated they would do so as a professional courtesy. I just got an escort to collect my stuff and get out of the building. The same happened to the 50-some other employees that got laid off. I did get paid for the rest of the day and they paid out my paid time off.
I got fired then and I just could finish the day (I was on contract) very laid back, but I didn't do anything that day anymore. Just filed my resume everywhere.
The employer will not give you the courtesy of the 2-week notice whether it's in the contract or not (especially for IT). They usually consider you a security risk and thus escort you out the building. Usually they don't want to pay you either for that time passing.
Sueing is something completely different and you'll have to check your contract to see what is possible. It might be you unknowingly signed a non-compete notice somewhere. Check with the HR-department of the company to make sure. In any case, I would get some legal advice as to their possibilities. It might just have been a threat because they were mad at you (especially coming from a VP of sales)
Actually I gave up a long time ago for home and small office use (2 years Windows-free -except for the desktop work environment of course-). It's just too expensive, and every time I do something, I hit a bug or something doesn't work as expected.
Give Linux and/or MacOSX a try. If you can't get your Exchange e-mail, it's your own fault that you got locked in by your vendor. You should have stuck with those Unix boxes in the 90's and actually demanded (open) standards that everybody can use. Now it's coming back to bite a lot of companies. Microsoft decided to switch their whole UI and everything that you were expecting to be, isn't anymore. Vista doesn't have a 'start' button, now you'll have to describe the button with the little flag. Office 2007 doesn't have a menu in which you can find stuff. I am an experienced IT person and I have trouble finding my way for the simplest functions in Word 2k7m. Switching users to those systems will require a lot of training, time and productivity and a lot of companies are looking at alternatives, but unless they're looking at a complete overhaul of their server systems, they're kinda locked in between a rock and a hard place. OK, you can migrate your Exchange boxes etc. but a lot of Windows 'admins' don't have any knowledge beyond the GUI of Windows so they're stuck there, let's see what Windows 'Longhorn' Server brings, if the GUI changes like Vista, I know quite some Windows Admins looking at a retraining.
-I have used RT which is awesome but indeed somewhat difficult. Hire a consultant (like me) if necessary.
-I also have used and implemented BugZilla, it's somewhat pointed at the developers, but good enough for anything else.
-Sharepoint does have an issue tracker implemented, but DON'T USE IT. It's awful, I am currently building a custom issue tracker through Sharepoint and I have to modify just about everything from fields to forms.
-I also used OCS-NG in combination with GLPI. It's pretty simple and has a lot of features.
Either way you'll probably want to modify stuff and thus I recommend you learn the language the Request Tracker you're using is talking or get a consultant to do it for you.
California might have quite some sunlight but still not during the night. Classic energy saving bulbs are imho still not a good replacement for incandescent or halogen light bulbs. The light is cold, weak and flickers (it is a fluorescent tube after all) and gives me a headache.
I would use halogen everywhere if I could, I like a lot of light. Maybe if someone took some time (and money) to improve the existing LED lighting (power-led's like Luxeon 3W come close but still not enough) AND make it cheaper, would be a better improvement.
Actually, you could use the same copy (@ $129) on all 5 of your computers although it wouldn't be 'legal' if multiple users were using them. Apple doesn't do any activation at all, let's you re-use the media and unless you're installing the Server-edition, you don't even have to key in a code.
And I think it's fair and better to fork over the extra $70 for your 5 licenses than risk having a single license and someone telling on you.
I haven't seen these coming on any computer any more since 1999. Oh, you must be using PC's! Really, the G4's came with a ZIP drive instead of a floppy and I haven't used any floppy's since I got my CD burner in the late 90's of the past century ($250 for a SCSI external Plextor at 2x,1x,8x)
It's not how it's pronounced that is important, it's how it's used. It's a protected path to YOUR media. The media being the body parts that excrete feces.
Mine doesn't. Why? If people want to look into my house and see me walking around without a shirt or less, then they can feel free to and if they are that persistent to do so and not disgusted by that sight, they could as well drill a hole and feed a camera.
Privacy in my home is a non-issue for me, since I am shameless. That is what that type of privacy you're describing is, just an issue of cultural shame to show your body to the world.
Privacy anywhere else (eg. public, internet) IS an issue for me, not because I am ashamed there, but because people can get to know more about my private life without being as obvious as staring down my window. It could also ruin me financially and otherwise since the combination of marketing and store databases, my bank, my employer and the government owns a lot more information about me, what I do and what I have than what you can see by looking through my windows.
If you want to know more about me, just come and talk to me, sure you can do so and if you are female, you could even date me to get to know me. If you sneak in the woods behind my house and set up a camera and I find out, I will punch you in the face not because you wanted to know more about me or occasionally saw me walking around in my underwear whilst walking by, but because you intently wanted to continuously gather the information and either use it for your own (commercial) gain or to use it against me.
And that lady's and gentlemen is what (in my eyes) privacy is all about. It's not about somebody remotely seeing you in public or private doing something (whether that be walking around naked or otherwise) but the continuous monitoring of individuals for your own or your organization's gain, seeing you every step and as soon as you cross a line (and who sets those anyway?) picking you up and punishing you for it, be that either oppressive by locking me up or annoying by sending me junk mail.
1. Not necessarily. If I order stuff from a website (eg. Apple), I usually don't pay VAT (here in the US) because it's interstate sales while going to the local Apple store does get me 8% added to the sales price for tax.
2. You might have a point, although proving jurisdiction is going to be difficult
3. The government can't just collect data, submit it to a court and say you did "Bad Things (tm)". That's why we have a constitution, search warrants, the burden of proof and so. Of course some people in our government wish they could just tap into your phone lines and bank accounts without any of that.
4. And thus concluding from the above, there are people here in the US that are putting that to the test, I recently saw on the news a guy that is having his home ready for 'urban warfare', posted his property with big warnings that the government isn't allowed to come on his ground. The IRS is not a part of the government, it's a separate entity of course endorsed and working for the government but it's a separate office just as the CIA, NSA and FBI. And actually, since the right to labor is in the constitution, it cannot be taxed by the state (Murdoc vs. Pennsylvania). Compensation for Labor is your property and, as such, is an "item of income, under the Constitution, not taxable by the Federal Government " and is, therefore, excluded from Gross Income and exempt from tax under Title 26 of the Internal Revenue Code!
well, you forgot this IS slashdot so somebody else will find a shorter way to do this, it will look ugly, probably done in perl and thus unreadable. If you want to do it in shell script, you could have used zgrep (not all distro's have it) and/or used grep to count the lines and recurse through the files.
Actually, they started a few years ago. According to the 'taskforce' they aren't targetting single resellers on e-bay. They are targetting (pseudo) companies that sell large amounts of stuff and thus also generating lots of income through these sites. Usually such sites also want to appear legit to their customers and probably are (except for their taxable income) also legit and thus have their contact information, website and address with the auction or at least a link to it.
I have however doubts as to how 'enforceable' this is since
1) where is the sale closed as constituted by law, it's on the internet on a server somewhere. Did you close the sale on e-bays servers in the US (which might be in another state than both buyer and seller), on the buyers computer or on your own computer.
2) where is the company then located as doing business. If they didn't file the paperwork needed to constitute a full business, and they sold something, where exactly are they doing business and thus in what state/country are they looking to be persecuted under
3) is it even legal for a government to do this, collecting evidence out of collated pieces of data in a remote database and
4) is it even legal for governments to tax those income, given that there are people that say taxes aren't constitutional (in the US there is currently no law that says we have to pay taxes) and that that income generated might be reselling stuff that has already undergone sales and income tax (second hand stuff)
Microsoft seems to have lost a lot of market share in the computers to Linux and Mac, only 25% of computers running Windows anymore?
I know this will get modded flame by some fanboy, but it's funny, laugh.