All those other users aren't collecting and using this information as EVIDENCE in court of law. Which is what most "investigator" legislation is about.
I hope SafeNet/MediaSentry/RIAA gets nailed to the wall with really large, rusty spikes on this one.
I ordered mine late. OLPC has been really good about keeping me informed. Frankly, I bought it for two reasons. Yes, I want to have a closeup look at the design. But I also wanted to donate. If they put a priority on getting laptops to those who actually need them, I'm cool with that. I'll get mine eventually, that's all I need to know.
I just hope that they don't get all corporate on us and start finding excuses. The best bet is to just tell the truth and go from there.
As for those who are jumping all over their arse because it's "LATE", I don't recall seeing any promised delivery dates when I bought mine. So perhaps those folks should just chill out.
It's a charity we're dealing with here, not Amazon or Tigerdirect. I'd rather they put their energy into delivering things to where they are needed (rather than just wanted) instead of diverting efforts and funds to becoming a retailer.
To be fair, many of these people weren't hired for their knowledge of MS Office, they were hired for other skills. Skills that in many cases they spent years acquiring. Unfortunately, rather than use appropriate tools, management (including IT VPs who get kickbacks to their local dept from Microsoft for pushing their software) then decrees that everyone has to use MS Office because that's what is "popular", not because that is what is appropriate for the task at hand.
If management then fails to provide the necessary training and resources for these users, it's hardly the user's fault if they can't then use the inappropriate tools they were supplied with by a management that probably doesn't understand what these people are doing anyway.
Unfortunately, the training requirement then gets dumped on the IT folks. Without a budget. Without a charge code. With penalties for not doing things that do have a charge code.
This situation reminds me of one company that replaced all the programmer Unix desktops with Microsoft desktops because they wanted these programmers to use "MS office" to fill in various forms. No concern was given to the fact that this divisions productive and profitable work was done on said unix boxes. Or that one tech could support several departments under unix, whereas IT would have to hire several more people to support a similar number of Microsoft OS boxes. So the programmers now had to share a smaller number of unix boxes over a congested network using a variety of remote windowing tools, while their desktops remained mostly idle. All to fill in forms that could easily have been done from unix desktops if someone at the top had just listened to the techs (including myself) offering a creative, easily managed, less expensive and even more error-proof solution that didn't require the programmers to suffer a 40%-60% reduction in productivity. Nope, they listened to the Microsoft sales rep and the slimy VP instead. Said VP got a nice hefty bonus for "exceeding his depts revenue" (through internal charging to the rest of the company) thanks to the Microsoft kickbacks for selling so many Microsoft OS licenses into the corporation (see motto). The productive, formerly money making division that had to suffer this idiocy was shut down a year later as "unprofitable" due to inability to keep up with necessary design changes to the product (possibly due to decreased productivity anyone?) and increased infrastructure costs (they really said this!!). The company eventually almost went bankrupt (it is recovering), and several of their execs are now in court. Not the right ones, unfortunately. The VP in charge of that little scam quit and got hired by another company, and I've lost track of him. For now.
Getting back to the relevant argument: these programmers had no idea how to use MS Office, no real interest in learning given that their morale and productivity had basically been trashed due to this one tool. Knowing MS Office also wasn't on their job requirement, so they didn't care anyway. Each time they had a problem, they called on the IT folks for assistance.
That is one of the many reasons IT gets called on for assistance to folks who don't know the tools they have been assigned. It wasn't their fault for not knowing how to use the tool, and frankly I didn't blame them for really not giving a rats arse about it.
Then DogDude never had a competent creative plumber. I've had both. A competent creative plumber, one with imagination and who can think "out of the box" (I hate that term. Any suggestions for an alternative?) is a godsend. Rather than just follow "what the others do" he was able to solve my problem creatively and with excellent effect, resulting in a much superior solution to what "the book" called for. Of course, the problem had previously been caused by a "creative" plumber who was a total numbskull. That's the kind of creative idiot you don't want.
Creativity is good. Creativity gets you solutions that actually work. Creativity in prevention of IT problems has a return on investment counted in hours or days, not months or years. Creativity isn't about more risks, it's about thinking outside the prescribed lines. Sometimes creativity is about LESS risk. Much less risk. Yes, creativity is sometimes about pushing boundaries. But it's also about reducing those boundaries when appropriate.
DogDude reminds me of too many people I've known. Invariably, these people are promoted to management, because they didn't have creativity, they simply mirrored their superiors, which is a desirable quality in large corporations (and even small ones). Also invariably, these people then ruined the departments, divisions and in one case the entire company they worked for because they couldn't adapt when they stopped being able to take credit for someone else's work. The managers that encouraged creativity in all their staff were the most competent, in that they met their budgets, they had high staff morale, and very low staff turnover. Unfortunately, their very competence tended to keep them down "in the ranks" because they were so damn good at their jobs. Not always (hi John McC!), but often (RIP John P.).
If Vista is so much more "secure", then any flaw should be much MORE serious, not less. After all, aren't they supposed to have worked so long and hard to reduce the flaws in this one? If one advertises a secure system, then any breach is, by definition, important. MS Vista is being pushed as a highly secure system to many businesses. Hence, security issues are that much more important, as they were used to sell the system in the first place.
As we've heard that much (some?) of their vaunted security is actually just optional smoke and mirrors (several of the user security features for instance), I don't think MS Vista should be given any easier ride than any other operating system. Let it be judged independently, on its own merits, and not through re-definition of what is critical or not for political (and of course publicity and monetary) purposes.
Any system that defines itself as "secure", but isn't, deserves to be ranked accordingly. Microsoft (and it isn't alone by a long shot) has a very long history of selling one thing and delivering another. Changing the criteria based on what they are selling isn't warranted until what they deliver matches that in every respect. So far, they aren't doing that with MS Vista either.
I spent 22 years in IT. My goal was, like many system admins, to be invisible. A properly managed system that does not attract attention but "just works as it should" is, by an IT definition, an excellent system. Was I or any other system admin rewarded for this? Hell no! Was the guy whose server room crashed regularly punished? Hell no, he got promoted, for being good at handling emergencies. Emergencies created by his own lack of foresight. That's why IT is dead.
Unfortunately, management today, in every company I've worked with, has different ideas. In management, accounting, what-have-you, if you get noticed, THEN you're good. You have to do something to be noticed. Something big. Something flashy. That's not how IT works. The only time something big and flashy happens in IT is when the UPS explodes and the server room catches fire. That is not a good result.
This is, however, the type of shit that IT outsourcing companies have to do in order to be sure management thinks they are worth the money they are getting paid. I've been asked to fake emergencies (usually just before a budget review) so that our response to that emergency can get us a pat on the back. I learned dozens of ways to make a server look like lightning had hit it without pointing to deliberate sabotage. I basically stopped caring about doing "good" IT, and only started to care about revenue. That's when my career took off and I finally understood the nature of business, where honesty and ethics are a liability and get you fired. Twice, in my case. I'm a slow learner. Now I'm trying to find my moral compass again. But at least I can afford to do so.
When I worked directly for that company that outsourced its IT, I went for at most 3 years without a single server crash. Suddenly, they put servers in MY server room that were almost guaranteed to crash weekly.
Management loved it!
Soon as they saw systems go down, they'd see how fast we got them back up again (easy, when you'd planned or predicted most of the outages in the first place) and just throw more money at the outsourcing company. The order of the day was no longer prevention, but quick fixes to problems. It made us look "better" in the minds of management, and management bought it. Hook, line and sinker. In several companies.
Management that didn't have a clue that each crash actually cost them much more money in lost time and lost sales. Not a fucking clue! When the techs tried to tell them, using management language and sound financial analysis, they still only listened to their counterparts at the various vendor companies. Namely the lying scum salespeople. Not their own techies. I understood why later: because management are by training and experience incapable of understanding honesty and good intentions. When I worked as pre-sales (as in, after I sold my soul and my career took off), I saw exactly how the sales people would lie, cheat and steal to get that contract, then hand off their promises to the poor sap who had to implement it. When said poor sap had to go back and say that what the sales rep had promised either didn't exist or could not be done (I know it couldn't be done and I'd told the sales rep, but he changed the message when talking to the client and I kept quiet), it wasn't the sales rep who got blamed, it was the post-sales installation guy!! Meanwhile, the sales rep still got his nice fat commission, I got my cut, and the poor bastard who had to try to install that box of twigs we sold never got a promotion.
THAT is why IT is dead, folks. You can't manipulate or lie to a machine. It either gets the correct input or it dies. Most technically oriented people I've met are also honest. Often brutally honest. But honesty is a liability in today's business world. So the mindset that makes a good tech is the total opposite of the mindset that allows someone to get ahead in todays "business economy". That's good capitalism folks. No ethics. Honesty sucks. Whoever has the biggest bankroll wins.
Truth hurts. Besides, anyone using Microsoft has already sold their soul to them (didn't you read the EULA?), and Microsoft never sells anything - they just license it.
So the correct wording would be "Microsoft licenses your soul to Satan".
The clicky keyboard is quicker for "fast" typists. Or should that be "insanely fast" typists?
For instance, my father types at about 170+ wpm on a "clicky" (mechanical switch) keyboard. Put him on a modern keyboard, his speed drops about 20% (+/- 10%, insufficient testing) and his error rate goes up. Given the amount of output he does (in the last three years: two dictionaries, at least one book that I know of, and several thousand pages of translations), that 20% is quite significant.
As for USB - PS/2 to USB converters work just fine. The noise is definitely a problem, unfortunately. Luckily, he's going deaf, and he doesn't live with me...:-)
We're having trouble finding "old" keyboards. He's got 3 in stock right now, and we might have found a source for more (at $200 a pop!), but it's going to get interesting in the next few years.
For slower typists, it's probably not a problem. I'm at a lazy 70 wpm or so, and I type just as badly on any keyboard.
When sites like this and other decide that ads that distract from the page (flashing, moving, loud, obnoxious, waving all over the place in my peripheral vision all the bloody time) are what are driving people like me to Adblock and Pithhelmet, then we might see some sanity.
I click on reasonably worded text ads that tell me what I need to know. Many sites have these, and for me they work. I utterly refuse to have my session hijacked by some numbnuts who thinks that a wildly active flash animation is a good way to get my attention. The same type of encyphalitic moron who used to think blink tags were a good idea. Until sites who want advertising revenue learn that less is more there will be a market for ad blockers, and I'll be at the head of the line. "Freeloader"? No. "Able to distinguish between idiotic tricks and true marketing"? I like to think so.
They don't need a conspiracy, they're getting all the free help they need without it.
Local energy board just voted to put in yet another gas fired power plant without even looking at (going so far as to specifically disqualify them) alternative energy sources. I'd call them bloody idiots, but the idiots are people like me who don't have the guts to shoot the bastards before they foist these things upon us.
I believe that in Canada anyone can patent an invention after one year has passed since the invention was first commercialised or made public. If an inventor doesn't do it, they can find their invention legally stolen by someone else.
The Patent Offices of many countries are totally and utterly out of control, and are subverting the social contract that made patents useful in the first place.
The applicant does not own the copyright to the artwork. Therefore, the applicant cannot legally reproduce said artwork. Therefore, the applicant is in violation of various US statutes and common law related to copyright, possibly even the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
All those other users aren't collecting and using this information as EVIDENCE in court of law. Which is what most "investigator" legislation is about. I hope SafeNet/MediaSentry/RIAA gets nailed to the wall with really large, rusty spikes on this one.
I ordered mine late. OLPC has been really good about keeping me informed. Frankly, I bought it for two reasons. Yes, I want to have a closeup look at the design. But I also wanted to donate. If they put a priority on getting laptops to those who actually need them, I'm cool with that. I'll get mine eventually, that's all I need to know. I just hope that they don't get all corporate on us and start finding excuses. The best bet is to just tell the truth and go from there. As for those who are jumping all over their arse because it's "LATE", I don't recall seeing any promised delivery dates when I bought mine. So perhaps those folks should just chill out. It's a charity we're dealing with here, not Amazon or Tigerdirect. I'd rather they put their energy into delivering things to where they are needed (rather than just wanted) instead of diverting efforts and funds to becoming a retailer.
To be fair, many of these people weren't hired for their knowledge of MS Office, they were hired for other skills. Skills that in many cases they spent years acquiring. Unfortunately, rather than use appropriate tools, management (including IT VPs who get kickbacks to their local dept from Microsoft for pushing their software) then decrees that everyone has to use MS Office because that's what is "popular", not because that is what is appropriate for the task at hand.
If management then fails to provide the necessary training and resources for these users, it's hardly the user's fault if they can't then use the inappropriate tools they were supplied with by a management that probably doesn't understand what these people are doing anyway.
Unfortunately, the training requirement then gets dumped on the IT folks. Without a budget. Without a charge code. With penalties for not doing things that do have a charge code.
This situation reminds me of one company that replaced all the programmer Unix desktops with Microsoft desktops because they wanted these programmers to use "MS office" to fill in various forms. No concern was given to the fact that this divisions productive and profitable work was done on said unix boxes. Or that one tech could support several departments under unix, whereas IT would have to hire several more people to support a similar number of Microsoft OS boxes. So the programmers now had to share a smaller number of unix boxes over a congested network using a variety of remote windowing tools, while their desktops remained mostly idle. All to fill in forms that could easily have been done from unix desktops if someone at the top had just listened to the techs (including myself) offering a creative, easily managed, less expensive and even more error-proof solution that didn't require the programmers to suffer a 40%-60% reduction in productivity. Nope, they listened to the Microsoft sales rep and the slimy VP instead. Said VP got a nice hefty bonus for "exceeding his depts revenue" (through internal charging to the rest of the company) thanks to the Microsoft kickbacks for selling so many Microsoft OS licenses into the corporation (see motto). The productive, formerly money making division that had to suffer this idiocy was shut down a year later as "unprofitable" due to inability to keep up with necessary design changes to the product (possibly due to decreased productivity anyone?) and increased infrastructure costs (they really said this!!). The company eventually almost went bankrupt (it is recovering), and several of their execs are now in court. Not the right ones, unfortunately. The VP in charge of that little scam quit and got hired by another company, and I've lost track of him. For now.
Getting back to the relevant argument: these programmers had no idea how to use MS Office, no real interest in learning given that their morale and productivity had basically been trashed due to this one tool. Knowing MS Office also wasn't on their job requirement, so they didn't care anyway. Each time they had a problem, they called on the IT folks for assistance.
That is one of the many reasons IT gets called on for assistance to folks who don't know the tools they have been assigned. It wasn't their fault for not knowing how to use the tool, and frankly I didn't blame them for really not giving a rats arse about it.
Then DogDude never had a competent creative plumber. I've had both. A competent creative plumber, one with imagination and who can think "out of the box" (I hate that term. Any suggestions for an alternative?) is a godsend. Rather than just follow "what the others do" he was able to solve my problem creatively and with excellent effect, resulting in a much superior solution to what "the book" called for. Of course, the problem had previously been caused by a "creative" plumber who was a total numbskull. That's the kind of creative idiot you don't want.
Creativity is good. Creativity gets you solutions that actually work. Creativity in prevention of IT problems has a return on investment counted in hours or days, not months or years. Creativity isn't about more risks, it's about thinking outside the prescribed lines. Sometimes creativity is about LESS risk. Much less risk. Yes, creativity is sometimes about pushing boundaries. But it's also about reducing those boundaries when appropriate.
DogDude reminds me of too many people I've known. Invariably, these people are promoted to management, because they didn't have creativity, they simply mirrored their superiors, which is a desirable quality in large corporations (and even small ones). Also invariably, these people then ruined the departments, divisions and in one case the entire company they worked for because they couldn't adapt when they stopped being able to take credit for someone else's work. The managers that encouraged creativity in all their staff were the most competent, in that they met their budgets, they had high staff morale, and very low staff turnover. Unfortunately, their very competence tended to keep them down "in the ranks" because they were so damn good at their jobs. Not always (hi John McC!), but often (RIP John P.).
If Vista is so much more "secure", then any flaw should be much MORE serious, not less. After all, aren't they supposed to have worked so long and hard to reduce the flaws in this one? If one advertises a secure system, then any breach is, by definition, important. MS Vista is being pushed as a highly secure system to many businesses. Hence, security issues are that much more important, as they were used to sell the system in the first place.
As we've heard that much (some?) of their vaunted security is actually just optional smoke and mirrors (several of the user security features for instance), I don't think MS Vista should be given any easier ride than any other operating system. Let it be judged independently, on its own merits, and not through re-definition of what is critical or not for political (and of course publicity and monetary) purposes.
Any system that defines itself as "secure", but isn't, deserves to be ranked accordingly. Microsoft (and it isn't alone by a long shot) has a very long history of selling one thing and delivering another. Changing the criteria based on what they are selling isn't warranted until what they deliver matches that in every respect. So far, they aren't doing that with MS Vista either.
I spent 22 years in IT. My goal was, like many system admins, to be invisible. A properly managed system that does not attract attention but "just works as it should" is, by an IT definition, an excellent system. Was I or any other system admin rewarded for this? Hell no! Was the guy whose server room crashed regularly punished? Hell no, he got promoted, for being good at handling emergencies. Emergencies created by his own lack of foresight. That's why IT is dead.
Unfortunately, management today, in every company I've worked with, has different ideas. In management, accounting, what-have-you, if you get noticed, THEN you're good. You have to do something to be noticed. Something big. Something flashy. That's not how IT works. The only time something big and flashy happens in IT is when the UPS explodes and the server room catches fire. That is not a good result.
This is, however, the type of shit that IT outsourcing companies have to do in order to be sure management thinks they are worth the money they are getting paid. I've been asked to fake emergencies (usually just before a budget review) so that our response to that emergency can get us a pat on the back. I learned dozens of ways to make a server look like lightning had hit it without pointing to deliberate sabotage. I basically stopped caring about doing "good" IT, and only started to care about revenue. That's when my career took off and I finally understood the nature of business, where honesty and ethics are a liability and get you fired. Twice, in my case. I'm a slow learner. Now I'm trying to find my moral compass again. But at least I can afford to do so.
When I worked directly for that company that outsourced its IT, I went for at most 3 years without a single server crash. Suddenly, they put servers in MY server room that were almost guaranteed to crash weekly.
Management loved it!
Soon as they saw systems go down, they'd see how fast we got them back up again (easy, when you'd planned or predicted most of the outages in the first place) and just throw more money at the outsourcing company. The order of the day was no longer prevention, but quick fixes to problems. It made us look "better" in the minds of management, and management bought it. Hook, line and sinker. In several companies.
Management that didn't have a clue that each crash actually cost them much more money in lost time and lost sales. Not a fucking clue! When the techs tried to tell them, using management language and sound financial analysis, they still only listened to their counterparts at the various vendor companies. Namely the lying scum salespeople. Not their own techies. I understood why later: because management are by training and experience incapable of understanding honesty and good intentions. When I worked as pre-sales (as in, after I sold my soul and my career took off), I saw exactly how the sales people would lie, cheat and steal to get that contract, then hand off their promises to the poor sap who had to implement it. When said poor sap had to go back and say that what the sales rep had promised either didn't exist or could not be done (I know it couldn't be done and I'd told the sales rep, but he changed the message when talking to the client and I kept quiet), it wasn't the sales rep who got blamed, it was the post-sales installation guy!! Meanwhile, the sales rep still got his nice fat commission, I got my cut, and the poor bastard who had to try to install that box of twigs we sold never got a promotion.
THAT is why IT is dead, folks. You can't manipulate or lie to a machine. It either gets the correct input or it dies. Most technically oriented people I've met are also honest. Often brutally honest. But honesty is a liability in today's business world. So the mindset that makes a good tech is the total opposite of the mindset that allows someone to get ahead in todays "business economy". That's good capitalism folks. No ethics. Honesty sucks. Whoever has the biggest bankroll wins.
So IT, good IT, is by definitio
Truth hurts. Besides, anyone using Microsoft
has already sold their soul to them (didn't
you read the EULA?), and Microsoft never
sells anything - they just license it.
So the correct wording would be "Microsoft
licenses your soul to Satan".
The clicky keyboard is quicker for "fast" typists. Or should that be "insanely fast" typists?
:-)
For instance, my father types at about 170+ wpm on a "clicky" (mechanical switch) keyboard. Put him on a modern keyboard, his speed drops about 20% (+/- 10%, insufficient testing) and his error rate goes up. Given the amount of output he does (in the last three years: two dictionaries, at least one book that I know of, and several thousand pages of translations), that 20% is quite significant.
As for USB - PS/2 to USB converters work just fine. The noise is definitely a problem, unfortunately. Luckily, he's going deaf, and he doesn't live with me...
We're having trouble finding "old" keyboards. He's got 3 in stock right now, and we might have found a source for more (at $200 a pop!), but it's going to get interesting in the next few years.
For slower typists, it's probably not a problem. I'm at a lazy 70 wpm or so, and I type just as badly on any keyboard.
When sites like this and other decide that ads that distract from the page (flashing, moving, loud, obnoxious, waving all over the place in my peripheral vision all the bloody time) are what are driving people like me to Adblock and Pithhelmet, then we might see some sanity.
I click on reasonably worded text ads that tell me what I need to know. Many sites have these, and for me they work. I utterly refuse to have my session hijacked by some numbnuts who thinks that a wildly active flash animation is a good way to get my attention. The same type of encyphalitic moron who used to think blink tags were a good idea. Until sites who want advertising revenue learn that less is more there will be a market for ad blockers, and I'll be at the head of the line. "Freeloader"? No. "Able to distinguish between idiotic tricks and true marketing"? I like to think so.
They don't need a conspiracy, they're getting all the free help they need without it.
Local energy board just voted to put in yet another gas fired power plant without even looking at (going so far as to specifically disqualify them) alternative energy sources. I'd call them bloody idiots, but the idiots are people like me who don't have the guts to shoot the bastards before they foist these things upon us.
I believe that in Canada anyone can patent an invention after one year has passed since the invention was first commercialised or made public. If an inventor doesn't do it, they can find their invention legally stolen by someone else.
The Patent Offices of many countries are totally and utterly out of control, and are subverting the social contract that made patents useful in the first place.
The applicant does not own the copyright to the artwork. Therefore, the applicant cannot legally reproduce said artwork. Therefore, the applicant is in violation of various US statutes and common law related to copyright, possibly even the DMCA.
THROW THE FUCKER IN JAIL!