Disclaimer: I am a very bitter OSX/ibook user.Be warned.
Dear Apple Customer,
Thank you for spending obscene amounts of money to purchase our hardware over comparably priced X86 PCs. Also, we thank you for giving us more money for OS X, which up untill now has really just been one of the largest beta tests in the history of computing. Thanks to your efforts and complaints, we have been able to fix numerous horrible bugs, add features that comparable free software had ten years ago, and finally figure out why the hell Quartz is so slow.
We are now ready to release our latest OS X service pack^H^H^H update for prices ranging from $19.95 to $129.95. That's right, now you can pay for the kind of updates that even the bastards at Microsoft give away for free! If you ever wondered why we brought back Steve Jobs, now you know just how good he is at bringing in new revenue!
Thank you again, dear customer, for continuing to flush your money away in the desparate search for a computer more stable than Windows without all the hassles of Linux! Just a few more years and a few more thousand dollars each, and the revolution will be in full swing!
Sony was part of the RIAA when it pushed CD-R taxes through in Canada and some European nations, and is also a manufacturer of CD recorders. Never underestimate greed-borne stupidity.
Software pirates in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia immediately began selling copies of NBC's entire 2006 TV lineup, Warcraft IV-10, Photoshop 2008, and MS Office Xtra-Ultra-Uber-Nextgen on the new disks for a street price of $5, all on one disk.
RIAA and MPAA lawyers assaulted Sony with lawsuits today, claiming that the disk assited in storage and dissemination of intellectual property and violating copyright control schemes.
Immediately after, Canadian and European lawyers under the control of movie and recording lobbyists added a hefty tax to the sale of each disk, with collected fees sent to movie and music companies.
Australians quickly installed $1 per/disc copy machines in Lucky Dragon stores across the continents.
Citizens of the USA tried to read reports about the new discs, but because a Microsoft lead consortium refused to provide digital certificates to news releases, Americans cannot view the files on their computers.
Microsoft doesn't have to care about foreign governments in the long run. The world economy is dominated by American money and American companies. Foreign companies that want to be more than a tiny, localized entity need to do business with Americans and American companies. As long as the US Government sticks with Microsoft, any American company with any serious plans to ever make it big time will have to work with Microsoft products, or at least stay compatible.
Other nations can stand up against the foreign monopoly all they want, but unless they can restrain serious international commerce, Microsoft is going to be around until the US Government kicks it out.
Isn't this what we wanted? The last time I checked, people were pissed at the MPAA for trying to sue filesharing networks out of existance. That tactic failed, and the MPAA followed up by trying to legislate DRM into existance. Public outcry seems to be keeping legislated DRM from happening, and also helps more and more people find out what laws like the DMCA can really be used for every day.
So now the MPAA is being responsible by dealing pirates the smart way - direct attacks. Rather than clogging up the legal and legislative systems with crap that will never go anywhere, tactics have switched to a little corporate communication to stop people from passing out movies online. Pirates are forced to stop passing out movies, while bandwidth hogs are tossed off networks, keeping net access cheap. Filesharing networks can now exist in peace, and perhaps once the pirates go away people will start finding legitimate uses.
I hope that this method DOES work for the MPAA. Furthermore, I hope the RIAA does the same. If internet music eventually moves from top 40 piracy to sharing files released by independent artists looking for cheap publicity, the popularity of musicians not on big labels will grow and the RIAA will have to work harder to sell records, instead of churning our generic overproduced top 40 hits.
This is the way the internet should be. As long as people keep our legislators and Microsoft from taking away the control that groups like the MPAA failed to, the internet will evolve to better humanity over time.
People who want Linux on the desktop to succeed need to do one thing: get the rest of the community to shut up and go away. No matter how many times I ask companies for good Linux drivers, the five hundred flaming hate mails/day from pissed GNU zealots will overshadow my pleas. GNU zealots are elitist, psychotic bastards, and until we can flush Richard Stallman and his followers down out of the community and establish a new community of friendly, happy Linux geeks, we're screwed.
Only when software/hardware companies WANT to work with Linux users will we get the support it takes to really move Linux forward on the desktop. Until then, vendors will keep supporting Windows rather than wasting their time coding Linux drivers/SW only to have it spit back at them in month-long flamewars on support message boards because the entire source isn't under the GPL.
"(If you hadn't noticed, the Web is meant to be an open medium, not controlled by a large, monopolistic and law-breaking American corporation)"
An open medium? Well then, I guess Microsoft should be free to do any damned thing they want to with web standards, developers should develop for any platform they want to, and consumers reap the benefits of openness. As for who controls the standards, how is Microsoft any worse than a bunch of dorks who write white papers about which standards to use?
Is the signup page for linuxworld Slashdotted yet?
Bury them in proof, nice programming exercise.
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So what if everyone out there has an mp3 of random backround noise listed as a hit song? Or even better, what if we all have ten, twenty, or even 100 hit songs? If the RIAA wants to go after users, shut the RIAA down by making them find so many copies of barking dogs, farting babies, and happy birthday listed as Eminem and Moby that lawyers and staff get wasted working around the false hits and it costs too much to keep up. Someone could even create a program to create random tracks from libraries of samples.
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
"We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice."
Hopefully some of those companies that are now saving many thousands of dollars by running OpenOffice (Especially the largeer firms/localities.) will consider hiring a developer to kick in some work on OpenOffice. Even if only a dozen companies worldwide did it, OpenOffice would suddenly get a huge boost of forward momentum.
I am offering up a rebuttal to the don't accept the counter-offer article.
"You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question."
Any employer expecting loyalty from employees is an idiot, and any employee with corporate loyalty is an idiot. How many companies are loyal to the tens-of-thousands of people laid off every year in the US?
"When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not."
Certainly. The employer will remember the losers without the courage and initiative to make clear their wants and needs, as compared to the strong-willed people who are not afraid to get what they want. Who would YOU want to promote in the cutthroat business world?
"When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you."
So? Are you really less likely to end up on the chopping block anyway?
"Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought."
Companies are in business to make money. You go to work to make money. "FUCK PRIDE."
"Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?"
If you get screwed on the next raise, just walk away then. You will just get bigger offers the next time you leave.
"Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price."
If the company wanted to do that, would the counter-offer really even be made?
"The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer."
Not likely. Employers know who stays and why. If you make it known that cash is your motivation, they will know better than to try and keep screwing you.
"Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high."
Statistics? Who doesn't know the joke about the statistican's answer to 2+2=x?
"Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance."
Or you might gain respect for having the balls to show some initiative. If your peers don't accept you over something like this, fuck them. Just remember to backstab them after your initiative gets you into management.
"What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?"
Being a sysadmin who always gets stuck specializing in backups, I recommend the following solution for a (relatively) low budget backup solution on Windows. Please note that this system ignores trying to get the users to do this themselves, because users will never do anything right.
1- Get all users off of Windows 98 and onto Windows 2000. Do NOT go to Windows XP. Having all your systems on one OS will make troubleshooting backup (Among others.) problems much easier, and having the systems on a better OS will help ensure that backups actually run right.
2- Get all of the systems on a Windows 2000 domain on which they have NO administrative privileges. This keeps users from screwing around with backup software and options.
3- Buy Veritas Backup Exec as well as the open file option (~$900 USD).Read the manual before you use it. If the company to spring for training, get trained. Set it up a server that won't mind the extra load.
You may notice that other companies sell other backup solutions. In a Windows environment, stick with Veritas. Veritas wrote the backup software built into Windows. Veritas works with Microsoft to make their product work well with Windows. Veritas also has what is, IMHO, some of the best software support out there.
4- First thing every morning, grab a cup of coffe and go through last night's backup logs. Keep a written journal of all failures and irregularities (A nice spreadsheet is userful as well.). This will help track errors.
5- Do test restores often! You don't want to do all this and find out that you cannot restore data properly!
6- Store backup tapes off site! Find out if Iron Mountain has a facility nearby and if so, USE IT. 99% (Yes, 99%!) of all lost data is caused by fires. Earthquakes and floods are not far behind. Nothing will wipe out a small site like a big fire that takes backup tapes with it.
7- Put together a good disaster recovery plan and try it out on test machines once a year or so. Aside from keeping you ready for a disaster (Imagine if you had been a sysadmin in the World Trade center, survived the disaster, kept fine backups off-site, but had no idea how to bring the systems back up from nothing but tapes!), it will keep you ready for small disasters (ie your domain controller's raid array croaks and corrupts all the disks on the way to the graveyard.) as well.
Hope this helps. And remember, most importantly - users are stupid assholes. The reason you get paid to dick around with computers all day is because users are stupid assholes, and can't use a computer without fucking things up. Making them backing up data is not your job; backing it up no matter what they think is!
About a month ago, a rep from Comcast showed up at my door, offering free, basic cable, no strings attached, to go with my cable modem. She removed the trap in the wiring closet, programmed my TV, and left. There was no contract to sign, just a little paper to sign saying that she had been there and hooked it up. All this happened on a Sunday afternoon, so I was already at home and didn't have to miss work for the install.
I feel sorry for Cox/AT&T customers, because all I ever hear about your cable systems is negative. Ever since Comcast went solo (No @home BS) my cablemodem experience continues to improve, with not a single bad experience.
"The thought that UnitedLinux won't even offer a development distribution to the community does not sit well with me."
The thought that people really believe that companies unable to compete with Red Hat can succeed by repackaging their work into one big pile does not sit well with me. Spend your time worrying about something important, not worrying about the losers in the open source world. Wasting time with UnitedLinux will do nothing but hold you back.
Open source is not about business. In the long run, companies will never generate the same revenue with open source products that can be generated by just attempting to build monopolies around closed source systems.
Open source is not about money. Open source is about the fact that human beings are reaching a level where we no longer need to just drive our technology around money. As we continue to use computers to heal ourselves, defend ourselves, entertain ourselves, and so on, we will find that it benefits us all to stop letting the greed of people like Bill Gates and Co. get in our way. This isn't about silly economic systems like capitalism and communism, this is about a new social system under which we realize that sharing our technology and related information allows us all to get what we want faster and with greater ease than we ever will when we fight over proprietary systems.
Open source needs to be concerned with being open source. There is no reason for us to waste our time worrying about Microsoft; all it does is waste our time and hold us back. Stop trying to convert Microsoft, do not waste time working to be better than Microsoft, just let open source move forward on its own and open source will lead the computing world in good time.
Every public library in the USA continues to stock numerous copies of the bible, a book with numerous graphic depictions of sex, rape, incest, murder, infanticide, torture, and just about anything else that human beings consider offensive.
Is it just me, or does United Linux just seem like one more annoying headache for people still hanging on to the Linux distros that have lost favor as Redhat and Mandrake continue to gain market share? Why would I bother working with one convoluted mess tossed together by several market losers, when I could just go with a company that is obviously doing something right?
To me this whole thing seems about as smart as HP and Compaq deciding that instead of revamping their product lines and just giving customers what they want, like Sun and Dell did, they decided to merge two unpopular firms into one big one.
On the upside, this may be a good trend in the industry, as conglomerations of crap may be easier to get rid of then a bunch of small piles.
I am not even going to address the wiretapping, most slashdotter's already have the sense to know why more wiretapping is bad.
I think what seems really interesting here is that it is being done to protect children from online predators. It seems to me that in many cases wiretapping will probably only happen long after a predator is suspected, at which point the damage is likely already done; and that we would be better off going after these people with targeted sting operations of some sort, allowing officers posing as kids to get these people BEFORE they have a chance to hurt a child.
This is long winded, but I went through what you are asking about and I fucked it all up. Pay attention.
A few years ago I dropped out of college after my second year and started working as a full-time sysadmin. During that time I have had multiple jobs, moving from working in the financial industry, to a dotcom (Which crashed and burned.) to government contracting. Each job change has resulted in a huge raise, and my salary (With no degrees or certifications.) has risen to over $65,000 USD with incredible benefits, not bad for a 23 year old college drop out with no degrees or certifications. I have my own car, my own apartment, little debt, and life is generally pretty good. But...
Not a day goes by that I don't regret not staying in school. Having a degree opens doors I never dreamed of, and people who do go through school come out knowing things that you will probably never learn on the job. Every time I turn around I think about all the useful skills I could have picked up by staying in school, especially when it comes to serious programming and computer internals. On top of that, there are always plenty of people who will not take me seriously until I get myself through night school an earn the degree.
I can understand why you might not want to go to college to be a sysadmin; most computer programs don't teach what it takes to do a sysadmin's job. But as a sysadmin who passed on college, you will find yourself trapped in far more limits than the limited choices you may have when it comes to learning to manage a network at school.
So stay in school. Just get yourself through a four-year computer science degree, and spend your time worrying about programming, network and computer internals, and other such stuff. Build good relationships with like minded folks at school and online, because helpful friends, especially on EFNet or mailing lists, will save your ass at work more than any vendor support or book. Plan ahead to find yourself good summer internships at tech related companies, even if you have to just volunteer. Try to get a government internship with a Top Secret clearance and you will be guaranteed a great job as soon as you get out of school.
When it comes to school, it sucks, but it will be worth it. Trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I am a very bitter OSX/ibook user.Be warned.
Dear Apple Customer,
Thank you for spending obscene amounts of money to purchase our hardware over comparably priced X86 PCs. Also, we thank you for giving us more money for OS X, which up untill now has really just been one of the largest beta tests in the history of computing. Thanks to your efforts and complaints, we have been able to fix numerous horrible bugs, add features that comparable free software had ten years ago, and finally figure out why the hell Quartz is so slow.
We are now ready to release our latest OS X service pack^H^H^H update for prices ranging from $19.95 to $129.95. That's right, now you can pay for the kind of updates that even the bastards at Microsoft give away for free! If you ever wondered why we brought back Steve Jobs, now you know just how good he is at bringing in new revenue!
Thank you again, dear customer, for continuing to flush your money away in the desparate search for a computer more stable than Windows without all the hassles of Linux! Just a few more years and a few more thousand dollars each, and the revolution will be in full swing!
Best regards,
Apple Computers
Sony was part of the RIAA when it pushed CD-R taxes through in Canada and some European nations, and is also a manufacturer of CD recorders. Never underestimate greed-borne stupidity.
If you enjoyed those lucky dragons, check out the ones in his last book,"All Tomorrow's Parties".
Headlines from 2003/2005
Software pirates in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia immediately began selling copies of NBC's entire 2006 TV lineup, Warcraft IV-10, Photoshop 2008, and MS Office Xtra-Ultra-Uber-Nextgen on the new disks for a street price of $5, all on one disk.
RIAA and MPAA lawyers assaulted Sony with lawsuits today, claiming that the disk assited in storage and dissemination of intellectual property and violating copyright control schemes.
Immediately after, Canadian and European lawyers under the control of movie and recording lobbyists added a hefty tax to the sale of each disk, with collected fees sent to movie and music companies.
Australians quickly installed $1 per/disc copy machines in Lucky Dragon stores across the continents.
Citizens of the USA tried to read reports about the new discs, but because a Microsoft lead consortium refused to provide digital certificates to news releases, Americans cannot view the files on their computers.
Great, now I can watch OS X render television just as slowly as it renders any other 2D graphics. Lame-assed quartz...
Microsoft doesn't have to care about foreign governments in the long run. The world economy is dominated by American money and American companies. Foreign companies that want to be more than a tiny, localized entity need to do business with Americans and American companies. As long as the US Government sticks with Microsoft, any American company with any serious plans to ever make it big time will have to work with Microsoft products, or at least stay compatible.
Other nations can stand up against the foreign monopoly all they want, but unless they can restrain serious international commerce, Microsoft is going to be around until the US Government kicks it out.
Isn't this what we wanted? The last time I checked, people were pissed at the MPAA for trying to sue filesharing networks out of existance. That tactic failed, and the MPAA followed up by trying to legislate DRM into existance. Public outcry seems to be keeping legislated DRM from happening, and also helps more and more people find out what laws like the DMCA can really be used for every day.
So now the MPAA is being responsible by dealing pirates the smart way - direct attacks. Rather than clogging up the legal and legislative systems with crap that will never go anywhere, tactics have switched to a little corporate communication to stop people from passing out movies online. Pirates are forced to stop passing out movies, while bandwidth hogs are tossed off networks, keeping net access cheap. Filesharing networks can now exist in peace, and perhaps once the pirates go away people will start finding legitimate uses.
I hope that this method DOES work for the MPAA. Furthermore, I hope the RIAA does the same. If internet music eventually moves from top 40 piracy to sharing files released by independent artists looking for cheap publicity, the popularity of musicians not on big labels will grow and the RIAA will have to work harder to sell records, instead of churning our generic overproduced top 40 hits.
This is the way the internet should be. As long as people keep our legislators and Microsoft from taking away the control that groups like the MPAA failed to, the internet will evolve to better humanity over time.
People who want Linux on the desktop to succeed need to do one thing: get the rest of the community to shut up and go away. No matter how many times I ask companies for good Linux drivers, the five hundred flaming hate mails/day from pissed GNU zealots will overshadow my pleas. GNU zealots are elitist, psychotic bastards, and until we can flush Richard Stallman and his followers down out of the community and establish a new community of friendly, happy Linux geeks, we're screwed.
Only when software/hardware companies WANT to work with Linux users will we get the support it takes to really move Linux forward on the desktop. Until then, vendors will keep supporting Windows rather than wasting their time coding Linux drivers/SW only to have it spit back at them in month-long flamewars on support message boards because the entire source isn't under the GPL.
"(If you hadn't noticed, the Web is meant to be an open medium, not controlled by a large, monopolistic and law-breaking American corporation)"
An open medium? Well then, I guess Microsoft should be free to do any damned thing they want to with web standards, developers should develop for any platform they want to, and consumers reap the benefits of openness. As for who controls the standards, how is Microsoft any worse than a bunch of dorks who write white papers about which standards to use?
Is the signup page for linuxworld Slashdotted yet?
So what if everyone out there has an mp3 of random backround noise listed as a hit song? Or even better, what if we all have ten, twenty, or even 100 hit songs? If the RIAA wants to go after users, shut the RIAA down by making them find so many copies of barking dogs, farting babies, and happy birthday listed as Eminem and Moby that lawyers and staff get wasted working around the false hits and it costs too much to keep up. Someone could even create a program to create random tracks from libraries of samples.
The downside of course, is that filesharing users would get sick of downloading garbage files, but then again it also might push people to start using P2P for legit purposes...
With Mandrake, everything includes light installs. The Mandrake 8.2 install CD can do functional installs that weigh in at less than 80 megs.
Want an open-source friendly latptop OS with guaranteed hardware compatibility? Those Powerbooks ain't cheap, but they do kick ass....
"We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice."
Hopefully some of those companies that are now saving many thousands of dollars by running OpenOffice (Especially the largeer firms/localities.) will consider hiring a developer to kick in some work on OpenOffice. Even if only a dozen companies worldwide did it, OpenOffice would suddenly get a huge boost of forward momentum.
I am offering up a rebuttal to the don't accept the counter-offer article.
"You have now made your employer aware that you are unhappy. From this day on, your loyalty will always be in question."
Any employer expecting loyalty from employees is an idiot, and any employee with corporate loyalty is an idiot. How many companies are loyal to the tens-of-thousands of people laid off every year in the US?
"When promotion time comes around, your employer will remember who is loyal and who is not."
Certainly. The employer will remember the losers without the courage and initiative to make clear their wants and needs, as compared to the strong-willed people who are not afraid to get what they want. Who would YOU want to promote in the cutthroat business world?
"When times get tough, your employer will begin the cutbacks with you."
So? Are you really less likely to end up on the chopping block anyway?
"Accepting a counteroffer is an insult to your intelligence and a blow to your personal pride; you were bought."
Companies are in business to make money. You go to work to make money. "FUCK PRIDE."
"Where is the money for the counteroffer coming from? All companies have wage and salary guidelines which must be followed. Is it your next raise early?"
If you get screwed on the next raise, just walk away then. You will just get bigger offers the next time you leave.
"Your company will immediately start looking for a new person at a cheaper price."
If the company wanted to do that, would the counter-offer really even be made?
"The same circumstances that now cause you to consider a change will repeat themselves in the future, even if you accept a counteroffer."
Not likely. Employers know who stays and why. If you make it known that cash is your motivation, they will know better than to try and keep screwing you.
"Statistics show that if you accept a counteroffer, the probability of voluntarily leaving in six months or being let go in one year is extremely high."
Statistics? Who doesn't know the joke about the statistican's answer to 2+2=x?
"Once the word gets out, the relationship that you now enjoy with your co-workers will never be the same. You will lose the personal satisfaction of peer group acceptance."
Or you might gain respect for having the balls to show some initiative. If your peers don't accept you over something like this, fuck them. Just remember to backstab them after your initiative gets you into management.
"What type of company do you work for if you have to threaten to resign before they will give you what you are worth?"
Most of the companies on earth.
Being a sysadmin who always gets stuck specializing in backups, I recommend the following solution for a (relatively) low budget backup solution on Windows. Please note that this system ignores trying to get the users to do this themselves, because users will never do anything right.
1- Get all users off of Windows 98 and onto Windows 2000. Do NOT go to Windows XP. Having all your systems on one OS will make troubleshooting backup (Among others.) problems much easier, and having the systems on a better OS will help ensure that backups actually run right.
2- Get all of the systems on a Windows 2000 domain on which they have NO administrative privileges. This keeps users from screwing around with backup software and options.
3- Buy Veritas Backup Exec as well as the open file option (~$900 USD).Read the manual before you use it. If the company to spring for training, get trained. Set it up a server that won't mind the extra load.
You may notice that other companies sell other backup solutions. In a Windows environment, stick with Veritas. Veritas wrote the backup software built into Windows. Veritas works with Microsoft to make their product work well with Windows. Veritas also has what is, IMHO, some of the best software support out there.
4- First thing every morning, grab a cup of coffe and go through last night's backup logs. Keep a written journal of all failures and irregularities (A nice spreadsheet is userful as well.). This will help track errors.
5- Do test restores often! You don't want to do all this and find out that you cannot restore data properly!
6- Store backup tapes off site! Find out if Iron Mountain has a facility nearby and if so, USE IT. 99% (Yes, 99%!) of all lost data is caused by fires. Earthquakes and floods are not far behind. Nothing will wipe out a small site like a big fire that takes backup tapes with it.
7- Put together a good disaster recovery plan and try it out on test machines once a year or so. Aside from keeping you ready for a disaster (Imagine if you had been a sysadmin in the World Trade center, survived the disaster, kept fine backups off-site, but had no idea how to bring the systems back up from nothing but tapes!), it will keep you ready for small disasters (ie your domain controller's raid array croaks and corrupts all the disks on the way to the graveyard.) as well.
Hope this helps. And remember, most importantly - users are stupid assholes. The reason you get paid to dick around with computers all day is because users are stupid assholes, and can't use a computer without fucking things up. Making them backing up data is not your job; backing it up no matter what they think is!
About a month ago, a rep from Comcast showed up at my door, offering free, basic cable, no strings attached, to go with my cable modem. She removed the trap in the wiring closet, programmed my TV, and left. There was no contract to sign, just a little paper to sign saying that she had been there and hooked it up. All this happened on a Sunday afternoon, so I was already at home and didn't have to miss work for the install.
I feel sorry for Cox/AT&T customers, because all I ever hear about your cable systems is negative. Ever since Comcast went solo (No @home BS) my cablemodem experience continues to improve, with not a single bad experience.
"The thought that UnitedLinux won't even offer a development distribution to the community does not sit well with me."
The thought that people really believe that companies unable to compete with Red Hat can succeed by repackaging their work into one big pile does not sit well with me. Spend your time worrying about something important, not worrying about the losers in the open source world. Wasting time with UnitedLinux will do nothing but hold you back.
"...it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun server..."
At Sun's prices, most companies can just buy cheap workstations from Dell or HPQ and still save money...
Open source is not about business. In the long run, companies will never generate the same revenue with open source products that can be generated by just attempting to build monopolies around closed source systems.
Open source is not about money. Open source is about the fact that human beings are reaching a level where we no longer need to just drive our technology around money. As we continue to use computers to heal ourselves, defend ourselves, entertain ourselves, and so on, we will find that it benefits us all to stop letting the greed of people like Bill Gates and Co. get in our way. This isn't about silly economic systems like capitalism and communism, this is about a new social system under which we realize that sharing our technology and related information allows us all to get what we want faster and with greater ease than we ever will when we fight over proprietary systems.
Open source needs to be concerned with being open source. There is no reason for us to waste our time worrying about Microsoft; all it does is waste our time and hold us back. Stop trying to convert Microsoft, do not waste time working to be better than Microsoft, just let open source move forward on its own and open source will lead the computing world in good time.
Every public library in the USA continues to stock numerous copies of the bible, a book with numerous graphic depictions of sex, rape, incest, murder, infanticide, torture, and just about anything else that human beings consider offensive.
Is it just me, or does United Linux just seem like one more annoying headache for people still hanging on to the Linux distros that have lost favor as Redhat and Mandrake continue to gain market share? Why would I bother working with one convoluted mess tossed together by several market losers, when I could just go with a company that is obviously doing something right?
To me this whole thing seems about as smart as HP and Compaq deciding that instead of revamping their product lines and just giving customers what they want, like Sun and Dell did, they decided to merge two unpopular firms into one big one.
On the upside, this may be a good trend in the industry, as conglomerations of crap may be easier to get rid of then a bunch of small piles.
I am not even going to address the wiretapping, most slashdotter's already have the sense to know why more wiretapping is bad.
I think what seems really interesting here is that it is being done to protect children from online predators. It seems to me that in many cases wiretapping will probably only happen long after a predator is suspected, at which point the damage is likely already done; and that we would be better off going after these people with targeted sting operations of some sort, allowing officers posing as kids to get these people BEFORE they have a chance to hurt a child.
This is long winded, but I went through what you are asking about and I fucked it all up. Pay attention.
A few years ago I dropped out of college after my second year and started working as a full-time sysadmin. During that time I have had multiple jobs, moving from working in the financial industry, to a dotcom (Which crashed and burned.) to government contracting. Each job change has resulted in a huge raise, and my salary (With no degrees or certifications.) has risen to over $65,000 USD with incredible benefits, not bad for a 23 year old college drop out with no degrees or certifications. I have my own car, my own apartment, little debt, and life is generally pretty good. But...
Not a day goes by that I don't regret not staying in school. Having a degree opens doors I never dreamed of, and people who do go through school come out knowing things that you will probably never learn on the job. Every time I turn around I think about all the useful skills I could have picked up by staying in school, especially when it comes to serious programming and computer internals. On top of that, there are always plenty of people who will not take me seriously until I get myself through night school an earn the degree.
I can understand why you might not want to go to college to be a sysadmin; most computer programs don't teach what it takes to do a sysadmin's job. But as a sysadmin who passed on college, you will find yourself trapped in far more limits than the limited choices you may have when it comes to learning to manage a network at school.
So stay in school. Just get yourself through a four-year computer science degree, and spend your time worrying about programming, network and computer internals, and other such stuff. Build good relationships with like minded folks at school and online, because helpful friends, especially on EFNet or mailing lists, will save your ass at work more than any vendor support or book. Plan ahead to find yourself good summer internships at tech related companies, even if you have to just volunteer. Try to get a government internship with a Top Secret clearance and you will be guaranteed a great job as soon as you get out of school.
When it comes to school, it sucks, but it will be worth it. Trust me.
ooops... I need to review those things more before I click submit...