Excuse me? What illegal use are you talking about? I have a right to fair use reguardless of what any law says. Its perfectly legal for me to use technology to use the music and movies I buy in the same way I used them for years. The only difference now is that we have laws like the DMCA which threaten fair use. That only means that anyone who wants to sue me for using and sharing my content the way I have always done will get a fight destined for the supreme court. And boy would I love the courts to throw away my rights to fair use. That would be the last day I'd ever pay for content again. But as thing are right now, as long as the MPAA and RIAA don't sue me, I'll continue to purchase my DVDs and CDs and rip them onto open unencrypted media formats that are portable and give me access to my content when I want it. No matter what you say there's nothing wrong with that.
Re:All I ask from my manager:
on
Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's a cool question. Being an asshole, geek, whatever, not an einstein, though, I'd like to answer. I expect a manager to provide me with the general direction the company wants to take, screen sensitive communications problems from my foul mouth, and get on my case when I'm slacking off. My current manager does an excellent job of this.
But I'm also curious what is expected of a project oriented geek. The proper question for any geek to ask in such an interview is "What do you want from me?" I find that most companies don't know how to manage their resources, their employees. I often find there are a lot of brilliant people that are not being asked for their input reguarding important corporate decisions. I tend to think that most of the problems companies have stem from a lack of internal open communication. Often because upper management either doesn't enjoy talking with rude foul mouth techs, like me, or they think they know everything and have no need to seek advice. I don't know. I feel like management outsources half their solutions, half the time. Anyone care to comment?
Working in a large corporation I find that most of the people I work with and talk to directly are good hard-working people who want to work with you through projects and make the office environment enjoyable. But it seems like upper management is cut-off from the rest of the company and reality, sometimes. But maybe that's just my perception, since I think I could run it better myself... and I think that is why someone needed to write a book called managing einsteins. Not because they are hard to work with, but because they have had a lot of experience and think they know something about how businesses actually work. The real question is "Do techs realisticly understand business?"
Ouch, man, that's fucked up. To start with how can you be a professional with so many spelling mistakes? (cuz I don't use a spel..) Shut the fuck up! Then you go on to dog MSCEs? Just what exactly is an MSCE? Huh? You're a freak. Lay off the drugs, pal.
If YOU want no more Hiroshimas or Perl Harbors or WTCs then I say "Throw down your weapons and burn all your money". Anything short of that is going to get suicide bombed and terrorized in retaliation for the wars and bombing and innocent deaths. We've killed more innocent people, consciously, in the last 6 months than died on the 11th. Do you believe those innocent deaths promote peace?
I studied for those exams and chose not to take them because they weren't related to my profession. I'm a Sr. Sys Admin. MSCE certification is for people who like to remember how many tabs are in the accessibilities options control panel on old operating systems. Not for computer professionals who's job it is to keep the companies networks and systems uptodate and running 24/7 with 99.998% uptime. Professionals need to know how to manage data and perform backups across networks, not how to point and click your way through a configurations while reading a word doc printout. They need to know how to monitor systems remotely or better yet how to tell systems how to monitor systems remotely. A real professional realizes that they can have computers do most of their work most of the time which is why you pay me to serf the web all day. All night I get to sleep, cuz I'm a professional, but it wasn't always this way. We learn from our mistakes and some of us use that experience to keep those mistakes from happening again. Any MCSEs care to comment? What did Microsoft teach you about system administration? I learned a lot in the last 7 years and most of it I learned on Linux.:)
I have neither a degree nor a certification and I probably won't be getting one anytime soon. I'm an IT professional. Or better yet I'm a systems and networks professional. I can design, maintain and troubleshoot any type of system or network any company would ever have. I learned the concepts and know how to look things up. You don't need a degree to do that. I would make absolutely sure all my IT professionals were well educated by having them show me their expertise first hand before hiring them. I can't believe that you'd hire someone who says they know something about computers without ever seeing them use a computer. Would you hire a race car driver without watching him race? Being a computer professional I know what to look for. If you're not a computer professional maybe you should have your professionals sit down with your potential new hires to see how competent they are. And if you don't have a computer professional on staff, well, good luck finding one.
*snicker* MCSE... Hahahahaha!!!!
P.S. I'd work for free if I never had to deal with money again, for a company that was 420 friendly, of course.;)
I agree, but I think this goes far beyond just IT. American business leaders, like most Americans, are brainwashed morons that think the end goal in business is to make money. And I love how we always push the blame onto someone else. Like its the governments job to protect us from ourselves. We have legal aliens, foreigners with visas, flying planes into our tallest buildings (something we should have seen coming from a mile away) and yet we trust our government and airlines to continue operation? We think we can protect ourselves from these types of disasters by going to War? With a country that never attacked us? Or several countries for that matter. How many people must we kill before we'll accept that its our own damned fault and get on with the clean up, recovery, and redesign of the OBVIOUSLY BROKEN SYSTEM? The answer? All of them. But as Microsoft has shown us, there's really nothing wrong with our system, nothing to see here. Trust in capitalism. Trust in it until you find yourself 80 years old, working to pay the bills. Then ask yourself what happened to the love, if there ever was such a thing.
That wouldn't be a problem if the people making these products were the same people using them. Unfortunately for us capitalists all our products are made by companies that want to make cheap throw-away products that work well right now, have the features we want, etc. But break in a year or two and need to be replaced. If you bought a car thinking you had to pay $15k every 5 years after buying it, you'd probably want a little more time to shop. But being a consumer all I see is that $2000 cash back, and get sucked in.:(
Okay, then explain to me how a company that cuts corners... let's say a car company, like Ford, that cuts corners when making their products. For example they use plastic screws and rivets to save some cash. Let's say those products fall into the hands of unsuspecting consumers as they usually do. Then in a few years those plastic screws break or the customer needs to work on something under the hood and finds half the things are rivetted or spot welded in place. How does that help the consumer? Please, explain yourself to me.
Companies that try to make money, like Enron, end up hurting not only consumers and their share holders, but other corporations and all the employees working for them as well. Just how much energy are we wasting today to hold our precious airlines together? And how many people did the airlines and car companies lay off in this not-recession. Our economy actually grew as expected this last year, so where are the justifications for the lay-offs? Where's the good in stealing money from hard working folk to give it to the rich? Oh, I guess maybe you think shareholders and Enron execs deserve their millions. They certainly worked hard for it, didn't they? I'd give it to the janitors.
And in those places its often cheaper than clean bottled water, too. Hrmmmm. Does this mean coke isn't made with water? Or that chemicals are cheaper that filtration systems? Or that the water companies hold a monopoly since EVERYONE needs it to survive?;)
Perhaps this has something to do with the decline of the world wide web and the creation of freenet? I haven't been browsing freenet, but if I was looking for neat and original content I'd be searching through freenet. In fact when I find the time I'll be posting all of my content on there under the OPL. Now my guess is that people like myself are fed up with ICANN and the entire idea of registerring domains, dealing with law suits, copyrights, patents, trademarks and capitalist crap. My hope is that freenet will remain free forever. But sadly noone understand freedom anymore.:(
I think the dual license thing allows you to accept either license to use the copyright. I think that means you can take the source with the LGPL license and make your own LGPL product out of it, as long as you conform to the license.
Is that related to this science fiction novel or this astronomy newsletter?:)
A fifth force that works against gravity could be related to the cosmological constant, a factor in relativity equations added by Einstein when he realized, to his horror, that general relativity allowed the universe to expand. He later retracted the constant, calling it his "greatest blunder." Reiss said the constant "is the only explanation we have" for the acceleration.
P.S. I downloaded my copy of Mandrake 8.2 from Sweeden. I live in the US. That doesn't feel like love to me. Any Linux corporation that makes tons of cash (from free source code), relative to the individual Linux contributor, should put up high bandwidth servers to share the software. Not that its required, I can still download from Sweeden, but its just polite. There's clearly more demand that supply here, and you're the one holding all the cash.
I'll purchase your software only after I've evaluated your company. Based on your contributions to the community and your work on your distro you can expect between $0 and $1000 from me. In the last year I gave GNU $500, SuSE $200, Slackware $100 (two copies of 7.1), Redhat $50, and Loki ~$400. And I have a lot more to give. I just can't find a company who I feel is really worthy, besides GNU who I'll probably give to every year. Loki is dead, I don't like SuSE or Redhat that much, and Slackware, my favorite, is in a sad state at the moment. Maybe I'll just contribute to Slackware and GNU from now on, maybe OOo, too. And just let these other corps sort out their problems on their own.
Didn't expect this move from Sun? This move happened like 6 months ago. Long before Mandrake asked for money. They made a mistake and should take care of the customers they lied to. They wouldn't have lied if they gave SO to the customers that had already paid them and just stopped giving away SO for new orders after they fixed their mistake.
Now since Mandrake asked for donations I don't see how anyone could expect to get a piece of commercial software back from their contribution. But on the other hand Mandrake did recieve a lot of money from the community in contributions. How many commercial companies can do that? Who do you think would contribute to Microsoft or AOL? I feel like they have an obligation to take care of their community, their market. The open source community does a lot more for their companies that just contribute money. They spread FUD AND facts, marketting the software to thousands of people by word of mouth alone. And surely any companies that deal in open source software must know that it isn't easy working with this market. These people are extremely idealistic and won't settle for the old closed source commercial way of doing business. But the community is also a valuable resource. I think Mandrake understands that. But do they LOVE the community? That remains to be seen.
I don't know who said that, but they are plain wrong. Sun would never be anything like Microsoft. They are based on some type of open hardware model that fully documents how their OS interacts with their hardware. They make quality products, in general. Occationally you hear about the bad cache cover up, but for the most part they provide quality products, like Apple. Except Sun GPLed Star Office. That would be equivelent to Apple GPLing Aqua. By doing that they become one of the largest contributors to the FSF's open software movement and an extremely valuable member of our community. But they didn't stop there, they're providing a lot of developement behind Open Office and still merging their work with the community. Very soon, maybe in a couple years, we'll have a standardized, completely stable, secure and efficient selection of OSs with all the options anyone could want. It probably won't even take that long once enterprises start using and working on the codebase. The more companies that hop on board the GNU train the better off we'll all be. With GNU no one can be a monopoly. Sun no longer controls Open Office anymore than you do.
I can see the future now: Do you want commercials and pop-ups with your OS? Sure, we got that? No? Here's a distro that will never ask you "are you sure?" or try to sell you anything.:)
I don't know. I'm going to start sending native Open Office documents around work. Eventually I'll get a few people to stop being lazy and do the free download. When they have both office suites installed they'll have more options. Eventually Open Office will become more stable and standardized. And since its the only office suite that runs on Solaris, Linux, Windows and OSX. It will certainly be the standard office suite for any self-respecting enterprise. Microsoft will have to embed their office suite in their OS before they'll be able to compete with Open Office.;)
Excuse me? Supported OpenOffice? They freakin' GPLed it! Sun gave us an entire office suite with complete MS Office 2000/XP compatibility for free. I don't think I'll ever complain about what Sun does with Star Office. I just wish companies, especially open source, GNU, Linux companies like Mandrake would choose the GNU/Linux software over commercial closed source versions (I don't think Sun is giving away the source to Star Office, haven't checked tho). I see this as a mean thing for Mandrake to do, deciding not to give SO to their supporters, while not promoting and offerring Open Office both included in the distro and for free download for their supporters. If you can't afford to give away SO at least give away OO and help support your community. The GNU/OO community is the same as the GNU/Linux community, y'know. Its all about the license, folks.
You're such a hypocrite, like every other American. You would have corporations break the law and cut corners, like they already do, so they could deliver a cheap product to you instead of force them to hire qualified people who do quality work and make quality products that cost their true value? I hate paying for an overpriced American car that breaks down in 5 years from a corp that just laid off a few thousand American employees, because they cost too much. I don't care if Ford doesn't make their profits this quarter, that's a few thousand families they just affected without a care. The tech industry is no different. Except with technology, corps have learned they can just buy out their competition and market cheaply made overpriced IP. The main difference is in the tech industry the IP costs a hell of a lot less to duplicate than an automobile. But this same problem plagues everything in our capitalistic system. What gets me is people still think they'll get quality products from cheap labor. Labor eventually wakes up and reallizes their value.
And foreigners may work harder, but that is not the measure of a man. Steel workers probably work harder than most people, yet their work is not worth $100k/year. And neither is mine, although I can manage a network of computers of any type you choose. But I get paid and the steel worker gets the shaft. That's fucked up! And foreigners work hard, stay longer hours, etc. But do they do as much as I do? I don't know, I don't work along side most of our developers, but I'll tell ya, they certainly don't have a lot of experience with the hardware they work on. And very little with their OSs. Maybe they learned how to write in a couple of languages, but they usually aren't head and shoulders above Americans. Just more prepared and willing, I'd guess.
Sneakers, good point. Remember when sneakers were really cheap? I don't, I wasn't alive back then. But my mom used to tell me about how she made her own shoes and clothes when she was a kid. Now that we have industrial automation, thanks to the computer and industrial revolutions, we can build factories to pump out hundreds of thousands of sneakers a day. We could make enough for everyone, but what do we do instead? We hire cheap labor to make them by hand and sell them for $100 a pair, using marketting to target them to the high paid middle class Americans, not the workers who make 'em. How sick is that? (I don't have proof, but do you really need it? This should be obvious, from what you've heard about Nike alone).
What's sad is that everyone still thinks Capitalism works. It doesn't. It allows a select few to get most of the money. And money is based off our labor, so they get most of our labor in their back pocket to spend later. That's sick. That's twisted and fucked up and why I won't work for less than $100k. I probably wouldn't even work for $100k if I didn't have debt. Once that is gone you can't pay me enough for what I know about computers and networks.
I'll work slave manual labor like everyone else and live in a cheap apartment or whatever in a slow part of the country where everything is still cheap. Sure I know a lot, sure I can make lots of cash, sure its easy. But its not worth it. Its definitely not worth the stress. If I have to work for a company that only wants to make money and doesn't care about the product I'm pouring my soul into, then I don't want to work for that company for any amount of money. I won't sell my soul.
I say fuck the corps and fuck capitalism. I'll work for free with anyone that wants to work and accomplish something (as long as you agree that we need to take care of eachother, and everyone). Until you come to me and tell me you want to work _with_ me, I'll be at your local drive through taking orders. How's that for your technically competent. Hope they got enough H1Bs.
P.S. I'd also be willing to relocate to another country that wants to work, as well. I don't like the legal system here in America any more. Its just not as Free as I'd expect a nation founded on freedom to be. And the saddest thing of all is no American is willing to fight for their freedom anymore.:( I want to cry.
I don't understand why we don't just ban all copyrighted material from being transmitted over TV/cable or the internet. Force these media companies to sell their products on proprietary encrypted formats, like they want to do anyway. But keep them away from my TV or my internet, because I use both those technologies to leverage the vast amount of public domain and freely available content that doesn't require these types of restrictions.
Well, what gets me is when someone says they back up ALL their statements, yet you hardly see any links and certainly no works cited page on anyone's posts. I just assume everyone talks out their ass until I find an authoritative source (one that has obviously done their research). I don't even believe most books I read these days. I'd much rather hear what everyone thinks than only what everyone can backup with facts. I'd hope that they don't intentially lie, but I'll accept that everyone lies from time to time. I won't accept, however, that anyone tells the truth ALL the time. Nobody knows everything and most of us get our information about these events from the news. Do you trust the news? I don't.
Well, think of it this way. Life exists with or without your help. You can kill it, sure, but it existed long before you were alive and it will continue to exist long after you die. Sure we'll kill many animals, but in eons many more will evolve and live. Life will grow around our pipes and ships and cars and houses and old forgotten structures, and it will thrive. But do you think the extreme use and reliance on oil is going to provide a long and healthy lifestyle for every human on earth? How long will the oil last?
I'm an ignorant American, so here's what I'm going to believe until I'm proven wrong by my government. Oil doesn't cause any harmful side effects to our environment. Even oilspills can be navigated around. And oil will last forever, at least the rest of my life, and that's forever for all I care. I'm not going to have kids, so I won't have to worry about my children's future. So as long as gas is cheap and I make a ton of cash working in this oil business life is good.:)
Somebody please prove me wrong...
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Excuse me? What illegal use are you talking about? I have a right to fair use reguardless of what any law says. Its perfectly legal for me to use technology to use the music and movies I buy in the same way I used them for years. The only difference now is that we have laws like the DMCA which threaten fair use. That only means that anyone who wants to sue me for using and sharing my content the way I have always done will get a fight destined for the supreme court. And boy would I love the courts to throw away my rights to fair use. That would be the last day I'd ever pay for content again. But as thing are right now, as long as the MPAA and RIAA don't sue me, I'll continue to purchase my DVDs and CDs and rip them onto open unencrypted media formats that are portable and give me access to my content when I want it. No matter what you say there's nothing wrong with that.
That's a cool question. Being an asshole, geek, whatever, not an einstein, though, I'd like to answer. I expect a manager to provide me with the general direction the company wants to take, screen sensitive communications problems from my foul mouth, and get on my case when I'm slacking off. My current manager does an excellent job of this.
But I'm also curious what is expected of a project oriented geek. The proper question for any geek to ask in such an interview is "What do you want from me?" I find that most companies don't know how to manage their resources, their employees. I often find there are a lot of brilliant people that are not being asked for their input reguarding important corporate decisions. I tend to think that most of the problems companies have stem from a lack of internal open communication. Often because upper management either doesn't enjoy talking with rude foul mouth techs, like me, or they think they know everything and have no need to seek advice. I don't know. I feel like management outsources half their solutions, half the time. Anyone care to comment?
Working in a large corporation I find that most of the people I work with and talk to directly are good hard-working people who want to work with you through projects and make the office environment enjoyable. But it seems like upper management is cut-off from the rest of the company and reality, sometimes. But maybe that's just my perception, since I think I could run it better myself... and I think that is why someone needed to write a book called managing einsteins. Not because they are hard to work with, but because they have had a lot of experience and think they know something about how businesses actually work. The real question is "Do techs realisticly understand business?"
Ouch, man, that's fucked up. To start with how can you be a professional with so many spelling mistakes? (cuz I don't use a spel..) Shut the fuck up! Then you go on to dog MSCEs? Just what exactly is an MSCE? Huh? You're a freak. Lay off the drugs, pal.
If YOU want no more Hiroshimas or Perl Harbors or WTCs then I say "Throw down your weapons and burn all your money". Anything short of that is going to get suicide bombed and terrorized in retaliation for the wars and bombing and innocent deaths. We've killed more innocent people, consciously, in the last 6 months than died on the 11th. Do you believe those innocent deaths promote peace?
I studied for those exams and chose not to take them because they weren't related to my profession. I'm a Sr. Sys Admin. MSCE certification is for people who like to remember how many tabs are in the accessibilities options control panel on old operating systems. Not for computer professionals who's job it is to keep the companies networks and systems uptodate and running 24/7 with 99.998% uptime. Professionals need to know how to manage data and perform backups across networks, not how to point and click your way through a configurations while reading a word doc printout. They need to know how to monitor systems remotely or better yet how to tell systems how to monitor systems remotely. A real professional realizes that they can have computers do most of their work most of the time which is why you pay me to serf the web all day. All night I get to sleep, cuz I'm a professional, but it wasn't always this way. We learn from our mistakes and some of us use that experience to keep those mistakes from happening again. Any MCSEs care to comment? What did Microsoft teach you about system administration? I learned a lot in the last 7 years and most of it I learned on Linux.
I have neither a degree nor a certification and I probably won't be getting one anytime soon. I'm an IT professional. Or better yet I'm a systems and networks professional. I can design, maintain and troubleshoot any type of system or network any company would ever have. I learned the concepts and know how to look things up. You don't need a degree to do that. I would make absolutely sure all my IT professionals were well educated by having them show me their expertise first hand before hiring them. I can't believe that you'd hire someone who says they know something about computers without ever seeing them use a computer. Would you hire a race car driver without watching him race? Being a computer professional I know what to look for. If you're not a computer professional maybe you should have your professionals sit down with your potential new hires to see how competent they are. And if you don't have a computer professional on staff, well, good luck finding one.
*snicker* MCSE... Hahahahaha!!!!
P.S. I'd work for free if I never had to deal with money again, for a company that was 420 friendly, of course.
I agree, but I think this goes far beyond just IT. American business leaders, like most Americans, are brainwashed morons that think the end goal in business is to make money. And I love how we always push the blame onto someone else. Like its the governments job to protect us from ourselves. We have legal aliens, foreigners with visas, flying planes into our tallest buildings (something we should have seen coming from a mile away) and yet we trust our government and airlines to continue operation? We think we can protect ourselves from these types of disasters by going to War? With a country that never attacked us? Or several countries for that matter. How many people must we kill before we'll accept that its our own damned fault and get on with the clean up, recovery, and redesign of the OBVIOUSLY BROKEN SYSTEM? The answer? All of them. But as Microsoft has shown us, there's really nothing wrong with our system, nothing to see here. Trust in capitalism. Trust in it until you find yourself 80 years old, working to pay the bills. Then ask yourself what happened to the love, if there ever was such a thing.
I want love, not money.
That wouldn't be a problem if the people making these products were the same people using them. Unfortunately for us capitalists all our products are made by companies that want to make cheap throw-away products that work well right now, have the features we want, etc. But break in a year or two and need to be replaced. If you bought a car thinking you had to pay $15k every 5 years after buying it, you'd probably want a little more time to shop. But being a consumer all I see is that $2000 cash back, and get sucked in.
Okay, then explain to me how a company that cuts corners... let's say a car company, like Ford, that cuts corners when making their products. For example they use plastic screws and rivets to save some cash. Let's say those products fall into the hands of unsuspecting consumers as they usually do. Then in a few years those plastic screws break or the customer needs to work on something under the hood and finds half the things are rivetted or spot welded in place. How does that help the consumer? Please, explain yourself to me.
Companies that try to make money, like Enron, end up hurting not only consumers and their share holders, but other corporations and all the employees working for them as well. Just how much energy are we wasting today to hold our precious airlines together? And how many people did the airlines and car companies lay off in this not-recession. Our economy actually grew as expected this last year, so where are the justifications for the lay-offs? Where's the good in stealing money from hard working folk to give it to the rich? Oh, I guess maybe you think shareholders and Enron execs deserve their millions. They certainly worked hard for it, didn't they? I'd give it to the janitors.
Linux is NOT unix
:)
I believe what you meant to say here was GNU's NOT UNIX.
And in those places its often cheaper than clean bottled water, too. Hrmmmm. Does this mean coke isn't made with water? Or that chemicals are cheaper that filtration systems? Or that the water companies hold a monopoly since EVERYONE needs it to survive? ;)
Perhaps this has something to do with the decline of the world wide web and the creation of freenet? I haven't been browsing freenet, but if I was looking for neat and original content I'd be searching through freenet. In fact when I find the time I'll be posting all of my content on there under the OPL. Now my guess is that people like myself are fed up with ICANN and the entire idea of registerring domains, dealing with law suits, copyrights, patents, trademarks and capitalist crap. My hope is that freenet will remain free forever. But sadly noone understand freedom anymore.
I think the dual license thing allows you to accept either license to use the copyright. I think that means you can take the source with the LGPL license and make your own LGPL product out of it, as long as you conform to the license.
A fifth force that works against gravity could be related to the cosmological constant, a factor in relativity equations added by Einstein when he realized, to his horror, that general relativity allowed the universe to expand. He later retracted the constant, calling it his "greatest blunder." Reiss said the constant "is the only explanation we have" for the acceleration.
Update, I hear Mandrake did include open office on the 3rd CD of their distro.
P.S. I downloaded my copy of Mandrake 8.2 from Sweeden. I live in the US. That doesn't feel like love to me. Any Linux corporation that makes tons of cash (from free source code), relative to the individual Linux contributor, should put up high bandwidth servers to share the software. Not that its required, I can still download from Sweeden, but its just polite. There's clearly more demand that supply here, and you're the one holding all the cash.
I'll purchase your software only after I've evaluated your company. Based on your contributions to the community and your work on your distro you can expect between $0 and $1000 from me. In the last year I gave GNU $500, SuSE $200, Slackware $100 (two copies of 7.1), Redhat $50, and Loki ~$400. And I have a lot more to give. I just can't find a company who I feel is really worthy, besides GNU who I'll probably give to every year. Loki is dead, I don't like SuSE or Redhat that much, and Slackware, my favorite, is in a sad state at the moment. Maybe I'll just contribute to Slackware and GNU from now on, maybe OOo, too. And just let these other corps sort out their problems on their own.
Didn't expect this move from Sun? This move happened like 6 months ago. Long before Mandrake asked for money. They made a mistake and should take care of the customers they lied to. They wouldn't have lied if they gave SO to the customers that had already paid them and just stopped giving away SO for new orders after they fixed their mistake.
Now since Mandrake asked for donations I don't see how anyone could expect to get a piece of commercial software back from their contribution. But on the other hand Mandrake did recieve a lot of money from the community in contributions. How many commercial companies can do that? Who do you think would contribute to Microsoft or AOL? I feel like they have an obligation to take care of their community, their market. The open source community does a lot more for their companies that just contribute money. They spread FUD AND facts, marketting the software to thousands of people by word of mouth alone. And surely any companies that deal in open source software must know that it isn't easy working with this market. These people are extremely idealistic and won't settle for the old closed source commercial way of doing business. But the community is also a valuable resource. I think Mandrake understands that. But do they LOVE the community? That remains to be seen.
I don't know who said that, but they are plain wrong. Sun would never be anything like Microsoft. They are based on some type of open hardware model that fully documents how their OS interacts with their hardware. They make quality products, in general. Occationally you hear about the bad cache cover up, but for the most part they provide quality products, like Apple. Except Sun GPLed Star Office. That would be equivelent to Apple GPLing Aqua. By doing that they become one of the largest contributors to the FSF's open software movement and an extremely valuable member of our community. But they didn't stop there, they're providing a lot of developement behind Open Office and still merging their work with the community. Very soon, maybe in a couple years, we'll have a standardized, completely stable, secure and efficient selection of OSs with all the options anyone could want. It probably won't even take that long once enterprises start using and working on the codebase. The more companies that hop on board the GNU train the better off we'll all be. With GNU no one can be a monopoly. Sun no longer controls Open Office anymore than you do.
I can see the future now: Do you want commercials and pop-ups with your OS? Sure, we got that? No? Here's a distro that will never ask you "are you sure?" or try to sell you anything.
I don't know. I'm going to start sending native Open Office documents around work. Eventually I'll get a few people to stop being lazy and do the free download. When they have both office suites installed they'll have more options. Eventually Open Office will become more stable and standardized. And since its the only office suite that runs on Solaris, Linux, Windows and OSX. It will certainly be the standard office suite for any self-respecting enterprise. Microsoft will have to embed their office suite in their OS before they'll be able to compete with Open Office. ;)
Excuse me? Supported OpenOffice? They freakin' GPLed it! Sun gave us an entire office suite with complete MS Office 2000/XP compatibility for free. I don't think I'll ever complain about what Sun does with Star Office. I just wish companies, especially open source, GNU, Linux companies like Mandrake would choose the GNU/Linux software over commercial closed source versions (I don't think Sun is giving away the source to Star Office, haven't checked tho). I see this as a mean thing for Mandrake to do, deciding not to give SO to their supporters, while not promoting and offerring Open Office both included in the distro and for free download for their supporters. If you can't afford to give away SO at least give away OO and help support your community. The GNU/OO community is the same as the GNU/Linux community, y'know. Its all about the license, folks.
Sorry, that was an anticapitalist rant. I do that from time to time. Not directed at anyone, really...
You're such a hypocrite, like every other American. You would have corporations break the law and cut corners, like they already do, so they could deliver a cheap product to you instead of force them to hire qualified people who do quality work and make quality products that cost their true value? I hate paying for an overpriced American car that breaks down in 5 years from a corp that just laid off a few thousand American employees, because they cost too much. I don't care if Ford doesn't make their profits this quarter, that's a few thousand families they just affected without a care. The tech industry is no different. Except with technology, corps have learned they can just buy out their competition and market cheaply made overpriced IP. The main difference is in the tech industry the IP costs a hell of a lot less to duplicate than an automobile. But this same problem plagues everything in our capitalistic system. What gets me is people still think they'll get quality products from cheap labor. Labor eventually wakes up and reallizes their value. :( I want to cry.
And foreigners may work harder, but that is not the measure of a man. Steel workers probably work harder than most people, yet their work is not worth $100k/year. And neither is mine, although I can manage a network of computers of any type you choose. But I get paid and the steel worker gets the shaft. That's fucked up! And foreigners work hard, stay longer hours, etc. But do they do as much as I do? I don't know, I don't work along side most of our developers, but I'll tell ya, they certainly don't have a lot of experience with the hardware they work on. And very little with their OSs. Maybe they learned how to write in a couple of languages, but they usually aren't head and shoulders above Americans. Just more prepared and willing, I'd guess.
Sneakers, good point. Remember when sneakers were really cheap? I don't, I wasn't alive back then. But my mom used to tell me about how she made her own shoes and clothes when she was a kid. Now that we have industrial automation, thanks to the computer and industrial revolutions, we can build factories to pump out hundreds of thousands of sneakers a day. We could make enough for everyone, but what do we do instead? We hire cheap labor to make them by hand and sell them for $100 a pair, using marketting to target them to the high paid middle class Americans, not the workers who make 'em. How sick is that? (I don't have proof, but do you really need it? This should be obvious, from what you've heard about Nike alone).
What's sad is that everyone still thinks Capitalism works. It doesn't. It allows a select few to get most of the money. And money is based off our labor, so they get most of our labor in their back pocket to spend later. That's sick. That's twisted and fucked up and why I won't work for less than $100k. I probably wouldn't even work for $100k if I didn't have debt. Once that is gone you can't pay me enough for what I know about computers and networks.
I'll work slave manual labor like everyone else and live in a cheap apartment or whatever in a slow part of the country where everything is still cheap. Sure I know a lot, sure I can make lots of cash, sure its easy. But its not worth it. Its definitely not worth the stress. If I have to work for a company that only wants to make money and doesn't care about the product I'm pouring my soul into, then I don't want to work for that company for any amount of money. I won't sell my soul.
I say fuck the corps and fuck capitalism. I'll work for free with anyone that wants to work and accomplish something (as long as you agree that we need to take care of eachother, and everyone). Until you come to me and tell me you want to work _with_ me, I'll be at your local drive through taking orders. How's that for your technically competent. Hope they got enough H1Bs.
P.S. I'd also be willing to relocate to another country that wants to work, as well. I don't like the legal system here in America any more. Its just not as Free as I'd expect a nation founded on freedom to be. And the saddest thing of all is no American is willing to fight for their freedom anymore.
I don't understand why we don't just ban all copyrighted material from being transmitted over TV/cable or the internet. Force these media companies to sell their products on proprietary encrypted formats, like they want to do anyway. But keep them away from my TV or my internet, because I use both those technologies to leverage the vast amount of public domain and freely available content that doesn't require these types of restrictions.
Well, what gets me is when someone says they back up ALL their statements, yet you hardly see any links and certainly no works cited page on anyone's posts. I just assume everyone talks out their ass until I find an authoritative source (one that has obviously done their research). I don't even believe most books I read these days. I'd much rather hear what everyone thinks than only what everyone can backup with facts. I'd hope that they don't intentially lie, but I'll accept that everyone lies from time to time. I won't accept, however, that anyone tells the truth ALL the time. Nobody knows everything and most of us get our information about these events from the news. Do you trust the news? I don't.
Well, think of it this way. Life exists with or without your help. You can kill it, sure, but it existed long before you were alive and it will continue to exist long after you die. Sure we'll kill many animals, but in eons many more will evolve and live. Life will grow around our pipes and ships and cars and houses and old forgotten structures, and it will thrive. But do you think the extreme use and reliance on oil is going to provide a long and healthy lifestyle for every human on earth? How long will the oil last?
I'm an ignorant American, so here's what I'm going to believe until I'm proven wrong by my government. Oil doesn't cause any harmful side effects to our environment. Even oilspills can be navigated around. And oil will last forever, at least the rest of my life, and that's forever for all I care. I'm not going to have kids, so I won't have to worry about my children's future. So as long as gas is cheap and I make a ton of cash working in this oil business life is good.
Somebody please prove me wrong...